I visited the website of my BIL's church and this was his "verse/quote" of the week...

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. (Matthew 9:17)

Quote of the Week
Doctrine must be a wineskin kept elastic by the oil of the Spirit. If it is rigid and unmoving, it will not yield to God's habit of opening up more of His Word to us. (Bill Johnson)

The quote sounds a bit fuzzy to me (Bill Johnson is a Word of Faith/Emergant mega church wannabe), but when I looked up the passage and saw that Jesus was teaching about fasting, I started feeling fuzzy myself.

The note in my Bible says that Jesus was teaching that his disciples were not fasting because the Savior was with them. I'm just having a hard time understanding how the wine in wineskins correlates with the teaching on fasting. Any help?

__________________
Moselle
PCA
TN

The quote, re. doctrine, is nonsense. Truth is, facts are. Situation-dependent realities are just that. So, is doctrine "situation-dependent"? According to that quote, it is. Well then, how do we decide which doctrines are "situation-dependent"? Is Jesus death of the cross "situational"? Probably, this person would say "No," however, he has nothing beside his personal "feeling" to tell us which things are permanent, and which are temporary.



Fasting is a discipline related to need and to prayer.

Deprive yourself of time for feeding your body, and devote that time to communion with God, specially for the needs of body and soul.

In the passage, Jesus says: I'm with my disciples, not far away. They have me--which is to say everything they need. Why do they need to fast?

His statements of vv16-17, dealing with old garments/old wineskins, have to do with a new Order of things which the Messianic age introduces. Under the old Order, there was a great deal of hope and anticipation of the Messiah's coming. There was the certainty that people needed to be repentant of sin, and pleading with God to fulfill his promises to deliver them from the curse of death.

OK, now God has provided the Promised One. In his advent is a new era. No question, there will be times of his physical distance, v15, when there will be occasions of fasting. But in the fulfillment of the promises there is a significant change in orientation.

Thus, to fast as the Pharisees insisted, as though it were still vital to orient the people of God in expectancy that Messiah should (yet) come, was to put a patch on a worn out robe (no, but change your robe); or to put new wine into the old skins (no, but get into new skins).

The new program is like new wine. It requires a new container, a new form. The fresh new wineskins are supple, and able to swell and stretch with the new Spirit-reality of the Kingdom (compared to the gas-creating fermentation process).

But the program isn't "changing with time." It has changed, based on Jesus' arrival and fulfillment, and we need to find out what the present-age facts are. Sounds like the man speaking the quote thinks we need new wine-skins every couple years or so. I don't think that's what Christ was teaching.

__________________
Rev. Bruce G. Buchanan
ChainOLakes Presbyterian Church, CentralLake, MI


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Thanks - that is very helpful!

Based on the other things I've read and heard of Bill Johnson's, I'd say he is in the habit of trying to make scripture conform to his own thoughts. Sounds good unless you actually pay attention to what he's saying.