Do you forget your passwords? It’s the bane of modern life. ‘Keep changing them,’ the authorities tell us, but then we forget the new one! Or, maybe you just have one password for everything? The most popular still is ‘password’ or ‘12345’, or to mix it up, ‘password12345’ (if this is yours, change it now!). I was so glad when facial recognition came in, I can’t forget my face.
The passage we start this year with begins, ‘Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place …’ (Heb 10:19) — ‘confidence’ could also be translated as ‘authorisation’. We who have given our lives to Jesus because of his death on the cross, are authorised to enter God’s presence and to meet with him face to face. This promise is for all God’s people, young or old – as individuals but also, importantly, as a community, and that’s what this year’s theme is all about. Tom Wright says in his new book, ‘The Vision of Ephesians’, that ‘The church is to be the advance sign to the world of the new creation, the new heaven-and-earth reality, which God plans to make’, he believes, ‘the church is a ‘small working model of new creation, is called to be an ongoing and powerful sign to the world of the real truth, the way things really are.’ We are made to be a New Creation Community, and this year we will unpack and enter further into what that means for us all. It’s only made possible by the fact that we are authorised to meet the living God, forgiven, and face to face, all because of Jesus. He is our Living Hope, and together, I pray, we will profess that together, both in word and work – with his help. As this year’s verse says… ‘Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. Heb 10:23’. We have an exciting 2026 ahead of us.