Made New, Not Patched

Luke 5:33 – 39

 

“We’ve always done it that way” are probably the six most frightening words ever strung together in a sentence. Now, change merely for the sake of change is not good either. Change must be rooted in wisdom and in truth, not trends and fads.

 

My dad absolutely hated change, he hated it. He succeeded in building a dairy business that survived two divorces and lasted 4 decades, 40 years. But it ultimately failed because of the mentality of “We’ve always done it that way.”

 

Our biggest, loudest, ugliest verbal fights were always about me proposing change and him resisting it. He clung to the old systems that worked well once upon a time, but no longer did and led to the death of his business.

 

On the surface it was stubbornness, but underneath it was a life or death fight for him for some semblance of control in the face of a new reality, one where he no longer was the leading authority in how to run his business.

 

Now, don’t get me wrong. I talk a lot from up here about my dad and our struggles with each other, but I love him dearly and miss him terribly. Every time I talk about him, and my life for that matter, I’m sharing a piece of myself, of my heart, with y’all.

 

As I continue to grow in my faith, and as a pastor, God has been faithfully showing me how He is using my upbringing to relate to His Word. Those experiences with my dad that are too numerous to count, help me to connect to God’s truth, His will, and to relate it to you guys.

 

Today’s final passage from Luke 5 speaks loudly as a condemnation of “We’ve always done it that way.” But it’s not advocating for a change just for the sake of change, it’s presenting the fulfillment of God’s promises, and it’s revealing the typical human response to the truth. Let’s read God’s Word together, Luke 5:33 – 39.

 

 

This is the third controversy that involves Jesus here to close out chapter 5, and it involves a contrast between Jesus’ disciples who weren’t fasting and the outwardly devout, religious practice of both the disciples of John the Baptist and the Pharisees.

 

After Jesus faced controversy and pushback from the Pharisees for forgiving sin and for eating and drinking with the sinners He came to call to repentance, Jesus gets questions because his disciples outwardly don’t appear to be faithful, devout, pious, they don’t appear outwardly religious.

 

Some folks said to Jesus, your disciples eat and drink while John’s and the Pharisee’s disciples fast often and pray often. Now, make no mistake, fasting and prayer a good spiritual disciplines and practices, when done according to how Jesus teaches.

 

The way that the Pharisee’s taught how to fast was to put ashes on their head, and look solemn and downtrodden, to make it quite visible that they were fasting. Their prayers were often elaborate and loud and ostentatious to demonstrate how holy and pious and righteous they were.

 

Yet Jesus taught in His Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6 that we should not look somber, but happy instead. That we should not put ashes and dust on ourselves, but to wash our faces and put on fragrant oil. He teaches us to keep our prayers simple, and direct to God, to pray in secret and not make a show of it, because God knows the posture of our hearts.

 

He teaches His disciples, He teaches us, to not be hypocrites, that our internal faith matters more than our external religion. God sees the condition of our hearts within, regardless of the performance we give on the outside.

 

So here’s the problem, here’s the tension. There is an established way of doing things, a “we’ve always done it this way” belief. There is a shared expectation among the Jews of Jesus’ day, beginning with the Pharisees and trickling to others, including John’s disciples, of what true devotion to God looks like. And Jesus, and His disciples don’t match it.

 

Jesus is essentially being asked why does His movement look spiritually inconsistent, or even deficient, from the established norms? Underneath the question becomes, can Jesus really be from God if He doesn’t line up with established religious practices?

It becomes about the appropriateness of old religious practices in light of Jesus’ arrival. The tension centered on the actions, or lack thereof, of His disciples. The Pharisees assume continuity of the Old Covenant and its laws. The same religious structures, the same expressions of worship.

 

But Jesus says no, something new has arrived. And so Jesus reframes the moment and answers the question with a question. Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?

 

Weddings can be such huge and outlandish celebrations, can they not? From the church and the venue to the food, the music, the dress code, the table setting, and the decorations, weddings have become such outwardly visible big deals.

 

And as long as people don’t enter into a lifetime of debt just to throw that party, I guess it’s ok for them to have fun, right? Weddings are supposed to be fun. Weddings are a big deal, because they are a celebration of a new life beginning together, of two lives being joined together by God into one, new flesh.

 

By His partial answer Jesus is centering everything on His presence. By answering this way Jesus is referring to Himself as the bridegroom, and His disciples as His wedding guests. Jesus is saying that the season of mourning and longing, the season for fasting, is over because He has arrived. So why should His disciples fast?

