What Jesus Offers Is Always Better
Marc Jolicoeur · Tidal Church Moncton · July 6, 2025 · What Do the Miracles of Jesus Mean? series
Marc Jolicoeur explores Jesus turning water into wine at Cana in John 2. The sign shows Jesus as Messiah: Creator, bringer of abundance, rescuer of the vulnerable, and fulfiller of the law. Whatever He offers is always better, so we trust Him.
More from Marc Jolicoeur · The What Do the Miracles of Jesus Mean? series
Topics: Faith, Grace, Discipleship
Transcript
[0:00] What do the miracles of Jesus mean? Well, that's the question, right? That's the question that we're gonna be asking as we go throughout our time here this morning. As Jim mentioned, my name is Marc, and I am ridiculously excited to talk about this actually, because to be honest with you, I have read this passage of Scripture. I don't know, I mean, probably dozens of times. I might even have seen, like, flannelgraph kind of versions of it when I was a kid, you know, but it always kinda seemed inconsequential to me. It just kind of seemed like a party trick. I was like, that's cool. But I'm like, but now that I've kind of dug into it a little bit and people have explained some things to me, I see, oh wow, there's a lot more going on here. So I'm really excited to talk about that with you. And I kind of want to just, I kind of wanted to get into it. So the how we're gonna do this here in week two of this, you know, What Do the Miracles of Jesus Mean?
[0:46] We're gonna be talking about John chapter 2, the miracle of turning water into wine. And the tagline, the thing that I want you to carry with you throughout the rest of this morning, and hopefully in the future, is what Jesus offers is always better. What Jesus offers is always better. I think that'll make more sense as we go. So we're gonna read the passage of Scripture. I'm gonna ask about three questions, just about things that I noticed right away, and then maybe you did too, so we can kind of preliminarily clear the ground. And then we're gonna ask the question that Pastor Jeremy last week taught us to ask, which is, what does this sign signify? What is it pointing to about Jesus as the Messiah? So I'm gonna do something that I think I saw Pastor Sam do a few weeks ago. If you're able to, and if you're willing, I'd invite you to stand as we read the words of John chapter 2.
[1:36] And then I'm gonna get you to do something at the end too. So you're integral to how this works. John chapter 2, starting in verse 1. On the third day, a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus was there and His disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus' mother said to Him, "They have no more wine." "Woman, why do you involve Me? Jesus replied, "My hour has not yet come." And His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever He tells you." Now nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind that are used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from 20 to 30 gallons. Jesus said to the servants, "Fill the jars with water." So they filled them to the brim.
[2:23] Then He told them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet." They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water did. They knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said, "Everyone brings out the choice wine first and the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink, but you have saved the best till now." 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. Now, I'm gonna say the word of the Lord, and if you are willing and able, you can respond, "Thanks be to God." So the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[3:09] You can have a seat. So like I said, three questions of just details that kind of stand out to me. Here's the first one. Why does running out of wine actually matter that much for this to be like a big deal? Miracle. Why does running out of wine matter? I don't host a lot, but if I did and I had, like, I dunno, a bag of potato chips, and then I realized I got down to the end of the bag and I kind of shook it. I was like, no more chips, I'd be like, oh, well off you go or you can stay, but the chips are gone. You know, I wouldn't feel bad about the fact that chips ran out. I got the biggest bag I could at Costco. They're gone now. The party's over, you know, figure it out. Now as you can tell, I'm obviously not much of a host. If I invite you over, my wife might take care of, better care of you than I do. Hospitality not high for me.
[3:55] I think that our culture in general is not necessarily super high on what we might think of as hospitality, and we're also not very high on what we might think of as honor, shame culture. So our culture, maybe you come from a place where some of these things actually resonate a little bit differently, but I just never understood why it was such a big deal that they might run out of wine until I read this guy this week. Edward Klink III, great name, Edward Klink. He has this to say. He says, "Although wine was a standard part of daily life in the ancient Mediterranean world, Jewish literature makes clear that wine was an important part of festive occasions, especially at weddings. And since weddings in the first century were not about two people, but actually about two families, the social dynamics were more comprehensive and intense.
