Wrestling with Beliefs

We're in a series of messages right now that we're calling there's more to the story.

Um I think we've all been in that place.

If you've been reading the Bible, uh you come up on a text or a story or a narrative and you're like, is that saying what I think it's saying?

Um sometimes Jesus might say something that's quite confusing.

Why would Jesus say that or why would he do that?

And uh it's it's kind of like um uh if you've ever been in a room where there's a conversation that's being had and you can feel that there's what's being said, but then there's uh things that are not being said, and you can feel interpersonal dynamics, and you're like, you know what, if I knew more to the story, I think I would understand that conversation better.

Or maybe you've been in a room where you did know more of the story, you knew the two parties, and you knew some backstory, and you knew some uh some elements of their relationship that cause the things that were being said back and forth uh to have even more depth of meaning.

And so when we think about the Bible, the more that we understand the context, the more that we understand the characters, uh the motive of the writer, who they're writing to, what's going on in the world, uh, what point are they making, uh, we're able to really see what we're supposed to see and be able to interpret it even better.

And so we try to do this every week uh here is to really try to add the proper amount of context that would help us to be able to take God's word and to understand it better, and then ultimately would cause us to live it out even better.

And so that's what we're doing uh within the series.

Um, if you have your Bibles, you can open with me, but don't feel like you have to.

This one I'm actually going to kind of jump around in the Synoptic Gospels.

Uh the Synoptic Gospels are Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Um, they have a lot of the same material.

So most of the stories, if you read it in Matthew, is probably in Mark and Luke as well, or at least one, if not both, of the books.

And so if you read those stories in the multiple books, you start to get a little bit bigger, clearer, uh more robust picture of the story.

And so um instead of you, you you're certainly welcome when I pull these up, you can flip back and forth in your Bible if you want.

Uh, but I'm going to kind of borrow from each of these uh synoptic gospels in these stories, because Jesus says something in these stories that when you first read it, you don't really know what to do with it, but it's going to lead to a bigger conversation.

All right.

So flip if you want.

If not, sit back, relax, it'll be up on the screen.

Uh, Matthew 8.

Matthew 8.

The context is Jesus has just finished the Sermon on the Mount, three chapters of teaching in the classroom, so to speak.

And then he pulls a classic rabbi move, which is to take his teaching and to start living it out.

Hey, great lesson, great principle.

What does that mean in the real world?

And so Matthew writes uh Matthew chapter 8, like a screenplay.

Matthew 8 · chapter mention

He's come out of the classroom, and now he's going to live this thing out.

And uh a man with leprosy comes up to Jesus.

And we we looked at this story a few months ago.

Um, a person with leprosy, leprosy was a broad, it wasn't like one skin disease, it was a term that was used for a broad range of skin diseases.

And so it they may have been contagious, some of them were, some of them weren't, but because they didn't know which was which, um, you were considered unclean.

You were ceremonially unclean.

And so you have not only a skin disorder or a rash or something, but now you're also not able to be in relationship and community.

So the guy comes up to Jesus and says, If you're willing, make me clean.

And what he wants is not just to be relieved of the pain of the skin issue, but the pain of being ostracized from community.

I want to be back in relationship.

I want to get my family back.

I want to get my friends back.

And so uh he says, if you're willing, make me clean.

And it says in verse 3, Jesus reached out and touched him.

I am willing, he said, be healed.

And instantly the leprosy disappeared.

Verse 4.

Then Jesus said to him, Don't tell anyone about this.

Don't tell anyone about this.

Isn't that weird?

I thought we were just saying, go tell it on the mountain, right?

Like, isn't we isn't like telling people?

Like, isn't that the whole point?

Like, isn't that what we're supposed to do?

Right?

We looked at the Great Commission last week.

Go into all the world.

Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth, what in the world?

Why would Jesus tell somebody to not tell somebody about him?

Uh when Mark tells this in Mark 1, 45, uh it says that after Jesus told him, Don't tell anyone about this, uh, Mark tells that, it says, verse 45, the man went and spread the word, proclaiming to everyone what had happened.

As a result, large crowds soon surrounded Jesus, and he couldn't publicly enter a town anywhere.

He had to stay out in secluded places, but people from everywhere kept coming to him.

All right, so Jesus tells the guy, don't tell anyone, and then he immediately goes and tells everyone.

