It was April 1976. I had just gotten born again. The person who told me about Jesus on Sunday evening had been at my home with her husband the night before. Two young couples playing cards and drinking until early on Sunday morning.
I was completely uninformed about salvation. I knew Who Jesus was. I had gone to church a few times when I lived with my aunt until I was 8 years old. My father remarried,nand took us to live with him and his new wife. That was the end of church attendance, so when I was 22 years old and my friend said, “I got saved tonight”, my response was, “From what?”
When I saw her excitement and heard her say, “I confessed my sins and got baptized and I felt so clean…” that was enough for me. As a childhood incest survivor, I wasn’t sure what it felt like to be clean, but I knew I had to have that for myself.
The next time she went to church, I went with her. I had extra clothes so I could get baptized. I ran to the altar at the end of service in that little church (it was later I found out why it was so little) but they baptized me on the spot in a horse trough that they filled with a water hose as we stood around and waited. I wasn’t really sure if my sins were frozen off, but it didn’t matter because I felt clean, at least for a few weeks.
There we were, two young best friends who had just gotten “saved”. In that decade, we used landline phones to talk about God, sometimes until three in the morning.
One night we talked about John 14:12 where Jesus said believers would do the works that He did and even greater! We were excited, rebels without a clue. She wondered what that meant we would do… I figured it meant what it said so I decided I would put it to the test.
The next morning, I got my Bible and a glass of water. Have you figured out what the first thing I was going to do like Jesus was? You guessed it. I was going to turn the water into wine.
I read where Jesus told the servants to fill the water pots, but I didn’t need that much wine. (It had only been a few weeks since I’d emptied the bottles that held wine substitutes) so I figured a clear glass filled with tap water would be enough to prove the point.
It got complicated when I didn’t know what came next. As I read where Jesus told them just to draw some water out of the pots He’d had them fill and take it to the head guy, then read that what looked like water tasted like the best wine ever, I came to the conclusion that since I was doing what Jesus did, it must be some holy power I now had and when I took a drink it would be wine. (I was only 22, but my faith was STRONG…and ignorant. )
I raised the glass to my mouth and that’s when my first experience with the question, “Why didn’t that work?” left me disappointed. The doubt started. I was pointing my finger at that passage and reading, “He who believes on me…”
I called my friend and asked her why it didn’t work. She didn’t know. I read her the passage. She still didn’t know. We finally came to the conclusion that all baby Christians arrive at eventually. The next step was to call our pastor and ask him why it didn’t work.
It never occurred to me that I would become the laughingstock for trying to do what Jesus had done. I genuinely believed it was just that simple. What my pastor explained to me in between his snickering was, “That doesn’t really mean that you can do everything Jesus did. But you can’t make wine because we don’t have to drink wine. They couldn’t drink the water, and we can.”
My young Christian heart was broken and I wondered if any of the Bible was true. My feelings were hurt because my pastor laughed at me.
And then I had a thought drop into the deepest part of me, which later I learned was how the Holy Spirit sounds. “You can’t make water into wine because I didn’t tell you to. “
I never told anyone about that, because I didn’t want to be laughed at. And in the last 43 years being loved by Jesus, taught by the Holy Spirit, I’ve learned some things through other experimental incidents. If God rolls His eyes, He’s rolled them at me. There have been times I’ve been sure I heard him laugh at me. It’s that laugh where your child does something goofy and your laugh at them is filled with love, and they know it.
I had forgotten that morning with the water experiment until the other day when I heard an amazing pastor (mine, who wasn’t even born in 1976) refer to Peter’s near drowning experience and say, “If you’re going to walk on water like Jesus did, you need to have His instruction to do it. Peter had Jesus’ instruction. “Come”. It still required faith, but Peter was walking on that word until He looked away from His Lord and onto the problem.
Jesus is my Lord. The Holy Spirit was sent to give me knowledge if I’ll ask. Even after all the times I’ve stepped out without proper understanding, and have learned valuable lessons, this I believe. If Jesus ever tells me to make wine, it will be the best.
For His Glory 