[4:46] For this reason, to run out of wine during the wedding celebration was likely to have caused a loss of family honor and status." In other words, it's actually kind of a big deal. People were gonna end up kind of being shamed. There's gonna be a lot like, kinda like a, maybe a bad mark for the wedding, for the marriage, therefore, and then for the families involved. So the stakes are actually pretty high. So hopefully that makes sense as to why Jesus was invited to step in here. Number two, and this is a big one, but we're not gonna spend a lot of time on it, I promise. Was this grape juice or was it wine? I grew up in this church tradition. Maybe you know that in a Wesleyan church, Wesleyan comes from Methodism. And so in our tradition, we're known as teetotalers.
[5:33] Most of this is certainly in our past. In other words, when it came to alcohol, the way that we talked about it was just don't do it. Abstain from alcohol. That was how it was kind of like presented to us for most of the existence of our time. In fact, if you know anything about grape juice, maybe, you know, Welch's grape juice, you don't see it very often in the stores anymore, but they still make grape jam and stuff. This was designed by a Wesleyan Methodist by the name of Thomas Welch. And he was able to figure out 150 years ago, mind you, he was able to figure out how to keep grapes on the shelf without it turning into wine. This was a fairly recent technology like, you know, only slightly more recent than like the telephone. Like this has not been around for a very long time. So what has often been said is, yeah, yeah, yeah, but this isn't wine, this is grape juice.
[6:24] And I just have to say it's probably not, it's probably wine because if you put grapes together for a long time, they become wine. And I also know that if you drink too much grape juice, it won't impede your ability to tell whether or not the grape juice that came afterwards was better or worse. Okay, so very clearly this is wine. So if you've heard otherwise, it's, I'm sorry, I should probably not true. However, if you've heard that somehow this is some sort of license towards overindulging or to drinking too much and drinking to excess, that's also definitely not what's going on here. So the substance oinos is the Greek word, like "oi," which makes a sound. So you can see where wine comes from in that word.
[7:09] It is definitely wine, but the point of it isn't necessarily the alcohol. The point, as we'll see much later on, is what wine comes to represent. Okay, that's all I'm gonna say about that last question though. I think the one that's most interesting to me is why does Jesus' mother ask Him to help? We don't really know the relationship and it's, but it's a bit of a weird setup, right? From the other Gospel accounts, we know that her name is Mary, but here she's just kind of unnamed. She's actually throughout the whole book of John, she's identified in reference to her Son, she's the mother of Jesus, and then also weirdly she's referred to as "woman" by that Son. When I read that, I actually heard somebody go, oh, kind of scoff at it. He seems to decline her request for Him to intervene, but then she says to the servants, "Hey, just do whatever He tells you."
[8:00] And then while the miracle's kind of off to the races. So there's a lot that we'll have to leave unsaid for now, but I think it's worth flagging up the reality that Jesus here is moved to act by the persistent request of someone that He loves and who loves Him. And I think we just sang this morning about how much we are loved by Him. We expressed our love for Him. So as we move throughout the rest of this Gospel book throughout the summer, on your own reading and other teachings here on Sunday morning, I'd invite you to keep your eyes open and look for those who intercede on behalf of others, as well as those who boldly ask on behalf of themselves. And note how Jesus responds not only to bare need, like to Him observing need, but to being asked to intervene.
[8:52] In other words, how He responds to prayer. Okay, so much for all that. I mean, we could talk all morning just about other little kind of details in the text. There's a whole bunch of them, but we want to turn our attention now to that question that Jeremy set us up so well to ask last week, when he was referring to John chapter 20, verses 30 and 31. If this turning of water into wine is not just a miracle, but it's a sign, then what is it signifying? What is it pointing to? What about this sign is supposed to make us believe about Jesus as the Messiah? How is He revealed through it? As far as I can tell, there's at least four different ways that this sign points to the person of Jesus as the person of the Messiah, as the Christ.
