Grace Baptist Church, Nokomis, IL.

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A little over a month ago, I contacted someone on Facebook to encourage them to come to church. I’ll call this person Jimmy. Jimmy was baptized when he was a child nearly 30 years ago, but when his family stopped attending church some years later, he stopped as well. It’s not that he was offended by the church, or stopped believing in Jesus, it’s just that he didn’t make his faith a priority, and therefore didn’t make church a priority.

So I contacted Jimmy and let him know that he was welcome to worship with us anytime. And when I invited him, he began to tell me all the reasons he wasn’t able to come. He told me about how busy he was. He told me about how he had work obligations, and about other obligations in the evenings. And he told me about how he was a single dad to three kids, and how his youngest daughter was about to have surgery.

And so I acknowledged to him, “Wow, yeah, it sounds like you’ve got a lot on your plate, I’ll be praying for you.” And I did. And then I checked up on Jimmy a couple weeks later, let him know that I’d been praying for him, and asked him how his daughter’s surgery went. And he said that they had to postpone the surgery because she ended up getting sick, and that she had to stay in the hospital for a week, but that she was out now. So I told him I was glad she was out, and I’d pray that she’d fully recover. And I did. And I’ll check on Jimmy again soon.

But this whole conversation reminded me that we need to have our priorities in line. It’s great that he’s working hard at his job, but is he working hard for Jesus? It’s great that he’s got time for his family, but does he have any time for Jesus?

And it’s not that these priorities really conflict with each other, because if you make Jesus your all-encompassing purpose in life, you’ll work hard, you’ll serve your family, but it’s not because these things are your life, it’s because Jesus is your life, because He is good, and glorious, and He alone is worthy of all praise.

Read Luke 5:33-39

There are two parts to this passage. In the first part, Jesus responds to an accusation about a lack of prayer and fasting. And in the second part, Jesus tells a parable about how we should look at our new life in Christ. I want to look at the second part of the passage first, because it will help us to understand the first part much more.

The second part of this passage is really a condemnation of the Pharisees. They thought they could be right with God based on their righteousness. They thought they could be good enough. They thought that if they just did things like fast and pray at certain times, and in a certain way, then they were fulling the Old Testament Law, and God would allow them into heaven.

So Jesus told them a parable. Actually, three parables, but they all have the same point. The first parable was about mending an old article of clothing (v. 36).

Now, we men are pretty strange creatures, aren’t we? You women out there might not understand this, but we men form emotional bonds with our clothing. And if a shirt, or a pair of jeans, or a pair of underwear gets old, with holes in it, and it starts falling apart, and even gets to the point that it needs to be thrown away, it’s hard for us to make that kind of decision. Those clothes were with us through the hard times!

But how ridiculous would it be for me to buy a brand new shirt, and then tear a piece out of it, so that I can sew that piece into an old shirt that had a hole in it. That would be just plain dumb, right?

So Jesus was pointing out how dumb it is cling to a rigid religious system of prayer and fasting when Jesus is so much greater than merely following rules. And, by implication, it’s also just plain dumb to hang onto our old, worn, beat up lifestyles when Jesus is so much greater than our old sin. It’s time to put off the old and put on the new!

The second parable was about filling old wineskins with new wine (v. 37-38). Now, what used to happen in those times was that when someone bought wine, it would come in a container made out of goatskin. And the goatskin would be sewn together in such a way as to contain all of the wine, and the wine would age in this container so that as the wine fermented, it would weaken the seams of the goatskin container. But because of how the fermentation process works, the wine would expand, and the wineskin would stretch, and the wine and the wineskin would in a sense age together so that it wouldn’t burst as long as this wine was still inside. But eventually, this wine would be used, whether at a celebration, or for medicinal purposes, since we’re Baptist, and the container would be empty.

But this old wineskin was now useless as a container for wine, because if you tried to pour new wine into it, the seams would now have been weakened by aging of the previous wine that it contained, and the new wine would just completely burst the seams, and would leak to the ground.

So Jesus was saying, “Look, you’re trying to pour Me into your existing container, but that doesn’t make any sense! If you want to really know God and follow God, you need to scrap the old system.”

Knowing God doesn’t come merely by praying and fasting. Knowing God comes through knowing Jesus! So if you pray and fast without even knowing Jesus, you’re wasting your time, because you’ve completely misunderstood how to know God.

The third parable was about drinking wine (v. 39). This parable seems to be a simple comparison between old wine and new wine. Personally, based on the very little amount of wine I’ve had in my life, I think all wine tastes disgusting, but when I first read this parable, I thought, “But don’t people say old wine is better?” Why would Jesus be comparing Himself to new wine, if the old wine is truly better?

But from what I can tell, this verse isn’t really commenting on how good wine is. The key word here is “desires.” What Jesus is condemning is the stubbornness of not even trying new things. How can you possibly know if the old is better unless you try the new as well? You can’t!

