The Old and the New

DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL OF LUKE

THE OLD AND THE NEW

Luke 5:36-39

36 He told them this parable: "No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. 37 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. 38 No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. 39 And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, 'The old is better.'" 

NIV

Perhaps we should have included the first response about fasting and the bridegroom, yet that is rather self-defining about Jesus being there and then not and when he is gone it is time enough to be sad, yet why sad as he will be at the right hand of the Father ever making intercession for us. In addition if he did not go, then the Holy Spirit would not be sent. Nevertheless let us examine these other two illustrations of Jesus. All three of them deal with the law which the Pharisees abide to religiously, or as the point Jesus is making, the old doctrine of the Law and his new doctrine. You cannot mix the new with the old and that is it in a nutshell. We cannot apply Jesus to the old way of thinking. When we encounter Jesus, we cannot simply apply him to our way of life, we have to apply him to a new life. That is why we are told that the old is gone and all things become new, we are a new creation in Christ. We are new wineskins. If we try to fit Jesus into our old life, continuing to live as we always have, then we will not survive, we will burst open, tear apart. The same goes with the patch from a new garment, Jesus being that patch, he simply does not match our old way of life, and if we try to use him as a patch on our old way, trying to keep that old garment, it will be torn by the new patch when washed. The fact is we have to put all the old way of thinking out of our mind, and think as a child of God should think. All that we once believed was the way to think is old and useless when we accept Jesus into our life. We can apply the principle, that truth to every aspect of life. What we think about life and death, heaven and hell, morality, material gain, security, along with so much more. All the old must be left old and everything must be new in order to apply Jesus. It is that simple. Yet Jesus is making a point that once we live the way we want to live, most of us prefer to stay that way, because we do not want to change, to become new. We want to retain the old ways and simply say we are Christians. Can we really do that? Jesus says, not a chance, we have to think according to his new way. We have to think the impossible. We have to rid the old and be the new.