WINESKINS

Matt.9:17 – Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.

I thought I had it pretty together back in the early 1990’s. I had a big church, was friends with well known preachers who often preached in our church, and I was on the prestigious Church Growth International board lead by Dr. Yonggi Cho. I preached in his church several times in Korea and he also came and preached at Victory. Life and ministry was good, or so I thought, until it just wasn’t. In the summer of 1994 I had to come to the conclusion that I wasn’t satisfied at all by the supposed success. I had spent years learning how to make a better wineskins or in other words the outward structure of a successful church. That’s where the teaching of Jesus was so important, what good was a wineskin without any wine? It seemed like we had built a beautiful container but all we had to offer was grape juice. There was no exciting or intoxicating nature to our services. To put it bluntly we, or I, had lost my first love. We needed the new wine of the Spirit in our church. Here is how Brian Simmons describes today’s verse.

“The teaching of Jesus is the new wine and the new cloth. What Jesus taught cannot patch up the old religious system, nor can it be contained in a wineskin of worn-out traditions. It is new, exhilarating, and powerful. It must be poured into a heart made new. The new and the old are not meant to be together. Jesus makes all things new. He didn’t come to reform Judaism, but to form a twice-born company of people.”

So here I am today at my desk 30 years later thinking about what happened in 1994 when God came down. All I can say is that He gave me a good long drink of the new wine of the Holy Spirit. The intoxicating effect of His presence began to fill me once again with that first love for Jesus that I desperately needed. All things became new as they had when i first accepted Christ. My love for Him was new, my love for the Bible was new, I fell in love with worship again and with our precious church congregation. He gave us new power, new revelation, and new vision. The intoxicating effects of this wine is still very real in our church. All I can say is that this generation needs some of this new wine, church as per usual just can never satisfy our hungry hearts.