The Word from God

[Here's a video of today's 11:00 AM worship service from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. Below, you'll find the text of today's message.]



Luke 5:1-11

Our Gospel lesson for today begins: “One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret, the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God.” (Luke 5:1) A Lutheran Bible commentator of the last century insisted, rightly I think, that the preposition in the last phrase of that verse shouldn’t be translated as “word of God,” but “word from God.” In today’s lesson Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, speaks the Word from God to a crowd of people who, for reasons they may have been unable to articulate, are hungry to hear from God.

Are you hungry to hear the Word from God? Not just on Sunday but every day? 

Or are you so sated and enticed by the junk food of this world–its temporary rewards, entertainments, and distractions–that you don’t have time to listen to the Word that the God we know in Jesus wants to give to you?

Human deafness to God is the greatest pandemic in our world today. I find myself afflicted by this deafness to God more often than I care to admit. And it’s a pandemic of resistance to God’s Word that is far more deadly, eternally so, than we may imagine. We prefer to hear almost anything to hearing the Word from God. This past week on social media, Lutheran theologian Chad Bird shared an observation by a contemporary Roman Catholic cardinal: “The world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing.”

But what the Word that God has for us, for the whole world collectively and for each of us individually, is far from nothing. 

In his prayer to the Father on the night of His arrest, Jesus says, “Your Word is truth.” (John 17:17) 

In Old Testament times, the psalmist tells God, “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.” (Psalm 119:105) 

And during Jesus’ ministry, Simon Peter, whose call as an apostle we consider today, tells Jesus: “You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68) 

Truth, guidance, eternal life: These are just a few of the blessings God gives us in His Word. Jesus Christ came into our universe to give us this definitive Word from God. And today, we see that that Word from God brings three major effects to us.

Now, you’re familiar with this incident. Jesus is teaching by the Sea of Galilee, here called the Lake of Gennesaret. It's daylight hours and, because the professional fishermen of Galilee only fish from dusk to dawn, there are two boats on the shore. Jesus climbs into one owned by Simon Peter to continue His teaching. You see, there are a series of craggy inlets around the Sea of Galilee, each forming perfect amphitheaters. This is what allows the large crowd listening to Jesus to hear Him now even though He’s likely speaking in a normal voice. Teaching done, Jesus, tells the professional fisherman Simon Peter, “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.” (Luke 5:4) Peter knows from years of experience that there will be no catch of fish in the middle of the day. Despite his doubts, Peter paid heed to Jesus’ word because, as Scripture tells us elsewhere, Jesus “taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.” (Matthew 7:29) 

You know what happens next. It’s a miracle at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry with Peter that will later be matched near the end of the resurrected Jesus’ ministry with the apostle (John 21:6): a haul of fish so great that Peter had to call for the boat of James and John to help bring it all in.

It’s here that we see the first effect of the Word from God. The first thing that happens to us when we encounter the Word from God is this: We see God’s sinlessness and we see our sin. 

Peter knows that in Jesus, He is seeing God face to face. Peter tells Jesus, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8) 

The Word from God shows all of us how far from God we are, how filled with sin, how unworthy to be in God’s presence, how unloving we are compared to God, how ungracious toward the sins and faults of others. 

I have an idea that’s exactly why so many people avoid listening to God’s Word and try instead to drown it out with the dead and dying things of this world.

But God doesn’t readily give up on us. That’s why Jesus says what He does now to Peter, the very words God has always spoken to those who come into His presence and are both intimidated by His power and overwhelmed by His holy perfection. “Don’t be afraid,” Jesus tells Simon. (Luke 5:10) 

This is the second Word from God we receive from Jesus, "Don't be afraid." 

Jesus is saying: “Yes, Simon; yes, human race; yes, Church, you are sinners and you deserve death and condemnation. There’s a chasm you cannot forge that lies between us. But I am the bridge between God and you. You need not be afraid that your sins will pull you away from My love. You need not fear condemnation.” 

There are many things in this world we might rightly fear: putting God to the test, suffering, causing suffering to others. But we need not be in terror of God. 

