In contemplating these issues, probably the most difficult thing to define is where to start. We are being challenged to completely change the way in which we live – and radically so. Potentially the best way to start is by coming to grips with some of the early changes that will need to take place.
Early Change #1 – A reason to relocate
First and foremost, I guess there has to be some reason to even think about this stuff. In the introduction to this Part, I proposed that there were a number of challenges facing us at this time, and more specifically a growing realisation that God wants to mentor us into our intended ministries to meet these challenges.
The reason that drives me to relocate is an increasing frustration with “possible living” – being constrained to do what I find possible when I can see that there are things I need to do and become that are impossible. Unless I can break free of the constraints, I will never do or become what God wants me to do and become. I will never really see God working in the way that He can (and wants to). I might gain some level of maturity and I might do some good, and I might even see flashes of God’s involvement in my life, but in the grand scheme of things I will have “prodigalised” my life[1] - squandering the opportunities and living below the spiritual poverty line.
One of the big things that I struggled with at the outset was my perception that this whole spiritual realm stuff was simply not that interesting or attractive (I’m being honest here!) There were simply not enough reasons to relocate.
I mean, in the natural realm, you generally move house when (and only when) there is a really, really good reason for doing so. Moving is a painful process, and we will usually avoid it at all costs. Even if you’ve got so much stuff that you can barely turn around, or moving would mean 30 minutes less travel in the day, you’ll avoid moving! I looked at the natural realm and saw that there were interesting things going on all around me, and it was comfortable. I had my environment set up and going the way that I wanted it. I looked at what I perceived as the spiritual realm, and there just wasn’t enough there to capture my attention and interest. God’s spiritual realm just wasn’t interesting enough – in fact, to be entirely and brutally honest, God Himself wasn’t interesting enough!
Because God is such a great listener, and has an inherent ability to say just the right thing at just the right time, He challenged me on this point. In fact, God basically stood right in the middle of the path and said, “Hang on a minute, I AM interesting – the fact of the matter is that you just don’t know Me well enough to realise it!” And (strangely enough) God was right – I had this concept of God, and it was a very flat, bland, colourless concept.
Early Change #2 - Sifting
The whole business of relocating from the world of the “possible” to the world of the “impossible” is costly. It’s costly because the relocation from the natural to the supernatural realm makes no allowance for taking our old lives with us, so if we’re going to move we are going to have to leave a whole bunch of things behind.
Genesis 12:1-3 Now [in Haran] the Lord said to Abram, Go for yourself [for your own advantage] away from your country, from your relatives and your father's house, to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you [with abundant increase of favors] and make your name famous and distinguished, and you will be a blessing [dispensing good to others]. And I will bless those who bless you [who confer prosperity or happiness upon you] and curse him who curses or uses insolent language toward you; in you will all the families and kindred of the earth be blessed [and by you they will bless themselves].
Abraham went through a relocation, and for him that was an incredibly costly process. He was set up – wealth, property, family, reputation. The natural side of his life was progressing well. But God wanted to move him from that natural life into a bigger, more significant spiritual life, and for Abraham that meant leaving all that security, stability and comfort behind. He was “sifted” - a lot of the stuff that he depended on could not be carried forward into the new life.
In Judges 7, God intended to have Gideon defeat the Midianites, and Gideon found that he had significant resources at his disposal (see chart). He was a trained soldier, who knew how to conduct a battle. However, from God’s perspective, this was not simply a battle – His intention was to shift Gideon personally from his reliance on his own significant resources, and in the process change Gideon’s perspective on what was possible.
Put simply, if we want to expand beyond the physical world and start to think and act as spiritual men, and experience the perception and power that accompanies that, we need to come to grips with the fact that we are going to be sifted. God is going to place us in situations where our skills and experience and resources are not sufficient. God may allow you to experience varying degrees of frustration, anger, pain, etc to bring highlight the insufficiency.
Early Change #3 – Forgetting the outcome
In a world that is defined by outcomes, this is a difficult step. We think in terms of creating an outcome in all areas of our lives – we use our time and resources to “make” something. Whether you consider yourself a relaxed or driven person, we all focus on the outcomes, results, benefits, etc of our efforts in life.
It would be an over-simplification to suggest that God is not focussed on outcomes. Clearly, God has plans and He applies effort and resource to achieving those plans – Genesis 1 is a prime example of that. However, we need to understand that God is the one Person that can never be restrained by an outcome that He wants to achieve. We unfortunately can be so restrained, and for that reason I believe that God wants us to turn away from our incessant “outcomes focus”.
