Are You Ready For What’s To Come?

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Well, it's really good to be back. And I miss the beach.

No sense in lying to you right out of the gate.

Two years ago, my family started practicing a sabbatical. Obviously, it's no secret. We're a Sabbath church. We meet on the Saturday. If you didn't realize that, sorry to burst your bubble, but we are a Saturday church.

We meet on Saturdays. And two years ago, my family decided that we were going to take a 30 day sabbatical, something we had never done before. If any of you know me, and most of you in this room do know I have zero chill. Zero. Just as much sugar as in a Dr.

Pepper, zero. I have that much chill, there's zero. I have artificial chill, but I don't have chill as in like it wasn't given to me in my DNA. And so going for 30 days to a beach and walking outside and literally putting your feet in the sand, not having any shuffleboard or all those things that people my age now do hang out and talk about Margaritaville and what it was like back in the good old days when Democrats and Republicans worked together. So we went and we took 30 days two years ago, and it was absolutely chaotic and it was not peaceful at all.

It was the opposite of peaceful. It's words I no longer use. And then all of a sudden this year, my wife was like, you know, our kids are getting older, I'm getting younger, but our kids are getting older. And so we should attempt to do this again. So I think it was in February where she said we should book it.

And so we stepped out on faith. We booked it. And I can tell you that God still performs miracles. I found 10% chill while we were there. That's a miracle.

That's a miracle. I actually found a lot of chill while we were there. And so it was very, very nice to just. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, except for the last two days and we came home early. But I think there was one day where there was rain, there was one day where there was wind and it was kind of cold.

Outside of that, it was literally perfection. And so we got to share that space with Cam and Sarah for about four days. And so I promise you, we Talked about church 10% less than we normally do, but only 10% less. But I told them one night while we were sitting there talking about the church and talking about what the Lord was doing and some of the books I had read and some of the prayer time and that I said, you know, it's absolutely hard to get mad here, you know, you're sitting there and you're sitting on the patio and you can hear the waves over and over and over and over and over again and they're rushing them. There was some decent sized waves for the month we were there and it's like it doesn't really matter what could happen.

It's easy to have peace when chaos might be around you because the whole place is peaceful. And so now that I've absolutely rubbed it in and I've made you commit covetous decisions in your mind to go to Florida next week rather than to come back and hear the second part of the sermon series, I am very glad to be back. We actually did come home two days earlier than anticipated. Some of that was for the weather, but my kids. And if I would have been a little bit younger, I might have attempted it.

My kids were like, dad, can we not just drive straight through the night? And so that way we can get to service. And I was like, that's going to be great. You guys will have a great time at service. And everybody who I'm going to have to see, I'm going to be the grumpy old man who says, get off my lawn.

I haven't slept. So we slept, we rested, and then we decided to show up. So we're really glad to be back. Glad to see all of you. Want to keep the Hellermans in your prayer today.

There is a Messiah meetings. Messiah meetings is something that HFF started a couple years ago to bring in messianic teachers, full Bible teachers from around the country. Some of them are pastors, Bible teachers, authors, whatever. It's kind of a TED Talk style where there's about 20, 25 minutes. We all talk on a topic.

This event's topic is the miracles of Yeshua. And there's a time of worship before and after. And Nick and Lizzie Spring just had their baby. And so Ian and Alyssa are down there filling in for that event this weekend. And as soon as we're done with service here, I have the honor to drive down there and teach in Dallas as well.

So that doesn't mean you're going to get a cam length sermon.

God says he's not going to violate my free will. Thank you, Brent. I did listen. See, I listened, but it was beautiful because on sabbatical it is a concentrated time for me to ask the Lord to speak to me, speak to me about what he wants to do with the church, speak to me about what he wants to do in my own personal life with him, my marriage, my relationship with my children, other areas, our finances, everything. Literally everything's on the table on the Sabbath with the Lord.

