Matthew 1:8

This verse is from the very opening of the Gospel of Matthew — a genealogy, or family tree, tracing the ancestors of Jesus from Abraham down to Joseph, the husband of Mary. In Jewish culture, genealogies were crucial: they established identity, lineage, and belonging. Asa, Jehoshaphat, Jehoram, and Uzziah are all kings of ancient Judah whose stories are told in the Old Testament. Notably, not all of them were upright men. Jehoram, for instance, was described in other Bible passages as a wicked king who worshipped false gods and even had his own brothers killed to secure his throne. Yet the Gospel writer includes him without apology in the direct line leading to Jesus. This genealogy is not a hall of heroes — it's a real family history, carrying both honor and wreckage.

God, you didn't build your story on spotless people — you built it on real ones, broken ones, complicated ones. Help me stop believing my history disqualifies me from your purposes. Whatever is behind me, write it into something that matters. Amen.

Nobody frames a genealogy and hangs it above the fireplace. Most of us skim these verses, eyes glazing, looking for where the actual story starts. But this quiet procession of ancient names carries something quietly radical: Jehoram — a king who murdered his brothers and led his nation into idol worship — sits right there in the chain leading to Jesus. Not edited out. Not footnoted. Not explained away. Just present in the lineage, part of the line. God didn't only work through the righteous and the noble in this story. He worked through the compromised, the violent, the deeply flawed. That matters for you in ways that aren't abstract. You carry your own genealogy — not just biological, but emotional and spiritual. The wounds passed down, the patterns inherited, the chapters of your story you'd rather quietly skip. And yet here is Jehoram, written into the most sacred lineage in all of Scripture. The same God who didn't edit him out hasn't written you out of anything either. Your messy history isn't disqualifying. It might be exactly the ground the story is moving through.