August 17, 2003
Matthew 9:14-17: “Then John’s disciples came and asked him, “How is it
that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” Jesus answered,
“How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time
will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them; then they will
fast. 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 men 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.”
When I first became a Christian, what is now called contemporary Christian
music was in its infancy. Mostly Jesus Freak bands were forming and beginning
to write and record music. One of the most controversial writers and singers
in those early days was a guy called Larry Norman. He wrote one song with
the memorable title, “Why Does the Devil have all the good music?”
I think about that song sometimes when I think about the message of the
gospels, the message of the Kingdom of God, because I think to myself, “Why
do the cults and politicians have all the good titles?”
For instance, in the last few years a very loosely defined pursuit of spirituality
that can involve anything from sitting under pyramids to a lot of eastern
religious ideas, has come to be called the New Age movement.
That is a great description of the gospel that Jesus announced.
One cult calls the places where they meet Kingdom Hall, which I think the
early Christians would have loved to call their meeting places.
Political and religious ideas have been called such things as the New Deal,
the Great Society, the New Humanity, the New Era, or the New Order. All of
these could be used to describe the gospel quite convincingly. Once again,
Jesus stresses that His coming is bringing something new. He warns that you
can’t mix the new cloth with the old cloth, or the new wine with the old wineskins.
I want to mainly concentrate on what it is that is new that Jesus is talking
about.
But before we get to that, let’s look briefly at what evoked the statement
in verses 14 and 15. The disciples of John ask Jesus why His disciples do
not fast. They fast. The Pharisees fast. Evidently they had been comparing
notes with the disciples and found out that Jesus was not instituting among
them any fasting. They thought this was strange. This tells us that fasting
was associated in the practice of Judaism at that time with what all did who
were taking their commitment seriously. Otherwise it would have not surprised
them or caused them to ask the question.
The answer Jesus gives us tells us several things. First of all, He agrees
with John’s disciples that His disciples were not fasting. But He says they
will after He leaves, evidently referring to their practice after His ascension.
This coincides with what Jesus already said in the Sermon on the Mount when
He gave some instruction on fasting and started that instruction by saying,
“When you fast.” Jesus, while giving no explicit command for His disciples
to fast, implies that this will be an expected practice of His disciples.
This fall, in adult Sunday School, we will be looking at the practice of
fasting. Let me just say that the purpose of fasting, if I was to summarize
it, was to give us a greater sensitivity to God, to better hear Him speak
to us and to better receive His power in our lives. It has nothing to do with
twisting God’s arm or manipulating God.
We said that when you enter the kingdom of God, you enter a parallel universe
that has new powers that we are not used to. Fasting is a way to help us at
certain times to better live in that kingdom in an effective way. Actually,
if you look at people in the Bible who fast, you could come up with a list
of reasons that people have fasted. We will be looking at these in class,
but as a preview, these reasons include: to strengthen prayer, to seek guidance,
to express grief or despair, to seek deliverance or protection, to express
and strengthen repentance, to humble our souls before God, to express concern
for the work of God in our midst, to overcome temptation, and to deepen our
commitment to God.
It makes sense that Jesus would say that the disciples had no need to fast
now. They had a flesh and blood relationship with Jesus Christ. They had no
problem hearing Him, or communicating with Him, or being sensitive to Him.
He was right there in plain sight. This is not to say that this was not a
spiritual relationship. They were definitely responding to Him spiritually.
Remember Jesus told Peter (when He had answered Jesus by saying, “You are
the Chirst, the son of the living God!”) that “flesh and blood had
not revealed this to [him] but my Father in heaven.”
However, it’s clear that as long as Jesus was physically present with His
disciples, most if not all of the legitimate reasons for fasting would not
exist.
Then Jesus makes this statement in response to the question about fasting.
Verses 16 and 17: “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 men 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 reason Jesus makes this statement is because He wants the disciples
of John to understand something about the difference between Him and John.
It relates to what Jesus will say a little later in Matthew, namely 11:11:
“I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there had not risen anyone
greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven
is greater than he.”