To position you on this, it is a fact that God is not bound by time or resources. He has the capacity to provide (and create from nothing) the resource that might be required in any given situation. Also, God is not bound by time – it is merely a convenience that He has created to tie together the physical world in which we currently find ourselves. If God wants to do something, He controls the resource and He controls time, so He is never daunted at the immensity of any outcome He wants to undertake and achieve.
On the other hand, when we want to achieve a result, usually the first things that we think about are time and resources. How do I fit this activity in amongst all my other activities and responsibilities? How can I afford to undertake that activity when I have other financial responsibilities? In this reality, we have exceptionally limited control over our resources and time.
The early change that needs to take place is a focus on the “journey” rather than the “outcome”. We will cover this in greater detail further on, sufficed to say that God will start to challenge us to be obedient and do what He sets in front of us to do without necessarily telling us what the outcome is to be, or even showing us the outcome when it happens. Are you getting uncomfortable yet?
There will always be an outcome (because God has a purpose in everything) but in the early part of our relocation we may not be privy to the outcome, either before or after the outcome happens. Why not? Because knowledge of the outcome (again, either before or after the outcome occurs) can really mess us up! If God were to tell us everything that He intended to do, the natural part of us would be looking for ways to make it happen, or we might even think that the outcome was impossible so “I mustn’t be hearing correctly from God”. Worse still, we might look at the outcome and take some personal pride and glory in it. So what God does is outline a path for us – He establishes some markers along a path that we can follow, and asks us to travel the path one step at a time. As we mature, God reveals more of the path at any given time, until eventually we get to a level of maturity where God can reveal outcomes to us without the risk of tripping us up.
Bottom line – forget the outcome and ask God to show you the journey. Don’t measure your spiritual maturity and relationship with God in terms of outcomes.
Now, some might say this proposal is unscriptural – that you should have fruit attached to what you do, and that a man is measured by that fruit. I agree wholeheartedly with the principle that we should be fruitful, but we often get it back to front. A farmer knows the fruit that he wants to produce when he plants a tree, and sometimes the farmer will graft branches onto a tree to make it produce different fruit. The farmer introduces different chemicals to the soil and the leaves to improve the health of the tree, and prunes the tree at particular times for the same reason. What say does the tree have in this process? Well, the tree had an inherent potential to produce something, but without the farmer’s intervention there are significant risks of the tree producing no fruit at all, or without the grafting it might produce unnecessary fruit, or it might just die. The tree cannot help but produce fruit (because that’s what trees do) but it’s energy is on maturing and making the most of the opportunity to grow – the fruit is a guaranteed outcome. Yes, that’s right, fruit is an outcome – you know, that thing that I have suggested we don’t focus on!
We will be recognised by our fruits[2] - I totally agree with that concept. But we don’t have the capacity to turn our potential into fruitfulness unless we focus on the journey. And that’s what this whole manifesto is about – becoming fruitful and useful.
Early Change #4 – Timing isn’t everything
Because time is merely a convenient concept for us to keep life on track (and one that God doesn’t need) we should understand that in the relocation from the natural to the spiritual environment our “normal” way of thinking about time will change.
Our lives are very short – there doesn’t appear to be nearly enough time to achieve everything that we are talking about here:
James 4:14 Yet you do not know [the least thing] about what may happen tomorrow. What is the nature of your life? You are [really] but a wisp of vapor (a puff of smoke, a mist) that is visible for a little while and then disappears [into thin air].
The encouraging thing is that the amount of time that we have available to us is not a constraint for God – take for instance the fact that the bible only contains “highlights” of the things that Jesus did in a space of three years:
John 21:25 Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
My point is that we should not see time as a barrier. Many of us have responsibilities and demands upon our time, and God is very aware of these things. It remains however that God is still wanting us to relocate, and because He “owns” time, He is ready to respond to our timing issues as we move down this path.
This leads to a second point – the fact that God is highly efficient. He has a tendency to tell us what we need to know when we need to know it – He doesn’t waste His time (or ours) telling us stuff that isn’t important yet. Oh sure, we might think it’s important to know tht whole plan and purpose up front, but God has a different view. Take the example of Abraham (Gen.12:3) where God says to him 'Leave your country and your people, and go to the land I will show you’.
