Jesus after being asked, why His disciples did not fast and pray as did the disciples of John and the Pharisees answered, "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. 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. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, "The old is better."
    Wine makers have known for generations, the great mysteries of making choice wine. Yeast, a unicellular micro-organism when deprived of oxygen, will convert to sugar and water to alcohol while expanding carbon dioxide. As we examine the art of wine making, we can conclude this process has something to do with LIFE.  Carbon and oxygen, the two building blocks of life, provide the environment for  a living organism.
  The Church under a New Covenant is a living body, a complex organism functioning under the direction of the head, Christ Jesus. Just as new wine grows and expands, so the church, also, must find variety and flexibility to meet the needs of a growing society. Someone once said, "The last seven words of a dying church are, "We've never done it like that before." Sometimes that may very well be the best reason for a change. William Barclay quotes. "If the church was run like a business, it would be out of business. No business could exist on worn-out methods and yet the church tries to. Any business which had lost as many customers as the church has would have tried new ways long ago - but the church tends to resent all that is new."
Christ never meant the church to function like a corporate, stagnate, old wine bag not able to stretch and flex to meet the needs of a giving community or social order. He never meant it to be a robotic religion of rules, just going through the motions, focusing only on the externals. Charles Swindol in his book Grace Awakening quotes, "God never meant the church to be a factory mass producing cookie cut Christians and paper doll saints." We tend to think we have unity of the faith when we all look alike and act alike. But, there is a difference between unity and uniformity.
    We are drunk on old wine. We are intoxicated, poisoned with legalism, ritualism, traditionalism, and the doctrines of men. Charles Swindol in his book, Quest for Character, quotes Jaroslaw Pelikan who said: "Tradition is the living faith of those now dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of those now living."
    We need New Wine. We need the vibrant, pulsating, life giving power of Christ! His resurrected spirit living through us and our variety of personalities. Christ did not come to build on an old foundation, or to build a new religion, but, to make a new humanity, a new creature, an extension of Himself here on planet Earth.
    New Wine represents a new covenant, a new way in which God deals with man, a new life (Rom. 6:23). Old wine represents the old covenant  conditioned upon obedience to the law of Moses. It represents and promotes the orthodoxy of our own self-sufficiency, our religion of externals and ceremony.
    The basic need in the heart of every man, woman and child is to know God. Man needs to know His love and total acceptance, to experience His complete forgiveness and freedom of guilt, to have meaning and purpose to life. Man has three basic inclinations that leave him with an unresolvable dilemma:

    The problem with man is not just his need for forgiveness and acceptance, but his deepest need is spiritual life, that which he lost in Adam.  Pascal, the French philosopher, said "There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of man that God can only fill through His son Jesus Christ." But, where is man to get this life?
    The Bible says man is dead )corpse) in trespasses and sin. Now, we get to the heart  of New Wine Ministries, a ministry of the New Covenant, a ministry of Life. This is in contrast to the Old Covenant, which is a ministry of condemnation and death. "For the letter killeth but the spirit gives life."
    Salvation is a life or death issue. God had to deal with two specific problems. First, is sin (guilt). This is the disease. Second is the result of the disease (death). The crucifixion of Christ dealt once for all time with mankind's sin problem (past, present, future). The barrier of guilt, and alienation was forever removed leaving open access to God's throne for every human being. The only thing that will keep any individual from this Life is his or her own unbelief (John 16:8,9). The crucifixion is God's answer to the sin problem. The resurrection  (restored life) is God's answer to the death problem.
    God instituted a plan "under the law," to accomplish two specific items, one. to reveal or foreshadowed the messiah to come. Two, to magnify for man the seriousness of sin, or living independent of God. The Law is designed to show how sinful man not only his sinful acts (behavior) but his sinful nature (death). The Law reveals that his sin is not just in his hands, but in hi heart.  The Law's purpose is to reveal to man not only is behavior problem but, that he is DEAD and in need of LIFE.
    In order to temporarily alleviate some of the consequences that guilt brings upon man, he appropriated the Levitical order of sacrifice. This is seen especially clear in the children if Israel's observance of the Day of Atonement.
    If you were around in the time of Jesus about two thousand years ago,  and you were a Jew, once a year you would be involved in a religious ceremony commanded in the Mosaic Law (Lev. 16). It was done every year on the tenth day of "Tisri". During this occasion only the high priest was allowed to enter into the Holy of Holies. Dressed in white linen, he brought forth a bullock for a sin offering for himself and his family.  He would bring two young goats for a sin offering for the sins of the people. He presented these two goats at the door of the temple and cast lots upon them, one lot "for Jehovah" and the other for the scapegoat. The goat for Jehovah was slain and its blood offered in the Holy of Holies. The scapegoat, however, was brought before the people. The high priest laid his hands on the goat and confessed the sins of the people. The goat was led into the wilderness and released.
    This symbolizes Christ complete, "Once for All" sacrifice for our sins, and also the removal of the barrier, our guilt and its load of sin. If you were there that day, can't you feel the anticipation as the high priest set the scapegoat free? This is the goat which in a very real sense, is bearing your  sins for the previous year, all your trespasses of the law of God, all of your minor infractions of the ceremonial law, all of your inability to meet God's moral and ethical standards of righteousness. You watch patiently as the scapegoat carries away your bad conscience of sin and guilt. Do you feel the release, the sense of awe, the cleansing peace?
    The bad news is deep down in your heart you know that the blood of bulls and goats can't take away your sons, and truly cleanse the conscience. The worse news is that although the slate/record has been cleansed/erased, you are now starting on another year. Under the Law, you better make sure that on the way home you don't have a wrong or lustful thought, no moment of selfishness, no fit of anger. Because you see, God's keeping up with every sin. He's writing down every sin and trespass on the books  there in the records, and there will be a need for atonement next year.
    Sound familiar, of course, this is precisely the same spiritual roller coaster ride we go through Sunday after Sunday. We walk the aisle, we confess sins, we receive forgiveness for sins that have already been forgiven and we return to our seats empty, powerless, never realizing the price for sins has been eternally paid. We spend much of our Christian experience asking "How can I keep from sinning?" Pre-occupied with sin, seeking for "additional forgiveness," something Jesus said was finished. Heb. 9:22 says "...without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins." Where does one get this additional forgiveness? This practice is a denial of the finished work of the cross. It puts Christ to public and open shame, requiring that He bleed over and over again. It is trampling under foot the blood of Christ. Until we believe in the finished work of the cross we can never enjoy the substance of His Resurrection. Reverting to a legal system in any way for the attainment of maintenance of a right relationship with God is to nullify Grace.