God pours His new wine into new wineskins. Over many decades now, christians have been crying out for the new wine of God. Preachers have encouraged this. Many believe they have received the new wine through the Baptism of the Spirit, or the Toronto Blessing. But, sadly, in the end the old wineskins mostly remain with us.

We can cry out all we like, but will we pay the price? God will only pour His new wine into new wineskins. We may join the most spiritual. church we know of, or totally turn our backs on all man made church systems, travel the skies seeking some great blessing in other lands, or spend years on a mountain top seeking God. However, until we become, appropriately enough, a totally new wineskin, He can never fully pour His new wine into us.

People ask, "Where is the new wine of God? . " But that's not the problem, The new wine has come. The real question to be asked is, "Where are the new wineskins suited to the pouring in of the new wine? . " If God can find them He is just longing to pour it in. Of that I'm sure!

When the new wine fills the new wineskins both are preserved.. But when new wine goes into an old wineskin the pressure of the fermenting and expanding new wine comes up against the rigidity of the old used wineskins. The old wineskin cannot cope and splits. The new wine pours out and is wasted. Maybe this is what happened in the 60's and 70's, with modern day christianity inheriting the mess ever since.

The new wineskins. message was shared by Jesus in answer to a question asked by the disciples of John the Baptist. "How come we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples don't?" Jesus reply made a clean sweep of all such issues. He introduced them to a new basis for harmony with God.

The new wine was coming and had come. It was totally embodied in the life of Jesus .. All religious activity based on externally produced behaviour (such as fasting) was of the old past-used-by-date wineskin.

The new basis for harmony with God required only two components to be fully effective. They are the new wine and its new compatible container, the new wineskin. Judaism was not an appropriate vessel. Nor is a human life unless it first undergoes a miraculous transformation.

I would like to look at the broad picture in an attempt to keep things in proper perspective. Yes, believers in Jesus Christ are born again. The Spirit of God has taken up residency within. In fact Paul boldly declared to those unspiritual believers at Corinth, "that God's Spirit and their spirits were one" (1 Cor 6:17 RAV). But obviously God's Spirit was only one with their spirit. deep down inside of them. The other parts of their person, (the soul, the body, the mind) showed by their soulish, selfish actions that they were not one with God..

In order to become suitable new wineskin vessels for God's Spirit we are required to submit soul, body and mind to the flow of God's Spirit. There needs to be an outworking of that oneness God first created with our spirit, so as to bring the whole person. into the same depth of harmony with the new wine. If we will!

The believers at Corinth were busy trying to do this and that, and everything else to please God. They saw themselves as human beings trying to be spiritual, instead of newborn spiritual beings learning to be human. viz God's way. Like many people today, they were unaware there was something new deep within.

That something. is a divinely created spiritual being created by the joining of God's Spirit and ours as one. Our lives are to learn to respond to this spiritual entity that is the new real spiritual me, bringing my soul, body and mind into a death to its old wineskin nature and into a new submission to the real spirituals in God Himself.

The Spirit says to the believers in Ephesus as also to us, "You were taught � to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires � and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness".

Many moons ago, when I first saw these insights, I discovered that the above word was so true. I was being corrupted by my own deceitful desires. My very praying, my witnessing, my preaching, my Bible study, and my quiet times, were all driven along by my own religious desires . toward God. My desires were so strong they in fact deceived me, corrupting my whole relationship with God.

I had to stop praying until I could allow the Holy Spirit's desires to pray through me. I stopped Bible study until God's Spirit began to teach me. And so it went on. Until more and more of what I did (though God taught me to do less) flowed from the new wine. In these new areas God could create harmonious blending of the new wine with a little more of the new wineskin in me.

So don't try and be spiritual, you can't! Rather seek to be broken. First. We are told to put off the old self - then. we're to put on the new self. Why do we struggle and strain, only to fail in putting on the new self, created to be like God? . The trouble is that we try and put it on over the old self and it wont fit. God won't go there! In brokeness and repentance God will break the old self's hold over us. Then we can put it off. Now we begin to become the new wineskin entrusted with a pouring in of His new wine. Now we can put on the new. And if this applies to us as individuals, in the purposes of God it applies even more so to Christ's body.

Footnote: re "fasting" I know, I know! I've brought an argument in that passing reference that 'fasting' was of the 'old wineskin' regime. To save many of you the trouble of having to write to sort me out, I'll explain. I used to fast according to the old wineskins' way. If an emergency came along I'd decide to fast. and pray. If a group went to camp, sometimes we'd decide . to fast. God dealt with me about this, teaching me His 'new wineskin' way. Nowadays He works like this. Sometimes I'll wake up, (and by the way I really have an appetite for food), and find almost miraculously I have no appetite for food at all, And this will last 2-6 days. I have no reason to fast, or made any decision to fast, but no doubt God has. He's the new wine. We're just to be compatible and submit and let all the decision making emanate from Him. The only area of decision making that we are to move into is deciding what is from Him and what is not! And then just go with the flow of glorious liberty under 'His captivity'!