In other words, Jesus is reminding John’s disciples that John is the last
Old Testament prophet. He stood at the end of a long line of prophets that
spoke to the people of Israel, with great intensity, great power, and great
truth. So the point is, John was a great man, the greatest Jesus says, but
he is of the old order, the old age. Jesus is of the New Age. He has inaugurated
a new kingdom. Or we could say the kingdom of God that has always existed,
has now intersected human life here on earth in a new and powerful way that
had not been the case before.
Jesus implies that some of the old practices of the Old Order will still
be important in the New Order or the New Age. He says that His disciples will
fast. But Jesus is implying that fasting will have to be done differently
than it was in the Old Order. It won’t work if it is not.
Just the way John’s disciples ask the question, we can discern a little
bit of the emotional overtones that are behind the question about fasting. Fasting was a common practice of the spiritually serious.
Earlier you will remember, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount warned that when
you fast, you are not to be seen by men. That was because this was the common
practice of fasting at that time. People fasted, not necessarily for the
reasons we just mentioned, but because it was an outward mark of their spiritual
seriousness. And to some extent, I think this is why the disciples of John
asked the question. They were a little annoyed with Jesus. After all, how
could He be a truly spiritual teacher if His disciples did not fast?
This is why the Pharisees fasted. They did it for the praise of men. They
did it because they wanted to maintain the reputation for being holy, righteous
men. This is what Jesus referred to back in the Sermon on the Mount as the
Pharisee kind of righteousness. It’s about the outward rather than the inward,
it’s about show instead of substance. And this is of course why the people
really did not like the Pharisees. They hated their self-righteous smugness.
This of course is a character quality that is always quite disagreeable to
us when we see it in others, but it’s much harder to detect in ourselves.
The story has been told that one of Winston Churchill’s political opponents
was a man by the name of Cripps, who was generally disliked for his self-righteous
behavior. One time someone told Churchill that Cripps had just stopped smoking
cigars, and Churchill—I can picture him puffing on his own cigar as he said
this—quipped, “Too bad. Those were his last contacts with humanity.” Another
story has it that one time when Churchill saw Cripps passing by, he quipped,
“There, but for the grace of God, goes God.”
At any rate, Jesus is saying that the new kingdom of God is going to operate
on a different set of criteria than what they had been used to thinking about.
His was a new kind of righteousness. The old kind of Pharisee righteousness
is not going to cut it. If you try to live the old way, it won’t work. Just
like His illustrations of unshrunken cloth and new wine and old wineskins
won’t work.
So one of the ways the New Age Jesus is bringing to us is different is that
he has a new brand of righteousness.
One of the ways to contrast this new wine is to compare it with the way
Jesus found fault with the Pharisees. Let’s look at some of these in Matthew
23, which will give us a pretty good idea of how the new wine of the kingdom
differs from the old wine of the Pharisees.
I want to acknowledge writer John Ortberg for some of these insights.
In Matthew 23:25 Jesus announces a woe on the Pharisee’s because, “[they]
clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and
self-indulgence.”
Emphasizing the outward conformity rather than inner transformation of character.
To the best of my knowledge, there was not one single person in my high
school class who was a Christian. I think that there may have been one exception.
One of the girls in my class, sometime about mid-high-school, started to come
to school dressed differently. She dressed in plain dresses that were very
long, and completely out of style. She began to wear her hair in a fashion
by which it was pinned closely to her head. Again, in a way that was completely
out of style. She was a nice girl. I knew vaguely that this new style of dress
had something to do with religion.
But, the only thing her classmates could see was her dress. That was it.
We found that outward behavior so strange, we rejected whatever else she was
about out of hand.
This is what happens when the outward is emphasized as being of supreme
importance. Even if self-righteousness is not an issue, it obscures the nature
of transformation. Jesus says the new wine of His kingdom will be about authenticity.
It will mean that we will concentrate on inward transformation rather than
outward conformity to some kind of religious subculture.
Another woe that Jesus pronounced on the old kind of righteousness is found
in verses 6 and 7: “they love the place of honor at banquets and the most
important seats in the synagogue; they love to be greeted in the marketplace
and to have men call them ‘Rabbi.’”
