Father, it's a privilege to stand up here from my position and to look out on your people. They are a beautiful people. They are the sheep of your pasture. They are the flock under your care. Your steadfast love for them endures forever. They are fearfully and wonderfully made, each one of them. You've established your covenant with your people. Given those who have received your grace through faith, a promise that they belong to you, that you are our God and we are your people. You've pursued us. You've redeemed us and you've done so at the cost of your own son. You've been good to us. You've blessed us with so many blessings. You've provided our daily bread. You've provided so many wonderful material blessings that we enjoy and that we take for granted. You've given us great relationships. You've seen us through many dangers and toils and snares. But there are some here this morning who come to us in pain. Their relationships are not how they had hoped that they would be. Many people here this morning have deep wounds of sadness. Some are depressed. Some have experienced deep loss, even in the past that they're still not over. Some fear the future and have overwhelming burdens. But we know that you care. Let us see our afflictions, Lord. As you're loud, unambiguous voice calling us to yourself. Calling us to dependence upon you, calling us to grace, calling us to one another. We know that none of the afflictions that we face can separate us from your love. And we also know that when we are weak, we are strong because your power is made perfect in our weakness. So I pray that you would make that personally known to each one of us this morning. We know that it's true because you've given us your word. And you say that your word is true every jot in tidalod. Your word doesn't return void. It accomplishes all that you purpose. We thank you that your word illuminates. It shines a light on the things in our life that are dark. It enables us to navigate this life. Your word nourishes our soul like food nourishes our body. We thank you that your word teaches us, that it rebukes us, that it corrects us, that it trains us in the way of righteousness so that we would be equipped for every good work. So I pray that you would make us a people who delight ourselves in your word. Make all that we do prosper because your word has given us deep roots. And make us not just hears but doers of it. This we pray in the name of him who came such a distance for us, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Well, please do turn with me in your Bible to John chapter 2. We're going to be looking at John chapter 2 this morning versus 1 through 12. We've been in John's Gospel the last few weeks. We're going to be in John's Gospel for the next few months. And we're doing this because we want to discover why Jesus matters. Why is Jesus worth building our whole identity upon? Why do we dock our ship at the port of Jesus Christ? That's what we're trying to discover. And John is trying to shed some light upon that for us. And I think one of the ways he's going to do it this morning is through showing us this beautiful story of what Jesus did at a wedding reception. One day, many, many years ago. So let's take a moment to read that passage now. It's John chapter 2 versus 1 through 12. On the third day, there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee. And the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus was also invited to the wedding with his disciples. When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, they have no wine. And Jesus said to her, woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come. His mother said to the servants, do whatever he tells you. Now, there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rights of purification. Each holding 20 or 30 gallons. Jesus said to the servants, fill the jars with water. And they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast. So they took it. 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. After this, he went down to Kapernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. And they stayed there for a few days. Amen. This ends this reading of God's holy, inspired, and an errant word. And this morning we pray that he would write the truth of his word upon our hearts. It goes without saying that every married couple has a set of unresolved issues. Every married couple has them. There is no couple that has immune to that. Those things tend to come out and rise to the surface about the time that the groom's tucks is due back to the tuxedo shop. They're just part and parcel of marriage. And the reason why you've had some of those nagging issues that have existed in your marriage since the Nixon administration is because they've just been unresolved. Insightful, isn't it? They've just been unresolved. You just haven't dealt fully with those issues and you keep fighting over them. Some of them are a result of just pure personality differences. One spouse is a type A personality. The other might be a more laid back, docile type B personality. We've discovered in our own family that some of these personality differences have risen to the surface lately. It comes out when you move into a new house. They say that if your marriage can survive a move or a remodel, it can survive anything. There's nothing that it can't survive. If I need to buy a lamp, I go down to Home Depot, buy a lamp, put a light bulb in it, plug it in, turn it on, and away we go. If Rebecca needs to buy a lamp for the new house, she goes and she buys 20 or 30 or 40 lamps. And she shops at every Home Depot, and Lowe's, and Walmart, and Target, and specialty lighting store, and the entire southeast United States. And we bring all these lamps home, and we move them around the house, and we decide we don't like them, and so