Jesus is Questioned About Fasting | Week 18

Good morning. You may be seated. It’s so good to be together, to sing songs to God, to worship him, to fellowship with each other. Tony’s out of town. My name’s Joe Stearns, and I have the duty and the privilege of talking about Jesus teachings, getting into the Bible and learning from Jesus. If you are visiting today, we are so glad to have you with us. I hope that if you have the time after the service that you can stay around and fellowship with us and experience a little bit of the Broward Church family. Thank you, Chase. So what we’re going to be looking at today in the Ministry of Jesus is the parable. The discussion of new wine, old wine, new wineskins, old wineskins. And this is part of a series called The Ministry of Jesus as we walk through the teachings of Jesus. So we’re going to be talking about old wine and new wine skins. I don’t think my clicker is working. Could you advance? There we go. We’ll get it. Have you ever on your job place, had a change in your job place where the way that you do things is completely shifted to a new paradigm?

Have you ever had that in your school system where things change completely? Maybe another company buys your company, or maybe the new management comes in with their new policies or that dreaded but wonderful new computer application that changes everything. For 16 years of my life, I was the manager of a doctor’s office, and we went in the middle of that time from paper records to computer records. Now, I know many of you are in the healthcare industry. If you work in a hospital or clinical settings, maybe some of you have seen where you go from those Manila colored charts with the metal clips that have the patient records to being computerized. It is a huge change. And the reason I bring that up is that Jesus is going to have a conversation with the religious leaders and with his disciples, and he is going to introduce that kind of change where the whole structure, the whole way we do things is going to go from the old and it’s going to go to the new. And the way we’re going to look at that is, first of all, we’re going to talk about what did Jesus teachings mean to his original audience?

And by the way, this is a great principle for learning from the Bible. It’s to first figure out in the Bible what the original audience heard for that portion of the Bible that you’re studying, and then how can we apply it to ourselves today? And so we’re going to take a little bit of a deep dive not only into what Jesus teaches, but into the Old Testament, which he’s referring back to. So let’s go ahead and get into our reading for today. They said to him, this is in Luke chapter five. John’s disciples often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees. But yours go on eating and drinking. So this is going to take four slides. But let me point out a couple of things. I put this in here in the brackets so you can get the context. They are the teachers of the law and the Pharisees. We know that because this scripture comes in the middle of a longer discourse. And then it says, they said to him, John’s disciples, that will be John the Baptist. They often fast and pray. So do we. But you’re not fasting.

What’s the topic? The topic is fasting, right? And some scholars believe that the reason the Pharisees are bringing this up is possibly to cause division between John Baptist disciples and Jesus disciples. Let’s read on. Let’s see how Jesus answers this. Jesus answered, can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them. In those days they will fast. He told them this parable, no one tears a piece of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise they 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 wine skins. Otherwise the new wine will burst the skins. The wine will run out and the wine skins will be ruined. No new wine must be poured into new wine skins. And no one, after drinking the old wine, wants the new. For they say the old is better. Let’s take a minute to pray to better understand this passage of Scripture. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for this promise, this teaching through Jesus that there’s new wine and new wine skins, that there’s a new day, Father, and that there is a bridegroom, your son, Jesus, who has come for us, Father, as we study the scripture with these symbols and metaphors, give us wisdom and insight to understand properly what you want us to learn from this.

We pray in your son’s name.

Amen. All right. The question on the table is, Why don’t you fast? Jesus response is, how should you act now that the bride dream has come? So Jesus has changed the subject. So Jesus is pointing out there’s a change coming from the old to the new, and there’s a wedding. Now, for those of you who are students of the Bible, you have already seen Jesus do this. On many occasions, people will ask Jesus a question and they’ll use the opportunity of the question to answer with a more important topic, with a more important point. So a lot of times when you read the Bible, you’re like, well, why didn’t he just answer the question? And sometimes Jesus will even answer a question with a question. Now it’s my view, my thoughts on this. I think that when Jesus is asked a question, he’s making the most of the fact that everyone’s paying attention to him. Now that he’s been asked a question, they’re waiting for his answer. And so he’s going to give him something that’s even more important. So he actually does not answer fully the question about fasting because he’s got a more important subject to talk about.

