The eternal Son of God left heaven to live among us, to die on a Roman cross, and to come to life again that He might redeem all who come to Him by faith.
In doing so He not only secures for us an eternity with Himself, He also desires to transform our here-and-now lives. He wants to enliven our day-to-day existence. He wants to sanctify our ordinary. That is the point of His first recorded miracle in John’s gospel.
So far we have seen in our passage how this miracle:
--reveals our great need,
--manifests God’s concern for that need,
--shows us the importance of obedience.
Today we move on to our fourth and final observation from this passage as we discover that,
This Miracle Revealed Results That Were Amazing
Verses 9-11 tell us: When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.
Those at the wedding celebration were astonished by what they experienced when Jesus sanctified the ordinary for them – when He turned common water into the very best of wine.
They were not aware of how He did it. That is not ours to understand. But they got to experience it ... they got to drink that wine, that “good” wine.
It’s easy to understand how guests at a wedding feast would be shocked with this, for it broke with routine custom as the text tells us.
But we who believe should not be surprised that the Master wants to do the very same thing in our lives. Such an outcome fits with the very nature of who He is and why He came.
And it’s important for us to understand that this experience was a direct result of the truth we saw in our last post…
Had there been no obedience to His command to fill the large clay pots with water, there would have been no transformation of that water into wine.
There would have been no sanctifying of the ordinary.
Our Lord came to give us eternal life, just as He stated. But there is a both-then-and-now aspect of eternal life. To His followers Jesus says, The kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21). He wants us to experience the essence of eternal life now as He works in us to transform us ... as He sanctifies our ordinary.
This is why the Amplified translation renders the latter part of verse 11 of our passage, openly displayed His power and greatness.
This is what our Lord wants to do in us and for us,
if we will but walk in obedience to His Word.
I want to conclude both this lesson and this series with a simple but true illustration.
A little girl owned a necklace of plastic pop-beads that she had spied one day while her mom was buying groceries.
They only cost a couple dollars, but she loved those pop beads and hardly took them off.
Then one day her dad came home from work, sat down at the kitchen table, and motioned for her to come over to him.
He asked if she would take off her beads and give them to him. A bit bewildered, she touched them, hesitated a bit, but then did as he asked.
He took her beads and casually tossed them on the table, which both confused and even hurt her a bit … and which he, of course, noticed.
But then her father lifted her onto his lap and gave her a reassuring hug. Next, he reached into his coat pocket and took out a black, rectangular box.
“This is for you,” he said.
She opened the box carefully and discovered, to her surprise, a beautiful gold necklace with her name on it.
Her eyes beamed and her face radiated. “This is for ME?” she asked.
“You bet it is!” her father said, smiling from ear to ear.
“Oh daddy, put it on me, put it on me!” she shouted.
Are you holding onto some aspect of your life … your own version of pop beads … that you don’t trust the Father with? Or what He may give you in return?
Til next time,