It's just, hey, look, come speak, have whatever you want, and I will do whatever you say to do. And so it was awesome to be sitting in Florida and having those conversations with the Lord and the Lord revealing to me. I've got like hundreds of notes in my iPhone from listening to podcasts and books and worship music. And then something would come in a prayer time, and I would take a note real quick, I'm starting. I didn't go down to the water with my own little, like, journal and write it out like I'm teaching old dog new tricks, but I've got it in my iPhone.

And then I'm watching on Saturdays and I'm watching the messages that Cam gave, one of which was not supposed to happen. Brent's back went out. And so it was a last minute, and hearing the messages from Brent and Cam and how they were aligning with where the Lord was taking me. And so it was really, really cool to get to see that. And over the next two months, as we lead into the Sermon of the Mount series in the first quarter, I believe it's going to be a very important time for us to look at parables of Yeshua, to look at the early part of Yeshua's ministry, and to remind ourself, you know, there's 3.8 billion probably a little bit different Christians in the world that are focusing this month alone on Jesus, and we're going to do the same thing.

But rather than focusing on just the birth of the King, we're going to focus on who the King was, the emotions of the king. Not all emotions are bad. The emotions of the king, the thoughts of the king, the actions of the King. And we're going to analyze what he said and how he did it, and we're going to look at it. And my prayer is, is that each and every one of us who is all at a different point of our journey with the Lord, that the Lord will absolutely wreck your heart.

That was my prayer, so if it happens, you can thank me and yell at me later. That was the verbiage, wreck their heart. And the reason why is because this week the Lord wrecked my heart. I've never wept during sermon prep before. There's times where I've sat in silence.

There's times where I've fasted, There's times where I've rejoiced. I've had a wide range of emotions, but. But crying uncontrollably is not one. Anybody who has known me for any period of time, and there's some in this room who've known me 10 plus years, crying is not a thing I do. I think I could have counted maybe four or five times where I had cried in the previous 10 years, and yet I could not stop crying over and over and over again, continuously while I was writing this message this week.

It was the point where literally I was like, I might need to call the doctor because maybe my testosterone levels are low. There might be something medically wrong with me. And I realized it wasn't because there wasn't sorrow in my heart. I wasn't sad. It wasn't like there was this overwhelming joy.

And so it was just bursting forth from me. There was an overwhelming sense of peace. Again, anybody who's known me for a long period of time, Lauren, we go back a long time. Peace is not a word, not an adjective that people would use to describe me. I am a mover.

Isabel, I can see you smiling at that. I see you smiling. I see it all the way back there in the back. You think I can't see. I can see.

I saw you smile with that. But she's not wrong. Peace is not something that people would have put with me. I'm a go getter. I'm a type A.

I get up in the morning, I want to solve all the problems. I want to do all the things, and I want to do it very, very quick. It's hard for me to sit and be quiet. I've only met one person in my life who is more driven than me, and that's Riley Peterson. I don't even know how that guy does it, but that's a similar nature to where it's like, we want to get things done, we want to make things go good.

And yet there was this overwhelming peace. As I sat in my room and I wrote these notes and I was going through the sermon and I was reminded, imagine a time in your life. For me, it was roughly. I think it was 13 years old. But imagine back to a time in your life, hopefully you've had one where love and peace and joy, they were just bursting out of you at the seams.

For me, that time was when I was in a small Nazarene church at the age of roughly 13. They had dirty maroon carpet. It's where I gave my life to the Lord. But love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self control, gentleness, they were bursting out of me. I could fall on my face on a Wednesday Night youth group.

And I could sing back in those days, man, they don't even make music like this anymore. But they were like, what would Jesus do working in our schools? And then they made a bracelet with it and like a whole marketing campaign. And then somebody was like, people, get ready. Jesus is coming soon.

We'll be coming home. And I'm like, just slobbering. 13 years old on my face. I wasn't playing Minecraft. I didn't have no social media profile.

I wasn't an influencer. This is the days before cell phones. Yes, we had pagers, but I was sitting there bursting forth every Wednesday night. It wasn't like, oh, I felt the Lord once or twice. It would burst out of me and I'd go home and I put the eight track in, or I put the vinyl in, or I'd put the tape.