[9:47] It says that He's the agent of creation, the bringer of abundance, the rescuer of the vulnerable, and the fulfiller of the law. So let's start at the beginning, as the agent of creation. Again, last week, Pastor Jeremy pointed out the way that John's Gospel opens in a symmetrical way with how the whole Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, how it opens. So John 1:1 reads like this: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. And the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made. And without Him, nothing was made that has been made." And again, if you know this, it will jog your memory of Genesis 1:1.
[10:33] "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." Now, it's important to understand the act of creation is described here as what they call, in a Latin fancy, creation ex nihilo, which means creation out of nothing. And we as a church absolutely hold to that, that everything exists because God created everything. A close reading of Genesis though kind of shows us that God, as the agent of creation, is taking formless matter and forming it into something useful.
[11:18] The Spirit of God hovers over the surface of the deep and then out of that deep He forms the basis of everything that we now see. So in this sense, the opposite of creation isn't nothingness, it's chaos, right? So once something becomes Spirit-filled, once it becomes inspired, it goes from being useless to being useful, from being unformed to being formed, from being chaotic to being created. This is what Jesus does with the water. Now is water useless? Absolutely not. But it wasn't suited to what was needed in this moment.
[12:04] And so John shows us Jesus's messianic power as the agent of creation by His ability to bring the needed life-filled order from the chaotic elements all around Him. He created wine from water. Jesus as the Messiah is the agent of creation. Jesus as the Messiah is also the bringer of abundance. Now, I mentioned earlier how important wine is in the Bible. Wine is the biblical symbol of abundance in some ways, maybe like oil and like bread or water, or maybe familiar with the idea of milk and honey. But wine has its own particular set of imagery, right? The majority of the Bible, as you might know, it was written, it emerged from contexts where people were living in agricultural situations that were anything but abundant.
[12:57] They had to squeeze for every calorie that they could get. And even if this year was a decent year, there's just no way of knowing what next year was gonna look like. This is likely part of the explanation for the ubiquity of wine. In the ancient world, when grapes are ripe, you've gotta harvest them. But what are you gonna do? You can only eat so many grapes. And then I had to throw some grapes out the other day, sadly, because they had gone past their prime. That is not the kind of thing that you wanna be doing in the ancient world. You want to preserve everything. And so wine is actually a way of taking the abundance of a grape harvest and actually helping it sustain longer than they would be able to be on the vine. So that explains certainly part of it. It also explains the reason that you would use it often to cut with water, because the water often had some problems with it.
[13:45] And so wine would help create safety for that water. So those are two utilitarian reasons why wine played such a role. But I don't wanna understate this celebratory nature of wine as well. It always seems to point to celebration. It points towards abundance. Many of the expectations that surrounded the coming of a Messiah were connected to the coming of not just Him, but a messianic age, an age that was characterized by abundance, by lots. You can picture like the feast of plenty or the horn of plenty, the cornucopia, right? Just having not just enough, but even more than enough. In Genesis chapter 49, Jacob, who had gone down to Egypt to meet Joseph, and all of his children were surrounding him.
[14:35] He's giving blessings to his 12 children before he passes on. And the blessing that he gives to some of them were not the greatest blessings, to be honest with you. I wouldn't wanna take those, but the one that he gives to Judah is beautiful. And you might know that Judah is the tribe from which David, King David, arises, and also the tribe from which Jesus Himself arises in the line of David. And here's the blessing that Jacob speaks over Judah. He says, "Judah will tether his donkey to a vine, his colt, to the choicest branch. He will wash his garments in wine, his robes in the blood of grapes. His eyes will be darker than wine, his teeth whiter than milk." Just this idea of just so much, you know, muchness. And then the prophets, they take up this theme, abundance, when they look for a future day.
