December 28, 2019 – John 2:10

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.
—John 2:10

Wherever God in Christ is working, the best wine is kept until the end.87
Think first for a moment of Creation.
First there was chaos and the formless deep, then light and the ingathering of the waters, then the first dawn of life in lowliest form, mounting into the power of bird and beast. And always, under the working of that wisdom to which a thousand years are as a day, the path was upward from dull and shapeless horror to what was better, richer, and more beautiful. And then at last, not at the first, came Adam, capable of communion with his Maker, greater, by that spark of God within him, than sun and moon and all the host of heaven. And it is in human beings, so noble though so fallen, so touched with heaven although so soiled with hell, that we discover it is the way of God to keep the best wine until the end.
Isn’t this true also of our Christian calling? The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day. Not all at once does Christ reveal himself, when we go forward determined to be his. The old life still struggles for the mastery, and we are in heaviness through manifold temptations. But the difference between Christ and the Devil is just this, that the Devil’s tomorrow is worse than his today; but the morrow of Christ, for everyone who trusts him, is always brighter and better than his yesterday. Every act of obedience that we do gives us a new vision of his love. Sorrow and trial reveal his might of sympathy, as the darkness of the night reveals the stars. And when at last the wrestling is over, and like tired children we lie down to sleep, and when we waken and see his face in the land where there is no more weariness, I think we will look back on it all and find new meanings in every hour of it, but I think also we will cry adoringly, “You have kept the best wine until now.”
—George H. Morrison