New Wine

There is a truth we lose sight of far too easily: God is always good. Not sometimes, not when we have earned it, but always. God is in a good mood toward you, and He wants you to live in a good mood too. Jesus put that heart of God on display in the most surprising way, at a small-town wedding that had run short of wine.

This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.

John 2:11

Stop and notice what that first sign was. Not raising the dead. Not casting out a demon. Not curing a disease. Jesus chose to reveal who He truly was by turning water into roughly five hundred liters of excellent wine at a wedding feast. Why would He begin there? Because in that single miracle, Jesus showed us exactly what is in God's heart for our redemption: to bring true joy and gladness back into a weary world.

What We Are Looking For Is Not Here

When they wanted wine, Mary said to Jesus, They have no wine. Notice, it was not a question of if the wine would run out, but when. That is the story of life on earth. You plan for months, you dream of the happiest day of your life, and scarcely has the celebration begun before you discover there is no wine. It is the cosmic disappointment we all eventually meet. Oh, if I could just get to that new country. Two weeks later, no wine. Oh, if I could just get married. On the wedding night, no wine. Oh, if I could just land that job. And there too, no wine. Jacob worked seven years for Rachel and woke up married to Leah. Why this endless cycle of letdown?

Because what we are actually searching for was never on this earth in the first place. What we are really looking for is the reason God made us: the love and presence of God Himself.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.

Psalm 16:11

God made us to love us. There is in each of us a God-shaped emptiness, a longing for His love and presence that He Himself placed there, and only God can fill it. So whenever a real want opens up in your life, God is often using it to draw you to Himself, to make you thirsty for His presence and hungry for His Spirit, who carries the presence of God here on earth. That ache you feel is, at its root, a cry for God. And He knows about it. He is not indifferent to it. He wants to come and meet it.

God Is Looking for Partners, Not Just Passengers

There are two lies the church has swallowed almost without noticing. The first is that Christianity is mainly about making sure you get to heaven. The second grows out of the first: that Christianity is basically a long list of things not to do. Once you believe it is all about not missing heaven, someone will hand you a list of rules to guarantee you make it, and before long your faith is defined by what you avoid rather than what you were made to do.

But hear this clearly: God has already settled the matter of how you get to heaven. Jesus is the reason, the only reason, you will ever get there. He made the One who knew no sin to become sin, so that you could become the righteousness of God in Him. The moment you trusted Jesus, the question of heaven was permanently resolved. You hold the ticket, and all you do to enter is present it: the blood of Jesus, given as the ransom for your soul. Scripture even says you have already been translated out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His dear Son. So how you live now is not to earn heaven; it is because heaven is already yours.

Do not let the enemy confuse you. The only way to lose that ticket is to throw it away, to stop believing that it is because of Jesus, and Jesus alone, that you are saved. Many drift here over time. They once trusted Christ, but slowly it becomes Jesus plus their tithing, Jesus plus their church attendance, Jesus plus their good works. On the last day, some will plead, Have we not fasted, prayed, fed the poor? But the only answer that opens the door is, Because of Jesus. And that ticket never expires, for He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Let me be equally clear on the other side. If anyone hears grace and thinks, Wonderful, now I can go and sin freely, that person has badly misunderstood, and honestly needs to come to Christ in earnest. No one who has genuinely found Jesus, who knows He now holds the ticket to heaven, walks away treating grace as a license to sin. What God plants in a truly saved heart is a burning desire to see happen exactly what He wants to see happen.

And what is uppermost in God's mind? We hear it in the prayer Jesus taught us: Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. It is deeply ironic that so many believers spend their energy trying to take the world up to heaven, when God is looking for people who will partner with Him to bring heaven down to the world. As the psalm says, the heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth He has given to us. No one can get a soul to heaven except God, and no one can bring heaven to earth except a willing person. That is why, the moment He saved you, He did not immediately take you home. Instead He deposited the riches of heaven inside you.

Jesus Himself Is the Ransom

When Mary first brought the need to Him, Jesus answered, My hour is not yet come. In other words, the way this deep need would truly be met required the Son of God going to the cross. Here is why nothing on earth can finally satisfy us: everything here has been contaminated by sin, and sin at its core is selfishness, putting oneself ahead of God and others. As Isaiah said, all of us like sheep have gone astray, each turning to his own way. So everything and everyone under that curse is headed toward death and decay. Nothing here ever quite reaches fullness. Nothing here lasts forever.

This left God with what looks like an impossible tension: how can a just God rightly deal with sin and still rescue the very ones He loves? Scripture's answer is a ransom, the person of Jesus. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting our sins against us. Remember those six stone waterpots at the wedding, set out for ceremonial washing. They pointed to the law and to the endless effort to scrub away the stain of sin. But washing with water never truly purified anyone; it only reminded people how deeply they needed cleansing they could not provide. And Jesus quietly set those pots aside and gave something far greater.

The Scriptures call it the law of the ransom: the life of the flesh is in the blood, given upon the altar to make atonement for our souls. It is as though God says to us: You have truly wronged me by your sin, and in justice you deserve to die. But because I love you, I will give you my own blood as the atonement. God does not merely offer a ransom; He provides it, and the ransom He provides is Himself. Unlike any human substitute, this ransom is infinitely greater than the penalty it covers. All the blood of bulls and goats in the Old Testament was only ever a signpost pointing to this one payment God would make in His own Son.

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

2 Corinthians 5:21

So Jesus came into this world knowing His hour would come, when He would become the ransom for the whole world. And because of what He did, God can now give Himself to us, the wine in abundance, the fullness of joy and lasting pleasure, freely offered to anyone who will receive it.

The Power in the Blood

This is why the good news of the New Testament is so much greater than what came before. Under the old covenant, if you touched a leper you became unclean and had to offer a sacrifice to be restored. But when Jesus reached out and touched the leper, the leper was made clean, because the ransom is beyond all comparison greater than the penalty. Under the old covenant, contact with death left you defiled. Yet Jesus laid hold of the dead and life came rushing back. That is the power at work in the blood of Jesus.

Best of all, under the old covenant the sacrifices had to be repeated year after year. But the blood of Jesus was shed once, for all people, for all time. Trust in it and you are received, whether you had stood at the foot of the cross the very day He died or come to Him thousands of years later, because it is the blood of God Himself, given as the ransom. Anyone who brings that ransom, in any generation, at any hour, is welcomed home. He is rescued from the guilt of sin. He finds hope in place of sorrow and light in place of despair. And whatever affliction weighs on him, he can bring it with confidence to a God who loves to give good gifts to His children.

So hear me. You may walk in today feeling impoverished, in want of wine. Perhaps there is no wine in your marriage, no wine in your work, no wine in your soul. But God has provided a ransom, and His name is Jesus. Because of His blood, you are delivered from the contamination of sin, and now you can receive the Holy Spirit, the One who alone meets and satisfies the deepest desire of your heart. And He does not stop there. He fills you so that your own emptiness is answered, and then, through you, God can meet the thirst of a needy world around you. There is new wine to be poured out. Come and drink.