No One Wants the New Wine
I once went to a very conservative, fundamentalist church. The pastor there believed God had given him a certain kind of work to do, but, just like the last servant in this parable, he believed that God was a hard task master and couldn’t believe that God was good. The result was that he tried to do God’s work using his own strength and his own resources, believing that God would punish him if the work didn’t get done but that God wasn’t good enough to give him anything he needed to accomplish it. The result was that he resorted to lying and stealing to accomplish what he thought God wanted him to do and thought that God was happy with what he was doing.
Every Sunday he preached austere holiness in the form of legalism and rule-following with his mouth, but then preached lying, stealing, and hypocrisy with his actions the moment that he left the pulpit. This was completely acceptable in a church like his because the focus was on external appearance and not on the heart. As long as you looked good, you were good. As long as you continued to follow the rules and keep up strict appearances, you could earn your way to heaven. There was no focus on true repentance from the heart. The only focus was on looking good in front of others.
Let me tell you, this was not the kind of church God wanted.
When God brings revival, He brings it through the Holy Spirit. When God moves, He does a new thing. He is the God Who makes things new. He identifies Himself as that when He says in Revelation 21:5:
“Look, I am making everything new!”
And Isaiah 43:19:
“See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?”
In Luke 5:36, Jesus says,
“No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and uses it to patch an old garment. For then the new garment would be ruined and the new patch wouldn’t even match the old garment.”
God will not allow those filled with His Spirit to suffer in legalistic churches forever.
He knows that legalism is soul-crushing and that it will make every effort to destroy them. He also knows that anyone He has set free is free indeed, so anyone who has tasted His goodness and His freedom can ultimately never be conformed into legalism the way that works-based churches want.
In Luke 5:37, Jesus goes on to say,
“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the new wine would burst the wineskins, spilling the wine and ruining the skins.”
If God poured out His Spirit and brought revival to a legalistic church, the people in that church would try to control the move because that’s what legalism does. It makes everything manmade so it can claim the credit for God’s work. Either the Holy Spirit would break out, destroying the self-righteous church in its present form, or the move would be squashed by people insisting that God operate according to the rules of men.
Like Jesus says in Luke 5:39:
“But no one who drinks the old wine seems to want the new wine. ‘The old is just fine,’ they say.”
If you’ve ever attended a very legalistic church, you know that no one loyal to these churches wants to believe that God can do new things. It’s part of their core beliefs that what the church is now is what the church must always be. They are averse to change and don’t want God to come upset things.
This is what Jesus said to the legalistic leaders in Matthew 12:41-42. He was referring to people’s acceptance or rejection of Himself, but I believe this Scripture can also be applied to our acceptance or rejection of the Holy Spirit when He comes to do God’s work among us:
“The people of Nineveh will stand up against this generation on judgment day and condemn it, for they repented of their sins at the preaching of Jonah. Now someone greater than Jonah is here—but you refuse to repent. The queen of Sheba will also stand up against this generation on judgment day and condemn it, for she came from a distant land to hear the wisdom of Solomon. Now someone greater than Solomon is here—but you refuse to listen.”
But if you listen attentively to what God teaches you, and if you would rather follow God’s way than the rules of men, here’s what Jesus says to you:
“You are permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but others are not. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given, and they will have an abundance of knowledge. But for those who are not listening, even what little understanding they have will be taken away from them. That is why I use these parables,
For they look, but they don’t really see.
They hear, but they don’t really listen or understand.This fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah that says,
‘When you hear what I say,
you will not understand.
When you see what I do,
you will not comprehend.For the hearts of these people are hardened,
and their ears cannot hear,
and they have closed their eyes—
so their eyes cannot see,
and their ears cannot hear,
and their hearts cannot understand,
and they cannot turn to me
and let me heal them.’“But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. I tell you the truth, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but they didn’t see it. And they longed to hear what you hear, but they didn’t hear it.”
Don’t reject the Holy Spirit when He comes to pour new wine for you.