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Text: Luke 5:36-39
A new garment (vs 36)
- Common sense
- You’ve got a new dress. Perfect colors. Perfect shape. It fits you perfectly and the best thing about it is that it makes you look good. You also have an old outfit. It’s a little T-shirt you found in the garage. It’s in bad shape and falling apart.
- Now, you have no inclination to cut up the new dress to patch the old shirt. That makes no sense. You’d ruin the dress and the old shirt would still be an old shirt. You understand perfectly what the LORD is saying.
- God’s agreements with man
- Here’s the point he’s illustrating. The new covenant in Jesus Christ is the new dress. The old shirt is the old covenant under Moses. No one destroys what’s new and perfect to patch something old and decaying.
- These two historic agreements God made with man are incompatible. Furthermore, one is so far superior to the other, there is nothing to improve upon in Jesus Christ.
- You can’t take the eternal forgiveness from the new covenant and mix it with temporary exemption in the old covenant.
- You can’t take the knowledge of God out of the new and patch it into the old where people were born into the covenant ignorantly and had to be taught.
- You can’t take the perfection of the new covenant and put it in the imperfections of the old covenant.
- You can’t take a new covenant based on spiritual matters and force them into an old agreement based on physical race and lineage.
- If you start taking away from the new testament in Jesus Christ and try to prop up the old covenant, you tear up the new covenant and it still doesn’t fix the old. The new doesn’t match the old.
- A ridiculous idea
- Some of you need to hear this. Some of you believe the Jews were saved and will be saved under a mixed system of Jesus plus Moses’ law. There is no such system. And Jesus said that the idea is so ridiculous it’s like destroying a new outfit to patch some old rotten shirt.
- (Hebrews 8:13) Since he said a NEW covenant, he be default made the first old. And that which is old decays and rots and is ready to vanish away.
- Paul dealt with this same terrible idea when he wrote to the Galatians. You can’t mix the new covenant in Jesus Christ back into the old covenant under Moses.
- Jesus Christ didn’t…
- The LORD Jesus Christ didn’t come to improve the old covenant. He came to make a new and better agreement between God and man.
- The LORD Jesus Christ didn’t come to make bad people a little bit better versions of themselves. He came to make new creatures. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
New wine (vss 37-38)
- You don’t take a good beverage and put it in some garbage container. Otherwise, you’ve just wasted what’s good. No, you take what’s new and good and put it in a new container.
- Here’s the point. The LORD doesn’t take his good gifts and mix them with the old man. The Holy Spirit would be wasted on a selfish, defensive, proud person. That person couldn’t carry the Holy Spirit properly.
- For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. … For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.
- Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?… For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other…
- So the LORD puts his good gifts in clean, new, sanctified vessels.
- If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master’s use, and prepared unto every good work.
- This is where the new wine and new bottles are preserved.
A taste for the old means no appetite for the new (vs 39)
- Now we get personal. If you have an appetite for the old, you won’t desire the new. If you thirst after pleasure then you have no appetite for righteousness. If you thirst for self-gratification, then you have no desire for godliness. If you crave money, you have no appetite for the kingdom of God.
- Religiously, the Jews were and many are in love with the old. They don’t mind reading Moses, but they have no use for Jesus Christ. They don’t mind the old testament, but the new testament is a bunch of made-up nonsense to them.
- This is a scary thought, but a reality. You’ve heard it and may have said it, this crazy idea that everyone has this God-shaped void in their heart. That’s not true. Some people are rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing. There is no desire or appetite for righteousness or godliness.
- Let’s apply it now.
- You’re here and you know you’re in love with the old things. You’re in control of those desires and appetites. It’s time to redirect your heart toward the things of God.
- In the last few years, you’ve lost your appetite for the LORD and it shows. You want us to pray for you but you don’t care to participate in the prayer meetings. You want your kids to love God, but you don’t care to make God a priority in their lives other than the Sunday mornings when you’re not doing your thing. You just want the old things with a little Jesus mixed in sometimes. And that’s not the way Jesus Christ works. It’s time to get that stuff right with God.
- You’re here and you think that Jesus Christ’s offer to you is to make a better version of you. Do you understand that a better version of you still isn’t a child of God? Jesus Christ came to make new creatures – God’s children. He isn’t trying to patch you up with some better cloth. He’s making a new person!