Basically, God challenges us to apply our limited capacity (and obedience) totally to a task. Task completed, God can then take us the next step we can totally commit to. God gets some time efficiency through attacking issues this way – there is no time wasted with us racing off down various paths or trying to jump ahead (and having to backtrack).
Early Change #5 – Different Strokes
Another point to raise here is that each of us moves down this relocation path at a different rate and in a different way. Because of that, looking at where others are at in their spiritual journey and making inappropriate comparisons is unhelpful.
The encouraging thing is that God will mark the path for you as fast as you can travel it and handle it. If someone else has spiritually developed faster than you, this should not be reason for you to become jealous of them, nor should the more developed person be conceited.
It is the case, however, that we develop together with no one racing ahead and leaving a trail of dust in their wake! God doesn’t want to build a “lop-sided” church, with the spiritually mature and powerful on one side, and the weaker, less developed people on the other.
Ephesians 2:21 In Him the whole structure is joined (bound, welded) together harmoniously, and it continues to rise (grow, increase) into a holy temple in the Lord [a sanctuary dedicated, consecrated, and sacred to the presence of the Lord].
Even whilst a lot of things here require us to focus inwardly and look to our own journey, we still have an equal responsibility to look out for one another and develop and a group. Racing ahead without fulfilling the responsibility we have to help one another develop will result in factions and “fault lines” in the church – these are points of failure along which the church will crack when pressure and stress are applied by the enemy.
Early Change #6 – Understanding God
God is looking to have a meaningful relationship with us, but the problem is that we will never understand where God is coming from, or appreciate Him, or appreciate how He looks at things or feels about things, if we don’t relocate from natural thinking to spiritual thinking.
1 Corinthians 2:14-15 But the natural, nonspiritual man does not accept or welcome or admit into his heart the gifts and teachings and revelations of the Spirit of God, for they are folly (meaningless nonsense) to him; and he is incapable of knowing them [of progressively recognizing, understanding, and becoming better acquainted with them] because they are spiritually discerned and estimated and appreciated.
One of the early changes that we will experience is an understanding of how God feels about things, and His intentions and purposes in all kinds of situations. This will occur as we spend time reading the bible (which is an incredibly effective way of God starting to share how He thinks) and simply acknowledging God in the things we do and really sincerely inviting Him to become involved and be active in our lives. A constant acknowledgment and awareness of God’s presence is crucial – it doesn’t involve “feeling” God’s presence, but simply acknowledging confidently that He is with you. Feelings are notoriously unreliable.
God wants to be involved – we don’t have to plead with Him to get involved because He is ready and waiting. But God is desperate for us to make space for Him to get involved.
Early Change #7 – The Tight Squeeze
If you thought that this was going to be an easy ride, you’re going to be bitterly disappointed! One of the things that you will realise very early in the piece is that there not so no barrier that separates natural ‘possible” living from supernatural, spiritual, “impossible” thinking – but what does exist is a narrow channel between the two realms.
This is part of the reason that the sifting process is so important. It’s like being a cave explorer that wants to find their way through into the deeper, undiscovered parts of an amazing underground cave. The “cavers” as they are called can’t negotiate their way from ground level in through the tight passages and various obstacles if they are carrying excessive amounts of unnecessary equipment – they travel light with only those things that are necessary to get them through.
Similarly, to move into the spiritual realm, we need to shed the stuff that is unnecessary, because we wont see, let alone be capable of negotiating, the channels and passages that God will take us down to get there.
Following on from this, check out the parable that Jesus told in…
Luke 5:36 No one puts a patch from a new garment on an old garment; if he does, he will both tear the new one, and the patch from the new one will not match the old garment. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the fresh wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled and the skins will be ruined (destroyed).
We can’t “patch together” our old life with our new life – they don’t match, and trying to do so will result in everything coming undone…like some sort of spiritual “wardrobe malfunction”. This new way of living is too big and amazing to try and contain within our old attitudes and desires.
The fact of the matter is that not everyone is going to make the decision to find this new life – whilst many will become Christians (which is the first part of the “squeeze”) the path gets narrower.
Matthew 7:14 But the gate is narrow (contracted by pressure) and the way is straitened and compressed that leads away to life, and few are those who find it.
I don’t think this scripture is simply talking about people becoming Christians – the “way to life” extends beyond simply the first step of salvation.