Uh, have you ever uh been having a confidential conversation with someone?

And you're like, hey, listen, before I tell you what I'm about to tell you, I'm telling you, don't tell anyone this.

This is between you and I.

Have you ever had this?

And then, you know, in a short time later, it makes its way through the grapevine back to you, and you're like, What in the world?

Right?

You're like uh upset about it.

So, anyways, Jesus tells this guy not to tell people, but this is like viral material.

Jesus, in a moment, healed a man with leprosy, and so the guy can't help himself.

He tells everybody.

Uh, in Luke chapter 8, okay, so this is not an isolate, this is not an isolated incident of Jesus uh telling people to not tell people about him, but he also does the opposite.

Luke 8 · chapter mention

In in Luke 8, um, this is the story of the demoniac, right?

Jesus goes across the Sea of Galilee from from Galilee, uh Galilee and and Capernaum and that whole side to the other side, the east side of the Sea of Galilee, and he goes to the Decapolis, which is essentially where the pagan people lived.

And it says that uh when they got there, you know, this man full of demons.

That's the story where Jesus casts the demons into the pigs and they jump in the water, that whole thing.

When Luke tells it in verse 38, it says, The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him.

He's so moved by what Jesus has done for him.

He wants to follow him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, verse 39, return home and tell how God uh tell how much God has done for you.

In other words, go tell it on the mountain, tell everybody what God has done.

So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.

But in Luke 8, okay, so that was Luke 8, 38, and 39, they get in the boat, they go back to the their home side of the Sea of Galilee, and um he Jesus raises a man by the name of Jairus.

He raises his daughter from the dead.

So his daughter had his daughter died, and and Jesus shows up to the house and there's funeral music playing, and people are crying.

And Jesus says, Hey, why are you guys crying?

You can stop because she's only asleep.

And they're like, What?

What are you talking about?

They laugh at him, they mock him, and he goes uh in the room, and it says in uh Luke 8, uh 54, he took her by the hand and said, My child, get up.

And her spirit returned, and at once she stood up, and Jesus told him to give her something to eat.

Now look at this, verse 56.

Her parents were astonished, but he ordered them, he ordered them, he ordered them not to tell anyone what had happened.

When Matthew tells this story in Matthew 9, 26, he adds a little uh nugget here, a little element of the story.

He says, the report of this miracle swept through the entire countryside.

Okay, so probably what they did was they told the two or three people they trusted not to tell anyone, who then told the two or three people they trusted not to tell anyone, who told that you know what I'm talking about.

You've been there, all right, you've been there, don't worry, we're gonna pray for you at the end.

All right, but but this is exactly what happened, it sweeps through the whole countryside.

After that, here we go, let's keep going.

Matthew 9, 30 and 31.

Jesus heals two blind men.

It says, verse 30, their eyes were open and they could see, and Jesus sternly warned them.

Sternly warned them, don't tell.

He says, Don't tell anyone about this.

Alright?

But instead, verse 31, they went out and spread his fame all over the region.

Okay.

Why would Jesus tell people to not tell people about him?

The short answer is it has something to do with timing and location.

Timing and location.

If you were to plot out uh Jesus' miracles and the ones that he told people to not tell people, you would see that they were in the region where the religious elite, where uh ultimately Pharisees, Sadducees, the people that were ultimately going to put him to death, people who had crystallized all of their religious views, um, and were frankly violent about their loyalty, violent about their allegiance.

We looked last week at the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, and we talked about the concentric courts in the temple, that in the Gentile court was the outer court of the temple, and there was an inscription on the wall that said, if a gentile goes inside into the next court where only Jews are supposed to go, if you go inside, it is punishable upon death.

We are willing to kill for this.

Uh, if you read later in the book of Acts, you're gonna see that the Apostle Paul uh is accused of taking a Gentile too far into the temple, too far into the concentric courts, and they try to, they're ready to kill him and uh the Gentile, both of them.

So this is something that really is um it really is indicative of a mindset where you are so convinced that you're not only right in your belief, but you're righteous in your belief.

This isn't just something I believe is right, this is something I believe God believes is right.

And that's where you get to where you're so uh austere about that belief that you'd be willing to kill over it.

You're willing to kill over it.