And what’s with the wedding? Why is he bringing up a wedding? So at this point, this is where we have to put ourselves in the shoes of the original audience. Because to me, when I first read this, I didn’t know what he was talking about. I thought perhaps Jesus was being a mystic, like he was being cryptic, he was being mysterious. He was saying, things that they didn’t understand, maybe perhaps to try to get them to think more deeply. But as I’ve read the Old Testament and the New Testament, I realized that his audience knew this metaphor of the wedding because it was an Old Testament metaphor. The metaphor of God being married to his people was something the Pharisees certainly were aware of. And even the fishermen and his disciples, the blue collar guys with their name on their shirt, those unschooled ordinary men, a lot of those men actually knew their Bible fairly well, even though they weren’t Pharisees, because it was their only Bible. As Jesus is teaching, the New Testament has not even been written yet. The only Bible any of them have is the Old Testament, and a lot of them know it really well.

We’re going to take about ten minutes to go into the New Testament and unpack what they’re hearing from Jesus, what it means, and then we’re going to come out of the New Testament and we’re going to apply it for our lives today. In Isaiah 54, it says, for your Maker is your husband, the Lord Almighty is his name. The Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer. He is called the God of all the Earth. So this is a metaphor. This is a symbolism that God is married to us. So it kind of stretches us because you think of marriage, of course, with humans as being between a man and a woman, one person, one person. But in the Bible, it’s showing God being married to a group, treating the Israelites like a single person. So God is their husband, the husband of a group of people. Now I’m going to step into the New Testament just for one scripture to show you that this applies to us. In the New Testament, in Ephesians Five, it says, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother be United to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery, but I’m talking about Christ and the Church.

Are you, as a Christian, married to Jesus Christ? Well, the illustration is actually not for you as an individual to be married to Jesus. It’s that Jesus has married us, the Church. And when the Bible uses this word Church, it doesn’t mean a Church building. The way the Bible uses the word Church is to mean the group of Christians all around the globe who make up his Church. He is married to us. Now, one of the things we should get from this is that the marriage devotion of God’s people, that’s the Church should be the marriage devotion of God’s person. So here’s what I mean. I don’t know if it’s correct to think of yourself as being married to God individually, but you ought to treat your relationship with God just like that. The kind of devotion that is supposed to happen in an ideal marriage is what’s supposed to happen between you in your heart and in your life with Jesus Christ, with God his Father, you act as if you are married to God, you are married to God. And so the only way for the bride, which in the Old Testament was Israel, which in the New Testament is the Church, the only way for the bride to be a good bride is for the individual members in that group to act like a bride.

Are you with me? For us collectively to be a pleasing wife to God, the husband, we each individually need to love Him with all our heart, give Him our deep faithfulness and our complete devotion. So the question is, why is Jesus bringing up that he’s getting married again? Like he doesn’t call himself the husband, he calls himself the bridegroom. So what’s wrong with the first marriage? And are we talking about marriage, divorce and remarriage? What’s the illustration here? So I want to take a minute and try to answer this question about the Old Testament marriage. What’s wrong with the marriage? Why is Jesus saying that we need the New? What’s wrong with the Old? Now there’s a very important scripture in the Bible, Jeremiah 31 31, that’s kind of easy to remember. Jeremiah 31 31, if you’re not familiar with it, it is a buried gold nugget in the Old Testament, but it is a pivot scripture. It’s a hinged scripture where the story of the Bible turns in a new direction at this point. It’s not just Jeremiah. There’s accompanying scriptures in Ezekiel, in Zechariah, in Daniel, all these prophets who lived at the same time, who say there’s got to be a change. The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new Covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the Covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt because they broke my Covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the Lord.

So there’s some radical stuff in here that I want to point out. This idea of a Covenant, when people get married today, they enter into a Covenant, even if they don’t use that terminology. They may not know that that terminology applies to marriage, but that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re making a sacred oath to be committed to each other. And so God is saying, I had a Covenant of marriage with Israel and they broke it. Does he mean adultery? Yes, he does. And the way we know that is there’s a lot of times in the Old Testament where God accuses the nation of Israel of committing adultery on him. And so then he says something that’s pretty powerful. He says, I was a husband to them, past tense. And so what we’re seeing here is a marriage that is falling apart. And he’s saying what we need is we need a new marriage, a new marriage. So I want to show you a little bit of the history of this marriage in the old testament So that you’ll become better familiar with what the old testament teaches here. It’ll help you in your study of the old testament and understanding the Bible as a whole.

