Right. Well, let's have a prayer of illumination here before we dig into the scriptures and hear God's word. Lord, I thank you for the message that you give us in your word, that we can dig through it every day for a lifetime and still find new things and new comfort and new challenges. And Lord, as we open your word today, I pray that your spirit would, that we would feel you here with us, that you'd open our hearts to receive the message you have for us. I pray that your hand would be on me that I may speak faithfully the message that you've put on my heart. In Christ's name. Amen.
So, we're going to skip around a little bit. We've been working on Luke for a while, well, since Advent. But back in May, I felt I should preach a sermon about forgiveness, and the passage for that was from Luke 7. So, I jumped ahead a little bit, just switched this up. So, now we're going back to Luke 5. So, we're going back in time a little. This is not too long after Jesus has healed the guy that was lowered down through the roof. And then there was the calling of Matthew, and Jesus had a big party at Matthew's house. And this is the next thing that's happened.
So, let's look at Luke 5:33 to 39. "And they said to him," they being the Pharisees. So, the Pharisees had just finished calling Jesus to task because he sat and had meals with a bunch of sinners. And Jesus kind of dismisses that and says, "Look, it's the sick who need a doctor, not the healthy." And they're like, "Well, we have another thing." And they said to him, "John's disciples often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but you go on eating and drinking."
And Jesus answered, "Can you make the friends of the groom fast while he's with them? The time will come when the groom will be taken from them, and in those days they will fast." He told them this parable: "No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they'll have torn the garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out, and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one, after drinking the old wine, wants the new, for they say, 'The old is better.'" This is the word of the Lord.
Okay, so a sermon title. I don't know if you ever look in the bulletin and see what the sermon title is. I find it hard to come up with sermon titles a lot of times. This one, as I was ruminating on this passage over the last few weeks, this was kind of my reaction. Something eventually popped out at me. I thought, "Wait, what was that?" So, this is in part three of today's sermon. So, part one, we're going to talk about fasting.
And when I first started digging into this passage, I thought this was a passage about fasting. And so, I wrote a whole big sermon all about fasting, and then realized after a while that this is actually not really about fasting. So, I canned that one, and now we have this sermon. Because I'm convinced that what happens here, when the Pharisees come to Jesus and say, "How come you guys aren't fasting?" they're not really interested in fasting.
Now, many of you are having a chance to visit the Island. A lot of you, I see, grew up here. You've been away, you're coming back, visiting family and stuff like that. Some of you may be visiting here for the first time. So, if you don't know, Islanders, we're really good at a few things. One of the things we're really good at is noticing stuff. Noticing stuff about other people. We're really good at that, and then discussing it among ourselves when the other person's not there.
So, for instance, you might find someone peek out the window and say, "The neighbor usually leaves for work at 7:40. It's 7:45, he still hasn't gone yet. Wonder what's going on." A few minutes later, "Well, now it's 7:48. He's going to be late for work. Oh, maybe he's sick. Oh, I'll have to keep an eye on that." Maybe you notice that the people up street, you haven't seen their car parked in the driveway for the... She was probably, I bet she had her baby. Oh, she must have the baby. I should tell somebody.
Or, even more strange, people down the road had their driveway redone. They got the cones at the end of the driveway, fresh asphalt. But it's been like a week, and they're still parking on the side of the road. What's going on? Actually, it's more, it's been 10 days, cuz... Maybe we should go up there, ring the doorbell, ask them, "How come you're not parking on your driveway?" After all, it's been 10 days. We're good at noticing stuff.
Now, it's maybe not awesome to say that we have something in common with the Pharisees. With the Pharisees... oh, I did that one already. The Pharisees have been noticing Jesus. In the first part of Luke, the Pharisees are still giving Jesus an open chance. Kind of curious about this message. He's teaching with something that seems kind of different. And then, this guy gets lowered down through the roof, and Jesus says, "Your sins are forgiven." And the Pharisees are like, "Okay, we're starting the naughty list here. You can't go forgiving people stuff."
Then, he starts associating with tax collectors. At this point, the Pharisees are kind of not on team Jesus anymore. But they've been noticing. They've been noticing that Jesus and his disciples don't seem to fast. Now, the Pharisees fast a lot. It's not really a sermon about fasting, but obviously fasting is mentioned. In those days, they had kind of come up with some rules. And fasting is mentioned in the Old Testament. The Pharisees kind of got to this point where it's good to fast twice a week. And when you fast, like, you basically don't eat anything for a whole day.