Remember in the story of the Apostle Paul when he's on the road to Damascus, it said he was eager to kill.

So when you get to that place where you go, look, um, this is something I am in defense of God.

I'm defending God.

And in fact, if I wasn't willing to kill for it, it probably uh would offend God.

God wants me to hold this line really tightly.

And so Jesus understood that it was actually his work was going to escalate, and these are the people that were ultimately going to kill him.

In fact, if you go to John chapter 11, you'll see that uh when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, right after the Lazarus story, is that the heading of the next section is they plot to kill Jesus.

John 11 · chapter mention

So it was the resurrection of Lazarus ultimately that led to the crucifixion of Jesus.

And it wasn't that Jesus was afraid to die because he knew he was gonna die.

It was really about timing.

Again, if you go back to the book of John, you're gonna see from John chapter 2 all the way to John chapter 17, Jesus says multiple times, My time has not yet come.

John 2 · chapter mention John 17 · chapter mention

My time has not yet come.

I have more work to do.

My time has not yet come.

He was gonna fulfill prophecy, uh, he was gonna ultimately um uh make clear, demonstrate the kingdom of God has come to the world.

And so I need time to do that.

And he recognized that in that region, in that location, this if this thing spread too quickly, if this viral information goes out too fast, it's gonna quickly precipitate the events that would end up at the crucifixion.

It's gonna happen too quickly.

And so he's essentially trying to slow it down, okay, on that side of the Sea of Galilee.

On the decapit side of the Sea of Galilee, he's like, go tell it on the mountain, man, go tell everybody.

Um, I want us to go a little deeper in this.

Um, yeah, we we kind of, you know, again, understand why he did what he did, but I want to dig a little bit deeper into the mindset of that region, right?

The the the idea that Jesus knew that these people were so, they had so crystallized what they believed to be true, that even God incarnate, even Jesus in his teaching was not going to be able to cause them to rethink or to think any differently about what they had already, what they had already cemented in terms of their beliefs.

Um I want to wrestle with this a little bit because um uh there is really sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the virtue of being steadfast and the vice of just being stubborn.

I I wrestle with that all the time.

Like if you think about a steadfast person, somebody we'll call steadfast, we'll define it as being stubborn for the right thing.

And when you think about a steadfast person, like what a great character quality.

Somebody who's like, you know what?

Though none go with me, still I will follow.

Like, I'm willing to stand for what's right, I'm willing to stand for what's true, and I don't give a rip what the culture says, I don't care what my tribe says, I don't care what my community says, if it's just me and Jesus, that's plenty.

I'll stand my ground, I don't care what's popular, I don't care how much heat I take for it.

In fact, I'd be willing to give my life.

If you look at Hebrews 11, it talks about the heroes of the faith, and it gets to the end, and it's like, you know what?

Some of these people were so steadfast in their faith that it ended ugly for them.

Some of them were sawed in half, some of them were fed to lions, some of them died destitute and with hopes and promises not yet fulfilled, but they did it and they did it faithfully.

They stood their ground and they said, Look, I'm gonna be so committed to my obedience to God, I'm gonna dig my heels in so deep that I'm gonna apply my will to God's word, and nothing can knock me off that course.

Okay, that's a virtue.

A vice would be I am being stubborn for the wrong thing.

And you can see I have a lot of empathy for these Pharisees and these teachers of the law and these scribes and these people who really believed that they were being stubborn for the right thing.

They truly believed that their interpretation of the Torah and their understanding of the mind of God and what they were willing to fight for was really holy and it was worth fighting for.

And yet Jesus describes them in this way in Luke 5.

This is this Luke 5 text really pairs well with this mindset ultimately that was of the people that crucified Jesus.

Luke 5, verse 37.

Luke 5:37

Jesus says, No uh no one pours new wine into old wineskins.

Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins and the wine will run out, and the wineskins will be ruined.

Verse 38.

No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins, and no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say the old is better.

Okay, Jesus uses here an illustration of wineskins to describe mindset.

So, so they would have been very familiar with this process of taking wine and aging it and letting it ferment.

So you would take wine, you'd put it into an animal skin, which is flexible.

So when you fill up the wineskin and seal it, okay, and the wine begins to ferment, what happens is the wine expands.

But because the skin is flexible, it's able to flex with the new wine.

