A Nugget from New Life Network
(written by David Mitts, One New Man Ministry)
Scripture for the Day (August 31, 2015)
Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved. (Matthew 9:17)
One of the challenges that new life and new opportunity face in the lives of people is old wineskins. By old wineskins the Lord is speaking about attitudes and attachments to “how things were”. Sentimentality about the past, even a good past, will keep us from the current thing that God is doing in and through us. In the days of Jesus the religious elders had been tasked by God with the preservation of a way of life.
[3] ‘If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments so as to carry them out, [4] then I shall give you rains in their season, so that the land will yield its produce and the trees of the field will bear their fruit. (Leviticus 26:3-4 (NASB).
God however did not always want the life to be about external commandments for His people. He wanted and wants a change of heart, so he promised a New Covenant.
[31] “Behold, days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, [32] not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD. [33] “But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the LORD, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. [34] “They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the LORD, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”(Jeremiah 31:31-34 (NASB)
God desired a new heart, not just obedience to rules but a transformation into a new kind of people who would want to love God and love each other from the inside. What came against this though was the old heart that had built a lifestyle and attitude out of learning how to succeed in an old vision. So when the new wine came, the old wineskins couldn’t expand with it and they broke.
We are being asked to carry new wine in this hour. We are being asked to be soft and flexible so the new wine can expand in us and release the joy of what God has planned in this hour. What will be our struggle? Our comfort level in the old wine. Our griping and complaining, which is old wineskin mentality. Our addiction to the old flavor, which is old wineskin mentality. I have found that it is sometimes easier to share a new vision with those who know nothing than to try to get some old wineskins to change.
So the ball is in your court. Will you be a new wineskin and embrace change and have faith and trust in God? Or, will you burst and be ineffective in the new move of God? It’s up to you!!!
Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19)
