My fridge door doesn’t close well. I discovered this one day after pouring some funny smelling milk onto my cereal. The bottom seal on the door doesn’t stick. Well, it does. You just have to give it a little nudge with your foot. We had to get used to doing this for the first week or so, but now it’s a reflex. When people come over to my house and help themselves to something in my fridge, they close the door, and I nonchalantly walk by after them and give it that little nudge it needs to keep my food serious… you know, not going funny.
This little reflex is just there now. I go over to my in-laws and I nudge their fridge door too. I treat all fridges equally – no favoritism here. Every refrigerator door I come in contact with gets a little kick from me. Sorry if I’ve kicked your fridge. It’s hard to change something like that. We get used to doing certain things that started for a good reason, but become unnecessary. I used to have a car with a door that needed a little tough love to close it. But my father-in-law doesn’t appreciate when I exhibit that love on his new Honda.
Jesus said, “New wine must be poured into new wineskins.” New situations call for new approaches. I can’t keep kicking the fridge if the door works. That would actually produce the opposite effect eventually. Counter-productive. But it’s more than that. Humanly speaking, some habits are necessary. Spiritually though, we need to think “new”. Growth is the idea here. When new wine went into a new wineskin, the wine fermented and grew. The wineskin had to keep up with this and got stretched. It was made of leather and had some give. I need to have some give. There is a new life inside of me – a life no less than the life of Jesus himself – and it’s growing. It’s occupying more room all the time, and it’s pushing the envelope.
I’m being stretched. It’s something I have to keep in the forefront of my mind because if I don’t, the experiences I am having will seem more like chastisement, or that I just haven’t gotten it right yet. Jesus is growing my spirit, and it’s not always a very comfortable thing. I love the way Psalm 119 puts it, “I will run the course of your commandments, for you will enlarge my heart.” There is purpose in it! There is something to be done. We are not just saved FROM things, but we are saved TO things also. True, we are saved from hell, death, sin, fear, the world, the devil, self – but also to life, good works God foreordained for us to walk in, heavenly citizenship, conformity to the image of the Son of God, and more.
I don’t want to dig myself into a rut. I don’t want to strap myself to the old contraption of tradition. Jesus was always stupefying people by doing things like picking grain on the Sabbath. That actually infuriated the Jews! Such a small thing, but they had sold themselves to something that was actually a gift to them from God. Jesus said, “Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man.” I don’t want to get it backward like they did. I want the life inside me to dictate the form I take, and not vice versa. I need to listen to mature and wise believers, but wisdom doesn’t always come with age. Jesus was the wisest man alive when he was just a boy. Didn’t he say, “Did you not know that I must be about my father’s business?”
The Father’s business is life, and more specifically resurrection life. You and I are taking shape according to HIS life in us. We long to be changed, but He has to do it. I don’t want to go around kicking fridges for the rest of my life. I don’t think you do either. We get so fixed on methods don’t we? We do it because it “works”. But what if those works are not supposed to be getting done? “Unless the Lord builds the house, the workers labour in vain.” We all want the Lord to make us into who we are, but we have to relinquish the ways of our old wineskin. It just can’t hold the new wine.
I drink coffee. Work begins each day with me standing at the coffee urn, thankful for the nice lady in the office who always puts it on. She doesn’t drink the stuff herself, but knows we do. The rest of us sure do. It goes fast. My brother wanted a cup one day, and finding the pot empty, came to me. He wanted me to make him some. I started to give him the old “give a man a fish, you feed him for a day…” speech. Nope. He still insisted that I make it for him and being not only my older brother, but also technically my boss, I complied. The soil from the fern pot in the foyer did the trick.