I had. I was all generations. No joke. I was all generations. I had all of them.

Some of my kids are like, what's an eight track? It's like, don't do drugs, kids. But I would go home and I would do that. And then I know this is not a Christian song, but I didn't know. But then I put Belinda Carlisle on, and I'd be bursting with joy.

Heaven is a place on earth. Yes, let's go, Lord. Like, not exactly what she meant, but I would be on fire for the Lord.

Remember back to those times. Hopefully you have one where there was an overwhelming emotion inside of you. And I'm not talking because you lost a loved one. I'm not talking because you saw somebody for the first time. Kids, I'm not talking about when your parents came home with your puppy or whatever it was.

I'm talking about with the Lord where when you came to Saturday church or Wednesday church or youth groups or whatever gatherings, you couldn't wait to go. Your Apple calendar revolved around those times, not fitting those times into everything else. I remember that, and it was brought back to me this week. Yet the older I got, the more those moments seemed to decrease.

The emotions of love and joy and excitement for the Lord were replaced with anger, anxiousness, fear. Is my production equal to the expectation? And really, this comes in almost every area of our life. We could say, is my production in our financial side equal to the expectation of xyz, my boss, my spouse, my parents, my brother, the church, whatever. Yet there's a real problem.

In all that time span, many people considered me to be a religious leader, a teacher or pastor. Different titles and different roles and different things. I was working in full time ministry.

Some of you don't have that blessing or that benefit. Some of you work in an environment with people who despise God.

I worked in an environment where everybody should have loved God. I mean, after all, you work for God and with people who are supposed to work for God. Then why was emotional distress bursting from me? Why was fear and anxiousness and anxiety? Why when I would go into the office, why would I have this weight of what conversation is coming next?

I know some people in this room probably go into your marketplace job and you have a colleague like that. When you see your colleague come through the door, it's like, not today, Tim.

But that's not supposed to happen in your home and that's definitely not supposed to happen in your church. And that's definitely not supposed to happen when every person is being employed to work for the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. When the things that are bursting out of your earthly vessel, when your face and your eyes and your lips and your body cannot contain anger or fear or distress, it tells me that the Holy Spirit was not present inside of me. And that's not a secret for a lot of the people in this room because I had to repent the last time I went on a sabbatical for being a horrible pastor for the previous seven years, for operating as a shepherd from more of an executive space than as a pastoral space, Putting more of an emphasis on operations and logistics than I did on your mental health, your emotional health, your spiritual health. That's not on anybody else.

That was on me. I was responsible for that. And three years ago I started this journey. I started asking myself the question, started asking the Lord the question, why was there a 13 year old boy whose parents said I could go to whatever church I wanted? And so I chose to go to this tiny little Nazarene church with my best friend while they went to el super large church.

Why did this 13 year old boy going from being in a place where he was so sold out, so on fire, so filled with the fruit of the Holy Spirit, to being a 20, 30 year old man who worked in full time ministry, whose fruit of the Spirit was the fruit of the adversary, not of the Lord. How did I get here, Lord? What happened?

Little concern. How did I lose that guy or gal? How did you lose that? It says that as we look through the progression of the scripture that we are to grow more like Christ. And it seems to me I did the opposite.

So why, Lord, how? Those were all questions I was asking When I counseled, called and talked to all the ministry leaders that I worked cooperatively with, and I did, I was very fortunate. I got to talk to those people who have 200,000 subscribers on YouTube and do these broadcasts. I got to talk to them face to face. I had them on speed dial.

I got to talk to them. And so I asked for counsel. I was seeking, I was knocking, looking for a door to be opened unto me. And yet nothing led me out of the wilderness of my life. Nothing led me out of that time.

None of the counsel, none of the scripture verses, none of the this too shall pass.

