Sermon: Expect A Miracle
Luke 4:18-21: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Isaiah 7:14: Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.
“Things never change.” We often hear this statement from discouraged Christians as they survey the world around them. It seems that conditions in the world don’t get better, and if anything, they only get worse. But in the midst of chaos and sin in the world, God is actively working and performing His will through the lives of average people, and in some cases, performing miracles.
In the text above, Jesus announced to those who knew him for many years, some of whom probably knew Him since He was a child, that He was the fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah 6:1,2. In other words, He was declaring Himself to be the long-promised Messiah. But the people could not accept this – they saw Jesus as part of the world around them, a world where there was not much hope and no expectation of God performing anything close to a miracle. Because of their lack of faith and pessimism, they missed the greatest miracle in all history – the Son of God, “Emanuel”, living in their midst.
We, too, can miss what God is not only doing today, but what He desires to do in the future. We do this when we live in our own doubt, faithlessness, and pessimism and fail to accept the fact that God is a God of miracles. God performs miracles and wants to perform them in our own lives, in the lives of others and in our church. We will talk more about expecting miracles as we begin the sermon series, “A Different Kind of Christmas” on Sunday. Hope to see you then!