And originally, of course, fasting is supposed to be that you can devote the time you would normally spend eating to prayer and scripture reading and meditation on God, that kind of stuff. So, instead of just like skipping lunch, you actually go off and use that to spend some time in prayer. It's not just walking around telling everyone how hungry you are all day cuz you haven't eaten anything.
These guys have been noticing that Jesus, he eats lunch every day. It seems to be kind of easy to notice when somebody's fasting. Like you notice, "Oh, having lunch, where is... oh, he must be off praying, he's not fasting today." It's harder to notice when somebody's not fasting unless you pay attention. Like, "Yeah, saw him have lunch on Tuesday. He had lunch on Wednesday. Definitely saw him eat lunch on Thursday." It's almost like the kid, you know, when you say grace for a meal and there's one of the kids, "She had her eyes open the whole time we were praying. I watched every second." She's like... if they're so busy noticing, like... anyway.
Not really a sermon about fasting. What the sermon's about, or what this passage is about, sorry, what this passage is about is about people taking good things and making a bunch of rules about it and making a bunch of have to's, and then judging other people about whether you're doing those have to's or not. And who decides what the have to's are? Well, us, right? People. And Jesus doesn't really have much patience for this.
Now, Jesus, of course, is not against fasting. You read this through and it kind of sounds like, "Yeah, fasting, it's not important." Now, Matthew 6, that's a passage about fasting. I'm not... it's in a small font. Again, we're not about this passage, but there's a sermon out there that talks about fasting and what fasting is for and how it's a good spiritual discipline, everything. Jesus talks about fasting sometimes. Fasting is a good thing. But just about anything can be taken and turned into a ritual or an obligation, you feel like you have to do it. And so, Jesus is speaking against that.
And then the next two things he says kind of come back to this idea of don't take something that's good from the Father and fence it off and make it into an obligation that you have to do. Now, one other little cool part about this fasting part, I'm not really usually big into Greek words, but I came across this, that the Greek word for "will be taken" is aparthe. You're like, "Oh, that's aparthe? I didn't know that." Yeah, the word aparthe, which actually means in Greek sort of a violent removal, often leading in like possible death.
Like, this "will be taken," this isn't taken like I took a cookie. This is like the Liam Neeson version of taken. Like, you get taken and things aren't going to end well. This is basically, according to the Bible scholars, Jesus' first prophecy of his death. And not just like a pleasant death, like a violent death. So, that was kind of cool. Here's Jesus first kind of throwing that out there. He's just started his ministry a few months ago, and he's already telling people, "By the way, there will be a time when I'll be violently taken from you. And in those days, disciples, you're going to be fasting cuz it's going to be bad times."
But I think the important part of this passage comes from the next part, talking about the new wine and the garments. So, back in the late '80s, I left home, off to university. Went to Waterloo, far away from everybody else. Lived in residence, that was good. I didn't have to look after my own food, but I did have to do my own laundry. So, I had a laundry basket in my room, and by the end of the first week, I was starting to run out of stuff. Time to do some laundry.
So, I went downstairs to the laundromat, and I had kind of, I'd done laundry when I was home. I knew how the washing machine worked and everything, and I knew that my mom always separated the lights from the darks. Wasn't 100% clear why, but I knew that was a thing. I looked at my basket, I thought, "I don't have enough for two. I'm not going to do two small loads here. It's a quarter for a wash and a quarter for a dry. I'm not spending that kind of money." So, I just throw everything...
Besides, everything I, I was at Waterloo. Some of you are living in southern Ontario. You know Waterloo's reputation is not exactly a fashion place. It was like, you know, t-shirts and athletic shorts and those big 80s socks that came well up the shin. And it wasn't like I was at Western or Redeemer or someplace you got to look good. So, it was mostly a bunch of white shirts, white socks, and I did have a brand new pair of red shorts and a brand new pair of blue shorts that I'd never washed before, but like this would be my first time to wear them. I thought I might as well wash them.
So, I threw them all in, as some of you know where this is going. I didn't. So, I threw them all in the wash, went down, took my clothes out of the washing machine, and some of you are thinking that's where he noticed it. But, like several men in this congregation, I am color blind. So, light pink to me is the same as white. I didn't think there was anything wrong at all. So, I took all the clothes, put them in the dryer, took them in, everything looked fine to me, didn't realize that from then on I was walking around the engineering buildings on campus with pink socks and pink shirts.
