In the latest version of
Star Trek released onto the big screen (a movie that I ended up regretting
having watched), a young Captain Kirk is required to go through a simulation as
a condition of his graduation from the academy.
(Hang in there you non-trekky people.) Upon finding out that the simulation
had been designed to fail and that doing things the “Star Fleet Way” would inevitably
lead to failure for him, he decides to reprogram the rules portion of the
simulation in a manner that would allow his unconventional methods to bring
about the first success in the simulation's history. While he could have been kicked out for
cheating the system, his unwillingness to accept the premise that this is the
way that things have to be done and his unwillingness to accept the status quo
end up earning him his own command.
Now to my point. In Matthew 9:17 Jesus is faced with multiple
accusers all basically saying the same thing- that he is not doing things the
“religious way" or the "right way”. He
responds by saying the following: “17
And no one puts new wine into old wine skins. For the old skins would burst from
the pressure, spilling the wine and ruining the skins. New wine is stored in
new wine skins so that both are preserved.”
I used to skip over this passage as being culturally irrelevant because
it talked about something that we no longer use- wine skins. But based upon my
recent experience, it seems to make real sense to me. Old
wine skins had been stretched to the limit as wine fermented and
expanded in them. Because old wine skins had already been stretched to the
limit, if they were filled with new wine, it would ultimately burst them when it
expanded. In the same way, it appears that Jesus was condemning the traditional
rituals of the time by saying that they must never become a straitjacket that
hinders us from embracing the message of God's new covenant kingdom life
style. Just as Kirk changed the rules of
the Federation to make the goal of survival of the test a possibility, the
rituals of the old covenant as well as the rituals of the John the Baptist preparatory
era were not to be allowed to hamstring the message of the kingdom. Wow, that was quite an analogy, not worthy of
the Bible college professors from my past training, but probably as timely as I
know how to give.
You see, my passion is that the Christian church wake up and be the relevant expression of what God
intended church to be when he created it.
I don’t believe it was God’s intent that we just morph the old covenant
concepts of the temple, priests, and the law into the new covenant concepts of
the church, the pastor, and the expectations of what it means to be a “Good
Christian”.
The church in the New Testament
is a community of believers all intricately involved with the welfare and
progress of each others' lives. Not a building, an organization, a business-like corporation, or an ongoing series of events or programs. Jesus came to make a way for man to relate to
the father directly with no other go-between than Him, yet many of us view our
pastor as the one who is to go to God on our behalf and get for us what we need. When the apostle Paul says that he considers
rubbish all the things that he once thought were so important, he is speaking
about knowing and following the law and the traditions that man had about the
best way to do so. He goes on to say
that these are rubbish compared to the surpassing greatness of just knowing
Christ. I believe that he chose to
emphasize the relationship with Christ and not just the knowledge of Christ as a
manner to emphasize the relational nature of the kingdom. Behavior modification was not the goal of the
kingdom, it was relational modification that God was after. Don’t get me wrong, relationship with the one
true living God will certainly modify your behavior, but simply modifying your
behavior alone will not increase your relationship with God. If it would, we would not have needed Christ’s
sacrifice.
If you have read my blog
before, you will know that I believe that much of the practices of the modern
church, while not bad in and of themselves, have become the focus of
Christianity instead of the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ himself. Let me encourage you to be certain that the
way your express your Christianity lines up with the message of Jesus found in
the gospels, not just with what you have learned from others regarding what the
verses in the Bible mean when they mention church and its various
expressions. When the Bible tells us not
neglect meeting together with other believers, we naturally interpret that to
mean we need to go to a church service multiple times each week or month, but
what it actually says is meeting together with other believers. While that can
happen at a church service, it doesn’t just happen naturally by being together
with them at an event or programmed service. Let’s let God define what church is by taking
a closer look at the teachings of Christ, the history of the early church found
in the book of Acts, and the principals of relational Christianity found in the
epistles of the New Testament. In doing
so we will inevitably see where that sort of an expression of church takes
us. I personally believe it will take us
to the next level. If you would like to learn more about the
church, start by reading more from this blog’s history, or by visiting our
YouTube Channel at