God’s Word tells us that, “...there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…” (Romans 8:1) 

Your sins may convict you, but Jesus, the one to whom you turn in daily repentance and trust, has set you free from sin and death. 

This requires no work or effort on your part. 

You needn’t fear that you’ve failed to take the right steps. (You haven’t and can’t, by the way.) 

You needn’t fear that you’ve not believed enough or done enough. (Again, you haven’t and can’t.) 

On His cross, Jesus has justified, qualified, and sanctified you for life with God, now and always. There, Jesus did all the good, followed all the right steps, taken the perfect path of obedience so that He, though sinless, could absorb all the sin and death of the human race so that we can be set free. 

That’s why Jesus tells Peter, and us, “Don’t be afraid!”

We see a third thing that Jesus’ powerful Word from God does to those who listen to it. Jesus tells Simon Peter, “from now on you will fish for people…” (Luke 5:10) 

After saving us from sin and death in Holy Baptism, creating faith in Christ within us through His Word, and sustaining us on His body and blood in Holy Communion, the third thing the Word from God from Jesus gives us is a whole new life! 

No longer afraid of condemnation, Jesus’ Word gives us a new life, a new reason for living. 

Our mission in life becomes, no less than it became the mission of Simon Peter, to follow Jesus and to fish for people, that is, to share the Word from God so that others can, like us, repent, believe, and have everlasting life with God. Jesus enlists us to share His Word everywhere.

There’s a small group composed of several men from Living Water and another man who’s part of another area congregation. They began meeting together over God’s Word several years ago, at the time we began our discipleship initiative. Even in the pandemic, they found ways to remain connected to God and each other. 

In the past year or so, a friend of two of the men, an unchurched man with no apparent connection to Christ and His Church, learned he had cancer. As the disease grew worse, the two small group members visited their friend, both at the hospital and later, at a hospice care facility. 

At one point, they shared a Christian book, Jesus Calling, with him. Later, during one of their visits, they shared another book, John Eldredge’s All Things New. 

On a subsequent visit, one of the group members asked their friend, “Did you read that book?” 

“Yes,” he said, “I’m counting on it.” 

The group member asked his friend if that meant he was receiving the Word from God that Jesus is Lord and Savior, the One Whose death and resurrection brings the forgiveness of sin and everlasting life with God? “Yes,” their friend said. 

Then they prayed together to declare their Word-given faith in Jesus. Their friend’s mother was there at the time and as the men prayed, she wept tears of joy. 

Three days later, that man died and, I am sure, because of His faith in Jesus and His Word, entered into the everlasting arms of God. 

Friends, Jesus’ Word sets us free to be His agents of grace in the world, to be fishers of people.

The Word from God that comes to us in Jesus is powerful! 

This Word shows us our distance from God and convicts us of our sin and shows us our powerlessness before life and death. 

This word also convinces us that in Jesus Christ, we need not fear condemnation because all who trust in Him have everlasting life with God. 

And this Word gives us an entirely new life, one in which our whole mission, our whole reason for living is changed by our gracious God. We’re empowered to live for the only mission worth living–or dying–for: to be fishers of people, makers of disciples, messengers of God and His love for everyone we meet. 

There is no better way to use the earthly lives God gives to us than that, to be fishers of people! 

May Jesus and His life-giving Word do God’s work in and through us. Amen

How Sermons Happen...at least for me

For me, every sermon I’ve preached for the past thirty-seven years has started with prayer for the Holy Spirit’s guidance.

Typically, the process proceeds to sitting down and making notes on the text, including little reminders of Scriptural words, ideas, and motifs I suspect are at play in the text. As an example, my initial notes for this week are shown.

After this, I go to the original Greek of the text, in the case of the New Testament, or the Hebrew, in the case of the Old Testament. I’ll translate the Greek, which I know, and consult an online “interlinear” literal translation of the Hebrew texts because I never learned Hebrew. I’ll do studies of individual words in the text that seem important to me.

Then, I study what Biblical scholars have to say about the text.

To help me frame the sermon, I then try to articulate what the Law and Gospel couplets are in the text.

What are Law and Gospel?