But making coffee takes a little skill, I guess. You don’t really want it too strong or too weak. We learn to do things and eventually have it down to a science, so to speak. Whether it’s the water to coffee ratio, when to apply the solder on a pipe, or when to stop sucking on the hose as your siphoning gas from your older brother’s van… We learn the method. “That’s not how you do it…” we find ourselves saying. “Let me show you how it’s done.” We seem to apply this thinking to everything. My brother had a method too. It was simply to get someone else to do it for him. Delegation is a funny thing. It needs to be learned by those who don’t know it, but it needs to be restrained by those who do. Anyway, we are methodical, generally speaking. We are Methodeers. Spellchecker didn’t like that one (it liked the name for itself though).
So, where does Christ come into this? I love Paul’s determination with the Corinthians, “to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified”. Jesus always factors into the equation, doesn’t he? He brings “all things… together under one head”. Well, he didn’t rely on methods much. Take his healings for instance. He gave sight to many. Sometimes he simply touched their eyes. On one occasion he used his own saliva to apply to a man’s eyes, and on another he mixed his spit with clay for the same purpose. The outcome was the same (slightly altered with the man who saw “tree-people” at first), but the method was different. I think that was intentional. When was he not intentional? He did this to show us that God’s ways are not our ways. We think we can get it down to 3 easy steps, 5 simple guidelines or 7 days to victory. There is no method when it comes to the Lord. You cannot confine him. Like C.S. Lewis says, “He’s not a tame lion.”
This makes us rely much more on him. We lean harder on him when we realize that Jesus did not just come to “show” the way, but to “be” the way. He said, “I am the way…”. Change is what we all want, but it always eludes us. We chase self-improvement like the junk food that it is. It abates the hunger for a little while, but you end up worse-off. Think about it for a second; when did you experience the most change in your life? For most people, the answer to that question is at conversion. You meet Jesus and find him to be the cure, the ransom, the wings, the key, and the life that he is, and it drastically alters you. There are many amazing stories of broken addictions, transformed tempers, and infused unshakable joy accompanying that first confrontation with the cross. But from there, the common continuance of the story finds people looking out for the next book or the next speaker, or even the next doctrine to get them through the dry spots. A return to the cross and to Christ himself has no comparison. That was his rebuke to that great church in Ephesus, “You have left your first love.”
Madness may have method sometimes, but do not be dictated by a form or a pattern. Don’t give in to the temptation of doing something because people say “it works.” Jesus isn’t a means to an end. He’s both the means and the end. Let him be both. People may call you impractical or even mad, but they called Jesus that too. And they didn’t understand what he was saying about the wineskin.
This gets us back to having to be really clear on the fact that we are new creations in Christ Jesus – new wineskins. It’s another picture of what is truly a spiritual reality for us. And the wine? The life of Jesus himself. I love that the first miracle (or “sign”) Jesus performs in John’s Gospel is the turning of the water into wine. There were all these huge jars full of water intended for ceremonial washings. He was at a Jewish wedding, and Jews sure loved to wash their hands. They thought it kept them from being defiled by the things they touched. Jesus had to correct there thinking later, of course, when he would tell them that it was actually they that were the source of defilement, but we’ve covered that ground already. All the same, he spoke volumes when he turned that ritualistic water into celebratory wine.
Wine is a symbol for joy in the Bible. That doesn’t mean that joy has anything to do with being drunk. Wine in those days was not like the stuff we have today. It was fermented, but not as alcoholic. Still, it is a picture of the joy the Lord gives us. That’s why Jesus is there blessing the union of a bride and groom. There is no way that they would have been able to drink all the wine he made for them! He was giving them joy. His very presence there meant joy. He wants us to know his joy. May we be full of him, causing our new wineskin to stretch so that he can occupy more of us.
One more thing. Going back to refrigerators, it seems to be a good metaphor for our old lives. When we were fridges, in order to preserve anything, we were dependent on the electricity of the world. Wine doesn’t need refrigeration. The process of fermentation protects the integrity of the wine. Everything is there in the wineskin, without any need for outside support. Don’t hold me to much to this illustration – they all break down eventually. But what I’m saying here is that Christ is our all! He is completely sufficient for all our needs. We have traded our fridge for the wineskin. It’s a fantastic deal. It means joy. It means growth. It means Jesus is in us. It couldn’t be better.