I get to take them back. And she discovers that lamp number 14 out of 40 was the best lamp, so we go back and buy it, we turn it on, and suddenly it is the lamp of our dreams. It's a big process. Personality differences in marriage. Well, sometimes conflicts in marriage are over deeper issues. Sometimes there needs to be some genuine repentance, asking for forgiveness, giving of forgiveness. I can already tell you a major point of conflict the couple in this story is going to have. We don't even know who these people are. John doesn't tell us. This story isn't even about them primarily. It's about Jesus. But we know what the conflict is going to be. They just got married. They've got their wedding reception going on. The groom is responsible for the wine, the meal, all that stuff, and they run out of wine. I have a feeling that the bride is not going to be particularly happy with her new husband, now that this has happened. In the day and time, it was the groom's family that paid for the wedding. Like I said, they were responsible for all this stuff, so they ran out of wine. And it's a shame-based culture. A little bit different than ours is a shame-based culture. And the embarrassment that this would have caused to the new couple, especially to the groom and to the family, it would have been a big deal. It would have placed them on the social outs for a long time. And it was even a possibility that the bride's family could sue the groom's family and the new groom because they didn't prepare adequately and they ran out of wine. But in reality, when you think about it and you think of all the miracles that Jesus has performed, it looks like here he has come to save this couple from a huge public embarrassment. That's really about it, it just seems like he came to save face. If I were riding a gospel myself, I might start with something huge, like Jesus calming a storm with his hand or raising Lazarus from the dead. Those are pretty big deals, those are monumental things. And it appears here that Jesus is just saving a couple from public humiliation. Well, I think there's got to be more to that. There's got to be more to that and there's got to be more profound meaning to this passage than that Jesus can come and fix all of your problems. Well, there is. And I think that John is trying to show us that here in this passage and I think he's trying to show us two things. One of the things that he's showing us through this passage is that Jesus has come to reveal his glory. Jesus has come to reveal his glory. The second thing that he's trying to show us is that Jesus has come to bring us joy. Jesus has come to reveal his glory and he's come to bring us joy. So why do I say that he came to reveal his glory? Because the glory of Christ is a recurring theme through everything that we see from John. It undergirds everything that he writes. It's the foundation upon which all of the other stuff that we see about Jesus is built upon. We discover that Jesus is wholly other than us as we read this gospel. That his power transcends physical and natural laws. That his wisdom and glory and knowledge far surpass that of what we see in the ivory tower of the Ivy League. That he is stunningly glorious. His grace and love are never conditioned upon circumstances. They're never conditioned upon hormonal fluctuations. They're never conditioned upon human limitations. So it makes Jesus glorious. And that's what John wants us to see here. You remember back in chapter one when we read it a few weeks ago that Jesus is the glory of the Father. He's full of grace and truth. So John shows us. And when we look at verse 11 of this particular passage, we see that Jesus manifests his glory through this particular sign. He manifests his glory through changing the water into wine. The miracle is a sign. What are signs designed to do? They're meant to point you to something beyond themselves. The sign is not an end. It's a means to an end. It's pointing to something beyond itself. And it's calling us to pursue whatever it is that the sign is pointing us to. And what this sign is pointing us to is to Jesus's glory. Jesus's mother comes to him. And he says they have no wine. The wine is gone. And Jesus replies to her in a way that might have been offensive to you as you read this. He says, Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come. Do any of you call your mother woman? I'll tell you what, I haven't lived with my mother since high school. And if I called her up and started calling her woman, she'd be out here on a plane from California and I'd be hanging from my belt loop from that tree out there so fast I wouldn't know what hit me. It's just not how we picture Jesus talking to people, especially his own mother, especially Mary. I mean, this is a godly woman. It seems to be talking to her in a somewhat brash, little bit insensitive way. Maybe it offended you. Well, what's he doing? Here's what he's not doing. I don't think he's being disrespectful. I don't think Jesus is being showvinistic or derogatory. But he is showing us something very, very important in this passage. And what he's showing us and what he's showing Mary is that he is more than just her son. He's more than just her son. He is not like a normal son. He is the only son from the father full of grace and truth. That's what he's putting on display here. And he's showing Mary that her place as his mother meant absolutely nothing. In light of the fact that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Lamb of God who has come to take away the Son of the world. He's showing her that family ties, that her position in the pecking order means nothing. That she has to come to Jesus the same way. Everybody else has to come to Jesus which is by his grace alone through faith alone and bracing him that way. And that's true regardless