[15:26] Amos says in chapter 9, "The days are coming," declares the Lord. "The days are coming when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman and the planter by the one treading grapes." In other words, they can't even keep up with how much they have. "New wine will drip from the mountains and flow from all the hills, and I will bring My people Israel back from exile. They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine. They will make gardens and they will eat their fruit." Or Joel chapter 2, "The threshing floors will be filled with grain, the vats will overflow with new wine and oil." Or check this one out from Isaiah 25. This is just perfect. "On this mountain, the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast, a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine, the best of meats and the finest of wines."
[16:24] See, this idea of a messianic age that was coming was characterized by someone who could bring abundance, and taking water and then turning that into wine is a sure sign that that's who You are. A bringer of abundance into a climate of scarcity. I believe this miracle also shows us that Jesus as the Messiah was the rescuer of the vulnerable. Now sometimes there's really only so many words on the page when it comes to the Bible and your imagination has to fill in the gaps. Sometimes that's good and sometimes that's, well, how about this, it's neutral. Sometimes it's right and sometimes it's wrong. So I don't know if this is right, okay, I'm reading into this a little bit.
[17:10] You could do your homework and you can judge for yourself. My guess is, given the fact that they ran out of wine, we don't know when they ran out, but they ran out. My question to you would be this: is it likelier that these are people who are very wealthy or people who are not very wealthy? I'm gonna say not very wealthy. I'm gonna say they probably don't have a lot of money. Now listen, shipping delays can happen to everybody. Kitchen accidents can happen to anybody, but all things being equal, it's more than likely the reason that they ran out of wine was because they're not exactly swimming in money. Weddings are expensive today, but as we heard, they were a huge financial burden back then as well. So this miracle may not literally be like saving somebody who is starving, but it is rescuing people who were socially and thus very really financially vulnerable from falling even further behind.
[18:11] It reminds me of how Jesus seems to announce His own public ministry in the other Gospels as well. I think of Luke chapter 4. This is when Jesus is rolling into His hometown and He goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath and He stands up to read and they hand Him a scroll, the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. This is from Luke chapter 4. He unrolls it and He finds the place where it is written. And this is, He's quoting here on the scroll from what we would know of as Isaiah 61. And it says, "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."
[18:59] And then He rolled the scroll, gave it back and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were just fastened on Him. And He began by saying to them, "Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing." Or in Matthew, we actually read in Matthew chapter 11, when John, this is John the Baptist who was in prison, he heard about the deeds of the Messiah. That's Jesus. He sent his disciples to ask Him, "Hey, are You the one who's to come or should we be expecting someone else?" And Jesus replied, "Go back, report to John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised.
[19:44] And listen, the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of Me." Jesus's ministry was always clearly aimed towards the vulnerable. Why? Because that's what the Messiah was always aimed to be, a minister to and rescuer of the vulnerable. Now, one last point here before we move on. How would this particular sign have impacted the servants who were involved? I mean, they had a front row seat to this miracle, right? They were actually involved in it themselves. They're the ones who poured the water. Who was it who saw His glory? First to whom was this?
[20:29] Glory first manifested to some kitchen workers who were behind the scenes. Jesus truly is the rescuer of the vulnerable. And fourth, this is the last one we'll talk about here for today, though we could do more. Jesus as the Messiah is the fulfiller of the law. He's the fulfiller of the law. We read that word "fulfilled" just a few moments ago when Jesus rolled the scroll up and said, "This word is fulfilled in your presence." Last summer, if some of you were with us, we took a look at how Jesus was self-consciously compared to, or even sometimes compared Himself to, Moses. When we took a deep dive into what is known as the Sermon on the Mount, that's from the Gospel according to Matthew, we called the series Kingdom Citizens. Moses delivered the law to God's people on a mountainside, midway between their old home and their new home.
