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The sermon presents Christ as the One who reserves the best blessings for the end, contrasting His increasing grace with Satan’s diminishing pleasures. Believers may experience poverty, illness, labor, fear, and sorrow, but these trials prepare them for the greater rest and joy of heaven. Heaven is described as perfect peace, holy fellowship, increasing joy, and everlasting nearness to Christ. The appropriate response is patient perseverance, joyful obedience, contentment in temporary hardship, and a life lived close to Christ and His cross.
Theological center: Christ’s saving work guarantees that believers’ present, partial blessings will culminate in final rest, glorification, and everlasting communion with Him.
Applications: Live as homeward travelers · Endure present hardships patiently · Stay near Christ · Consider heaven’s greater blessings
Primary texts: John 2:9-10 · Hebrews 4:9 · Luke 12:32
“The governor of the feast called the bridegroom, and saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.” John 2:9-10 I HAD exhausted my time this morning by describing the feast of Satan—how at the four tables where the profligate sat, the self-righteous, the worldly, and the secretly sinful, the course of Satan was always on this wise—first the good wine, and when men had well drunken, that which was worse. His feast diminished in its value as it proceeded, and went from the bright crackling of the thorn under the pot to the blackness of darkness forever. I had then in my second point to show, that the rule of Christ’s banquet is just the very reverse—that Christ does always give the best wine last—that He does save the good things until the end of the feast, nay, that sometimes the first cups at the table of Christ are full of wormwood and gall, and are exceeding bitter, but that if we tarry at the feast, they will grow sweeter, and sweeter, and sweeter, until at last, when we shall come into the land Beulah, and especially when we shall enter into the city of our God, we shall be compelled to say, “Thou hast kept the good wine until now.” Now, my dear friends, this is a great fact, that Christ’s feast increases in sweetness. When first the Lord Jesus Christ proclaimed a feast for the sons of men, the first cup He set upon the table was but a very little one, and it had in it but few words of consolation. You remember the inscription upon that ancient vessel, the first cup of consolation that was ever held to the sons of men—“The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head.” There was to them but little sweetness there, much to us because we can understand it better, and some to them, because God’s Spirit might help them to understand it, but still, in the revelation of it there seemed but little promise. As the world went on, there were greater cups of precious wine brought forth, whereof patriarchs and ancient saints did drink, but beloved, all the wine they ever had under the Old Testament dispensation was far behind that of which we drink. He that is least in the kingdom of heaven is more highly favored than he who is chief under the Old Testament dispensation. Our fathers did eat manna, but we do eat the bread that came down from heaven, they did drink of water in the wilderness, but we drink of that living water whereof if a man drink he shall never thirst. It is true they had much sweetness, the cups of the ancient tabern…