The One About Living With Your Parents, the Complexity of King David, and the Inescapable Messy Wonder of Being a Human Person

Dear West Family

Welcome to the seven readers who still open mails during Spring Break. You really shouldn’t, but here we are. Happy St. Patrick’s day to you. In honor of the good saint himself, may your day be filled with the centrality of the gospel of Jesus, and the absolute absence of snakes of any sort.

I am forty three years old and I live with my parents. 

Well, to be totally accurate, my parents live with me, while they wait to have their new house built, which is a seemingly impossible task in 2022. “Oh, you want windows? Sorry, we no longer know how to make those. Also, when we remember how, they are going to be a lot more expensive than any window you have ever seen. Like, a lot more. But to be clear, we can’t make windows, but also, they will be really expensive when we can.”

What I have realized afresh through this season of parental cohabitation is that you don’t really fully know people until you live with them. Make no mistake, I know my parents very well on one level, in fact I have known them since I was born, or perhaps even slightly before. But, I have found that in adult life you don’t actually know people as they really are, with all the marvelous messiness of how God is shaping and molding them in this season of their current reality, until you have to sit at the breakfast table with them every day, for lots of days in a row, wishing that they would turn the audible keyboard clicks off on their phones. 

Now, I am well aware that this season is actually an immense privilege and a bit of a delight and I don’t take it lightly at all, and I am actually enjoying it immensely, but I was thinking the other day that it would be totally possible to miss out on the opportunity to really know and love my parents in this season unless I stop and consider afresh the incredible grace of everyday, ordinary rhythms of life lived in the presence of fellow image-bearers of the Divine. 

All of this was in my mind last week when my bible reading plan reminded me that I was due to read Matthew 1 … again. I didn’t feel like reading Matthew 1. I know it well. We have been in Matthew quite a lot. But the opening verse stopped me in my tracks.

“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” - Matt 1:1 (ESV)

There is obviously rich prophetic significance in the bloodline of Jesus Christ. It is an absolute marvel how God oversaw thousands of years of history to bring His redemptive plan to fulfillment in His Son. But, that wasn’t what jumped out at me this time when I read it. 

I couldn’t get past the phrase … “the son of David.”

I have been doing a lot of reading on the life of David in anticipation of our upcoming sermon series on his life, and his story is so complex, so mixed, so earthy, so very human and none of it is glossed over with a brush of redemptive consequential beauty. The reality of who David was - at his best and really at his worst - are laid out in graphic detail in ink for all subsequent generations to see. We don’t get a distant and sanitized view of this complicated king. We get a very “in your face at the breakfast table” sort of picture. As Peterson said, “David isn’t an ideal life, but an actual life.” 

And yet, Jesus doesn’t desire to separate Himself from that complex legacy in any way. The grace that He brings to the world is a grace that is big enough for David, real enough for the mess of his complex legacy, and therefore real and powerful enough to cover the very real and ordinary versions of ourselves that people outside of our house rarely get to experience.

Peterson went on to say this of Jesus’ Davidic titling …

“That designation isn’t an incidental detail of genealogy but a major item of theology - that is, it’s about God. The David story anticipates the Jesus story. The Jesus story presupposes the David story. David. Why David? There are several strands that make up the answer, but prominent among them is David’s earthiness. He’s so emphatically human: David fighting, praying, loving, sinning. David conditioned by the morals and assumptions of a brutal Iron Age culture. David with his eight wives. David angry; David devious; David generous; David dancing. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that God can’t and doesn’t use to work his salvation and holiness into our lives.” 

Friends, like David, in my humanity I am a bit of a mixed bag. Just ask my poor parents, or my dear wife. They get to see my everyday ordinariness without any touch up or cover, and I imagine that most of it isn’t that impressive. And yet, I am loved by God in the very midst of all that mess. And yet, I have a Savior who never sought to escape association with any of the everyday normal frailty and magnificence of the human experience. I have a King who sits with me at the breakfast table and loves me through the undeniably annoying loud slurps of my coffee and cereal, and who offers me grace when He sees me live most of my life in what must be deeply disappointing levels of self-obsession.

The son of David loves the son of Errol and Barbara, even in the unseen ordinariness of my routine life. This is a profound mystery. What a supernatural mind-bender it is to be fully seen as you really are and fully loved by the one who knows you. Don’t miss it.

Every single day is an opportunity from God to revel in the love of the son of David.
Don’t miss out through pretense.

Every single day is an opportunity from God to marvel at the extraordinarily ordinary means of grace that God gives us in the presence of fellow image bearers.
Don’t miss out through judgment.

One last thing. The music this week is from Andrew Peterson again. This is a song he wrote for his kids. I’ll be off crying in the corner with it on repeat.

Andrew Peterson - Be Kind to Yourself (Official Lyric Video)

See you Sunday,
Ross