Texting Hallelujah!

The Proper Time

My mom used to say there’s a proper time and place for certain activities — especially when I made obnoxious noises at the dinner table or when I used my outdoor voice indoors. Mothers know something about proper timing!

Imagine being mother to the perfect Son of God—how do you parent the One who was in the beginning with God, who is God, who made all things, including the sun, moon and stars by which we measure time? (See John 1:1-3). She did her best! What’s remarkable is that she knew the proper time to “Let Go and Let God.” 

John chapter two records an exchange between Jesus, his mother, and wedding attendants regarding the lack of wine—a necessity at the wedding and they were all out!

“When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”

And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”

Was Jesus being rude? 

His mother didn’t take it that way. Her reply was not to lecture Jesus about proper timing, but she directed her profound instruction to the wedding attendants. Mary said, “Do whatever he tells you”(John 2:3-5 ESV). 

Mary knew something about God’s timing, when she was a young virgin God’s timing seemed inconvenient, but it was perfectly “in the fullness of time.” 

Mary knew something about Jesus: “He shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Like code between mother and son, they both knew Jesus was going to perform a miracle.

And Jesus wanted to teach his disciples what he and his mother knew: He had come to save his people from their sins; all he did would lead up to the proper time. No one could alter his timing. Not even powerful religious leaders who later became jealous of Jesus’s popularity and sent police to arrest him, “but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come” (see John 7:30 and John 8:20).  Only when Jesus willingly surrendered himself to become God’s final sacrifice for the sins people have committed from Adam to the end of time did he say, “the hour has come” (John 17:1).

In that moment at a wedding in Cana, when the wedding attendants listened to Jesus and followed his instructions, Jesus “manifested his glory and his disciples believed in him” (John 2.11). It was the proper time.

Today, you don’t need to know the proper time to do important things, you don’t have to have all the answers or solutions, you don’t have to fix everyone’s problems, but you do need to listen to Jesus. Today is the proper time to “do whatever Jesus tells you.”

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