Getting to Know Jesus Series, #6 – Miracles March 7, 2010
John 2:1-11 (New International Version)
1On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus' mother was there, 2and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 3When the wine was gone, Jesus' mother said to him, "They have no more wine."
4"Dear woman, why do you involve me?" Jesus replied, "My time has not yet come."
5His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."
6Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.[a]
7Jesus said to the servants, "Fill the jars with water"; so they filled them to the brim.
8Then he told them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet."
They did so, 9and 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 knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside 10and 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 till now."
11This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed in Cana of Galilee. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.
Miracles; if I ask you today, ‘Do you believe in miracles?’ what would your answer be? You could ask me to clarify; do I mean the miracles in the bible, or miracles that happen today. Do miracles still happen today? What IS a miracle anyway? Then if I asked, ‘have you ever seen a miracle?’ what would you say to that?
My answer would be YES, I believe, YES, miracles still happen and YES, I’ve seen miracles of many kinds. A few examples:
When I was in YWAM in Texas, I was driving from one part of the ranch to another in order to pickup Stephanie from her job duty at the director’s home. It was raining heavily, this was a thunderstorm. On the way there, I witnessed several bolts of lightning strike the ground, straight from the clouds to the ground. On approaching the house, a lightning bolt came down right over that house, but just above the roofline, the bolt split and struck on either side of the house, with no damage to anything. Was that a miracle?
Later that year, as our team was heading to Central America, we got lost in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, with no idea on how to get where we were headed. We stopped on the side of the road, and several leaders were pouring over maps while everyone was praying. Seemingly from nowhere, a pickup truck pulled up beside us, there were several men, dressed in clean white clothes smiling and sitting in the bed of the truck along the rails. We asked if they new where we were and how to get to our destination. They did, and offered to lead us to the road we needed to be on. So in the middle of the night, we followed these guys for several miles until they all stopped and pointed to a turnoff that we should take…then they drove off into the night. Was that a miracle?
In one of the evening services we held in a small adobe building in Belize, we as a team offered to pray for anyone who would like to come forward. One woman limped to the front on crutches. Her kneecap had been torn from its proper place and had dropped down way out of place, and she was in much pain. A young man form our group prayed for God to heal her, and as he placed his hand on her broken kneecap, it moved back into place under his hand, and she walked out of that room perfectly healed. Was that a miracle?
A miracle could be defined as an amazing event… ‘It’ll be a miracle if the church service starts and ends on time today.’ Or perhaps ‘If the Canucks ever win the Stanley Cup, THAT would be a miracle!’
A miracle could also be defined as a marvellous example of skill or craftsmanship. The automobile of today is a miracle of modern engineering, but it’ll take a real miracle to make them last more than 5 years without breaking down…
Miracles have been called times when God intervenes in our world, or in our lives; changing things that would not normally occur. That, I believe is close, but not quite there. You see, I believe that God is not here one moment, and gone the next. I don’t think He pops in and out of planet earth to check on us every now and then between commercials in heaven. I do not think that God shows up in our lives, for our convenience or His, to do something extraordinary, in order that we might believe He exists.
What I DO believe, is that God is always present, always near, always active, here when we’re up, here when we’re down. I believe God works miracles every single day; people may just not be looking for them, or want to recognize them, or give credit to the Creator for the miracles He does around the world all the time. I believe a miracle is when God, Who is always active in this world, does something that is out of the ordinary pattern of His creation and is truly extraordinary.
We are studying specifically the life and ministry of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Now, did Jesus perform miracles? Yes, He did! His very birth on this earth by a young virgin girl in Bethlehem was a miracle…and Jesus’ life and ministry were accented by several miracles that He did and were witnessed by individuals, by His disciples, by small groups gathered in homes, and sometimes by thousands of people.
• There are 35 miracles of Jesus given in the New Testament.
• No Gospel writer includes all 35.
• Some miracles are included in all four Gospels and some in only one.
• Scripture makes it clear that Jesus performed many more miracles than the Gospel’s record. John 20:30Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. 31But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
• The miracle accounts may occur in a slightly different order in the different Gospels.
