NEW WINESKINS

I have been reading about new wine and new wine skins. Jesus said you don’t put new wine into old wineskins. Why is that? apparently wine skins that were made out of goat skins, when they had wine put into them, the wine fermented, meaning it became alcoholic.

Whilst this fermentation took place, gasses were produced which a new wineskin could cope with as it expanded. An old wineskin did not have this capacity so putting new wine into an old wine skin meant that you would probably lose the lot as the old skin would burst under the pressure of the gasses.

All sorts of interpretations have been put on this passage of scripture in Luke 5, even to the point of arguing that Christians should not drink alcohol.

When I read scripture, I like to have the proceeding word of God as well as the written word, so I tend to ask the Holy Spirit if there is anything that he wants me to know.

With this passage, I started thinking about the church, and God putting new wine into……..

I get the impression that we are very pleased to have the new wine but we want it put into old wineskins. In other words, we don’t want to change. God can give us the new wine but it will have to be in the context of a programme that never changes from week to week, so if that is not convenient to God, then we will have to give it a miss (and continue with our programme).

My experience has been over the years that when the new wine comes, the programme goes out the window, because the new wine of the Holy Spirit always challenges the status quo.

The programme says we are running the show. The new wine says God is in charge because anything can happen, including the supernatural. We tend to shy away from this as…we can’t control it and we see that as chaos.

Well it is chaos in a way as we don’t know what the Holy Spirit is going to do next.

I know of a church that has a prayer group that prays for God to show them people out in the community that need prayer. They actually see the person concerned that He wants them to pray for in a vision and then they go out into the community looking for that person.

A father and his young daughter got a vision of a lady with her arm in a cast. They went down the street and they met a lady with her arm in a cast. The little girl said to her “can we pray for your arm?”

When a sweet little girl says that to you how can you refuse. She and her father laid hands on the arm and prayed and she was healed of a medical condition that she’d had for years.

That is new wine at work, not a programme.

If you want to control everything, keep going with your programmes. If you want the Holy Spirit to be in control, get rid of the old wineskins so you can have a new filling of new wine.