NEW WINE, NEW WINESKINS

...new wine must be poured into new wineskins (Luke 5:38).

From time to time every church faces the challenge of change. As our mission-target changes we must change or lose the chance to reach them. As we ponder the past and face the future we need the guidance of this passage of Scripture.

1. New wine demands new wineskins.

In Jesus’ time and place wine was usually kept in wineskins—the skins of animals, sheep or goats usually. Leather dries and cracks with age. The grape juice poured into the skin-containers would ferment. The force of this expansion would split the skins if they were no longer supple and strong.

Jesus was criticized because His disciples were not living and working by the patterns of the disciples made by John the Baptist or by the Pharisees. He said, in effect, “I have given them new life. It must be contained and expressed in new ways. Your traditions cannot withstand the pressure of what I am giving and what I am doing.” New wine demands new wineskins or it will be lost.

We don’t make changes just for the sake of changing. Novelty is not our God. We don’t change the wineskins because they are old. We change them because the wine is new. The wine improves with age, the wineskins do not. The wine is essential; the skins are expendable. What matters is the life that Jesus gives, the work that He is doing—and not the forms in which that life and work are shaped or expressed.

2. New wineskins demand death.

It took death to produce the wine—the grapes were picked and pressed.

It took death to produce the wineskins—the animals were killed. It took the death of Jesus to provide our spiritual life. If that life is to expand, to develop, to become a blessing to others, we must die to our wills so that the will of the Lord may be done. We must die to our desires, to our ambitions, to our traditions—to everything that would keep the church from being robbed of its power to minister effectively and redemptively to the present time.

We cannot serve the present if we are prisoners to the past. To cling to the past is to paralyze the present. To paralyze the present is to forfeit the future. We must allow the Lord, the One who gives life, to guide us in deciding and executing the changes by which that life is best preserved, developed and made available for the benefit of others.

Let Jesus be Lord. He is the founder and builder of the church. His Spirit will guide us in discerning and doing His will—and we will neither lose the wine nor ruin the wineskins.