‘The Formula of Concord,’ one of the basic confessional statements of the Lutheran Christian movement, says this about the Law. “Everything that proclaims something about sin and God’s wrath is the proclamation of the law, however and whenever it takes place.”

When a passage in Scripture reveals our sinful human nature that’s the Law. As the apostle Paul says, the most that God’s Law can show us is our unrighteousness. God’s Law is unable to give us a right standing with God. Preachers who only proclaim God’s Law or their own warped versions of that Law—as the Pharisees often scorned by Jesus did—render a disservice to God and those who hear them. If a sermon is only a guilt trip, it’s not a sermon.

The Gospel is altogether different from the Law, although the Law points us to our need of the Gospel.

Martin Luther wrote: “The gospel…does not preach what we are to do or to avoid. It sets up no requirements but reversed the approach of the law, and says, ‘This is what God has done for you; he has let his Sin be made flesh for you, has let him be put to death for your sake”…the gospel teaches exclusively what has been given us by God, and not—as in the case of the law—what we are to do and give to God.“

As one Baptist pastor writes: “Roughly speaking, the gospel is that Jesus died on the cross as your substitute and rose again from the dead. Jesus took away the sins of the world, including your sins…” (Shawn Lazar, ‘One Point Preaching’)

One of the things for which I repent when I look back on my old sermons is how often my sermons have amounted to faithless law diatribes rather than faithful calls to both repentance for sin and new life and forgiveness from the God now revealed to all people in Jesus Christ.

Once I’ve decided on a Law/Gospel couplet—most texts have many possible couplets, I come to the hard part. That’s finding the entry point, an idea, a story, a thought, that can help people enter into and be entered by the text and that may serve as a continuing motif by which the Holy Spirit can do His work on both congregation and preacher. The primary work of the Holy Spirit is described by Jesus in John 16:7-11 as basically to convict us of our sin and to convince us that God gives Jesus righteousness to those who believe in Jesus. “The work of God [for human beings] is this,” Jesus says in John 6:29, “to believe in the One He has sent.”

That’s how a sermon should end, assuring people we can trust that Jesus, God the Son, through His death and resurrection, has done everything necessary to eternally save us from our sinful selves. Our call is, by the power of God’s Spirit, the One Who gives the gift of faith, to trust in Jesus and what He has accomplished for us on the cross.

My aim in writing my sermons is to say enough but not too much. I write three pages, a space-and-a-half between lines, in 14-point Arial font. Sometimes, the sermons go just a little over three pages, others a bit less.

It’s by processes like these, I’m sure, that pastors all over the world try week after week to share the truth about you and God and to extend God’s grace to you. It’s wonderful, rewarding work, and some weeks, by the power of the Holy Spirit, it actually happens in helpful ways.

 

The Old Testament Book of Genesis, Part 38 (Final Part)

The Old Testament Book of Genesis, Part 37

The Powerful Word!

[Below is a video of today's 11:00 AM worship service with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. After that, you'll find the text of today's message. God bless you this week with a growing faith in Jesus Christ.]



Luke 4:16-30

I was ten years old when my mom spoke words to me that have had an impact, both good and ill, on me ever since. 

She said: “I wish I knew your IQ. You are so intelligent, Mark.” 

On the one hand, those words helped me, for the rest of my life, to feel free in loving to learn. 

On the other hand, they have sometimes made me arrogant.

Such can be the impact of words spoken by human beings like my mom. 

In light of that then consider how much greater the impact can be of words spoken by the Word made flesh, Jesus, God the Son. 

It is Jesus the Word Who is the means by which we come to saving faith in Him. As Saint Paul says in one of my favorite passages in Scripture: “...faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ…” (Romans 10:17) 

But it’s possible to hear the Word of God and spurn Christ, faith in Christ, and the life with God now and in eternity that God gives to those who believe. This happens when human hearts are hardened to God, caught up in the greatest idolatry of all, the worship of self. As we will see today, it even happens to people who confess faith in the God now revealed in Jesus.

In our Gospel lesson for today, Luke 4:16-30, Jesus returns to His hometown of Nazareth. News of His ministry, filled with the proclamation of God’s Word and miraculous signs, have reached the folks here. He returns to Nazareth as a celebrated rabbi of rising importance.