• In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) the writers tended to cluster miracles together to establish something important about the person of Jesus.
I found a list of these 35 miracles,
1. Jesus Turns Water Into Wine (Jn 2: 1- 11)
2. Jesus Heals The Noble Man’s Son (John 4:46-54)
3. Jesus Provides A Great Catch Of Fish (Lk 5:1-11)
4. Jesus Heals A Demonic In A Synagogue (Mark 1:21-28, Luke 4:31-37)
5. Jesus Heals Peter’s Mother-In-Law (Mt 8:14-15, Mark 1:29-31, Luke 4:38-39)
6. Jesus Cleanses A Leper (Mark 1:40-45, Luke 5:12-15)
7. Jesus Heals A Paralytic (Mt 9:2-7, Mark 2:3-12, Lk. 5:18-26)
8. Jesus Heals A Cripple At Bethesda (John 5: 1-18)
9. Jesus Heals A Withered Hand (Mt 12:9-12, Mark 3:1-6, Luke 5:6-10,)
10. Jesus Heals A Centurion’s Servant (Mt 8:5-13, Luke 7:1-10)
11. Jesus Raises A Widow’s Son (Luke 7:11-17)
12. Jesus Stills A Storm (Mt 8:23-27, Mk 4:35-41, Lk 8:22-25)
13. Jesus Delivers A Demonic In Gerasenes (Mt 8:28-34, Mk 5:1-20, Luke 8:27-39)
14. Jesus A Woman Of A Haemorrhage (Mt 9: 20-22, Mk 5:25-34, Luke 8:43-48)
15. Jesus Raises Jairus’s Daughter (Mt 9:18-26, Mk 5:22-43, Luke 8:41-56)
16. Jesus Heals Two Blind Men (Matt. 9:27-31)
17. Jesus Cast Out A Mute Spirit (Matt. 9:32-25)
18. Jesus Feeds The 5,000 (Mt 14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:10-17, John 6:1-14)
19. Jesus Walks On Water (Matt. 14:22-33, Mark 6:45-52, John 6: 15-21)
20. Jesus Heals A Syro-Phoneician Girl(Mt 15:21-28, Mk 7:24-30)
21. Jesus Heals the Deaf and the Dumb Man (Mark 7:31-37)
22. Jesus Feeds The 4,000 (Mt 15:30-38, Mark 8:1-9)
23. Jesus Heals The Blind Man (Mark 8:22-26)
24. Jesus Delivers The Demonized Boy (Mt 17:14-21, Mk 9:14-29, Luke 9:37-43)
25. Jesus Provides Money In A Fish’s Mouth (Matt. 17:24-27)
26. Jesus Heals A Man Born Blind (Jn 9:1-7)
27. Jesus Heals A Woman Bound By Satan (Luke 13: 10-17)
28. Jesus Heals A Man With Dropsy (Luke 14:1-6)
29. Jesus Raises Lazarus (John 11)
30. Jesus Cleanses Ten Lepers (Luke 17:11-19)
31. Jesus Heals Bartimaeus (Mt 20:29-34, Mark 10:46-52, Luke 18:35-43)
32. Jesus Curses A Fig Tree (Mt 21:17-22, Mark 11: 12-14, 20-24)
33. Jesus Replaces Malchus’s Ear (Mt 26:51-56, Mk4: 46-47, Lk 22:50-51, Jn 18: 10-11)
34. Wonders At Calvary
35. Jesus Provides A Catch Of Fish (Jn 21:1-14)
[Larry Richards. “Every Miracle of the Bible.” ( Nashville: Thomas Nelson Pub., 1998) pp. 198-199]
Why did Jesus do these and many other miracles then, and why do they happen now? I’d like to suggest three reasons, from our text In John 2 and from the other miraculous things we see in the gospels and in life today.
Miracles happen to fill a need we can’t fill ourselves, to reveal God’s glory to us, and to lead us to faith in Christ.