 

His presence on earth was certainly cause for great joy and celebration. His presence was anticipated by the Old Covenant. The old prophets longed for His arrival and Israel long awaited Him. Jeremiah 31. The Bridegroom has come. Jesus doesn’t just participate in God’s plan; He is the fulfillment of it.

 

But Jesus’ explanation raises more questions than it answers because nearly everyone couldn’t see the forest through the trees then, they couldn’t yet fully grasp who Jesus was and was what happening. They couldn’t grasp what was going on here.

 

And as if they already couldn’t understand what Jesus was saying, He points His violent removal, He points the cross, when He says, “The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away, and then they will fast in those days.” The answer itself creates new tension.

Jesus’ disciples don’t fast now because He’s with them, but the day is coming when He will be taken away from them, the day is coming when there will be fasting, the day is coming when there will loss and mourning.

 

Those are the days when Jesus is betrayed, when He is arrested, tried, and crucified. Those are the days when Jesus voluntarily gave up His life on the cross for you, for His people. Those are the days when He laid in the tomb before He rose from the dead.

 

The cross was once a universal symbol of pain, suffering, torture, and a gruesome death. The cross was, for a time, a symbol of grief, mourning, and loss, quite the valid reason for fasting.

 

And yet the cross became the turning point in the history of the world and God’s people. The Old Covenant anticipated and pointed to the cross. The cross was the fulfillment of God’s promise to save His people, and the New Covenant in Christ was established on the cross.

 

The cross became the instrument God chose to redeem you from the debt of your sin, to pay the price you could never pay. The cross of Christ bridged the chasm of your sin, opening the way of salvation in Christ alone. The cross is a symbol of the greatest reason for celebrating and feasting, it became a symbol of our greatest joy and hope.

 

God’s people, the church, is not characterized by ongoing mourning. We don’t keep Jesus up on the cross. Because Christ is risen, His church is characterized by resurrection joy.

 

Then, Jesus tells them a parable, which aren’t always clear. In fact, many times (though this isn’t one of them) His disciples end up asking Him (sometimes much to His chagrin) to explain what His parables mean.

 

I’m one of those disciples. I gotta tell you, one of the reasons why I love preaching, and preaching whole books from beginning to end, is because it forces me to study passages I often times have just read right over.

 

Before sitting down to study this passage this week, I never fully understood what new and old garments and new and old wineskins had to do with anything, let alone fasting and feasting, mourning and praying.

It’s really quite simple once you see it. If you have an old garment, your old, worn out favorite rock band t-shirt from one of their concert tours, and you take a new garment, a new shirt, and you tear up the new shirt to make a patch for the old one two things happen.

 

First, you’ve ruined the new shirt. You’ve taken a perfectly good garment and tore it up in order to patch up that old, favorite shirt of yours that you just refuse to let go of. And second, no matter how hard you try, that new patch never matches the old shirt.

 

It’s not worn out the same so it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t feel the same, and it doesn’t behave the same way the old fabric does. The new shirt just isn’t compatible, it doesn’t fit with your old, comfy, worn out, favorite Third Day t-shirt. Jesus is saying the issue is compatibility.

 

He then reinforces that point by talking about wineskins. Now, this one is a little harder for us today to relate to. Wineskins were made from animal skin that had the hair removed and sewn together to hold your beverages? How many of you have a wineskin in your kitchen cupboard?

 

Wine, however, is something that many of us do understand. Wine is made from fermented grape juice. While there wasn’t much alcohol consumption in my house growing up, my dad didn’t drink much, harvesting corn and forages to make into silage to feed cows taught me plenty about fermentation.

 

In Jesus’ day, the wine was fermented right in the wineskin. So, when it was filled and capped and allowed to sit, the grape juice would ferment and the fermentation process gives off gas, and when that gas is trapped, it wants to find a way out.

 

New wineskins are pliable, because well skin is pliable. It would give and stretch just enough to not burst during the fermentation process. But old wineskins turned dry and brittle and had no give and could not stretch.

 

Placing new wine that still needed to ferment in an old wineskin would burst the wineskin, spill and waste the wine (a travesty I know), and destroy the old wineskin. Highlighting the absolute issue and drawing everyone’s focus, Jesus emphasizes that new wine must be put into fresh wineskins.