Over time, when the wine ferments to where it's old wine and they pour it out and consume it, the wine skin becomes hardened and brittle.

And so now if you were to take new wine, pour it in there and seal it again, that the the brittle nature of the wineskin would cause, when it when the wine expands, it would cause it to break and to crack, and then you waste the wine.

And so what Jesus is doing is he's taking this illustration, this metaphor, and he's applying it and talking about mindset.

Um, when God is doing something new, when he's bringing new wine, the new wine Jesus is bringing, he's saying, if your mindset is not flexible, if you have crystallized all of your beliefs, if you have come to this place where you were stubborn for the wrong thing, ultimately when this new wine begins to expand, it's going to cause you to break.

It's going to cause you to break.

And what happens when the way they broke, right?

When we break, often we break uh in a way that causes us to either fight and attack or flight and run away.

Uh, but ultimately Jesus is talking about a flexible mindset.

Let's sit in this for a little bit because I think this is a good question to ask.

The the question I want to put in front of you today, and I want you to wrestle with coming from here is am I stubborn for the right thing?

Am I stubborn for the right things?

All right, and and what I want to do is I want to give you a few things to think about related to this story that would kind of give you somewhat of a rubric or something to kind of uh use as you're trying to kind of work your way through uh these questions.

Uh how do I how do I distinguish between the virtue of being steadfast and the vice of being stubborn?

Alright, three things uh to think about as you're uh contextualizing this to your life.

The first one is wrestling with a belief doesn't mean that you're weak-minded.

Wrestling with a belief doesn't mean that you're weak-minded.

Uh these people were so rooted in their beliefs, again, they were willing to kill for them.

They were so rooted, and to go and consider that Jesus is bringing something that's new and different, and to be able to receive it, for them to even entertain that idea, felt wrong.

You're gonna see that there were uh there were Pharisees and Sadducees and scribes and teachers of the law who came to Jesus and they had already decided he was wrong, and so they tried to trap him.

We've looked at those verses before.

But then there were others who came, sometimes uh like John 3, the uh Nicodemus, who comes in the in the night.

He comes in the protection of evening and darkness, but he's sincere in his question.

He's asking Jesus questions.

So there were some uh who had because what Jesus said to them was different, okay, it they rejected it.

But there were others that were like, maybe I'm missing something here, you know, and they opened up their mind and they opened up their heart and ultimately uh were able to receive what Jesus was was trying to show them or what Jesus was trying to give them.

And so I want to encourage you, you know, I think sometimes the idea of taking a belief and re-examining it, or or sometimes again when you're there's more to the story and you're digging in deeper into context and you see something and it may question and challenge the way you've interpreted or the way you've thought, okay, sometimes it feels wrong to even ask the question, you know.

We think about the book of James that says don't be like tossed like the wind and the waves, and you know, a double-minded man.

He says, and of course, like none of us want to be so wishy-washy that I talk to this person, now I believe this.

And now I go, I talk to that person, now I believe that.

And I go, and and whoever, you know, my beliefs are all who's the last podcast I listen to, or who's the last person I talk to.

We don't want to be um, you know, just blown all over the place, but at the same time, to be able to, in a disciplined way, to be able to gain more information, all right, be able to take this to the Lord and to be able to sometimes re-examine our beliefs and to wrestle with them and wrestle through them.

And and ultimately, I think we need to understand that wrestling through that belief doesn't make you weak-minded.

Often, by the way, I I I come I'm of the mindset, and I think some others are as well.

Um, people that land here often are people that like to have their beliefs challenged.

Because how can I really actually know if I believe something unless it stood up to the heat of good questions?

Like I like to run my belief through the gauntlet.

I like to listen to the other side of the argument.

I like to hear why somebody wouldn't believe what.

I like to take the other position because if they can stand up to that and come all the way through it, okay, I believe now I actually do believe it.

I don't just say I believe it.

And so uh don't be afraid to wrestle with these beliefs.

The the Pharisees, the teachers of the law, these highly educated people who had already become conclusive, if they would have re-engaged their curiosity, they would have been introduced to a new wine.

They would have been introduced, they would have been a new wine skin.

Their flexibility of curiosity would have enabled them to ultimately see and be impacted by what Jesus was teaching.

The second thing is this fall in love with questions more than answers.

Fall in love with questions more than answers.

