New wine in old wine skins

The New Wine in Old Wine Skins parable was one of Jesus' teachings. Was this actually about wine or was he trying to teach a spiritual truth? Jesus taught loving truths by using physical metaphors.


"No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wine skins, and so both are preserved." ....... Matthew 9:16-17

Jesus was trying to teach us how to live in the Spirit, and the Scribes and Pharisees apparently did not understand what he was trying to say. They apparently wanted him to teach within the organized structure of the Jewish Priesthood, but Jesus understood that his spiritual teachings could get lost in the ancient structure of legal minded teachings. So he used the metaphor about the wine skins to help make his point.

He taught that you cannot put new wine into old wine skins or the ancient skins would burst as the wine ages.

It is like that with organized religion today. If they were to teach Jesus' teachings in most churches today, the structures of the churches would collapse, because they are not teaching the spiritual truths that Jesus taught.

As the spiritual truths are taught and understood, they would burst the old skins of the organized church structures. People would want to live in Creator's spiritual kingdom as Jesus did, beyond the doctrinal teachings of organized religions, and the old dogmatic teachings of the churches would collapse.

We are moving into a time of living Creator's spiritual truths as we learn about them in Torah, in Jesus’ teachings, and as those truths are lived by the Hopi and Keetoowah Cherokee. We are learning these truths and making them a part of our daily lives as we prepare to enter the next world.


by Dorothy K Daigle

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Parables have many different meanings. Since everyone is at a different spiritual level of understanding they all get a different meaning out of the same parable. Another view of the above parable is that Jesus was speaking of us. Modern day religious people are fixed and structured that they cannot see anything that does not validate what they already believe is truth. You cannot introduce anything new to these people, because there is no room for it in their way of thinking. They cannot understand it.

The only way they would understand or accept a new way of thinking (real truth) would require that they "become as new creations" (2 Corinthians 5:17). When we hear new things, we must be willing to hear these things and honestly ask Creator if these new things are truth. The only way we can learn new truths is by having an open mind and listening. We must be willing to accept the fact that maybe, just maybe, the truths that we cling to so strongly may not be truths after all.

We have been taught certain things for as long as we can remember. We accept some things as truth without even thinking. We must be careful and question literally everything we think we know as truth, our own souls are at stake here. Take everything you know and everything you hear to Creator in prayer, and He will tell you what is truth and what is false.

When we drop the lies (things we took as truth before) and accept the real truths, then we become new creations (no longer "old wine skins") and can move on to even deeper understandings of our spiritual selves. We shed our old selves and become new.


by Dale L Gustafson

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