Now, Waterloo's not a big fashion place, but it's enough that people noticed and I got some comments. Eventually they kind of, continued washing, it faded more and more. It wasn't really a thing for men to wear pink back in the late 80s. Anyway, and for an engineer anyway, got some comments.
I sort of wonder, we hear about patching garments. I don't think we tend to patch garments all that much anymore. You don't tend to see people sewing patches on things. We like rip things, right? Especially if you're younger. Rip knees and rip jeans and stuff like that. I wonder if Jesus was doing his ministry on earth now, would he say, "You know, you can't put unwashed colors in with whites because then the colors will run." I think, "Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a good point."
Anyway, Jesus is talking about patching garments. And you wonder, the disciples, what are they making of this? They might have been a little like, "What did he mean by that groom thing?" And then he starts talking about patching garments. You can just imagine the disciples like, "He's talking about you. Look at that patch. It's... anyway."
What's Jesus talking about? Well, a new patch on an old garment. Jesus is the new garment. Jesus is trying to say to the people listening, to the disciples, the Pharisees, the rest of the crowd, "You can't just cut something out of a brand new garment and patch it onto an old garment. It's not going to look good. It's not going to fit." Jesus is the new garment. And what he's telling people is, "Don't try to cut some little piece out of my teaching or out of the kingdom that I'm bringing and patch it onto what you already got, cuz that's not going to work."
Sometimes we tend to think we can take a little bit of Jesus. We're like, "Jesus and..." and we've got sort of take some of Jesus' teaching and sprinkle it in with maybe the life I'm used to living. Some of us have become Christians during the course of our lives, and there's all that temptation to keep some stuff from your before Jesus days and just add some Jesus stuff into it. Many of us grew up knowing Jesus, grew up in the church, grew up in the faith, but you still have that natural kind of sinful side there. You don't just take a bit of Jesus one day a week and patch that onto another 6 days a week of kind of doing your own thing.
Jesus says, "I will not be a patch." Now, to the Pharisees, of course, what he's also trying to say is, "Don't keep your Moses and all the laws and stuff you guys are so proud of and the rules that you made up, and just think that my teaching is going to be a little bit of this big mosaic. That's not how it works. I am the full garment." Jesus wants to be the full garment. He wants to clothe you from head to toe in something brand new.
And the cool thing about that is that we can look back and say, "You know, there's the moment where I was not a Christian, I'm a Christian. That was the moment where I kind of made my faith my own. That's the moment where it was a profession of faith or whatever happened," and say, that's when I was clothed in new garments. But Jesus also likes to keep coming on with more fresh new garments. And when we finally enter the kingdom, there'll be more stuff in there, too. This is an ongoing thing. So, Jesus doesn't want to be the patch.
Now, he makes the message even more clear. He talks about the wineskins. And maybe you know this, but maybe you don't. So, they didn't really have bottles back in those days. Glass was around, it's very expensive. You wouldn't just have glass bottles of wine. So, if you had a lot of wine in your house, you had it in a big stone jar, and you'd keep it there. But if you wanted to go somewhere, you've been invited out, "I'll bring some wine for the meal," you'd put it in a skin. So, they would, you know, kill a goat or a calf or something like this, make a little skin, and then put the fresh wine in there.
Now, I'm not much of a wine maker, but I do understand that when you first put down a new batch of wine that comes out, it's still not really done fermenting. It's going to expand a little bit. And so, you put brand new wine in a brand new wineskin, it's soft and supple like a brand new pair of shoes or something. It's going to kind of stretch and flex a little bit. And as the wine expands, it'll expand with it. But eventually that wineskin gets kind of hard and brittle and tough. And then if you try to add new wine into an old wineskin, the wine's going to expand. Well, as Jesus says, you're going to burst the whole thing.
I think people would have been listening to Jesus at that time. It was like, for once, you're making total sense. We know exactly how this works. I have done that before. Yeah, I tried to put some new wine in an old wineskin, and it burst. What does Jesus mean by this? Well, Jesus is telling us, just like he's the new garment, he is also the new wine. We'll leave that for a sec. Jesus is also the new wine. He's bringing a completely new teaching about the kingdom.
God's dealings with men are not going to be the same anymore as they were in the Old Testament. The law of Moses doesn't completely disappear, but Jesus is fulfilling it as something brand new comes. And you can't just put that into your old sort of Old Testament kind of Moses teaching, cuz Jesus is going to burst your expectations. He's telling people that, that whole image of wine bursting out of an old wineskin is Jesus bursting everyone's expectations.