I've I've mentioned this stat before, but it really applies here.

You know, Jesus as a rabbinic teacher used questions.

And he he's recorded in the gospels as having asked 307 questions.

307 questions.

187 times he is asked a question.

Somebody poses a question to Jesus 187 times, and only three times does he answer the question directly.

184 out of 187.

He answers a question with a question.

In other words, he's not wanting to take the mystery out of it.

He's not just wanting to give you the answer.

He wants you to wrestle with it because there's buried treasure in the question.

And he wants you to keep asking the question.

You know, think of your mentality as it comes to your faith in God, even your relationship to the Bible or your faith.

Sometimes we are so eager to get answers.

I'm trying to get all the answers.

Trying to get all the answers.

And if you do that, there are so many questions that need answered that once you get an answer that makes any sense at all or satisfy, then you just check it off and go to the next one.

And the reality is that question probably needs more time to think about it more deeply, to turn the prism on it, to discuss it, to think about it, to sleep on it, to wake up and think about it again, talk about it, because there's more dimension often to a lot of these questions.

But sometimes people are so eager for answers that once they get an answer, cool, now I'm certain about that answer.

What's the next question?

What's the next question?

And they compile answers and yet don't necessarily compile deep knowledge.

Instead of making your quest to have as many answers as possible, what if you change your quest to get it gaining as much knowledge and wisdom as possible?

Because think about this.

Sometimes the more you know, the fewer answers you have.

If you just want answers, you can get an answer and just harden around that answer.

Or you can fall in love with the questions, and if I'll keep it open, actually, the more I know, I might have fewer answers, but more knowledge.

And knowledge and wisdom is even better than answers.

Especially answers sometimes that, again, we might take and harden around and yet uh ultimately missing maybe the deeper understanding.

And so Jesus in his rabbinic style, he would use very simple metaphors or parables.

And those parables are they're simple in that they're easy to understand, but often the application of those parables, we're still talking about 2,000 years later that we can we can come back to and continue to wrestle with.

So let's use, for example, the question I just put in front of you.

Am I stubborn for the right things?

Am I stubborn for the right things?

Well, let's fall in love with that question.

Let's ask ourselves.

Like, here's an exercise.

You could go home uh today and you could sit down with your phone or with a piece of paper and pen, and you could write down what are the five things I'm most stubborn about?

The five things I'm most stubborn for.

And you write those five things down, and then you look at them and you go, Are those five things, let's go one thing at a time and go, is it worth being stubborn for this?

And by the way, we're in church, and so we're talking about the Bible, and we're talking about religion and faith and theology and all that good stuff.

So it's certainly good to do for that.

But I think this actually applies beyond just your faith.

I think it applies to your marriage.

I think it applies to how you parent, I think it applies to how you are as a citizen, how you are as a person, uh how you think about your career and your work, okay, the way you show up at work, the way that you interact where you are, decisions you're making.

What are the five things I'm most stubborn about?

And then look at them and each one of them, challenge yourself and challenge those questions.

Is that really worth being stubborn about?

And here's what you're gonna find.

If you fall in love with the question more than the answer, and let's say you did it again in five years, five years from now, you asked the same thing.

You might have a different list of five.

Because you were willing to challenge something you had dug your heels on.

I was, I thought I was steadfast, but I was stubborn, and actually, through the wisdom I now have, I realized that hill's not worth dying on anymore.

I used to be willing to die on it, but I'm not today.

And frankly, as you mature throughout life, and some of you right now, you bear witness with what I'm saying, throughout life, there were things 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you were super stubborn about.

I was willing to die on that battlefield, and now through the wisdom of more life experience and maybe a deeper faith, you come and go, that's not nearly as big a deal as it used to be.

See, that's falling in love with the question, continuing to ask it, continuing to challenge the question or the answer based on today's wisdom, based on how much uh you've grown and learned and the information you now have.

So fall in love with the question uh more than the answers.

And again, Jesus ultimately was crucified and was ultimately the antagonist in the story with Jesus were the people who loved their answers and stopped asking the questions.

Uh okay, number three thing to think about is this don't let your desire for certainty be stronger than your desire for truth.

Don't let your desire for certainty be stronger than your desire for truth.

I mentioned how often people, I think, especially Christians, we feel a need.