[1] Luke 15 – parable of the prodigal son
[2] Matthew 7
Early Change #1 – A reason to relocate
First and foremost, I guess there has to be some reason to even think about this stuff. In the introduction to this Part, I proposed that there were a number of challenges facing us at this time, and more specifically a growing realisation that God wants to mentor us into our intended ministries to meet these challenges.
The reason that drives me to relocate is an increasing frustration with “possible living” – being constrained to do what I find possible when I can see that there are things I need to do and become that are impossible. Unless I can break free of the constraints, I will never do or become what God wants me to do and become. I will never really see God working in the way that He can (and wants to). I might gain some level of maturity and I might do some good, and I might even see flashes of God’s involvement in my life, but in the grand scheme of things I will have “prodigalised” my life[1] - squandering the opportunities and living below the spiritual poverty line.
One of the big things that I struggled with at the outset was my perception that this whole spiritual realm stuff was simply not that interesting or attractive (I’m being honest here!) There were simply not enough reasons to relocate.
I mean, in the natural realm, you generally move house when (and only when) there is a really, really good reason for doing so. Moving is a painful process, and we will usually avoid it at all costs. Even if you’ve got so much stuff that you can barely turn around, or moving would mean 30 minutes less travel in the day, you’ll avoid moving! I looked at the natural realm and saw that there were interesting things going on all around me, and it was comfortable. I had my environment set up and going the way that I wanted it. I looked at what I perceived as the spiritual realm, and there just wasn’t enough there to capture my attention and interest. God’s spiritual realm just wasn’t interesting enough – in fact, to be entirely and brutally honest, God Himself wasn’t interesting enough!
Because God is such a great listener, and has an inherent ability to say just the right thing at just the right time, He challenged me on this point. In fact, God basically stood right in the middle of the path and said, “Hang on a minute, I AM interesting – the fact of the matter is that you just don’t know Me well enough to realise it!” And (strangely enough) God was right – I had this concept of God, and it was a very flat, bland, colourless concept.
Early Change #2 - Sifting
The whole business of relocating from the world of the “possible” to the world of the “impossible” is costly. It’s costly because the relocation from the natural to the supernatural realm makes no allowance for taking our old lives with us, so if we’re going to move we are going to have to leave a whole bunch of things behind.
Genesis 12:1-3 Now [in Haran] the Lord said to Abram, Go for yourself [for your own advantage] away from your country, from your relatives and your father's house, to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you [with abundant increase of favors] and make your name famous and distinguished, and you will be a blessing [dispensing good to others]. And I will bless those who bless you [who confer prosperity or happiness upon you] and curse him who curses or uses insolent language toward you; in you will all the families and kindred of the earth be blessed [and by you they will bless themselves].
Abraham went through a relocation, and for him that was an incredibly costly process. He was set up – wealth, property, family, reputation. The natural side of his life was progressing well. But God wanted to move him from that natural life into a bigger, more significant spiritual life, and for Abraham that meant leaving all that security, stability and comfort behind. He was “sifted” - a lot of the stuff that he depended on could not be carried forward into the new life.
In Judges 7, God intended to have Gideon defeat the Midianites, and Gideon found that he had significant resources at his disposal (see chart). He was a trained soldier, who knew how to conduct a battle. However, from God’s perspective, this was not simply a battle – His intention was to shift Gideon personally from his reliance on his own significant resources, and in the process change Gideon’s perspective on what was possible.
Put simply, if we want to expand beyond the physical world and start to think and act as spiritual men, and experience the perception and power that accompanies that, we need to come to grips with the fact that we are going to be sifted. God is going to place us in situations where our skills and experience and resources are not sufficient. God may allow you to experience varying degrees of frustration, anger, pain, etc to bring highlight the insufficiency.
Early Change #3 – Forgetting the outcome
In a world that is defined by outcomes, this is a difficult step. We think in terms of creating an outcome in all areas of our lives – we use our time and resources to “make” something. Whether you consider yourself a relaxed or driven person, we all focus on the outcomes, results, benefits, etc of our efforts in life.
It would be an over-simplification to suggest that God is not focussed on outcomes. Clearly, God has plans and He applies effort and resource to achieving those plans – Genesis 1 is a prime example of that. However, we need to understand that God is the one Person that can never be restrained by an outcome that He wants to achieve. We unfortunately can be so restrained, and for that reason I believe that God wants us to turn away from our incessant “outcomes focus”.