Because the reality is that the Lord wanted me in that wilderness so that I could be molded and made into the image. He didn't take the Israelites into the wilderness so that they could die there. A lot of them made their choice that they were going to die there and not enter the promised land. He took them there to make them more like him. And so he took me into this wilderness time to make me more like him and less like me.

Which is a good thing because somewhere along the line of like 13 to 35, I lost the good parts of me. I kind of need to find those. Well, obviously, I don't know where to look because I obviously didn't intentionally decide to wake up one morning and be like, hey, I want to replace my love and my joy with fear or anxiety wasn't a calculated effort. I didn't have it on my task list, on my iPad. It just kind of worked out that way.

But I believe this wilderness season of my life is coming to an end. I've cried more this week than I probably did as a nursing baby. My mom said I came out stubborn and I embraced every second of it. And I will embrace every second of it as it comes in the future. Because the overwhelming power, presence, grace and majesty of God was present in the room with me while I was writing that sermon.

It was present with me while I was smoking my cigar in the ocean. And that feeling is better than anything in this world. Been a long time since I have felt it. There were some glimmers over the last couple of years, but this thing came rushing in like Tropical Storm Sarah on my weekend in Florida. Thank you, Sarah.

I appreciate you.

But I was an old wineskin. I'd become brittle, lacking in wine to fill me up and to keep me pliable.

After all, everybody knows that the old wine is better. I'm going to go buy a six dollar bottle of white Zinfandel from Sutter Home and It's not going to Compare to a 1928 Zinfandel. I don't know, Vicki, you're from California, you tell me. I read it online that the older wine is better. And so when you have older wine, a lot of times they're older.

I'm a bourbon guy, so I like to hold on to bourbon. You hold onto it, because the older the age, the better it is. How funny. Our culture is opposite of Jesus culture. See, as wine is put into a wineskin, as bourbon is put into a barrel, whatever you want to do, it expands, it ferments, and as that happens, it causes the wineskin to grow with it.

So why wasn't I expanding? I mean, 17 years into serving the Lord. I keep Torah, I do all of these things. Why wasn't I expanding? Why wasn't I growing?

It seemed, if anything, I was shrinking backwards. I was becoming more brittle.

So why wasn't I growing?

Some of you in this room, you have loved the Lord for 20, 30 years. Some of you, we baptized this year. Some of you have been walking in a full Bible, Hebrew, passionate element of Christianity for many, many years. 17, almost 18 years for me and my wife. Some of you, this is brand new to you.

You don't even know what that is. You showed up here thinking you were going to get Brent, and you got some young guy with a man bun.

Each one of us has old wine inside of us. Each one of us has a portion of our previous life. Each one of us has a portion of our legalistic self. Each one of us has a portion of old wine in us.

And here's what I believe.

I expected the Lord to outpour his presence, his holy spirit, and to put new wine in me. And yet I was still holding onto the old wine in my wineskin, if you will. If you have your Bibles, if you have your apps, if you memorize the entire gospel. Luke, chapter 5, 33. And they said to him, the disciples of John fast and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees.

But yours eat and drink. And Jesus said to them, can you make a wedding guest fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days. And then he told them a parable. No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment.

If he does, he will tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into an old wineskin if he does, the new wine will burst the skin and it will be spilled and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires the new, for he says the old is good. There's multiple accounts of this interaction with Jesus in the Bible.

I chose Luke's one because I like Luke's literary style. But also that last line does not appear in the other Gospel accounts. And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says the old is good. It's kind of like you find a restaurant. I know this restaurant has the best tacos.

Well, I call you and say, hey, let's go to dinner. So awesome. What do you want? I'm always down for a street taco. So I say tacos and you say Taco Tuesday.

And so we're getting ready to go and I say, I found this new place. They're like, oh, I really like to go over here. Why? Because what you've eaten, you know, is solid. There is a risk with something you do not know there's a risk.