Jesus isn’t talking about old clothes and new clothes, old wineskins and new skins. No, He’s talking about old religion and new, genuine faith. He’s talking about the Old Covenant, the Law practiced and twisted by the Pharisees and their traditions, compared to the New Covenant soon to be established and secured by His blood.

 

Jesus is making it clear that the old religious framework cannot hold what Jesus is bringing. The real issue in the passage isn’t just about timing of religious practices, when to fast and pray vs. when not to fast and pray, but rather that the new and the old are incompatible.

 

Jesus makes clear that the religions and traditions of men are not compatible with the gospel, not just the Judaism of the Pharisees, but any tradition and religion that claims to be Christian but doesn’t align with and is supported by Scripture.

 

He’s not saying let’s refresh Judaism, let’s add grace to the law, or let’s tweak the system. His own disciples later struggled with that in trying to enforce circumcision upon Gentile believers and the Apostles had to decide which side of that debate to fall on in Acts 15.

 

Jesus didn’t come to make bad religion better; He came to replace it with something entirely new. Jesus makes clear that any attempt at combining legalistic religiosity with the gospel message of Jesus Christ results in damage, in diminishing or losing the truth of the gospel, in bursting the hope found in the kingdom of God brought to us by Jesus.

 

The New Covenant isn’t just a patch on the Old Covenant. It is superior to the Old Covenant. Hebrews 8. The old system was heavy on external identity and obedience, by the new system is all about internal transformation leading to a new identity and obedience. You don’t just belong to God’s people; you are made new.

 

Here’s the gospel truth, in Jesus, God brought to fulfillment a new covenant reality that cannot be contained within or combined with old religious systems and traditions of men. It just can’t, so what do you do about this truth? How do you respond to the reality that the gospel doesn’t isn’t merely a patch your old life?

 

You cannot continue to hold on to your old way of relating to God and receive and embrace the new life that Christ brings you.

You don’t patch Jesus onto your life, and you don’t pour Him into what you’re already holding onto. Some of you don’t reject Jesus, you just try to manage Him. You’ll take forgiveness but surrender. You’ll take comfort, but not authority. That’s not new wine, that’s trying to pour Jesus into a life that’s holding on to control with a death grip.

 

He’s not an addition to everything you’re already doing. He didn’t come to be an add on to your religious practices, or to your daily routine. You don’t adapt Jesus to your life. He makes you a new creation. He transforms your life, and the life of the church, and your life must be remade centered entirely around Him.

 

Look at how our passage ends. Jesus exposes the real issue (He’s good at exposing the hearts of men, isn’t he?). Jesus adds, “And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’” He might as well have said, “The way we’ve always done it is good.”

 

The problem isn’t lack of clarity, nor is it a lack of evidence. The real problem is a serious, eternally consequential, lack of desire. The real issue is a deep-seated preference for the old. People prefer the old.

 

People love their old familiar religion, they love to cling to their known ways and programs, and they cherish the righteousness that they can control and define, even if it means rejecting the new reality of the kingdom of God right in front of them.

 

So this week, I want you to do two things. First, I want you to let go of what feels safe and familiar and take one step of surrender and obedience to Jesus that you’ve been avoiding.

 

This could be a conversation, gospel or otherwise, you need to have. This could be a sin you need to cut off, a step of obedience you’ve postponed, or a relationship you need to reconcile.

 

Most of us don’t need more information, we already know the next step. We just haven’t taken it. So what has Jesus already made clear tat you’re still holding back from?

 

Define that one step and then take it this week, don’t put it off any longer than you already have.

 

Secondly, I want you to stop settling for merely external Christianity. It iss possible to look completely put together on the outside and still remain unchanged on the inside you know. So, if everything external were stripped away today, would there be a real life with Christ underneath?

 

So, I want you to take an honest look at yourself by sitting in Scripture, not just to read it, but to be searched by the Spirit. Let God show you whether your walk with Christ is mostly external or truly transformed by Christ from within.

 

Ask God whether your actions—like attending church, spiritual habits, and serving others—are motivated by seeking approval (God’s or man’s), or if they stem from genuine inner transformation through faith, repentance, and love for Christ leading to growing obedience.

 

So spend time this week in honest prayer, not routine prayer. Ask God, “Lord, where am I going through motions? God, where am I putting on a show?” And then repent of that, surrender in obedience to Christ, and draw into a closer walk with God.

 

Jesus didn’t come to patch up your life; He came to make you new. So be done with the old, and follow Him.