February 7/21 Sermon - Luke 5:33-39 (36-39)
The live version of this sermon is here, current as of February 7, 2021: https://youtu.be/60MgHCRjrKk?t=1487
Today’s message will include a few practical tips on prayer and spiritual formation near the end, so you might want to grab a pen or have your phone open on a notes app.
Many of you know my wife Barbara. She is a retired teacher, and is currently caring for her elderly mother 24/7 at our home in Scarborough. Her father, when he was alive, had an impressive knowledge of the land. He had a doctorate in horticulture and was expert in growing diverse crops.
He also grew grapes. And from those grapes he made wine. When I first began dating Barbara, and visited her parents, I noticed a pretty strong ferment-y smell in their basement. I learned that, despite his expert knowledge of all things horticultural and winemaking, he was human and he made a mistake.
At one point a barrel that was stored in the basement, full of fermenting wine, exploded. And it exploded good. Nothing in the basement was untouched, everything was saturated with a kind of vinegar-y pungent odour. Yum. I don't know precisely why that happened, but at the least somehow the barrel could not handle the fermentation of the grapes, and the lid just blew off the barrel, spoiling the new wine.
In today's passage, Jesus uses a wine metaphor to talk about the challenge of new things, versus old things. He is talking about the fresh activity of the Spirit of God, and how what God is doing today in your life and in the church, in the Kingdom, requires fresh thinking and a new heart.
As always, Jesus uses something from the everyday life of the people that he was talking to. Because water was often contaminated and could cause serious disease when you’d take a drink, wine, which had gone through a fermenting process, was the more reliable liquid to imbibe.
And Jesus' audience would have been familiar with the built-in challenges of dealing with wine. When wine, new wine, sits in any container, due to the bubbling effervescence of active fermentation, the volume of the wine expands.
If it is poured into an old, inflexible wineskin, that dried-out, crusty wineskin will not be able to contain the expanding volume of the wine, and inevitably the wineskin will blow, just like the barrel blew in Barb’s basement.
This of course will waste the wine, and forfeit any remaining usefulness of the old wineskin. It’s worth noting that it is safe to put old wine in Old wineskins, simply because old wine isn’t active. It just sits there, kind of inert. It won’t break the old wineskin because both wine and wineskin have settled in.
In the gospels, we find the teachings of Jesus, God - in - the - Flesh, who was not teaching into a void, he was not writing on a blank chalkboard as it were. He was talking to people who had traditions, ways of doing things, spiritual habits that were familiar and comforting in themselves.
One of the biggest challenges that Jesus faced was that among the people to whom he came were religious leaders who personally benefited from the religious traditions and practices of their day. They were served well by them, kept in power by them, and so they were not particularly open to new ways of thinking. Being open-hearted and open-minded didn’t serve their interests.
That is perhaps being too kind. The truth is that when they were faced with the teachings of Jesus, and the Miracles of Jesus, which amounted to extremely solid evidence that Jesus was divine, that he was the Messiah, they were so attached to their previous ways, their old assumptions about the spiritual life that they could not accept the things Jesus said or the things that He did.
Never mind that they were obvious miracles, never mind that Jesus taught things that were generally just really fresh ways of understanding the truths that had been communicated earlier by God, that we find in the Torah.
So not only were the Pharisees closed to Jesus, the end result of their patterns of thinking led to them deciding that Jesus needed to die. The new wine of the Spirit as wonderful as it was, being poured out in and through Jesus, had to go. In their minds Jesus needed to die.
So the biggest problem Jesus faced was actually not the Romans who were the military overlords in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. it wasn't the poverty that was experienced by the majority of people. His biggest problem was these religious Pharisees, who were entrenched in old ways of thinking.
They were the old wineskins. They were not open to God as he revealed himself in Jesus Christ.
And for you and me, in order for us to be able to receive and respond well to the present work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, God has done something amazing: we have been made a new creation in Christ.
1 Cor 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
This is an Incredible Gift. He's given us the faith to believe that Jesus died for our sins. If you believe that, please don’t take it for granted. Don’t assume: it’s so easy. Most people do not believe the gospel.
Even among people who call themselves Christians, there are some, bizarrely, who could not affirm that Jesus died on the cross for us, for our sins, to reconcile us to God. I remember being really very shocked when I learned that.
Just a little aside: Just as Jesus spoke of the teachings in the Law in a fresh way that reflected God’s current movement in that day, the Spirit of God today when he moves, moves in direct alignment with the teachings of the Bible, which for us includes the Old Testament, but which is refined in Jesus’ life and ministry in the New Testament.
By that I mean that we don’t go beyond what the Bible says, we don’t assume the Bible speaks from silence; we don’t teach that if the Bible doesn’t touch on it, we can believe whatever we want to believe. That is a dangerous, slippery slope that can only lead us far away from God.
