It may seem like an old analogy but the truth of Jesus' words still endure. The simplicity of His words are a reminder to us of how we encounter the Lord and carry this new experience into life.
What Jesus brought to Jerusalem was a new understanding of God, a new way of life, and a new entry into the Kingdom. To follow Him meant that you had to be willing to abandon some old, tired, and religious systems. It's quite simple to understand and yet quite difficult to walk out. Difficult because we tend to want to take a new encounter with the Lord and bring it into an old understanding. It just doesn't work. Something has to change. And the only way we are guaranteed to preserve the new wine is to place it in a new wineskin.
Consider what Paul went through with the church in Galatia. This was a group of Gentile believers who were birthed into true freedom in Christ. They didn't have to go through the process of aligning this new way of life with an old religious system. They were saved, filled with the Holy Spirit, and taught the basic fundamentals of their faith. What happened was a group of Jewish "believers" showed up wondering why these new converts had not been circumcised according to the law of Moses. The letter to the church that Paul wrote provides incredible insight to us of how we should not revert back to a religious system and how to walk in the freedom that God has granted. To put it simply: You cannot take a new way of life and keep it in an inferior system. You can't start in the Spirit and then be made perfect in the flesh. What starts in the Spirit is maintained through the Spirit. This is the only way to maintain the proper mindset that keeps moving us forward in our faith.
Personally, I have had to go through this process in many areas of life. Here are some topics for discussion that have forced me to look into old ways of thinking:
The finished work of Christ
The unconditional love of God
Living out the new nature in Christ
To be honest with you, while I really wanted to come into an understanding of these things, they didn't fit into my belief system. They didn't fit into the way I was taught to know the Lord, experience Him, etc. While most people say they believe in the unconditional love of God, it doesn't fit into their belief system. For instance, how can we say that God loves us unconditionally and yet we can lose our salvation? Think about it.
How can we say that we believe in the finished work of Christ and yet still believe that mankind is stuck in a fallen nature?
How can we say that we are living in our new nature in Christ and yet still hold to the belief that there is an old nature at work in us? These types of beliefs cannot co-exist. There must be a willingness to allow the Lord to teach us and at times a willingness to scrap old wineskins.
This does not mean that every belief that has been handed down through the church needs to be scrapped. On the contrary. Jesus never said destroy the old wine with the wineskins. He simply said that new wine must be kept in new wineskins. Why? Because new wineskins have the ability to stretch and can handle the pressure of fermentation. A wineskin for us is our mindset and anytime our mindset is set in an inferior system we cannot handle what the new wine offers.
There are many in the church who will bristle at the thought of changing things that have been around for centuries. And yet the Bible has many examples of where the Lord was doing a "new thing". Whenever the Lord does a new thing in your life then you are required to move into that new level of experience. It raises the playing field if you will. The difficulty you will go through is typically trying to bring this new experience or new understanding into a tired/old/religious system.
We must always maintain a freshness in our relationship with the Lord. We must be willing to allow the Spirit of God to bring us into new experiences even if they clash with old beliefs. Be assured that the nature and person of God will not change but our understanding of Him will. Be assured that Jesus is always the same yesterday, today, and forever but our experiences of Him can be new. The Spirit of God is all about bringing God's children into newer and greater revelations of what is possible. We cannot be willing to simply sip on the old wine of religion and treasure the old wineskins of the past. There must always be a willing to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.
It's an incredible part of our journey with the Lord. It keeps us in a place of trusting in Him, learning from Him, and experiencing Him. There is so much the Lord wants to bring us into but the question will always be how much mobility does the Lord have in our lives? The Bible says of Israel that they "limited" God in all He wanted to accomplish. It was their lack of faith that hindered them. Faith in Him - not a religious system - is what is required to move into this new territory. There will be battles, there will be places of resistance, but the promise is that He will walk with us to claim the new ground. Let's do this!!!
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