[21:25] And Jesus, well, He delivered His words, the words that echoed and that amplified that Mosaic law. He did so on a mountainside right in the liminal space between His kingdom coming and His kingdom come. And in this sign, the changing of the water into wine, John is showing us that Jesus is participating in this tradition of the law and is also, in a way, He's transforming it or He is, He's fulfilling it. Pay attention to how this miracle actually happened. John chapter 2, starting in verse 6. "Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for their ceremonial washing. Each were holding from 20 to 30 gallons.
[22:12] Jesus said to the servants, "Fill the jars with water." And so they filled them to the brim. Now, just a little aside to clarify here, something maybe it felt odd to you for me to read the words out loud, "the Jews," to use that term. If you're reading through the Gospel of John, depending upon what version of it you read, you might actually find that that term shows up about 70 times throughout the book. And sometimes it's pretty positive and sometimes it's pretty neutral. But often it can sound like the context is leading you to think that this is a negative or a bad thing. And this has led some people over the course of history to make some really bad choices concerning how they think about, talk about, and then treat Jewish people in particular and Judaism in general.
[23:03] Really quick, maybe you know this, maybe you don't. But John, the person who wrote the book, and Jesus, the main character of the book, they're both Jewish, and in this book, Jesus engages in the Jewish temple. He, as we just read, engages in the synagogue. He engages with the Hebrew Bible, known to us as the Old Testament Scriptures. He engages in Jewish festivals and celebrations. Now, it may be a little bit too simplistic, but I think it's easiest for us to understand that when the term is used as "the Jews" in a negative way, it is referring specifically to the ruling classes at that time in the area of Judea who were actually working against the idea that Jesus Himself was who He claimed to be, the one who came not to abolish the Mosaic law, but the one who came to fulfill it.
[23:53] So just keep that in mind as you're doing your reading this summer. Okay, so Jesus looks at these jars, right? These giant jars for ceremonial washing. And He says, "You know what? Let's fill these." So what do the servants do? They fill them. They fill them. Actually, it says to the brim, so they are filled full. These jars that were used for sometimes maybe inconsequential ceremonial washings have become full-filled. Jesus doesn't just fulfill the law as in keep it, which He does, but in the sense that He brings it to maturity, to a sense of completeness, to its zenith, to its peak, to its best, right? Like the wine that came out near the end of the party.
[24:41] What does it say at the ninth and 10th verse of this chapter? The master of the banquet. He tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and he said, "Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink. But you have saved the best until now. You've saved the best until now." Because what Jesus offers is always better. Andreas Köstenberger, in his book Signs of the Messiah, says it quite succinctly. He says, "The law was good, but Jesus is better," or a little bit longer.
[25:26] D. A. Carson, in his book The Gospel According to John, says, "John's point is simply that the wine Jesus provides is unqualified superior, as must everything be that is tied to the new Messianic age that Jesus is introducing." What Jesus offers is always better. And so I just have one simple question for you before we move on this morning. What are you trying to do on your own? What kind of problem are you trying to find a solution for by yourself, on your own wisdom, your own experience, your own efforts, your own merits?
[26:19] Should we not maybe take a lesson from the mother of Jesus and just simply ask Jesus to intervene, do whatever He tells us to do, and then surrender the results into His hand? Ask Him to intervene, do what He tells us, and then leave it in His hands. Because what Jesus offers, regardless of what we expect or what we hope for, what Jesus offers is always going to be better. Jesus as the Christ, Jesus as the Messiah, is the agent of creation. He's the bringer of abundance.
[27:04] He's the rescuer of the vulnerable, the fulfiller of the law. And whatever Jesus offers is always better. And only what He offers can bring us true life. Life that is everlasting. In a few moments, we're gonna shift into a time of communion together. And there's actually a very natural reason that we're going to do that. Do you remember how Jesus responded to His mother when she asked Him to intervene in John 2:4? He said, "My hour is not yet come." "My hour is not yet come." All throughout the Gospel according to John, when you hear that phrase, "my hour" or "the hour of Jesus" or "His hour," it is almost exclusively referring to His crucifixion, which is also somewhat paradoxically referred to as His glorification. Near the very end of the book, after Jesus has already been crucified and He's dead on the cross, we read John 19:34. One of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.