The Pharisee kind of righteousness leads to pride and judgmentalism and
to staying away from people. Inevitably, it leads to an attitude that causes
people to think themselves better than others, and to cause them to not associate
with certain people.
As Ortberg writes, the Jesus kind of righteousness will cause us to become
more approachable, not less: “In Jesus’ day, lepers and prostitutes and tax
collectors were especially careful to steer clear of the rabbis, who were
considered especially close to God. The rabbis had the mistaken notion their
spirituality required them to distance themselves from people. The irony is
that the only rabbi the outcasts could touch turned out to be God.”
The Jesus kind of righteousness drew people and drew people out of themselves.
The Pharisee kind of righteousness pushed people away, making them feel isolated.
The more we exhibit the Jesus kind of righteousness in our lives, the more
we will be approachable by other people.
The next woe or criticism of Jesus regarding the Pharisees is found in verse
4: “They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves
are not willing to lift a finger to move them.”
What is being referred to here?
The heavy loads are the teaching that the Pharisees were giving out.
Note this is not talking here about hypocrisy. It does not say that the
Pharisees were dumping heavy burdens on people and then they were not carrying
the burdens themselves. They did that - but that is not what Jesus was talking
about here.
What He was talking about is dumping commands on people and not helping
them carry them.
What does He mean they were not helping them carry them?
First, they were not giving the people an adequate vision of life that would
motivate them to do the things they were telling them to do. Jesus said they
were the blind leading the blind.
People have to understand how doing something is going to help them, they
have to understand how this is going to help them to love God and to obey
God. If they don’t understand that, eventually they will be crushed by the
burden. This is what was happening to the people.
They were being told to do a lot of things. They were especially being told
about the importance of Sabbath-keeping, with lots of heavy rules and dietary
laws, which also had a lot of difficult and scrupulous rules and regulations.
The Pharisees
failed to connect the dots for people, to help them understand how these things
helped them relate to God, to love God and to obey God. They just dumped
these burdens on them, in essence saying, “Just do it.”
I think the other thing Jesus meant by not helping the people carry the
burdens was they did not show any sensitivity to the actual lives of the
people. The Pharisees lived a very different lifestyle than most of the people
they lorded it over. They were generally wealthier, and because of their
privileged and esteemed position in society, they did not have to deal with
many of the same kind of difficulties that ordinary people did. They were
out of touch. They didn’t really care.
But the biggest thing Jesus had in mind was that they simply did not have
a real vision for life. They heaped tons of guilt on people. But they could
not give the people an adequate vision of life because they themselves did
not have it. They could not give what they did not have. And so the result
was that the people were worn out, trying to carry out the instructions of
the Pharisees, but for the most part failing, and feeling an increasing sense
of guilt and frustration, in the process. The result was they could not trace
in any way how what they did was actually helping them to love God with all
of their hearts and minds. In fact, they became further and further from the
goal because in addition to everything else, they were becoming embittered
against God because they felt they had tried and nothing good came of it.
This kind of thing is not just limited to first century Palestine. Because
we often have the same kind of things going on, Christian people today experience
the same thing. They are told to do this thing and do that thing, yet they
don’t percieve they are drawing closer to God. And so they get greatly worn
out.
Observing rules and outward forms because it’s what is supposed to be spiritual
is not a compelling enough vision for life.
Writer Steven Mosely says such a life “becomes intimidating and unchallenging
at the same time.”
It’s intimidating because it is hard. Keeping a set of outward rules can
become exhausting. Trying to fulfill what other people have decided a good
Christian should do or be leaves one tired and empty.
It’s unchallenging because it never leads to life. We can exert ourselves
in obeying all the rules, but it is unchallenging if it never leads to opening
our lives to love and joy and peace.
Related to this is another of the criticisms Jesus had of the Pharisee kind
of righteousness. In verse 24: “You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”
One way to summarize this is that you make much to do of things that are
relatively minor and superficial, but you trivialize things that are of great
importance.
The example Jesus used regarding the Pharisees is found right before this
in verse 23: “You give a tenth of your spices – mint, dill and cummin.
But you have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy,
and faithfulness.”