of who you are. He is the way, the truth, and the life. We're gonna see that when we get to John 14. And that is the great equalizer. It's true for every person. And folks, I want to tell you something. This is a good thing. It's a good thing that Jesus doesn't ask who's your daddy and accept you on the basis of your answer. It's a good thing that that's how he relates to us. Because everything that we're taught as Americans from cradle to the grave is that you get blessed on the basis of who you are and what you have accomplished. But in the gospel, Jesus shows us that you get blessed on the basis of who Christ is and what he has accomplished for you. It's totally counterintuitive and it's available for all who would believe in him. Your family, your background, what you've done in the past, the things that your eyes have seen and experienced, what's happened to you. None of that at all disqualifies you from coming to Jesus. There are definitely advantages to having grown up in a family where you're brought to hear the word and you grow up around God's people. There are advantages to that. But in reality, the way to taste and see and experience God's love and forgiveness is through Christ alone. And that is true, whether your parents are the most wretched creatures you know, whether the things you have done in the past are so ugly that you fear anybody ever knowing just a hint of it. Jesus says, come to me through faith, embrace me, you will be forgiven. He's glorious because of this. He's glorious because he shows no favoritism. He's glorious because he was completely bound to the Father's will. He's also glorious because he can take a hopeless, empty situation and fill it back up with hope. That's what we see here, isn't it? You can take this hopelessness and fill it up with hope. Do you notice the timing of all of this? You know, the timing which Jesus comes to reveal His glory is when the situation has become hopeless, when the groom failed to estimate the amount of wine that was going to be needed. When he ran out of money, when his financial resources were gone, and when the wine had been dried up, you know, it wasn't as easy as just running off to the local liquor store in the middle of the wedding reception to buy a few more bottles of wine. It wasn't as easy as that. And in the middle of that sense of hopelessness, Jesus comes and He rescues. Look, if Jesus can turn water into wine, what else can He do? Really, what else can He do? If Jesus can do this, what else can He do? Why can't He take something in your life that seems to be utterly hopeless and totally empty and fill it up with the very best that He has to offer? Why can't He do that? This passage tells me that He can. Maybe He'll say to you what He said to Mary. I mean, He essentially said, it's not time yet. My hour is not yet come. Maybe you'll have to wait and depend on Christ and trust His goodness in the midst of what you're lacking. Mary doesn't understand it. She doesn't understand it, but she just says, do whatever He says. It's an affirmation of faith. It's an affirmation of trust. That Jesus's wisdom is greater than her wisdom. What He is going to do is greater than what she can conceive of, and He'll do it in a time that is for her very best and for everybody else's very best. Do you believe that Jesus knows what He's doing in your life in the midst of your hopelessness, of what appears to be utter darkness? Jesus shows us that He does here. He's come to make all things new. You're a new creation. That's what He says, and now you can see Him as being able to bring hope in the midst of all your hopelessness and it's glorious. It's glorious. That's what He came to do. Jesus came to reveal His glory. That's the first point. Here's the last point we need to see. Jesus not only came to reveal His glory, but He came to bring us joy. That's what He came to do. He came to bring us joy. Now I just want to acknowledge up front. Some of you don't believe that. Some of you don't believe that. Some of you do not believe that Jesus has come to bring you joy. You don't see it in your life. That's not been the normal course of your Christian experience. Some of you are here this morning and joy and contentment and satisfaction. Those things seem to be on another planet for you. They're not even in your paradigm. Life is so painfully oppressive and hard. So you're full of doubt. You're full of suffering. It actually angers you that I'd make that as a point. Well, sometimes when ministers are preparing their sermons, they hit writer's block. And I hit that when I was looking at this because the passage tells me that Jesus has come to bring me joy. And yet sometimes that's not my normal experience. And I don't want to just peel off a Bible verse and slap it on whatever wound you have. Romans 8.28. God works all things for the good of those who love him and then call the according to his purpose. You don't want to hear that in the midst of your suffering sometimes. Follow me on this. I want to show you what he's doing. Jesus is at a wedding feast. I mean, this is a place of joy. People have just gotten married. There's singing. There's dancing. There's food. There's wine. The wine had alcohol in it. Jesus drank it. Wine is a beverage that is satisfying. Good wine is a satisfying thing. It's a satisfying gift. And it's meant to loosen you up a little bit so you can enjoy the party. But it's all good and well and the party is going great and the reception is a wonderful time. And then the wine runs out. It's gone. Parties over. Embarrassment begins. So Jesus tells the servants to go fill up these six big stone water jars. They're these big water jars. They hold 20 or 30 gallons a piece. They were used to wash hands and purify utensils for eating. And Jesus tells the servants to go and fill them up to the