There's so many questions, and so we try to get as many answers as we can.

And I think if you're not careful, what ends up happening is those answers give you a sense of certainty that lead to a sense of safety.

And for me to reopen the question or to me to consider the fact or the possibility, maybe not the fact, the possibility that what I have been certain about might not be true sometimes causes an insecurity so deep in a person that they would rather fight or flight.

Okay?

I'll give you an example.

I might have used this in a previous sermon.

I couldn't remember if I had or if I had edited it out or whatever.

You should see in my sermons I have a line and the stuff that doesn't make it's like the cutting room floor.

I got like two or three pages of stuff I didn't say, right?

Because we didn't have time.

All right.

But but I so I can't remember if I did this or not.

So if if this is unnecessarily redundant, please forgive me.

Um, but my wife and I were watching a documentary one time about a family that was essentially found out some DNA within like DNA testing, they found out that the truth about their family was different than what they had thought.

So they grew up in the family and they thought, well, this is my dad, or that's my mom, and that, you know, this is, you know, my siblings and all this.

And now with 23 and me and ancestry and whatever, they start doing these DNA tests, and they find out that the narrative or the story they'd been told and accepted about their family wasn't true.

That there was actually, you know, it was a difference.

There was more to the story, okay?

And so certain members of the family, once they found this out, they were like diligent.

I want to know the truth.

Like, I want to know everything.

They were they're trying to get tested, they want to find everything.

And then other members of the family were so disrupted internally by this new information, even if it was truth, they didn't want to know it.

I like my family the way it is, I like my belief the way it is.

I I have a certain certainty around my family dynamic, and so they put their fingers in their ears and they close their eyes and la la la la la.

Like I don't want to know.

If the truth is different from what I'm saying, I don't, I would rather be ignorant and be able to hang on to my certainty, which gives me security.

To go disrupt that, I would almost rather hang on to a lie.

So even when it comes to, again, our beliefs about God, our beliefs about faith, um, theology, our faiths about family, our beliefs about family, relationship, life, a lot of these things, sometimes that need for certainty tends to become the biggest priority besides what is the truth.

And some people are naturally just wired, like, I want to know the truth, and others go, ultimately, I'd rather not know.

And so I just want to encourage you, don't let your desire for certainty be stronger than your desire for truth.

Um, all right.

I got a few minutes, I gotta give you this, and then we're gonna um baptize some folks.

This wineskin uh parable that Jesus gives.

He says something at the end that I I never saw it until until now, and I can't wait to share it with you.

Okay, look at this.

Luke 5, 38.

Jesus says, New wine must be poured into new wineskins.

That's what he says in verse 38.

New wine must be poured into new wineskins.

And of course, we get the point.

We just talked about it.

We've got to be, we still have boundaries to our beliefs, but we have to be flexible in our beliefs so we can receive the new thing uh that that God is doing, that Jesus was doing.

And so, okay, we get the wineskin thing.

But look at verse 39.

He said, No one after drinking old wine wants the new.

For they say the old is better.

I was like, what?

I never really looked at that.

Like I just kind of went, okay, I get the wine skin thing.

And then I just really, I just read right over verse 39.

But I went, like, let's look at that.

What is he talking about?

Because he makes this switch, like he's been talking about wine skins, and and we have to kind of get our bearings in the metaphor.

The wine skins represent the mindset of a person being flexible, but then he flips it in verse 39 and he starts talking about wine, not wine skins, but wine itself.

And he said, No one after drinking the old wine wants the new, for they say the old is better.

So I'm like, what is it?

Okay, so I know what the wine skins are, but what is the wine?

So the old wine, right?

I'm looking at it, interpreting it, the things I'm reading, he's essentially talking about the old wine was their way of interpreting God's law, their way of interpreting the Torah, what they believe, their theology.

And he said, but no one who drinks the old wine wants the new, for they say the old is better.

And it confused the heck out of me because I'm sitting there like, well, wait, what?

The old wine is better.

Like that is, I mean, that's what it is.

Old wine's better.

Right?

So-and-so's like a fine wine.

They get better with age.

That's the point.

It's had longer to ferment, it's a higher quality wine, it's more valuable, it's more expensive.

This isn't even arguable.

Everybody knows this.

This is a fact.

Old wine is better than new wine.