In those days, when a recognized rabbi visited the synagogue on the Sabbath, they were invited to read one of the appointed lessons for the day. On the day that Jesus visits the Nazareth synagogue, He finds the appointed text from Isaiah, and, having recently been affirmed by God the Father at His Baptism, where God the Holy Spirit also anointed Him as Messiah, He reads: “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.” (Luke 4:18-19)

God first gave these words to Isaiah to tell the people of Israel, hundreds of years before, that their exile under foreign conquerors would end. It did end. But when Jesus preaches in Nazareth He says that this Word is also about Him. “Today,” He tells the worshipers, “this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21)

Jesus claims that God has anointed Him to speak His Word that first, proclaims the Good News, or the Gospel, to the poor, whether their poverty is financial or spiritual. He has come to those who, like you and me, are born helpless, unable to resist the temptation to sin and death that comes to us from our human nature, from the world, and from the devil. Jesus has come also to set free all those held as prisoners, in bondage to sin and death, like you and me. He has come to give sight to those who are blind both physically and spiritually, incapable without God’s Word coming to them, of seeing the God of undeserved grace. 

And Jesus comes to bring the year of the Lord’s favor. This last “mission” of Jesus is wrapped up in the Old Testament provision for ancient Israel of a Jubilee year, which came every fifty years. 

In Jubilee years, God said in Leviticus, all prisoners were to be released, whatever their crimes; all debts were to be forgiven, however much the debt was; and all families were to be given back the properties to which they were entitled when their ancestors first entered the Promised Land, no matter if the property had been lost through mismanagement or misfortune. 

The Jubilee year was a time of pure grace, undeserved forgiveness, and new life. 

Now Jesus is proclaiming the Jubilee of all Jubilees, one to last for all eternity. This Jubilee brings eternal forgiveness and eternal life with God to all who believe in Him. “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Initially, Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes react positively to this Word. They feel a pride of ownership and entitlement. 

But as will happen with Jesus’ fellow Jews (and with their Gentile overlords) on Good Friday two years later, they can’t accept that someone with whom they think they’re familiar could be Who He claims to be. 

They demand that Jesus prove Himself by performing a sign for them, a miracle like the ones He’s done in other places. But they have the cart before the horse. The miraculous signs of Jesus’ power over life, death, destitution, and eternity have always been performed in the lives of those who first, however tentatively, believe the Word about Him as the Savior Who brings God’s salvation. 

The Nazarenes want what they can get out of Jesus without trusting in Jesus. They want faith without repentance. They want goodies without discipleship.

This is often our problem too, which is why so many Christians are babies in their faith even though the Gospel Word that brings faith in Christ and growth in that faith has been shared with them many times.

Hebrews 4:12 tells us, “...the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” 

Now, like a skillful surgeon, Jesus wields the Word of God to cut away the fatal growths of ethnic, religious, and familial pride–sin–that would prevent His Word from giving His fellow Nazarenes the gift of saving faith He wants to give to all. “Surely…you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.,” Jesus tells them.

He reminds the Nazarenes that in Old Testament times, God sent the prophet Elijah, not to all the Jewish widows who may have felt themselves entitled to God’s favor because they were Jews, sending him instead to a widow who was a foreigner. 

And God didn’t use the prophet Elisha to heal a Jewish leper, but a leper who commanded a foreign army. 

God sent His prophets to perform signs of His grace to these foreigners because they admitted that without the God long revealed to the Jews, they were poor, imprisoned, blind, and oppressed by sin and darkness. They knew how much they needed God, the God now revealed to all of us in Jesus. 

Do we know how much we need Jesus every single day? Or do we only turn to Jesus when we think we could use Him?

Are we willing to daily repent and believe in Jesus' Word?

The people of Nazareth are too proud to receive grace. And now, having heard Jesus’ powerful, life-giving Word of grace, we witness the powerful impact of Jesus’ Word on those who refuse to believe. 

The hometown crowd realizes that Jesus is telling them that they have no special hold on God, that God loves all people, that their self-righteousness and ethnic pride don’t impress God. So they take Jesus to the brow of the hill on which Nazareth is builtg to throw Him over the edge to His death. 