You guys know I like charts and graphs. This is a timeline. I won’t spend too long on it, But I want to show you this. This is a timeline starting in about 2200 BC. We got markers of 1446 BC, 1000 BC, and 600 years before Christ. The story of the old testament people starts with the patriarchs. It starts with the patriarchs are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And here you see the beginning of the Hebrew people, the Israelite people. What would become the Jewish people? Now, Abraham starts a family that eventually becomes a nation, which we know of as the Jewish people. And since he had such great faith in God, he is called in the Bible the father of us all, the father of Jews and Christians, Because genetically, he’s the father of the Jews. By faith, he’s the father of the Christians. Now, after Abraham’s descendants grew into a large family, they went to Egypt. They were enslaved for 400 years. We’re going to do the history of Israel in five minutes, okay? They were in slavery for 400 years. And then under Moses, they came out. They were free from slavery, a metaphor for Christianity.

They were free from slavery. A lot of scholars think 1290. A lot of other scholars think 1446. They came out in the exodus, and then they moved into a period called the judges. I didn’t have room to put that in there, but the period of judges last for three or 400 years. They had no King. How did they do in this relationship? Well, here’s what happens. With Moses and the exodus, God gets married to his people. He establishes a Covenant with his people, and they begin this relationship. So when Moses comes out in the exodus, It is the birth of a nation. I don’t know if you knew that, But Israel did not exist before this. They had been a family who was enslaved over 400 years. That grew to be about probably 1.7 million people. And they grew from being a family to a nation, and God marries them. How did the marriage go? Well, in the book of judges, it went terrible. There’s a famous line in the book of judges that shows up, I think, at least three times Where it says everyone did as he saw fit. And what that meant was everyone was sinning against God, Losing their faith against God And getting involved in pagan religion, Committing adultery on God.

So God gave him a chance to be married to him without having to worry about Kings. So that didn’t go well. So God introduces Kings. The first King was King Saul. Then there was King David then there was King Solomon. Even today, the flag of Israel is the Star of David from that King’s name. So we try with the Kings has an okay start, and then it goes terrible under the Kings. And so for 400 years here and for about 600 years, four to 600 years during this period of time, the Israelite nation has some good times, but they have a lot more bad times than good times, to the point where the nation is fractured by a civil war and they divide into two nations. So God’s bride is falling apart, and so it becomes Israel, not just Israel, but Judah. This civil war, unlike the American civil war, did not bring the two fighting parties back together. They stayed apart. And so God punished the Israelite people by having foreign nations conquer them, and they go into a period called the exile. Here’s the marriage vows. You want to hear the marriage vows? If you obey me, the Covenant works.

This is what God’s saying. If you don’t obey me, the covenant doesn’t work. I like for richer or poorer better, in sickness and in health. I like that one better. This is kind of a tough deal. The Covenant of Moses, the marriage vows of God to his people given through Moses, which has been called the law, is a merit system. So if you do good, you merit, you earn favor with God. If you do bad, you earn punishment and separation from God. And so I put the scales here because the way people often think about this is if my good deeds outweigh my bad deeds, then I’m good with God. And the most famous example of the marriage vows between God and his people are the Ten Commandments. How do the Ten Commandments make you feel? You like them? I printed up the Ten Commandments and put them up in that medical office. I put it up later in a feed store business I own. I put up the Ten Commandments. I honor them. I review them. I don’t know if I can say this. I don’t like them because I break them. The Ten Commandments are that there’s only one God.

You can’t have other gods like, you can’t have a God of money. You can’t have a God of pleasure. You can’t have a God of hobbies. You can’t have a God of family. You have to have a God of God. That’s the first commandment. Like, I blew that already. The second one is you can’t make other gods. The third one is you can’t use God’s name in vain. I’m not going to ask for a show of hands, but how many of you have used God’s Holy name as profanity or his son’s name as profanity? I’ve broken that. The fourth is honor the Sabbath. The fifth is to honor your parents who made it through their teenage years holding on to that one. And then it’s like you can’t commit adultery, you can’t steal, you can’t lie, and you can’t want what you shouldn’t have. Like if you came through your life so far doing better than two out of ten, you’re doing really well. So this is what we’re looking at. God establishes a merit system. They do it for 800 to actually almost 1000 years and it doesn’t end in failure. It was a failure the whole time.