And as a church, we need to be willing to try new things. We should never get so stuck in our ways that we say, “Oh, we’ve never done it that way before!” Great! Maybe that means we should try it to see how it goes! And, even more importantly, we need to see our traditions as far less important than following and rejoicing in Jesus.

Jesus was telling the Pharisees, “I’m here! I’m with you! Rejoice! But instead, you keep trying to fit Me into your old system. “You refuse to even give Me a chance! Throw that old system out! It’s broken! It won’t save you! It won’t give you true, lasting joy! And as long as you keep holding onto it, you’re going to think it’s good enough. But it’s not!”

And I say the same thing to you this morning. Don’t cling to your previous way of life. Throw it out, and cling to Jesus. Allow Him to dictate what you do. What you read. What you watch on TV. Where you go. What you spend your money on. What you spend your time doing. Don’t just try to live your life and add Jesus. Don’t just squeeze Jesus into your life. Don’t say to yourself, “Well, I can squeeze Jesus in right here. I can squeeze Jesus in on Sunday morning. Or I can squeeze Him in for a couple minutes each morning.”

Jesus doesn’t want you to just squeeze Him into your life. He wants to be your life. Make Jesus your life.

Now that we’ve looked at the parables Jesus told, I want to go back and look at what prompted these parables (v. 33). So the Pharisees accused Jesus and His disciples of not being reverent. Of not being solemn. Of being joyful and partying instead of fasting and praying.

Now, to be fair, Jesus set a great example of prayer and fasting. Jesus frequently isolated Himself to pray. And Jesus fasted once for 40 days as He resisted temptation in the wilderness. So Jesus could have simply responded, “Man, I’m trying to teach these guys, but these dummies just won’t follow my lead.”

But instead Jesus said this in verse 34, “Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?” Basically, just like the point of the parables, Jesus was saying, “I’m here! Rejoice!”

Knowing Christ as Savior causes us to rejoice! How can we possibly be sorrowful when our Savior has saved us from sin, and has given us the Holy Spirit inside of us to strengthen us for each day, and has promised to bring us home to heaven where we’ll glorify God and rejoice for all eternity? Knowing Jesus is a joyful thing!

But then Jesus adds something to this statement (v. 35). While the Christian life is full of joy, it also has a place for fasting. It’s when the bridegroom, Jesus, was taken away. It’s when Jesus had to go the the cross and die for our sin.

We don’t fast because we’re trying to follow some old system, we fast because we know the price that Jesus had to pay for our sin. As Christians, we occasionally fast, not out of obligation, but out of solemn remembrance of the sacrifice of Christ. We fast, knowing that He went to the cross because of our sin. And He went there because of the sins of many who don’t know Him yet.

The disciples couldn’t fast while Jesus was with them, but were compelled to fast when Jesus ascended because they were reminded of how much they needed Jesus. And if they needed Jesus that much, then those who didn’t even know Jesus yet needed Him that much more.

We want all of the world to be able to rejoice as we rejoiced when we came to know Christ. So we fast and pray for strength to overcome our sin, and we fast and pray for those who don’t yet know Christ as Savior.

Will you fast and pray with me like that?

I don’t want to impose a fast on anyone, because then I’d be just like the Pharisees, but there are times throughout biblical history when God used His people to fast and pray so that they would be more focused on His will.

Consider Joel 1:14, which says, “Consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly. Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the LORD your God, and cry out to the LORD.” (Joel 1:14)

And see how the Ninevites reacted when the heard the Word of God, “And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.” (Jonah 3:5)

And notice what Ezra did as he was leading many Israelites back to Jerusalem. “Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river Ahava, that we might humble ourselves before our God, to seek from him a safe journey for ourselves, our children, and all our goods.” (Ezra 8:21)

Listen, I don’t know what God has for our church. And I don’t know what God has for each of you. But I do know this: if we want to see God work among us, we need to cry out to Him in our brokenness. We need to turn to Him because we know we can’t turn to anyone else. And we need to simply ask Him to use us. To guide us. To glorify Himself through us.

Would you please fast with me? It can be as long or as short as God impresses on your heart. And it can be as frequent or sporadic as God leads you. And just to be clear, I’m not saying anyone here must fast with me. I’m not laying that obligation on you. What I’m saying is that if you see your sin, and the sins of our world, in light of a holy God, and in light of the sacrifice of Jesus, you’ll be compelled to fast and pray for yourself and for your world. In fact, my greatest times of fasting and prayer had nothing to do with my intention to fast, and everything to do with an awareness of God’s holy presence around me. So would you begin to pray for God to do a work in your heart, and in our church, that we might see the need for God to move among us in order to grow us and use us to reach the lost in our area.