water. And they fill them with to the brim. And Jesus, because of his own power and his own authority over natural laws, he's able to take the water and in some mysterious way convert it into wine. It's like 120, somewhere between 120 and 180 gallons of wine. That's a lot of wine. And the wine that he gives is not the cheap wine out of a box. It's the best wine. It's the very best that he has to offer and he saves the party. But it's just a sign. You see that? It's just a sign. Jesus wants to see that he not only saves the party but that he himself is the party. He's the party. He's the feast. That's what this sign points to. When you get to Revelation chapter 19 at the very end of the Bible, you see that the whole Bible, the whole history of redemption, the whole story of what God has been doing since He created Adam and Eve, was to bring His people to this great marriage feast, the wedding supper of the Lamb, that would be all satisfied. In fact, I don't know if you've seen this. The whole Bible is really a book about marriage. It begins with a marriage. Adam and Eve was the perfect marriage. It didn't last very long. And then the rest of the Bible is about God pursuing His adulterous bride to the very point in which He would give up His own son for that bride. I mean, that is just a mind-bogglingly, beautiful thing. He's come to take this bride, His people, and make them His. And He has done it for a purpose so that on the last day, that we can join with Him in the great feasts, that He has provided for us, that will always be satisfied and never be lacking in anything. You see that in Revelation 19. In Revelation 19, we see that Jesus will provide for you everything that you hoped that you would get in marriage. When you get married, you hoped that it would be an end to the emptiness and the loneliness of life. And you envisioned companionship, and intimacy, and security, and safety, and a sense of being known and completed and satisfied. If you're not yet married, and you hope to be someday, those are probably some of the reasons why you want to be married. And Jesus is showing us here in John chapter 2 that it is through the wine of His blood that He's going to bring people to the marriage supper that we discover in Revelation 19. It's through the wine of His blood. That's what He's talking about when He says that His hour has not yet come. I don't know if you saw this in the passage. It's a wedding feast. It's a party. Everybody's having a great time. They run out of wine. Jesus' mother confronts them about it. And all of a sudden goes from being a feast, and Jesus becomes very, very serious. It's sobering. My hour has not yet come. He's talking about the hour of His death. So he's talking about the hour of His death. We see him taking the water out of a purification jar, and he turns it in to satisfying wine and provides it. And what he's really saying is that if you really want to experience and taste the joy of being with me, if you want to have your bondage to sin and sorrow and suffering and your confusion and your lack and weakness removed forever and ever and ever. And if you want to experience what it means to be full and complete and forgiven and burdenless, the way in which you're going to get there is through the wine of my blood. That's what Jesus is showing us here. It's through His death. That's what the Lord suffers about. We're going to enjoy it here in just a few moments. Jesus says, this is the cup of the wine. This is the cup of the new covenant in my blood. It's a sign. It's about the personal reception, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. It's tasting and seeing to whom the wine points. It's saying that Jesus is the wine. Jesus is the feast. And that's what the kingdom of heaven is. It's a consummated marriage. So Jesus is all about. You see this when you read your Bible that the relationship that you have with God is not just the relationship of a king to a vassal. It's the relationship of a husband to a wife of a groom to his bride. He's the groom. We're the bride. But he's not like the groom in this passage. The groom in this passage failed. He failed before he could get through the first week of marriage. How would you like to be married to someone? You just get married. And within the first week of marriage, he does something to bring public humiliation upon yourself and your family. And he gets you into a big lawsuit. That's the man of your dreams, right? That's what this groom did. That's where he got his marriage kicked off. That's how he got his marriage going. But Jesus isn't like that. See Jesus is the perfect bridegroom. Men, when you read in Ephesians, Paul saying that you need to love your wife as Christ loved the church and laid his life down for her. If you don't read that with some sense of fear and trepidation, then you're not really taking seriously what Paul has to say. Because what he's saying is that Jesus loved his bride. He loved the church with such a white, hot, zeal that he pursued her to the point of death. That's what he did. That's what this wine is about. He did it so he could consummate this marriage between his people and himself and bring them everlasting joy. Some of you are still not thinking that this is very helpful. Maybe a little bit, but right now life is hard. There's got to be a greater joy than what you're experiencing at the moment. How do you get that? Quickly two ways. One is you have to acknowledge your emptiness. You have to acknowledge your emptiness. You have to admit that you're not running low, but that you're empty. Your resources are out. If you think you're full enough and that you have enough resources on your own, you're not only self deceived, but what we see in this passage is that Jesus won't fill you up. He fills up empty jars, not jars that are low. We have to