[28:23] And if you actually look, online for kind of images of this, you could type in iconography of this event. Very often you'll see an image of a man or woman holding a cup and catching what is very clearly supposed to be represented as wine that is coming from the side of Jesus Christ. Since the beginning of the church, we have known that the wine that's represented here is also representative of His blood. Beasley-Murray say, "The day of the cross is when the wine of the kingdom becomes available to all." You see, the wine of the wedding maintained the relationships of those who were involved, right? That's why we said it was a big deal because the wine was available in abundance, therefore everyone was able to stay in community and relationship.
[29:14] But we know that that wine ran out. But this wine, the wine that Jesus offers us, the eschatological wine, the new wine of the kingdom, the wine of the new covenant, which is the very blood of Jesus, this is a well might, will never run dry. A gift that restores and fulfills and then also sustains our relationships with each other and with Him. But how does this happen? And this, my friend, if you didn't think it was weird before, this is when things start to get real weird, okay? In the Gospel according to John, there is no kind of like Last Supper scene or at least not the kind of version that we would think of from, you know, like Da Vinci's Last Supper or whatever.
[30:01] There's no institution of communion, frankly, in the way that we think of it. But what we do have is this discourse from Jesus in John chapter 6. Now, it happens after another sign, which, I know, spoilers, 'cause we're gonna get that one in a few weeks. But this is something that we hear Jesus say afterwards. Starting John chapter 6, starting in verse 26, "Very truly, I tell you, you're looking for Me not because you saw the signs that I performed, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on Him God the Father has placed His seal of approval." Then they asked Him, "What must we do to do the works that God requires?"
[30:49] And Jesus answered, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one He has sent." And so they asked Him, "Well, what sign will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written: 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'" And Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is My Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." "Well, sir," they said, "always give us this bread." And then Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to Me will never go hungry, and then, check this out, whoever believes in Me will never be thirsty." If we skip ahead to verse 53, Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.
[31:47] Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For My flesh is real food and My blood is real drink. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood remains in Me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on Me will live because of Me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever." And if you think that's weird, you are in good company because the people who were sitting there hearing Jesus say this, it says that many of them said, "This is where I tap out. Like, this has gone too far for me. I liked some of the things that You're doing, but this is a little bit wild." But here's church.
[32:37] This is kind of like where the rubber meets road. And if you were here and you, like them, are thinking this is a little bit wild, yes, by all means, feel free to stand by and watch this next part. But there's some things that we actually only come to understand by experience. There's some things that we only come to understand by tasting. That anybody's ever asked you to explain how something tastes? You know the absolute limitations of that, right? That's why everything tastes like chicken. But when you actually taste something, this is when you experience it. Some things you need to go there before they actually make sense. And so I'm gonna invite our ushers to come forward here and I'm going to pray over the elements. This is what we call communion. It's, it is bread and it is grape juice, but it comes to mean so much more in how Jesus presents Himself to us.
[33:26] It is a sustaining thing that brings us together as a family and brings us in line with our Heavenly Father. It is true life for us. And if you are new to the church, that's totally fine. If you are seeking after Jesus Christ in any way, shape or form, you are welcome to this cup. This morning, I'll just ask you to remain seated as the elements are distributed. And in a few moments I'll come back and that we'll take those elements together, as you can hang onto those. Let me just pray. Heavenly Father, You are the one who sends the bread from heaven. You are the one who gives the wine of the new kingdom. We're often so guilty of trying to make it make our own way, but we cannot make our own way to You.
[34:12] We absolutely must be sustained by what You offer us. Forgive us for the times where we have tried to use our own wisdom to just try to, you know, build our own, kinda like Tower of Babel thing. Lord, would You help us to see that what You offer is always, always, always better? I pray that You take these simple elements this morning and that You would transform them as You transform us into what You would have. May Your kingdom come and may Your will be done in our space this morning. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.