And the nice thing with that is that also doesn't happen just once. Jesus isn't just in the story, saying, "Oh, now I see what happened back in those days. How does this apply to us?" Jesus wants to keep giving us new wine. I think our hearts, too, can kind of get sort of tough and leathery like that wineskin on the side if we don't kind of keep them softened up, if we don't let God soften them. They're going to get tough as well, and Jesus wants to keep pouring you new wine.
You can live to be a hundred years old and God is still going to keep revealing new stuff about himself all the time. You never stop learning. You never stop growing. You don't get to the point where you say, "Yep, I'm okay to be an old wineskin now. I have learned about Christianity. Feel like I'm good to go." Jesus keeps wanting to pour some new wine in there. He keeps wanting to burst your expectations. So, whether you're 16 or whether you're 80, Jesus has still got something new coming down for you. He still wants to burst your expectations. Hope that we let God keep our wineskins of our hearts nice and soft so we can absorb that new wine.
Now, there's another layer in here, too, because when Jesus starts out with new wine, we might kind of miss this, but especially the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, their radar would have started going off. Their spider sense would have been tingling when Jesus says, "New wine." Cuz new wine in the Old Testament is something that the prophets used to talk about the coming Messiah. There was always a promise of new wine in somewhere.
Amos 9:13 is an example here. "The days are coming 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." Or in Joel, "I'm sending you grain, new wine, and olive oil, enough to satisfy you fully. Never again will I make you an object of scorn in the nations." These were considered to be Messianic prophecies. We don't usually hear these too much during Advent, but the Jews of the time definitely understood this.
And when Jesus is saying, "I am new wine," he's basically announcing, "I am the Messiah. I am the one you're expecting." Which makes the miracle at Cana, Jesus' very first miracle, that makes that kind of extra punchy. The very first thing he does to announce his arrival as a prophet, as more than a prophet, is to turn water into new wine. He brings new wine, and he still wants to bring new wine to us all the time.
Now, what about this with the old? Cuz as I was working through this, this still feels like it contradicts everything. Then at the end Jesus says, "Oh, by the way, but the old wine is better." But he doesn't say the old wine is better. He says, "People who are used to the old wine say the old wine is better." At the time he's kind of nailing the Pharisees. Like, you guys aren't going to like this new wine. You don't want to have your expectations kind of burst a bit cuz you're used to the way the laws work and you're pretty good at keeping them and everything.
And people who are used to the old wine try the new wine and they go, "I don't like that. That's kind of new." It's easy, I think, for all of us to kind of fall into that. We like the way our lives get comfortable, whether it's our home routines, whether it's our church routines, whether it's our worship service routines. Kind of like the way things have been going. We kind of like the old wine. And then something new comes along. It's like, "Oh, the old wine is better."
And there's something in there, too. God frequently talks, especially in the Psalms, "Sing to the Lord a new song." There's always something new coming. And we don't want to just grab new stuff just cuz it's new, but God continues to reveal that to us. God continues to reveal himself to us in new ways. And it's good to keep that in mind. Not be too stuck on the old. Again, not to let our hearts be sort of tough like an old wineskin.
But there was a part in this passage, I think, okay, well, it seems like we're at the end of the passage now and wrapped it up. But there's a phrase used in there twice. I had to stop and say, wait a second. I feel like that means a lot more. I went down a rabbit hole, and I hope you'll come down this rabbit hole with me. What did Jesus just say? Well, first a little story.
Wedding plans. This summer, many of you may have been to a wedding this summer. You may know some people who have traveled for weddings and stuff like that. And weddings always kind of look sort of the same. Well, I saw recently a video of a wedding that didn't look the same. So, Sandy, my son, many of you know, travels to Africa quite often. And so he was showing me a film of a wedding that took place in the DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, not too far from Goma where he goes.
And a wedding in this part of Africa is a really big deal. The women are dressed up like with lots of colors and the head scarves that match everything. And the men are in these shiny suits and the shoes that are so shiny again you can almost not look at them. People like to look good. And a wedding, a lot of people are invited. Basically, if you hear about the wedding, you can come to the wedding. And if they can't keep you out, you can get in and enjoy the feast.
And in this video you see people dressed up and everyone's having a great time and there's a big stack of presents off in the corner. And somebody has decided that their gift to the bride and groom is going to be a pig. A live 300-lb oinker. And they bring the pig in, and I'm not sure what they thought was going to happen. And I'm not sure what the pig thought was going to happen either. Maybe the pig realized, like, they're not giving me to these new families so I can live a long and healthy life. That eventually part of the wedding feast could involve the pig.
