Text: Luke 5:2739

Topic: The new wine of grace cannot be contained in the old wineskins of merit.

Introduction: In Luke's gospel, the theme of food is significant in meaning.

Jesus gives a parable to get people's attention and hopefully to change them.

• He notes the incompatibility between new wine and old wineskins.

Unfermented wine expands, bursting brittle wineskins, and ruining both.

• New cloth on an old garment will shrink and pull away from old garment.

Instead of doing it this way, we need to make a brand new garment.

• Jesus is saying that we have to change it and make it brand new.

Grace is too powerful for the old wineskin of merit.

• Jews hated tax collectors, and yet Jesus tells one of them, "Follow me."

Levi goes from being a hated tax man to being Matthew, recipient of grace.

• God takes ordinary sinners and makes them new — Peter, Mary Magdalene, others.

Levi's banquet is an "evangelistic campaign for Jesus."

• Jesus is comfortable with all the sinners at this event, and they're attracted to him.
• We can't be so "holy" we don't attract sinners. Churches should attract sinners.
• Jesus didn't come for the healthy, but for people who know they're sick.

God invites sinners to bring their problems to him.

• "Come to me. If you are heavy laden, I will give you rest."
• In the church, we're all "Humpty Dumpties," because we've all had a great fall.
• Christianity is not a funeral. Christianity is a wedding.
• We detach our "cranial Christianity" from our "cardiological Christianity."
• We need to turn our "thinking theology" into "theology of the feet" via action.

Conclusion: We need to give God glory for what he has done.

• Worship's a noun, but "if I get my together, my will follow."