admit that. We have to come to him saying, I'm empty. That I've grossly miscalculated my resources and my need. And look, there's never a greater opportunity for Jesus to reveal his glory in your life than when your life seems perilously hopeless. This is a hopeless situation. When you realize that your resources are not low, but they're gone. When you have completely and totally failed, why is that? Why can Jesus reveal his glory then? It's because that's the point when you've been humbled. That's when you have nothing left to yourself and you actually have to be transparent and you have to let God know those things and let them known to His people. Through the apostle Paul knew this, he said that Jesus' power is made perfect in His weakness and that when He is weak, He is strong. When you realize that, my friends, that's when your marriage can turn around. That's when your relationships that are so fractured in your life can begin to be healed. That's when your bitterness and your discontentment about life can be vanished. The glory and the grace of Christ come to you when you look at your life and you say, I am empty. That's when God begins to reveal his glory in your life and when a whole church is full of people like that, that's when he begins to reveal his glory and the church. You have to admit your empty. But here's the second thing you need to do. You need to take the credit that Jesus gives to you. Your empty Jesus gives you the credit. You have to take the credit. Did you notice that in this story? It's the groom that causes the problem. They lack wine because of him. Jesus turns the water into wine. He does it secretly. It's not a public spectacle. All of a sudden there's wine and the master of the feast, the reception coordinator, doesn't come to Jesus to give him credit to it. He comes to the groom. The master of the feast comes to the groom and says, you've kept the good wine until now. It's Jesus. It's not Jesus. It's the groom that gets the credit for what Jesus has done. He comes out looking radiant, beautiful, glorious as the one who saved the day and yet he had nothing to do with it. It was Jesus who did it all. Folks, you get a foretaste of that in your life. If you've entrusted yourself to Jesus, you start to be your life in your past and your present and your future, all through the grid of what Jesus has already prepared for you. We take for granted those things. We get bite-sized portions of them in this life that you begin to see Jesus as the one whose glory and grace is a sea and it swallows up your afflictions. And he's come to bring you joy. I know that some of you don't see Jesus like that. I know how hard it is. I struggle with it myself. Because when I look at myself, I see a person who in many respects is a colossal failure. Someone who hasn't loved his wife as well as he should at times or his daughter or his church who's just been a real mess up in many cases. And I think that Jesus sees me like that too. Well, one last story and then I'll be done. Six years ago, this upcoming Saturday, Rebecca and I got married. We got married at first Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi. Big, beautiful church like this only bigger. And we're getting ready for our wedding ceremony. The minister comes up to the front of the chancel. I'm standing right next to him. My best man is standing right next to me. The bridesmaids and the groomsmen are making their way down the aisle. It's beautiful. The organ is playing softly. The last couple comes down. They take their positions and the music stops. And it was dead silence, probably for five seconds. It seemed like an hour and a half to me. And then all of a sudden, the organist starts playing this beautiful hymn. And all the people rise and the back doors open and down comes Rebecca. Dressed in white, looking more beautiful than I have ever seen her in my life. And after the wedding, at the reception, everybody was saying two things. One was how stunningly gorgeous Rebecca looked. And two was how huge the grin was on my face when I saw her. Do you see Jesus like that? Do you see Jesus at the end of the aisle of your own personal history, knees buckling, grin from ear to ear, arms wide open, ready to receive you and make you his? Or do you see him with his arms crossed, a frown on his face, and the look of disappointment in his eyes? Because if you see him like that, you've missed it. You've missed the gospel completely because Jesus is the one who the Bible says has come to quiet us with his love and rejoice over us with singing. And there's nothing in all of our life that can condemn us any longer because Jesus is the blood and He's given us that in the gospel. Is there any room in your life to even imagine that? My friends, it is my prayer that you would see Jesus like that and that I would see Jesus like that. As we leave here this morning and as we prepare to feast on this good meal that He's given to us. Oh Lord, this is a beautiful passage. You didn't come just to save face for this couple. You came to show off how glorious you are, how beautiful you are. And you came to show us that as we lay hold of who you are and rest and you're glory. That is where we will find our greatest joy. We will be fulfilled and satisfied because of what you have done for us in the gospel. Lord, we do recognize that life is hard. We live on this side of the fall. And yet you can bring us joy in the midst of that. And even in our afflictions and even in our lack and even in our emptiness, you have given us the hope of the marriage supper of the Lamb, where we will be satisfied and fulfilled with you and with your people forever. So impress that on us, make it real to us, make that known to us for the sake of your glory and for the sake of our joy. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.