Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
—1 Corinthians 5:7-8
Week 2 Day 5 (Wineskins)
Genesis 26:17-27:46
Matthew 9:1-17
Psalm 10:16-18
Proverbs 3:9-10
Matthew 9:17
“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the old wineskins would burst from the pressure spilling the wine and ruining the skins. New wine is preserved in new wine skins so that both are preserved.”
As I was reading today, I felt like the Lord was showing me something very clearly as I read this verse. It may not seem like anything important, but the principal can apply to our lives as Christians.
When we take the first step to follow Christ we become a new creation as it says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” When we accept Christ into our lives, he wipes out everything, and remakes us as a beautiful new creation, much like a new wineskin.
However some of us may look new on the outside, fitting the description as new, yet we choose to fill up our insides with everything old. We fill it up with our old sins that we try to get away with, hurt from our past, condemnation from sins we have committed, anger, strife, guilt, doubt and the list could go on and on. So we have now accepted this amazing gift the Lord has given us of this new wineskin, yet we choose to junk up the inside with everything from our past that didn’t work then and won’t work now. We have seen a change on the surface, on the outside, but our own actions still fill us up with filth on the inside.
Just as an old wineskin will burst and leak out and ruin the new wine because it can’t handle the pressure, a heart change won’t last unless their is a new lifestyle to go along with it and vise versa. You won’t stand long allowing old sins into your new lifestyle in Christ. We can’t preserve our new life if we are putting old habits into it, and we can’t put new habits into the same old lifestyle….it won’t work, it won’t last. Until both your inside and outside focus is on Christ, you will crumble under the pressure.
I am asking God today to make me like a new wineskin, and fill me with new wine. Cleanse me from the inside out and help me to preserve my heart for you. Help me not to fill your new creation with old sins that you have already forgiven and forgotten, and help me not to dwell on the condemnation that has stemmed from them. Help me to live as your servant pure and holy from the inside out. I love you and thank you for your patience and grace with me.
Romans 6:3-4
“Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”
Let my flesh die Father, and let me be made new in You.
