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RHM Devotional: Wineskins from Refreshing Hope Ministries on Vimeo.

No one puts new wine into old wine skins, or else the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wine skins, and both are preserved. Luke 5:37-38 WEB  (Paralleled in: Matthew 9:17, Mark 2:22)

The most radical change recorded in the Bible was the change from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. John the Baptist was the last prophet of the Old Covenant. Jesus Christ was the beginning of the New Covenant. Between these two, a graceful transition took place.

When the disciples of John came to Jesus, He told them the parable of the Wineskins. Jesus said that when God has new wine for His people, He pours it only into new, flexible wineskins. He doesn’t pour it into old, hardened wineskins, though they were once His new wineskins. God loves them, and He does not want to destroy them with something radically new, explosive, perhaps beyond their ability to comprehend, or contain.

Let’s look more deeply at that. In ancient times, whole animal skins, generally taken from goats, were cleaned by a tanner or leather worker like the Apostle Paul, then sewn into watertight bags. These were used to store wine. New wineskins were stretchable, elastic, but as they grew older, they became more set, hardened, even brittle.

In the fall, when grapes begin to ripen, natural yeast would begin to gather on the outside of the grapes, just waiting to make it lunch. The instant that the grape skin is broken, the yeast begin to ferment the juice into wine. As the yeast feeds on the natural sugar in the grape juice, it produces alcohol and carbon dioxide. During the first three to five days, the fermentation is extremely volatile and downright explosive, but gradually becomes less until all the sugar in the juice is consumed. I used to make homemade wine and have had the airlock stop up, and the wine would blow the top off the bottle, spraying wine on the ceiling.

The New Wine that God brought through Jesus Christ was explosive. Radical change like this always meets resistance from the old, but not from the anointed leaders. John the Baptist, leader of the Old, blessed the New that was coming and said: Jesus must increase, but I must decrease (John 3:30) and He who is coming is mightier than I (Matthew 3:11). Nicodemus is another example of an anointed old-wineskin leader. They gracefully embraced the change that God was bringing.

On the other hand, God’s changes are always resisted by the un-anointed leaders of the old wineskin. For example, the attitude of the Pharisees was the exact opposite of John the Baptist’s attitude. The last thing they were willing to do was to decrease and lose the position of power that they were enjoying in the old wineskin establishment. Rather than change, they were filled with envy and crucified Jesus.

After Jesus ascended to heaven, the new church grew in amazing ways. The shadow of Peter passing over people in the streets healed them. A few years later, God started doing unusual miracles through the Apostle Paul. Acts 19:11 tells us that even handkerchiefs that were sent from Paul to others, healed them. That was the beginning of the prayer cloth. It was something new that God did through the next generation of believers, and not through the original Apostles who had walked with Jesus, like Peter and John.

This is important to understand: Paul was not one of the original twelve Apostles who walked with Jesus on the earth for three and a half years. He was not in the upper room on the day of Pentecost. Acts 9:4 tells us that Paul was converted later on the road to Damascus, oddly enough while on his way to arrest some of Jesus’ disciples. Paul had a personal experience with Jesus outside of the new church, and the original Apostles were not involved in his conversion at all. He had never met them.

This means that if Peter, John, and all the original Apostles of Jesus used all that they had experienced to compile a belief system, being healed by a person’s shadow would have been included, but prayer cloths would not. All that they knew about God, and everything they had personally lived through with Jesus, was still not sufficient to cover all that God might do. God did something new, outside their circle, through someone else they didn’t know, but they accepted it gracefully.

We are moving into the digital age, and what used to work no longer does. Things are changing. In order to stay in tune with what God is doing today, we need to remain humble, teachable, flexible, expandable. When you try to cling to the old, you become unusable. God is not dead, and He is full of surprises. So let us welcome His Kingdom, and let our old one go.

 Prayer: Heavenly Father, please let me see what You are doing today through Your eyes. I choose to believe that You are alive, that You love me, and that You are listening to me today. I want to ally myself with You, to be part of what You are doing, and to walk hand in hand. Come and be a part of my life today, help me be stretchable, in the name of Jesus Christ I pray.

Note: Thank you all so much for your feedback on our first video devotional last week! We are truly blessed by your encouragement, and look forward to your thoughts on this message. As an additional note, we made an update to the RHM Music page this week, that includes some background on what our music ministry is about, the ability to make your own playlist (just click on the "+" next to any of the songs to start one) and a custom music player. We hope you enjoy it!