For instance, we know that one of the things the Pharisees did was to use
a loophole in the law so that they would not have to use any of their money
to help their aged parents. And yet at the same time, they were making a big
to do about keeping Sabbath regulations and making sure they tithed their
spices.
I have heard that waiters and waitresses hate it when the Sunday crowds
come into restaurants after church because they say they are inevitably the
most difficult people to please, and they are the least generous in their
tipping.
You see the connection. We go to church. We worship God. We study our Bibles.
But we exhibit a hard-to-please and ungenerous spirit.
This is another characteristic of the Pharisee kind of righteousness.
At the heart of it is a distortion of what makes a person spiritual, or
better yet, a distortion of what it means to be like Christ.
Can you seriously picture Christ’s being hard on His waitress and not being
generous with the tip?
Can you picture Christ’s not taking care of His aged mother or being callous
and indifferent to her needs and struggles?
What if I were to ask you how your spiritual life is going?
How would you answer?
Would you answer according to how much you had been reading your Bible,
how faithfully you had attended church, or how often you had prayed?
Those things are not how to measure spirituality. One way or the other.
Those are simply means to the end. They may be important means. But they
are not the measure.
How should we measure how we are doing spiritually?
Answers to the positive might include things such as, “I was generous to
someone because I really wanted to be.”
“I didn’t snip and snap at my son or daughter as I usually do.”
“I accepted
someone who did something or behaved in a way that I would not have been comfortable
with.”
“I didn’t get angry and become impatient in a circumstance that typically
would have caused me to do that.”
“I listened to someone instead of assuming I already knew what they were
going to say or what they meant.”
“I was flooded with joy and gratitude to God for a simple everyday pleasure.”
In other words, the way to answer that question is some specific form of
“I am loving God more, or I am loving people more.”
That is a mark of the Jesus kind of righteousness. So one of the new wineskins
of the new age that Jesus has brought to us is the new kind of righteousness.
Another new wineskin of the New Age is power.
When Jesus dealt with the man possessed of demons, He showed the disciples
and us that there is no power that Jesus cannot overcome.
Listen to how the writer of Hebrews describes the experience of people who
are partaking of the kingdom of Jesus: “(they have) … tasted the goodness
of the word of God and the powers of the coming age.” Therefore, one of
the things we must learn is to use the new powers of this kingdom.
God is giving us such power that is a foretaste of the total unleashing
of power that will be customary after Christ returns.
Jesus always stressed that the coming kingdom is a kingdom of great power.
In many different places, He repeated the idea that all power on heaven
and earth had been given to Him.
He told the Pharisees who were accusing him of doing miracles by the power
of the devil that you can only bind a strong man if you have the power to
overcome him.
Just a quick perusal of the New Testament tells us that one of the vast
differences between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, the New Age, that
Jesus has brought to us is that God has given great power to all of His people.
Peter, in describing what he thought the proclamation of the gospel is all
about, said in 2 Peter 1:16 that he proclaimed “the power and coming of
the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Take almost any New Testament book of the Bible and you will find an unmistakable
theme of power as being associated with Jesus Christ and with the giving
of that power to His people, right here, right now, today.
Take Ephesians as an example. We start with Ephesians 1:19. Paul is telling
the believers at Ephesus what he is praying that they will be able to understand.
He calls it the eyes of their heart being enlightened. And one of the things
he wants them to comprehend from 19 is, “his incomparably great power for
us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which
he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at high
right hand …”
Notice, his power, Christ’s power, is for us who believe. He doesn’t keep
it. He gives it to us.
It’s the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead. That means it
is the greatest power the earth has ever seen.
Let’s move on down to Ephesians 3. In Ephesians 3, Paul relates again what
he is praying for the Ephesians. This is of great importance. It tells us
what we should be praying for each other. But if you were to pick one theme
out of this prayer, it is a prayer about power. Paul understood that the Kingdom
of Jesus is first and foremost a kingdom of power. And so when he prayed
for the expansion of that kingdom, when he prayed for God’s will to be done
on earth as it is in heaven, his concern for power surfaced again and again
in his prayer.
Turn with me to Ephesians 3:14-17: “For this reason I kneel before the
Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.
