New wine requires new wine skins

“Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”” – Matthew 9:17 NIV

You are entering a new season in your life. God is doing a new thing.

I know that that phrase can sound so like a cliché, but it is true because it is in the nature of God always to do new things.

“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

Isaiah 43:19 NIV

Yet behold what God does generally: I believe that he wants to do some new things in our individual lives. He is in the process of ushering a new season into our lives.

This was the case of the Jews at the time of Christ’s advent on earth as recorded in the Gospels. God had burst into their normal routine and he was doing a new thing. Christ had come in the flesh and was walking among them. It was a new season. This was the new wine. Wine here signifies the Holy Spirit and a new move of His among us.

Now here was the tragedy – the new wine had come yet they sought to retain their old wineskin and were working hard to try to contain him in that old wineskin. This was the reason why the majority of the Jews in those days missed out of that new wine. Most times the more religious a person is, the harder it is to move with God. The religious spirit is an ugly spirit,  and because it lives within the church it is very difficult to discern when it is ruling us. But the test question is, ‘What am I following? Rules or Christ? What does my heart pant for? Christ? Or just to belong and be accepted in the group?

So here is what I am trying to say: When God begins to do a new thing in my life I need to change some of the ways in which I do things so as to contain what he is doing. I can’t go on doing everything as before in a new season.

Sometimes the reason we are not co-operating with God – to cast away the old and be in shape for the new – is because we do not even discern that the new wine has come or is almost here. Just as the Jews did not recognise that the Christ had come.

The first prayer I encourage you to pray as you head into this year is ‘Lord please help me to see what you are doing in my life’. Then look around and notice what the new wine is that God is bringing into your life.

Then the second question you need the help of God to answer so as to contain, and flow in, this new wine, is this: ‘What needs to change in my life so that I will be able to contain this new wine?’ It is not necessarily bad things that have to go. Sometimes the biggest stumbling blocks are those things that were good and useful in the past season, but which are not necessary now, or have even begun to distract you from Christ in this season.