And now we’re back: So we have been given this amazing gift. And as new creations, we can receive new encouragements from God’s Word, we can receive new visions for our lives, we can take in the blessings that God intends for us and to flow through us to many others.
But, hang on, you might say. “I know folks who are Christians, and I myself sometimes, who get stuck. I feel like I can’t take in new things. I feel stuck in my old ways, my old lifestyle.
I’m not living with anything I can call consistency, in this new creation identity. I’m floundering around in the dark and you’re saying God means to bless me? He wants to be my light? How in the world is that supposed to work?
“I’m overwhelmed by life, and when that happens, I’m not even thinking about God. I’m just trying to stay alive. What do you say TO THAT, PREACHER?”
I say I feel your pain. I relate. Life is really hard. And in this pandemic, life is harder for many. We have to work hard and reach out to not be completely isolated.
But I also know that the way out of living an overwhelmed life has a lot to do with Who you surround yourself with.
See, if those around you are living in chaos and not showing any fruit of living in the Spirit, they will drag you down. You won’t pull them up.
You need to separate yourself from toxic people, people who don’t support the new way of life that you really want to live in Jesus. And you need to surround yourself with two things. The first and lessor is you need to surround yourself with people who believe in you. People who support your active desire to live right before God.
Separate yourself from toxic people. Those people represent old wineskins. They can’t or won’t accept the new you. Who you are becoming no longer fits comfortably for them, so they want to pull you back to who you were and where you were so that you “fit” again into their expectations. So they can use you.
Those people who won’t support you moving forward in Christ are the old wineskins. The old clothes. They can’t go on the new garment. You are clothing yourself with Jesus Christ.
Romans 13:14 Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.
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So first surround yourself with people who support your new, better way forward with Jesus. If you’re like me, that might mean, as it did for me, walking away - you can ask God for strength and grace and wisdom to walk away - from the old wineskins in your life.
At one point I walked away from my entire toxic social world not knowing what would replace it. God replaced it with an abundance of new people who were on the same journey as I was.
Second, draw near to Jesus. I asked recently to give advice to young pastors who are just starting out. What I said to them I say to all followers of Jesus: spend as much time as humanly possible in direct communion with the living God.
How in the world do you do that?
Structure your life around God. Put him first in your day. If that means changing your sleep patterns to get up long before others so you can commune with God without distraction...do that. That’s what I do. Read God’s Holy Word prayerfully and carefully.
God will speak into your life through His Word, whether or not you even notice it. Pray - confess your sins, openly, honestly.
We have more help from God’s Word: Matthew 16:24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
Actively deny yourself every day, take up your cross and follow Jesus.
Deny Yourself
Simply put, that means don’t do the things your flesh wants to do that are not God’s will for you.
Take Up Your Cross
Accept, embrace the hardship you face with faith, trusting God to deliver you, and even to make you more like Jesus through the suffering that is in your life.
Follow Jesus
And then make the daily choice - every single day - to follow Jesus, to walk with him, to obey Him in all things, to live in the joy of the Lord as you walk in good conscience with God.
And when you mess up - and you will mess up - go right back to God, plead His forgiveness, and move forward. Don’t wallow in self-condemnation. Satan loves when we do that. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Go to God sincerely seeking His forgiveness, and He will run to you and embrace you.
Pray for others. Create your own prayer cycle where you add the names of those God draws to your attention, and pray regularly for them, trusting that God is hearing you and He is leading you. Show chart.
Get a spiritual mentor - someone who can guide you in your spiritual journey. That’s what Pastor Jan, Pastor Arleen, myself and our Elders do. We guide people who are on the same journey we are on.
Old barrels of wine will sometimes blow up when fresh wine, active and alive, is fermenting on the inside.
God’s wine - by that I mean God’s new life, His new hope, His new purpose and power in your life, needs you to be like a new wineskin. Teachable, flexible, willing to grow to make room for the works of the Holy Spirit in your life.
So you can keep your personal “wineskin” fresh and alive, responsive to the new wine of God’s Spirit that He will pour into you by practicing some of the spiritual disciplines I just talk about. May we do that. May we take what we’ve heard today and don’t let it be something we may have heard about once somewhere in the past, some long-forgotten sermon.
May we put these things into practice, choosing, choosing, choosing every day to live the abundant, free, dedicated life that we have been given the privilege in Jesus to live.
And let’s do that together, church...arm in arm, the strong encouraging the weak until the weak are strong; the weak staying connected and in relationship with the strong, so that the strong remember why they’re there to love and enrich and carry each other’s burdens.
And as the body moves as one, may we continue to grow into being more like our glorious and precious Saviour, Jesus Christ. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen? Amen.
