I recently began to study a curious passage in Matthew 9: Jesus tells his disciples that His teaching and His new way of being are radically different from the old ways of living to try to earn God’s favor through obedience. But Jesus says it like this: “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. 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.”
The old clothes and old wineskins represent the old way of thinking and living apart from Christ. We need a whole new way of thinking and living. We can’t just stuff Jesus into our regular old patterns of living or working. We need an entire makeover. We need a life of new wineskins.
I think about any way I’m living or working that places me back into the old me that’s not the Holy Spirit’s new wineskins.