And it finally got to such a bad point that God had to cut it off. What you see here is an ache, it’s an ache, it’s a need. It’s like, God, we need to be rescued from you, we need to be rescued from your wrath. Like we don’t know how to make this marriage work. And so enter these men. Enter Jeremiah. We already read Jeremiah 31 31. There needs to be a new Covenant. We’re going to have to do something to fix this marriage to make it right. He’s accompanied by Ezekiel and others. Here’s the key. For the marriage to be successful between God and his people, the bride needs to become a new people. So we’re not talking about marriage, divorce and remarriage, we’re talking about a reset. We’re talking about maybe look, these illustrations have limits, but I’m going to give it a try. Maybe this is where you get married and get divorced and then you tell your spouse we need to repent and give it a try again, and you get married to that spouse again, hoping that you have repented enough to finally make it work. Well, most problems in marriage are the fault of both the husband and the wife.

Now, when you’re married to a Holy God, there’s a 100% chance that you’re the one who has the problem. But here’s the thing, in order to be the new people, you just have to do better. You know, I’m going to get married again and I’m just going to try harder. And God in his wisdom and his mercy realizes, we’re not going to fix it by you guys just trying to do better. We need to provide mercy, we need to provide Grace. And so this passage in Jeremiah 31 is repeated twice in the book of Hebrews because Jeremiah 31 is so important and we’re going to read this in Hebrews. In the New Testament, it says, Let me fast forward to it here. If there had been nothing wrong with that first Covenant, no place would have been sought for another. But God found fault with the people. The problem is not with the Covenant, the problem is with the people. But God found fault with the people and said, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new Covenant with the people of Israel and the people of Judah. He is quoting as we see Jeremiah 31 31.

Now I’m going to touch on the doctrinal point that’s actually a sensitive doctrinal point even in biblical scholarship in the 21st century. What he’s saying. Let’s see if I can back this up. Yeah. He’s saying there was something wrong with the first Covenant. And so that means the Covenant of Moses for the Jewish people had a foundational flaw in it that was built into it by God. You see, what God is doing is he’s giving us what we naturally look for. And that’s a merit system. And he’s giving us the merit system and he says, you need to see that this is not the final answer. And the people live it out for 1000 years. And then God says, you need a savior. We need a different foundation than the merit system. So the Covenant of Moses is obsolete. It’s not a permanent Covenant. What we need is what a lot of scholars call the Christ Covenant. We need Jesus. We need to be saved from this situation. Ezekiel puts this really beautifully. He says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. He’s talking about us, the bride.

He’s like, I’m going to save you, my bride so we can make this work. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And that is our hope as Christians. Now, what the New Testament says, the New Testament explains why God ever did this in the first place. It says, Therefore, no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law. The Moses Covenant, the merit system. No one is going to be able to make that marriage work, but through that merit system, we become conscious of our sin. You see that Moses Covenant was given to us to see our need for Jesus. We are rescued by Grace. Grace means undeserved favor. When Jesus died on the cross, what he did was he got the punishment that we should have received in that marriage deal under Moses, where if you do good, you’re blessed. If you do bad, you’re cursed. Jesus became a curse for us so that the wrath of God is no longer on us. Our sins are forgiven, and we can have a normal, comfortable relationship with God because Jesus took our punishment for us.

I want you to know that this is extraordinary in the world of religion because of how humans naturally look for a merit system. Judaism is based on the merit system we just looked at. That the Muslim faith. If you’re good, you go to paradise. If you’re a good Muslim, if you’re a bad Muslim, you don’t. The Norse gods, how do you get into Valhalla? Right? You have to die with a sword in your hand. So that’s the deal. There’s something you have to do in order to be saved. For Hindus with the wheel of reincarnation. If you’re good, you come back as something better. If you’re bad, you come back as a bug or whatever. See, and the philosophy religions like Taoism, like Buddhism, like the Confucius, the Shinto religion, although they don’t really focus on a divine being as firmly as the Muslim faith, the Christian faith, the Jewish faith, they’re based on this idea that if you’re wise, you prosper, if you’re foolish, you don’t. All of these are the merit system, because all of these come from our manmade value system. The only religion that faces the frailty of man and solves the problem is Christianity.

It’s just not naturally how man would make a man made religion. And I’m not saying the Jewish religion is manmade, but I do believe that these others are. Christianity shines out as having the hand of God on it. How do we apply these things to our lives now that we see what’s going on with this marriage? How do we apply this to us today? What are some lessons that we can take with us? I’m going to read you a short bridge bridge story from the Old Testament into the New Testament and into application in our lives. Now, there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus, who was a member of the Jewish ruling Council. He came to Jesus at night and said, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could perform the signs you were doing if God were not with him. Jesus replied, Very truly, I tell you, here we go. No one can see the Kingdom of God unless they are born again. Later on in this conversation, Nicodemus says, how can this be? Nicodemus asked, and Jesus counters, you are Israel’s teacher, said, Jesus, and you do not understand these things?

