Let God fill us with His Spirit in the coming year!
“No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. 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. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”
(Matthew 9:16-17 (NIV))
As we enter in the new year what are we going to fill ourselves with?
Society looks at the new year as a chance to make a clean start. We make resolutions about things that we plan on doing differently. We tell ourselves and others that we will lose weight, that we will exercise, that we will go to church more, that we will . . .
It could go on and on and list the things that we say we are going to do. Have we ever stopped to think that what we say we are going to do is comparable to the new wine and that we are the old wineskins? We cannot handle the new things without changing ourselves first. It is a matter of the heart. It is a matter of priorities.
If you go into an activity to lose weight and get in shape and you try to start full throttle, it usually doesn’t last long. We must start slowly and build up to what we long to do. The same is true of our spirituality and our relationship with Jesus. We must learn to crawl before we can walk. We must learn to walk before we can run. To use the concept that we are familiar with, we must be fed milk until we are mature enough for solid food.
Walking with Jesus, just like anything in this life, is not an activity that we can achieve perfection instantly. We will stumble. We will fall, and we will all have times when we will think that Jesus must really be shaking His head because of all of our failures.
Don’t give up!
A life spent walking with Jesus is just that. It is a life long event. It is a journey and not a destination. We can’t simply arrive at a point where we are perfect in our walk. We will be made new every single day of our life. We will be filled with new wine as our old wineskin is made anew.
Let's pray that we go in to this new year with the attitude that we will stand firm and stay the course that is laid out before us.
Paul described it as a race and that he was in it to win it!
"Good morning"
"Have a blessed Sunday"
