New Wine

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New Wine

Luke 5:36-38: “He told them this parable: “No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old.  And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins.”

New wine is made from grapes that have recently been crushed. Many of us are experiencing crushing and overwhelming times at the moment. Many of us are frustrated and lonely and desperate to find hope and meaning for the difficulties that we are facing while adapting to new ways of life during this period of uncertainty. Some are a lot more hard-pressed than others. Yet I am sure that few have been able to escape the heaviness that leaks slowly into our hearts and sometimes threaten to flood our minds with dark thoughts and threats of hopelessness.

Yet it is exactly in these pressing times that God is doing a new thing. Hillsong Worship beautifully illustrates this in their song: “New Wine”:

“In the crushing, In the pressing, You are making New wine. In the soil, I Now surrender You are breaking New ground.

So I yield to you and to Your careful hand When I trust you I don’t need to understand….

Jesus, bring new wine out of me”

I believe God is using these times of adversity, to create new wineskins into which He will be pouring out His Spirit like never before.

He is making you into a new being amidst the crushing you are experiencing from all sides. I believe there will come a time, that we will never want to go back to the old wine. A time when we will be able to look back on everything and realize that God was working throughout it all, even if we didn’t see it at the time.

God has a new anointing and new blessings to give us, but He can’t deposit it into old vessels, as it will destroy the vessel. So He is using this time to create new vessels, but we have to surrender ourselves and our hearts to Him for Him to “break new ground”. We have to be willing to leave behind old ways and old habits and embrace the new that God has for us. It may be a painful process, but in the end, it will be worth it, for the joy it will bring forth:

Psalms 40:3: “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him.”

The pain and hardships that we are facing in this time, need not be for nothing. I pray that we will use it as a catalyst to draw nearer to God and let Him use this time to shape us into vessels that will carry the fresh anointing of the Holy Spirit into a world desperate for the love and healing only to be found in our God.