You see, Nicodemus should have remembered Jeremiah 31 31 where it said, we need to be new.

For you to have a saving relationship with God, you must be born again.

Let me talk with you about this. This is not theory. This is theory, but it’s not just theory. This is life application. Have you been born again? Can you think of a time in your life where you went from being not a Christian to being a Christian, from being not a follower of Jesus to being a follower of Jesus? You should be able to point to a second in real time when you were born again. Now, this is what’s necessary for you to have a successful relationship with God. This is where the bride becomes who she should be for her husband, God, and through his son, Jesus. Now, if you’re not sure, I don’t know if I’ve ever been born again or you know for sure that you have not been born again. We are here for you. So you can talk to someone on the Ministry staff here at the Broward Church. But our members of our Church, especially the mature members of our Church, are prepared to share the gospel with you to help you be born again because they went through it themselves. And so I want to encourage you this is the newness that Jesus is bringing.

We must be born again.

Look how the Bible describes it. It says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone. The new is here. Listen, God does not want you to have a self improvement program where your good deeds begin to outweigh your bad deeds. There is no Salvation in that. There’s no Salvation through works. What he’s looking for is for you to turn to him in faith and be born again. So as Jesus said, you’re the new wine and the new wine skins. The old doesn’t work anymore. It’s obsolete. You need what is new. What about us as Christians? What about us as Christians? You who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated from Christ. You have fallen away from Grace. Paul wrote this to Christians and what he’s saying is, you guys got born again. You got the new marriage, you got the problem solved. Why would you drift back to the merit system? Why would you do that?

Would Christians ever drift back to the marriage system? Yes. And so this is what we have to watch out for. I’m going to give you as we wind up here, I just want to ask you to evaluate yourself. Are you following Jesus primarily out of love or primarily out of fear? Now, the fear of God is a valid motive, but it is a lesser motive. What God wants is for you to move from fear to love. He wants you to move from this. Have I done enough? Have you ever felt that way? Listen, lots of us have felt that way. Have I done enough to be in a right saving relationship with God? And what God wants is for you to be able to accept his Grace, lean on the cross of Christ, and move from fear once again to I’m so grateful. I’m just so grateful to be a Christian. I’m so grateful for the new life he gave me. Another difference between the old and the new is that the old man, the old Covenant has an inner focus.

Am I good? Am I right? And am I doing what I should do for God? And the new Covenant under the leadership of Jesus is an outer focus, an outward focus. You’re looking at serving others, living a life of compassion, not being worried about do’s and don’ts, but about love and compassion. Are you saved by yourself or are you saved by God? And we as Christians need to hold onto the Grace of God and not slip back into the old. Listen, if a Christian falls back into the merit system, it leads to the sins of the religious. The sins of the religious are self righteousness and a double life. Here’s the tension. If you’re trying to do enough to be saved, then you could think, I’m a churchgoer, that guy’s not. I don’t steal anymore. That guy does. I don’t cuss that guy does. And you begin to develop this I’m better than you self righteousness, that is condescending, that looks down on other people. This is very damaging to the Christian witness. But at the same time, while you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re better than the next guy, you know that you’re failing.

And so you’re tempted to be pulled into under the merit system, a double life, or at least a deceitful life where you’re trying to put up that good front of the good Christian. And you know, you’re still having problems with sin. And so it leads to impurity. A lot of religious people have problems with sexual perversion because they’re faking it and it opens up that secretive door for Satan to go to work. And of course, it leads to hypocrisy. The world doesn’t need more religious people. It needs more compassionate, serving people.

The next slide I’m going to read is our last slide, and then we’re going to go into the Communion together. And I want us to be grateful for Jesus Christ that he brought us the new that we so desperately needed so we could solve this problem of having a successful marriage, so to speak, with God. Listen to this outward focus and the new that Jesus is bringing in this last scripture. Let’s think about this as we go to Communion,. A new command I give you love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another, let’s pray together.

Father, thank you for the new and thank you for solving the problems of the old. Thank you so much, God, for sending your son for his death and resurrection and how it gave us a new chance, a successful chance of having a relationship with you. Fill us with gratitude and love for you.

We pray in your son’s name. Amen.