To position you on this, it is a fact that God is not bound by time or resources. He has the capacity to provide (and create from nothing) the resource that might be required in any given situation. Also, God is not bound by time – it is merely a convenience that He has created to tie together the physical world in which we currently find ourselves. If God wants to do something, He controls the resource and He controls time, so He is never daunted at the immensity of any outcome He wants to undertake and achieve.
On the other hand, when we want to achieve a result, usually the first things that we think about are time and resources. How do I fit this activity in amongst all my other activities and responsibilities? How can I afford to undertake that activity when I have other financial responsibilities? In this reality, we have exceptionally limited control over our resources and time.
The early change that needs to take place is a focus on the “journey” rather than the “outcome”. We will cover this in greater detail further on, sufficed to say that God will start to challenge us to be obedient and do what He sets in front of us to do without necessarily telling us what the outcome is to be, or even showing us the outcome when it happens. Are you getting uncomfortable yet?
There will always be an outcome (because God has a purpose in everything) but in the early part of our relocation we may not be privy to the outcome, either before or after the outcome happens. Why not? Because knowledge of the outcome (again, either before or after the outcome occurs) can really mess us up! If God were to tell us everything that He intended to do, the natural part of us would be looking for ways to make it happen, or we might even think that the outcome was impossible so “I mustn’t be hearing correctly from God”. Worse still, we might look at the outcome and take some personal pride and glory in it. So what God does is outline a path for us – He establishes some markers along a path that we can follow, and asks us to travel the path one step at a time. As we mature, God reveals more of the path at any given time, until eventually we get to a level of maturity where God can reveal outcomes to us without the risk of tripping us up.
Bottom line – forget the outcome and ask God to show you the journey. Don’t measure your spiritual maturity and relationship with God in terms of outcomes.
Now, some might say this proposal is unscriptural – that you should have fruit attached to what you do, and that a man is measured by that fruit. I agree wholeheartedly with the principle that we should be fruitful, but we often get it back to front. A farmer knows the fruit that he wants to produce when he plants a tree, and sometimes the farmer will graft branches onto a tree to make it produce different fruit. The farmer introduces different chemicals to the soil and the leaves to improve the health of the tree, and prunes the tree at particular times for the same reason. What say does the tree have in this process? Well, the tree had an inherent potential to produce something, but without the farmer’s intervention there are significant risks of the tree producing no fruit at all, or without the grafting it might produce unnecessary fruit, or it might just die. The tree cannot help but produce fruit (because that’s what trees do) but it’s energy is on maturing and making the most of the opportunity to grow – the fruit is a guaranteed outcome. Yes, that’s right, fruit is an outcome – you know, that thing that I have suggested we don’t focus on!
We will be recognised by our fruits[2] - I totally agree with that concept. But we don’t have the capacity to turn our potential into fruitfulness unless we focus on the journey. And that’s what this whole manifesto is about – becoming fruitful and useful.
Early Change #4 – Timing isn’t everything
Because time is merely a convenient concept for us to keep life on track (and one that God doesn’t need) we should understand that in the relocation from the natural to the spiritual environment our “normal” way of thinking about time will change.
Our lives are very short – there doesn’t appear to be nearly enough time to achieve everything that we are talking about here:
James 4:14 Yet you do not know [the least thing] about what may happen tomorrow. What is the nature of your life? You are [really] but a wisp of vapor (a puff of smoke, a mist) that is visible for a little while and then disappears [into thin air].
The encouraging thing is that the amount of time that we have available to us is not a constraint for God – take for instance the fact that the bible only contains “highlights” of the things that Jesus did in a space of three years:
John 21:25 Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
My point is that we should not see time as a barrier. Many of us have responsibilities and demands upon our time, and God is very aware of these things. It remains however that God is still wanting us to relocate, and because He “owns” time, He is ready to respond to our timing issues as we move down this path.
This leads to a second point – the fact that God is highly efficient. He has a tendency to tell us what we need to know when we need to know it – He doesn’t waste His time (or ours) telling us stuff that isn’t important yet. Oh sure, we might think it’s important to know tht whole plan and purpose up front, but God has a different view. Take the example of Abraham (Gen.12:3) where God says to him 'Leave your country and your people, and go to the land I will show you’.