It’s here that Jesus actually does perform a miracle, although the Nazareth crowd doesn’t perceive it: He walks through the crowd and keeps on walking. Jesus will submit to death in order to conquer it for us, but now is not the time. Good Friday (and Easter) will happen at a time appointed by God and not a moment earlier or a moment later than God has decided. The God revealed in Jesus will have the final Word.

Jesus the Word then, reveals two important truths to us today. 

The first is that He has come to set you free from sin and death and that when you trust that Gospel Word, you are free. Right this moment. Eternity with God starts when we believe this Word, no matter what we’ve done or what we’ve been. That's the Gospel and it's for you, friends! 

The second thing is that the free gift of His salvation comes by way of the cross. 

It comes by Jesus’ cross. The Messiah will be rejected by the world, even by His own people, so that Jesus can save those who believe. His rejection at Nazareth foreshadows His impending rejection at Jerusalem. 

There’s another cross: ours. Jesus will later say, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." (Luke 9:23) We bear our cross as, in response to Jesus’ word, we set aside our pride and daily confess our need of Jesus, Who gives us the riches of His grace, freedom from our sin, eyes to see the love God bears for us always, and freedom from sin, death, and the devil.

Once more this morning, Jesus comes to us in His gracious, Gospel Word and, in Word-inspired faith we can now say, “Today, God’s salvation has been accomploshed in our hearing.” This is the power of His Word for us. May God help us daily to receive Jesus and His Word. Amen

The Old Testament Book of Genesis, Part 36

The Old Testament Book of Genesis, Part 35

The One Who Fills the Universal Emptiness

Here is both the video of today's second worship service with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio and the text of the message. Have a good and blessed week.



John 2:1-11

This past week, Ann and I welcomed a high school classmate and her husband, whose wedding I did thirty-three years ago, to our house for dinner. It was so much fun! During the course of our time together, we prayed and our friend talked about things she is praying for in her quiet time. We reminisced and talked about our challenges. And we laughed and laughed. I found myself unable to sleep that night because I was so excited just thinking about all the four of us had shared. Do you ever have times like this, moments filled with so much meaning and joy that you can’t catalog it all? 

These sorts of moments, I think, are gifts from God meant to sustain us in His love, joy, and grace.

All of this brings us to the subject of our Gospel lesson for this Second Sunday after Epiphany, John 2:1-11. I’m sure that if I’d been one of the disciples with Jesus on the day our lesson recounts, I would have had an even harder time sleeping that night than I did this past Thursday! There is so much in Jesus’ first recorded miracle, turning water into wine, that we could never catalog all the love, joy, and grace to be seen here. In fact, as I was preparing this message this past week, I began by listing about twelve different things I could talk about.

Today though, I want to focus on two basic things revealed to us in this encounter with Jesus. 

You know what happens. There’s a wedding in Cana, a village not far from Nazareth, where Jesus grew up. It’s been one week since Jesus began His ministry and three days since He and the disciples left the Jordan to arrive here. Wedding celebrations last a week in these times and the festivities have just begun when a crisis happens. Jesus’ mother thinks Jesus should do something about it. “They have no more wine,” she says. (John 2:3) It’s probable that the mother of our Lord wants Jesus to save the wedding hosts from embarrassment.

But this crisis is more than a socially embarrassing situation bringing the potential for community ridicule and scorn. It points us to a simple fact: Nothing in this life is guaranteed, permanent, perfect, or utterly reliable. 

Wine runs out. 

Good health fades. 

Relationships fray. 

Life ends. 

And, as to our supply of righteousness–a sinlessness that would make us worthy of life with God, we are completely lacking, totally unworthy of salvation. 

David, described by the Bible as a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22), who also committed adultery and murder, confesses: “I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” (Psalm 51:5) 

Friends, we are all lacking. 

In our own power, we lack the certainty that we will be alive this afternoon, let alone in the tomorrows we so carefully plan. 

In our own power, we lack the righteousness needed to have a life with God or a place in His Kingdom. 