For whatever reason, the pig slipped away and started kind of moving around, and I have only once in my life tried to catch a pig. Many of you have been up close and personal with pigs. It's hard to grab on to a pig. They don't really have like horns or like even a nice big long tail. Like, I guess there's ears, but they're just animals that are not designed to be tackled. So, the pig knocked over the presents, it knocked over a couple ladies. The whole wedding did not go according to plan. Wedding planning, you'd like to maybe think somebody with a bit more of a plan is in charge of a wedding. So, and also, like, don't bring a pig to a wedding.
Here's the thing. Jesus says, "Can you make the friends of the groom fast while he's with them?" I don't know what the disciples thought about this or what the Pharisees even kind of clicked and registered. Something about Jesus is slipping out from this, they thought they had him. How come you guys never fast? Aha. It's like, well, he can't make me fast, you know, the groom is here. And everybody sort of pause. Wait, did you say groom? Where's the wedding? We're just having lunch here. We just got back from Matthew's place. Where's the wedding?
Well, to us reading this now, we're like, well, Jesus frequently refers to himself as the groom. A lot of Jesus' parables talk about wedding banquets and feasts and brides and grooms and stuff. So, this is again the first time that Jesus refers to himself as the groom. Okay, and he does use it twice in the same passage, once in verse 34, once in verse 35, where it says the groom will be taken from them.
So, who's Jesus marrying? We've probably, many of us have learned this in the past. Jesus is marrying the church, right? So, Jesus is going to marry the church. I don't know if anybody's been to that church. I understand it's a famous one. Anyway, but Jesus can't be marrying a building. He's not going to be marrying a bunch of bricks. So, who's Jesus marrying? Well, he's marrying, of course, the universal church, right? The bride of Christ is the church. The people. And you know who those people are made up of? You. And me. And you, and you, and you, and you. Jesus is marrying us. You're going to get married to Jesus.
And maybe you're like, "I know, that's how I always read that." But for me, this was a complete surprise. Like, I just figured it was something kind of impersonal, impartial sort of thing. And Jesus is going to marry the church, that's really nice. Jesus wants to marry you.
And the more I sort of dig into this and reading stuff about it, you understand that, like, I think we know that God has given fatherhood to us as an institution, so that we can look at the good things about our fathers, the things they get right, the love and the protection, everything. And we can see in God then, when God says, "I am a loving father," we kind of understand that because we have fathers. I think marriage, in the same kind of way, is given to us as a bit of an image that we can see this is the kind of relationship that Jesus wants to have with us. This is the kind of closeness, the kind of oneness that Jesus wants to have, the same kind of relationship that a husband and wife have for each other.
So, what does that mean? I'm sort of digging through this. What does it mean to be married? When you're a husband and wife, what does that relationship look like? I didn't want to make an exhaustive list. I had a much larger list. I cut them out, a bunch of things. But here are some things, and let's see, do these things, does this fit with our relationship with Jesus? Cuz I imagine some of you are probably sort of skeptical, thinking, well, it's a bit of a leap there, saying Jesus is going to marry the church isn't the same thing as Jesus wants to marry me. So, well, let's have a look.
Marriage is about commitment. You commit to somebody for the rest of your life. Is Jesus committing to us? Yeah. Yeah, he does. And since Jesus has already died, the rest of his life is basically the rest of eternity. So, that's pretty cool. We certainly wouldn't want to serve a God who doesn't make an absolute commitment to us. I will never leave you or forsake you. Marriage is all about being faithful. You make a vow to be faithful to someone. Again, Jesus is the very definition of faithful. So, I think that fits.
When you're married to somebody, you would willingly give up your life for that person. Whether it's, you know, a health donation or whether it's to save somebody's life in the case of an accident or whatever else. And you also spend your whole life, that other person has a higher priority than you. Jesus, of course, I mean, when you talk about Jesus giving his life for us, he's already done that and laid down his entire life on Earth to serve us.
When you're married to someone, you know them fully. Well, you might be like, I don't know, you still surprise me at times. But I think you would probably say when you're married, you would know your spouse better than anybody else on Earth. Probably your spouse knows you better than anybody else on Earth knows you. Is that the same thing with Jesus? Yeah, Jesus knows us fully. The hairs on our head are numbered. Jesus knows us completely, fully, intimately. This sounds a lot like a marriage relationship.
