Do Whatever He Tells You

Mary said to the servants at the wedding feast, “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5).

One of the mistakes we sometimes make is thinking that Jesus just wants to save us.

Before you ring up the pastor and elders, be patient for just a minute.

Of course: Jesus does indeed save us from all the power and penalty of Sin and Law and Death.

And: Jesus does indeed save us in order to change us.  As we explored in our recent Home for Christmas series, God not only intends to bring us home; God also wants us to learn how to be and behave as beloved daughters and sons in his one great family.

So this month we’re going to explore how Jesus keeps working on us so that we are becoming more like him in a new series called Shift.

We want to cooperate with Jesus in making shifts, in the work of changing and growing to be more like him.  As has been said, “God loves you just the way you are – and because he loves you, he’s not going to leave you like that!”

We’ll begin with a passage that might be familiar from wedding services you have attended, Jesus changing water into wine (John 2:1-11).  Mary, Jesus’s mother, along with Jesus and his disciples, have been invited to a wedding in the small village of Cana in Galilee.  This was a major event in small-village life, and the festivities might have gone on for several days.  In the midst of the celebrations, a crisis: they have run out of wine!  A social disaster!  Mary asks Jesus to do something to help, he replies enigmatically (“My time has not yet come”), and then Mary tells the catering staff, “Do whatever he tells you.”

What Jesus tells them to do seems simple enough, and useless: fill up six large stone jars with water.  Each jar held around 25 gallons, so that’s no trivial amount of work.  But the servants comply: “OK, 150 gallons of water, all set.”  Jesus then tells them to take a sample to the host.  John tells us that the servants realized that the water had somehow shifted from being regular water to wine (perhaps some surreptitious sipping?), but the host only knew that a social crisis was in the making.

But when he tasted what the servants had brought, he pronounced it “the best!”

Lots of shifts going on here: water shifted into wine, shifting plans and expectations, shifts in how Jesus is perceived.  

But it all starts in and with the simple and ordinary stuff of our everyday lives, water and stone jars.   Jesus can make wine out of nothing, but he chooses to work with what nature provides (water) and what humans make (ordinary stone jars).

And one thing more: “Do whatever he tells you.”

If the servants don’t do what Jesus says, no wine, no miracle: social disaster.  If they do …

So maybe that’s an important shift for us as we begin this new year: to give new (or renewed) attention to listening to Scripture.  After all, how can we do whatever he tells us if we don’t allow him to tell us anything

What’s one thing that you’re pretty sure Jesus said (even if you aren’t sure where to find it in the Bible) that you’re currently not doing?  What’s a small shift that God wants to help you make?

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