Paraphrasing Jesus’ mother, we can say honestly about our existences and prospects, “We have no more wine. We have nothing!” 

Without the God revealed in Jesus Christ, our lives can only be exercises in meaninglessness and futility.

Jesus responds to His mother, asking her what their hosts’ dilemma has to do with the two of them, and reminding her, “My hour has not yet come.” (John 2:4) Jesus’ “hour,” according to the Gospel of John, is the time of His glorification, which includes His death, resurrection, and ascension. 

Jesus is reminding her that God acts on His timetable, not ours. 

While Jesus would later reveal Himself to be “I AM,” Yahweh, the God of all creation, the time for such disclosure to the world at large had not yet come, and not even His earthly mother could change that.

But Jesus does hear our requests of Him, our prayers in His name, and He has compassion for all His children. 

When our conditions of lack, of helplessness and need, are brought before Him, He doesn’t walk away. 

When we acknowledge our sins, He doesn’t hide His face! 

You know what happens next. Jesus, without a word beyond telling the servants to fill the large stone purification jars with water, calls no attention to the miracle–the sign of His lordship–that He performs, turning water into wine. Only those who already in some way believed in Him–His mother and His disciples–have a clue as to what has just happened. (John 1:29) The steward of the party and the others think that it’s either a fortuitous circumstance or good planning that the groom has saved the best wine for last.

That’s often how an unbelieving world views the ways in which Jesus meets our helplessness with His help. 

When I had the so-called “widowmaker” heart attack twelve years ago, my cardiologist told me the day I received a stent, “Because you had none of the risk factors, I can’t explain why you had the heart attack you did. I also can’t explain why you survived.” When I shared that with an unbelieving friend, he told me, “Well, I’m sure that there’s a medical explanation.” “Sure,” I told him, “my cardiologist is top-notch. He can explain what happened to me. But he was telling me that he couldn’t explain why it happened.” My attending nurse, looking at the miracle of my survival through the eyes of faith, had as good an explanation for my survival as I’ve heard: “God has other plans for you.”

At the end of today’s Gospel lesson, John tells us, “What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” (John 2:11) 

What was it about turning water into wine that made the disciples believe all the more that Jesus was the Messiah?

Consider the visions of fruitfulness, plenty, and life that the Old Testament prophets, hundreds of years before, said would come when the Messiah brought the Kingdom of God into being. 

Joel 3:18-19 says: “In that day the mountains will drip new wine...” 

And God says through the prophet Amos, “‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman and the planter by the one treading grapes. New wine will drip from the mountains and flow from all the hills…” (Amos 9:13) 

And, beyond the prophets, in the period between the Old and New Testaments, a time of despair and spiritual emptiness, one of the rabbis wrote with precision about the miracle at Cana: “And it shall come to pass…that the Anointed One shall then begin to be revealed…each branch shall produce a thousand clusters, and each cluster produce a thousand grapes and each grape produce 120 gallons of wine,” precisely the amount of wine Jesus made from water in our lesson. (2 Baruch 29:3, 5-6, Apocrypha)

Jesus is the Messiah Who offers up His body and His blood, Who, for those who believe in Him, replaces the old bitterness of sin, death, and futility with the new wine of life, fullness, plenty, and eternal reconciliation with God. Jesus says, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10)

By God’s grace through faith in Jesus, our unrighteousness is replaced with Jesus’ righteousness, our death is replaced with Jesus’ life, our grief is supplanted by His resurrection joy.

Life in this world is hard. But we who are born captives to sin and death can see in the One Who turned water into wine and has already finished His work of saving us and granting eternity to all who turn to Him in faith, hope. 

Suffering, death, decrepitude, sorrow, and spiritual poverty need not be the final word over a human life. 

Already, we have seen the epiphanies revealing Christ’s identity as God the Son and our Savior. 

Already at Cana, we can faintly hear in the distance the cry believers will hear on that Resurrection morning when all the dead in Christ will be called from their graves as God and His angels shout: “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” (Ephesians 5:14) 

This is our joy and the joy we are privileged to share with all the world! Amen 

The Old Testament Book of Genesis, Part 34

The Old Testament Book of Genesis, Part 33