Basically, God challenges us to apply our limited capacity (and obedience) totally to a task. Task completed, God can then take us the next step we can totally commit to. God gets some time efficiency through attacking issues this way – there is no time wasted with us racing off down various paths or trying to jump ahead (and having to backtrack).
Early Change #5 – Different Strokes
Another point to raise here is that each of us moves down this relocation path at a different rate and in a different way. Because of that, looking at where others are at in their spiritual journey and making inappropriate comparisons is unhelpful.
The encouraging thing is that God will mark the path for you as fast as you can travel it and handle it. If someone else has spiritually developed faster than you, this should not be reason for you to become jealous of them, nor should the more developed person be conceited.
It is the case, however, that we develop together with no one racing ahead and leaving a trail of dust in their wake! God doesn’t want to build a “lop-sided” church, with the spiritually mature and powerful on one side, and the weaker, less developed people on the other.
Ephesians 2:21 In Him the whole structure is joined (bound, welded) together harmoniously, and it continues to rise (grow, increase) into a holy temple in the Lord [a sanctuary dedicated, consecrated, and sacred to the presence of the Lord].
Even whilst a lot of things here require us to focus inwardly and look to our own journey, we still have an equal responsibility to look out for one another and develop and a group. Racing ahead without fulfilling the responsibility we have to help one another develop will result in factions and “fault lines” in the church – these are points of failure along which the church will crack when pressure and stress are applied by the enemy.
Early Change #6 – Understanding God
God is looking to have a meaningful relationship with us, but the problem is that we will never understand where God is coming from, or appreciate Him, or appreciate how He looks at things or feels about things, if we don’t relocate from natural thinking to spiritual thinking.
1 Corinthians 2:14-15 But the natural, nonspiritual man does not accept or welcome or admit into his heart the gifts and teachings and revelations of the Spirit of God, for they are folly (meaningless nonsense) to him; and he is incapable of knowing them [of progressively recognizing, understanding, and becoming better acquainted with them] because they are spiritually discerned and estimated and appreciated.
One of the early changes that we will experience is an understanding of how God feels about things, and His intentions and purposes in all kinds of situations. This will occur as we spend time reading the bible (which is an incredibly effective way of God starting to share how He thinks) and simply acknowledging God in the things we do and really sincerely inviting Him to become involved and be active in our lives. A constant acknowledgment and awareness of God’s presence is crucial – it doesn’t involve “feeling” God’s presence, but simply acknowledging confidently that He is with you. Feelings are notoriously unreliable.
God wants to be involved – we don’t have to plead with Him to get involved because He is ready and waiting. But God is desperate for us to make space for Him to get involved.
Early Change #7 – The Tight Squeeze
If you thought that this was going to be an easy ride, you’re going to be bitterly disappointed! One of the things that you will realise very early in the piece is that there not so no barrier that separates natural ‘possible” living from supernatural, spiritual, “impossible” thinking – but what does exist is a narrow channel between the two realms.
This is part of the reason that the sifting process is so important. It’s like being a cave explorer that wants to find their way through into the deeper, undiscovered parts of an amazing underground cave. The “cavers” as they are called can’t negotiate their way from ground level in through the tight passages and various obstacles if they are carrying excessive amounts of unnecessary equipment – they travel light with only those things that are necessary to get them through.
Similarly, to move into the spiritual realm, we need to shed the stuff that is unnecessary, because we wont see, let alone be capable of negotiating, the channels and passages that God will take us down to get there.
Following on from this, check out the parable that Jesus told in…
Luke 5:36 No one puts a patch from a new garment on an old garment; if he does, he will both tear the new one, and the patch from the new one will not match the old garment. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the fresh wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled and the skins will be ruined (destroyed).
We can’t “patch together” our old life with our new life – they don’t match, and trying to do so will result in everything coming undone…like some sort of spiritual “wardrobe malfunction”. This new way of living is too big and amazing to try and contain within our old attitudes and desires.
The fact of the matter is that not everyone is going to make the decision to find this new life – whilst many will become Christians (which is the first part of the “squeeze”) the path gets narrower.
Matthew 7:14 But the gate is narrow (contracted by pressure) and the way is straitened and compressed that leads away to life, and few are those who find it.
I don’t think this scripture is simply talking about people becoming Christians – the “way to life” extends beyond simply the first step of salvation.
[1] Luke 15 – parable of the prodigal son
[2] Matthew 7
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