I’m old enough to recall the battlelines drawn in the 1980s over church worship. The church that Karen and I attended back then was still using the 1936 Methodist Hymn Book together with the original edition of Songs of Fellowship. I remember vividly those people who would enter the church; approach the table stacked with hymnbooks and walk out if they caught sight of a ‘chorus’ book alongside the hymnbooks. Yet, within a few years, those modern compositions had entered the bloodstream of churches and, a few years later, they had entered denominational hymnbooks.
This is a fourth ‘bag-related’ thought but this time we’re not looking at the meaning of words but at the meaning of an illustration:
“And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.” (Mark 2:22).
Most households in Jesus’ day would have used leather containers to store wine. The freshly pressed wine is left to ferment and this creates gases and fizz requiring the wineskin to be capable of stretching. Old wineskins become brittle and thus more likely to crack from the internal pressure.
To understand Jesus, we need to consider his role as a teacher and here he operated very similarly to the Jewish rabbis. They understood that the Torah – the books of the Law – had been given to Moses hundreds of years previously in a completely different cultural context to the one in which they were living. The rabbis, therefore, served as interpreters, guiding people in applying those laws to an ever-changing world. Jesus did the same for his followers albeit in a more radical way than the religious establishment was prepared to stomach. He also said that the Holy Spirit would continue that role of interpreter and guide after he had returned to the Father (John 14:26).
The ‘new wine’ that Jesus was bringing to the world was completely different in its nature but it is also true that every new generation finds its own way. Those Songs of Fellowship books were the result of Christians responding to a world with ‘pop music’ in it and being led by the Spirit to produce worship material in different styles and rhythms to their predecessors. The traditional churches struggled to contain that new wine but a generation later it had matured and was bringing blessing to many. The wheels keep turning. The world keeps changing. The Holy Spirit keeps inspiring. Every generation of Christians keeps producing new wine. It is not for anyone to make disdainful judgments believing their ‘mature’ wine is the only way that God works. Rather we should be encouraging, knowing that, as the Holy Spirit connects the things of God to emerging culture, tomorrow’s old wine is coming into being.
Prayer: Lord God, Please give me discernment to see where your Spirit is at work bringing new things into being, that I might be encouraging and never judgmental. Amen.