I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through
his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your heart through
faith.”
Notice, Paul prays that through the Holy Spirit that Christ has given to
us we would be inwardly strengthened with God’s power. This is power without
limit because it is power that comes from the glorious riches of Christ Himself.
Notice this power that Paul prays for is so that we can walk by faith. It
takes power to walk by faith. Inward power. God’s power. And so Paul says
that it is a legitimate and God-honoring thing to pray that we would receive
this power that God has given us so that we can trust in Christ in the day-to-day
and moment-by-moment challenges of life.
He continues with the last part of verse 17: “And I pray that you, being
rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints,
to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to
know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure
of all the fullness of God.”
Paul says that part of the power of Christ in our lives is to be able to
know deep in our souls that Christ Himself loves us with a love that is bigger
and deeper than what we can really conceive. We actually have to have God’s
power to comprehend this personal love that God has for each one of us.
It’s a love that goes beyond knowledge. In other words, it’s a love that
goes beyond our finite minds. And surely part of what Paul means is that this
love needs to be comprehended in a way that goes beyond the mind as well.
It is a comprehension of our spirits that in turn leads to strength. See
where Paul says it leads right at the end of verse 19 – that you may be filled
to the measure of the fullness of God.
So the power to comprehend the love of God leads to more power for us because
surely the fullness of God means power. It would be inconceivable to think
that we could be filled with God and not filled with His power.
Remember, that power is the power to fulfill the vision of life that Jesus
has given us. Remember the Sermon on the Mount. That power is not for the
purpose of having nice feelings, or having warm fuzzy feelings, or having
any feelings at all. The power is so that we can live out the Sermon on the
Mount. So that you and I, within the context of who we are, the people God
has made us, can fulfill that vision for life. And finally, in Ephesians 6:10,
we read this command: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty
power.”
How can you be strong in the Lord’s power? Well, at the very least we are
talking about an expectation that God’s power is available when we need it.
We cannot expect to draw on God’s power unless we believe that He will give
it to us.
Why do I bring this up in connection with what Jesus said about old and
new wineskins? Because one of the things that is very different, I believe
the greatest difference, between the old covenant and the new covenant is
the power that God gives to us.
Turn with me to Romans 8:1-4: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation
for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of
the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the
law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God
did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering.
And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements
of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful
nature but according to the Spirit.”
Notice that the law was powerless to transform people, to really set people
free, because it was overcome by the sinful nature. But that is no longer
the case. Now, the power of the sinful nature has been broken, and we have
power to live according to the vision of life that Jesus gave us.
And what is that vision? Paul puts it like this in verse 4: “that the righteous requirements of the law might
be fully met in us.”
Does that sound familiar? Isn’t that what Jesus said? “I did not come
to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.” The entire Sermon on the Mount
sets forth what a life looks like when we are actually fulfilling the law.
We have the power to love our neighbors.
We have the power to forgive people.
We have the power to humble ourselves before God.
We have the power to resist and overcome temptation.
We have the power to bless those who curse us.
We have the power to be both salt and light to the world around us.
Why is this important?
Just this. Isn’t one of the primary things that we hear going through our
minds all the time is that we are powerless?
You can never forgive that person.
You can never really become a gracious and love-filled person.
You can never live in strong confidence in God.
You can never really believe that God loves you personally, to a depth and
degree that has no limit.
God has given us new power through the kingdom of Jesus. Unlike the law,
that was powerless to actually transform us from the inside out, God has given
us power through the spirit to actually experience that transformation.
Do you really desire to grow spiritually? Do you really want to be transformed
into the character of Christ?
One thing you must believe to see that happen is that God will give you
the power you need. He has not left you without resources.
Think of what Paul told Timothy. Timothy was in a difficult situation. He
was surrounded with circumstances that were problematic and intimidating.
And Paul reminded Timothy what God had given him.
He said: “For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit
of power, of love, and of self-discipline.”
We live in a new age. We live in an age when we can live out the new kind
of righteousness that Jesus taught us. We live in an age when God has given
to us the powers of the coming age. And we can live in that power today.