And so I'm sitting here, I'm like, what point is Jesus making?

Because it's not just that they think that the old is better, the old is better.

So I'm sitting there wrestling with this, and I'm thinking, yo, if I if we had a several hundred-year-old bottle of wine that had been in our family, super valuable, and somebody came up and said, Here's a brand new bottle of wine, let's trade.

Like, what are you talking about?

Get out of my face.

This is better.

And as I sat and thought about it, I was thinking, this is like perfect teaching by Jesus.

Because even here I am a couple thousand years later, looking at the text, going, This isn't even debatable.

Oh, the old wine's better, the old belief is better.

But then I started thinking about Jesus when he teaches on the Sermon on the Mount and he says, Hey, listen, before I say anything, I did not come to abolish the law, I came to fulfill the law.

And he said, I have to tell you that because it's going to sound like I'm coming up with some brand new wine, but actually, what I'm giving you is older than old.

This is actually what was in the mind of God before creation.

I'm gonna tell you what God intended all along is greater than what you think Moses was saying when he wrote it down.

So he's saying this is the old, this new wine is actually the oldest wine, it's the better wine, it's new to you, but it's old, old wine, but it's the new wine, it's a new, and so he's like, if you've already concluded, but and so then I start to think about how could the new wine ever be better than the old wine?

And I'm sitting there and I'm staring at this text, and I start thinking, is there anywhere in the Gospels where new wine was better than old wine?

Come on, it's about to get good, Keith.

Don't go anywhere, Keith.

Remember John 2?

Jesus shows up, he's at the wedding at Cana.

They run out of wine.

And his mom is like, we gotta help these people out.

And Jesus is like, this sounds like a them problem.

He said, Mom, this isn't our problem.

We didn't, this is they they should have thought about the wine.

The white wine problem is not our problem.

We got 99 problems, wine ain't one.

I'm not working about it.

That's their that's their thing.

And and and she says, she says, uh, she says, Listen, I know you have a heavenly father, but I'm your earthly mother.

You better do what I say.

And then she goes over to the servant.

I mean, it's paraphrased.

She goes over to the servants and she says, do whatever my son tells you to do.

And Jesus takes these 20 to 30 gallon jars and he fills them to the brim with water.

Actually, they fill them to the brim with water and he turns it into wine.

And it's brand spanking new wine.

This wine's only been in existence for like a few seconds.

Remember this?

Brand new wine.

And so he says, Hey, take it to the master of ceremonies, take it to the connoisseur, take it to the one that knows the good wine from the bad wine, the best wine from the worst wine.

And he takes it to, and the and the and the master of ceremony takes one sip and he's like, That's the best wine I've ever tasted.

Where did you get that?

Where did you what he said?

What were this what's wrong with you guys?

You know how it works.

You bring out the best wine first, and once everybody's had a little bit too much wine, then you bring out the bad wine.

Then you do that, you go well, you guys know how this works.

He's like, This is the best wine I've ever tasted.

Where did you get this?

And Jesus made it a few seconds ago.

Came from the hand of God.

And so when you think about this parable of the wineskins, the conventional belief that the old wine is better.

I don't want that new one, I don't want that new thing.

It's actually when we receive it from God, the new one, the new thing that Jesus is doing, the thing you need to be flexible to receive, the thing that if you stay unnecessarily stubborn will break you.

If you be flexible to it, you've already concluded that there's no way the new wine can be better because conventional wisdom, and everybody says it, and all the connoisseurs say it, and everybody that knows anything about fermentation and about wine says the old is better than the new, except when it comes from God, it's better.

It's better, it's better.

And so today I want to ask you this question.

I want you to wrestle with this and start wrestling with it and fall in love with the question.

Don't fall in love with the answer.

Fall in love with the question.

Am I stubborn for the right thing?

Maybe there's something that God's trying to show you.

Maybe that it's more to the story has to do.

Maybe it's something theological, maybe it's something relational, maybe there's more to the story of the people in your world, maybe there's more to the story going on in your life now.

Are you flexible enough to receive it, or have you become so crystallized in who you are, so hardened in your belief, and so hardened in where you are that you're being stubborn for the wrong thing?

I don't have an answer.

It's contextual to each one of you.

Jesus, the rabbi today, brings brings something that we're to bring before God and ask him for his guidance and wisdom.