Do you like going to weddings? They can be a lot of fun, and they should be. They are celebrations of two lives being joined together as one. Weddings are a picture of our relationship to God, and it’s interesting that Jesus’ first miracle is held at a wedding, and when we see Him again in the new earth, it will be a great wedding feast (Rev.19), and it’s going to be a big party!
Weddings usually have lots of things going on, one of the biggest is often the food and drink. And in Jesus’ day, weddings weren’t just a Saturday afternoon thing, they would often go on for several days. And it was the host family’s duty to make sure the food and drink was constantly available to the guests. Jesus and His disciples were invited to this wedding in Cana. Why, probably because people knew Jesus, He’d lived and worked in the area for 30 years, and because He was probably a very likeable man, He was welcomed to the party. But after a lot of partying, the wine had run out. This was a potential disaster for the family, very embarrassing and not a great way to start a marriage for their child. What to do? How to fill the need? You can’t just go and buy the wine, everybody would find out. You can’t ask someone to donate it, they’re saving theirs up for the wedding of their children…these folks are unprepared for the problem, and unable to fill the need to keep their guests satisfied.
So Jesus is asked by His mother, in a round about way, to help remedy the situation. But He is a bit reluctant at first…my time’s not yet come…is this the right place, the right time, the right people, the right need to do something miraculous? Mother seemed to think so. No, it wasn’t that the bride had slipped while dancing and broken her leg, nor the groom choking on a piece of meat, or the father-in-law freaking out at the wedding bill and collapsing of a heart attack…no, it was just a lack of wine, but nevertheless, a need; a need that only Jesus could fill. And so Mary asked for a miracle, there’s no wine, Jesus do something.
What needs do we have? I’m sure we have some, some are big some are small. The question I have for us is simply this, have we told Jesus about our need? I wonder how many of us, myself included, try to fill all of our needs ourselves without ever involving Jesus. Sure we may run to Him when our world is collapsing, our health is failing, our kids are headed in the wrong direction, our spouse wants nothing to do with God, our job is gone, or the ground beneath our feet is literally shaking…and we’ll cry for a miracle then, but do we ask Jesus to get involved in our everyday needs, and do we thank Him when He does?
As I said earlier, God IS involved in working miracles today. Put your hand on your heart…do you feel the beat? That’s life, that’s a miraculous gift. Your life, my life, every life is a miraculous thing created by the hand of a wonderful Creator Who gave each of us life, breath, and a pulse. I’d like to live each day for the One Who gave me life, so I need to ask him for the strength to do that. I need to be a good husband and father to my wife and kids, I need God’s guidance in how to do that. We need to follow Jesus’ command to go and make disciples; have we asked Him how we can use the abilities we have to do that? We as a church need to be united in our purpose to reach out in love to our community; have we asked God how we can best do that? We have many needs, and we need to ask God to help us with all of them. I believe He wants to fill our needs, just like he filled those jars with wonderful wine, He can fill our needs with wonderful answers…but we have to ask Him, and He will give us the BEST.
The wine that Jesus made from that water was the best the banquet master had ever tasted. Water that was intended for washing people’s hands and feet was now delicious wine that dazzled their senses. A miracle happened, Jesus revealed a bit of His glorious power over the natural order of things. When all seemed to be going wrong, Jesus made it all right. This was just a sneak peak at God’s power. But whether it’s turning bath water into wine or making blind eyes to see, lame legs to walk, shrivelled hands to be raised in praise, cancer to be conquered, a brother to be saved from taking his life, a spouse to put their trust in Jesus, or death to be defeated and a lifeless body raised to live again…all these point to the fact that God is powerful and can do things that we simply cannot explain in any other way except that God did something in that situation…there’s no other way it cold happen. That’s power, God’s power. And sometimes it takes that kind of situation to get our attention in order that we might put our faith in Him.
Jesus wants us to trust in Him, not just so He can do some miracles in our life, but because He already did the greatest miracle in giving His life for us, dying for our sin, and being raised to life again, in order that we may have life everlasting, with all our sins paid for in full…that is the greatest miracle ever. Will you put your trust in Him today?
