This podcast is a repost, originally published on January 19, 2017.

In Matthew 9:16-17, Jesus is giving a very beautiful metaphor by saying, “When you buy a new cloth, you don’t stitch it along with the old cloth”. Nobody buys a new shirt and stitches it with an old coat and wear it together. You wouldn’t want the new cloth to give you a fresh and a new look whenever you want to wear it, whenever you want to try it on.

The same goes with wine. Whenever you buy new wine, you’re not going to mix it with old wine, because you know that if you do that, the old wine will also get destroyed and so will the new wine, and you don’t want to do that. What you want to do is you want to create a new wine skin and put the new wine into the new wine skin.

And Jesus is saying this, you want to experience something new in your life, you have to be willing to let the old thing go away, let the unproductive thing get outside your view. You have to make it a point to look for things in your life that’s not working anymore, that is not glorifying God anymore, that is probably pulling you down and making you slow, not allowing you to enter into your destiny, those things that are being a point of conflict in your life and you have to keep disconnecting from them completely.

Jesus said it would be dramatic if you put new wine in old wine skins. What will happen is it will burst open. If God had to do something new in your life and you are still sticking in your traditions, then it’ll be a disaster because your life is going to be destroyed.

You know how most churches become traditional? Today we have so many denominations and churches that we call as a traditional church and a denominational church, and we (tend to) look down upon them. 

The Methodist Church was born under the leadership of John Wesley. John Wesley was the greatest revivalist in the whole of UK, England. People would be convicted of their sins and there would be repenting. They would be looking for a church to go to. Just his mere presence would cause revival in the towns and cities he would pass by. Not even his sermons, he was the greatest preacher who had ever lived and has preached more sermons than most preachers can ever dream of preaching.

Now why do you think the Methodist Church today is it able to host God the same way he was able to host God when he was on earth? It’s because, when God is changing the season, you have to be willing to change. If you are continuing to stick to what John Wesley did in the time that he was alive and active on earth, then it is like God wanting to pour new wine into a wine skin which is three hundred, four hundred years old. It’s not going to work. It is only going to create disaster if God is trying to pour out His Spirit.

There are so many Methodist Churches around the world that are experiencing revival right now and it’s not because God is saying-what you did three hundred, four hundred years ago was good enough for you today. It is because they’re willing to change and adopt and let the Holy Spirit move in a fresh and a new way in the church.

God knows that if He would pour new wine into old wine skin, it would burst open. You need to start afresh every single morning and you need to go to God and say-God, what is the patch of old clothing in my life that need to rip off and get rid off? What is the old wine in my lead that I probably need to pour out? What are the old wine skins that I need to give away and probably adopt into, what you’re doing new in my life, this week in my life this day? Today, make some radical decisions in your life.

Have a blessed week!