REV Ben Haslam led the service at Crediton Methodist Church on Sunday, January 26.

Has anyone made a New Year’s Resolution? It is very easy on January 1 to say I am going to do this or not do this, but we are not very good at keeping promises we make to ourselves.

Sometimes we make promises to others, and it is not easy to keep those promises either.

The Bible is full of promises. Politicians make promises especially coming up to an election so last year we had lots of manifestos.

How many of those promises has the government kept? We are cynical – people promise the world, but it never really turns out like that.

What we must not do is become so cynical that we transfer that to the wonderful promises in the Bible God continually promises His people that He will be with them, that He will deliver them and one massive promise that He will send a saviour – and He does.

When Jesus stands up in the synagogue, He refers to God’s promise that He will send someone to liberate, to release captives, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring hope, healing and deliverance.

You can imagine the people in the synagogue thinking, “we are sure this person will come one day, but it is not happening yet”. Jesus shocked them all when He said: “this promise is being fulfilled in me”.

There is one great promise in the Bible that has not happened yet, but because He has kept all His other promises, we can be sure that He will keep that promise – that heaven and earth will be made a new creation (Revelation). The new creation, the last of God’s great promises, will come about also.

Clement Attlee, former Prime Minister, was asked what he thought of Christianity. He liked the ethics and morals but had no time for the mumbo-jumbo like Jesus walking on water or turning water into wine. He said we know better than that these days.

Ben refuted that. The mumbo-jumbo is Christianity. It is a super-natural faith. It is not a self-help programme nor a collection of moral stories. It is about the super-natural.

It is about God erupting into the world and enabling us to live super-naturally, i.e. enabling us to live with the aid and power of the Holy Spirit.

There is pressure to make Christianity purely practical, to make it only what we can see and use in order to be relevant.

Well, why? We know that if we give our lives to Jesus that will be useful.

We should first and foremost be involved in introducing people to Jesus and allowing Him to transform their lives.

Jesus stands in the synagogue and reads from Isaiah. These are not just old forgotten words – it is a promise and today that promise is being fulfilled in your hearing. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.

Some people call this Jesus’s manifesto as if it were a political programme. We are understandably cynical about manifestos. It is not helpful because this is not Jesus announcing a political programme.

This is Jesus saying I am anointed; I am called to be the means by which God is fulfilling His promise today. The importance of Jesus’s vocation is that He is anointed and called and everything that follows is part of God’s plan.

So, those who say this is some sort of political agenda are missing the point. Jesus is not going just to bring deliverance, He IS TO BE deliverance. There is no hope of salvation, no new life, but by Him.

The healing and resolution and new life that Jesus brings is inseparable from faith in Him.

Jesus does not give us a good example. He calls us to follow Him and to give our very self. He calls us along the path we cannot hope to tread without the Holy Spirit.

That is why Christianity is a super-natural faith founded on an event in history – God coming into the world in Jesus Christ. God who created the world is beyond it and so that tells us that what we can see and feel and touch is not all there is.

There is more – miracles do happen. One way we can see miracles is simply God being God. It does not mean that God will do everything we ask of Him, but it means that God is present in the world. God is active. Jesus stands in the synagogue and says I am the means through which God’s promises will be fulfilled. It is not easy.

The Israelites were sent into exile, but God promised when the time was right, they would return. The Jews were allowed to go back to Jerusalem and to rebuild walls and the temple.

It was not easy; there was opposition, but Ezra and Nehemiah had faith that God fulfils His promises. Rebuilding Israel was not politically correct – it aroused hostility, but Nehemiah says “the joy of the Lord is my strength”.

It was not easy for Jesus either. Shortly afterwards, Jesus gets quite inflammatory and they tried to throw Him off a cliff. Jesus’s ministry was opposed. There is always opposition when God is at work. Today there are governments and regimes trying to stamp out Christianity. Why is Christianity so offensive?

We believe that Christianity is founded on truth and is based on God revealing Himself to us in Jesus Christ. God the creator in glory, power and perfection chooses to come amongst us in Jesus Christ.

God’s Spirit is on me, says Jesus. This a statement that what He is, what He is doing is super-natural in origin. It does not come from the world but comes from beyond us. So, Christianity is a super-natural faith and we can celebrate that God is with us and the joy of the Lord is our strength.

Bronwyn Nott