I hope if you're married, and I hope if you're not married, when it happens, you marry your favorite person. It's really awesome to be married to your favorite person. We talked with this, I talked with this a few times ago in a sermon. You're Jesus' favorite. Jesus can actually have a lot of different favorites. And you're Jesus' favorite. He loves you not just like, "Oh, that's, what's her name over there?" Jesus knows you intimately and you are his favorite.
And this one may seem a little funny, but as I look around, I just remind myself this is true. Have you ever noticed married people, after married for a while, start to look like each other? You've noticed that, haven't you? You look at couples and say like, yep, like here's the wedding pictures, right? They look different, but then as the years go by, they start to converge. Something about living with somebody else, you start to kind of look like them. Isn't that cool? We start to look like Jesus. To the world around us, we have the appearance of Christ. Of course, we're also clothed with Jesus' clothes. Back to that in a sec.
So, there's a lot you can say about marriage, but I think this actually seems to fit pretty well. Now, there's one other thing in marriage. Some of you are like, yeah, he's not going to mention that. Okay, well, let's go there. There's one other thing that husbands and wives do exclusively. How does that fit? So, I don't know for sure. There's a lot of ways to go wrong with this.
And yet, I think when I read the Song of Solomon, it seems obvious to me that God thinks that physical pleasure in marriage is a good thing. When I read the creation account in Genesis 3, and God says the man and the woman will be united with each other and become one flesh, there's a reason he mentions that. It kind of almost doesn't fit in the rest of the creation account. But it's in there, I think, for a reason.
I don't pretend to know everything about this, but I think there's something about physical intimacy with a husband and wife that's a lot more important than we sometimes think it is. There's something spiritual and deep there. Something that tells us about, I don't know, about God's connection with us that I think most of us don't really get. And I don't really sort of understand that either, but I think maybe that's why physical intimacy is something that God mentions over and over again in the Bible, and why it has to be in a certain... That's why God put fences around that, because there's something in that that tells us about, somehow, again, I don't know, somehow our future connection with Christ. There's an image in there that we're going to look back and say, that's how that works.
Okay. Now, some of you are also wondering, what about the guys? Like, I'm not going to be a bride of Christ. Picture me all dressed up in a white dress and everything. Well, for generations we've been telling women that, you know, when God talks about you shall be declared sons of the Most High, this applies to all the girls, too. And I think that does. Well, if women could be sons of the Most High, guys, we can be brides of Christ. I don't plan to wear a white dress. Because you know what I want to be clothed in when it comes time for my wedding? A brand new garment, the righteousness of Christ. Not my righteousness, Christ's righteousness. I think that'll look pretty good. So, guys, I think we can own this one.
I think we'll wrap up, okay? So, you know where this... It's the summer, it's wedding season. You have a wedding, of course you're going to mention 1 Corinthians 13. I want to look at it two different ways. And some of you have seen this before, but I still like the way this goes. You think about a wedding, you think about a marriage, you think about a relationship. And so, this is us. And if you've been to a wedding, there's a pretty good chance this was read. And many of us have heard this passage before, about love.
And the thing is, when we try this, we try to be patient and kind and not envying, not boasting and not being proud, we mess it up. We try it, but we can't do it perfectly. Not dishonor others, not being self-seeking, not easily angered. It's a beautiful picture of love. And it's something that we are called to, for sure. And a good marriage looks a lot like this. But since we can't do this perfectly, fortunately, we have a groom who can.
And of course, since God is love, Jesus is love, you can just do a search and replace right here and read it this way. And so, let's close by reading, I'll read this through. Jesus is patient. Jesus is kind. Jesus does not envy. He does not boast. He is not proud. Jesus does not dishonor others. He's not self-seeking. He's not easily angered. He keeps no record of wrongs. Jesus does not delight in evil, but he rejoices with the truth. Jesus always protects. He always trusts. He always hopes and he always perseveres. Jesus never fails. Amen.
Let us pray. Lord, I thank you that all of these things we have just read are so true about you. Thank you that you do never fail. That you always protect us and always love us and you're always there for us. Lord, I pray that you will soften our hearts, keep us ready for your message, for your new wine that you long to pour into us. And also for being clothed with your righteousness. Lord, I pray that you'll continue to help us to want to walk closer and deeper with you. To dig deeper into your word, and Lord, I pray for that great wedding feast in the future where all this shall be, our faith shall be sight. In Christ's name. Amen.