So when we're looking at Luke's account of the gospel here we were talking to Jewish believers in the first century that had strayed somewhat. There's an argument over to what degree strayed from the original teachings of Moses, the teachings of David in the Torah, the applications through Haggai and some of the other prophets and that. And they had strayed to a time where the Pharisaical leadership was taking the seat of Moses as the religious leaders of the dead. In comes baby Jesus, grows into infant Jesus, into toddler, Jesus into little boy. Jesus gets left at the temple and says a little antagonistic to his parents, like, I think y'all need to leave me here, I'm good.

But he goes home, he obeys, probably got a spanking and grew up to be the king of the Jews. And he's saying here to Luke, no one after drinking old wine desires new. He's not talking about old wine. They didn't go get the 1928 bottle here. This is a parable that leads to something.

But if we have old wine, it's fermented, it tastes better. Jacob's made some amazing well done steak with still not sure how that happens, but it is a miracle. And you do it and you're sitting down and you know it's good, you know what you're going to get. And he says, nobody wants the new wine after drinking the old wine because the old wine is good. Jesus at the start of his ministry.

Before we get to this, in Luke 27:32, a little context. At the start of his ministry, he calls a tax collector. The tax collector immediately says, hey, Stephen and Lesha, I'm having this dude over tonight. You guys should come with me. Hey, Castellanos.

Hey, I'm having this dude over. Like, he's super cool, what he's doing right here, like, I don't even understand it, but it's something different about him. You should come over for dinner. Hey, Ava, you should come over for dinner tonight. He starts inviting all of his tax collector friends, and it says that they threw a feast.

It's not a Leviticus 23 feast, but it was a feast. And at that feast, there was something really interesting that popped off the page for me. It says that they were reclining at the table. See, this is not a feast that the first century rabbis would have attended. They wouldn't have attended it.

The Pharisees were the righteous ones. They were the so called Zaddik. They wouldn't have been sitting at a tax collector's table. They wouldn't have been sitting with a hippie. Those people were beneath them.

You don't do that.

And yet here's Yeshua of Nazareth reclining at a table with a bunch of them. And the Pharisees and the scribes and John's disciples, they're all kind of gathering around. Maybe they walked and they saw the window and they were like, what's that dude doing with those dudes? But either way, there's an antagonism that's happening here.

There's only two times historically in the first century that people would be reclining at a table. One is Greek and one is Hebrew.

This is Passover language. Ah, Chris, man, this can't be Passover. We're only in Luke chapter three. We're not in the end of the Epistle of Luke. You're right, it is not Passover.

Passover comes later in the Gospel accounts. This is early on in Jesus ministry, but it's definitely Passover language. Passover is the only Hebrew feast where you would eat reclining. What is Passover? It is a feast of freedom.

That's why you recline. You can be at ease, not anxious, because the Lord is going to fight your battles. Everybody in that room knew this. Like, we, okay, so like, we get together and we talk about all these cool things that happen. Like, hey, do you remember the time where 9, 11 happened?

There's all these markers in life. One of the greatest markers of the Hebrew culture of all time is when God took out the Egyptians in a body of water, kind of a showstopper. They didn't even realize what they were going to see afterwards. They saw pillars of fire, they saw clouds of dust, they heard Yahweh talk from the mountaintop. All kinds of really cool things were to come.

But one of the things they saw, one of the pillars of the Hebrew culture in the history of the Hebrews was that their enemies were coming to kill them and a sea gobbled them up.

I'm guessing the Egyptians did not do infant swim lessons because the chariots and everything went to the bottom of the sea. Horse and rider thrown into the sea. Oh, Passover language. The other possibility is Greek language, Greek symposiums. Now why do I say that?

Because we all study history. And when you study history, you know that Hellenized Greek influence happened to kind of spill into the first century of Judaism. It wasn't this locked down. There was, there was, there was a whole element of Hellenized Greeks. And the Jews saw that and they were Hellenized Jews and they said, oh, hey, we should do this or whatever.

And one of the things that had become a part of some of the culture, culture in the 1st century of Judaism was Greek symposiums. Greek symposiums had banquets and at the banquets the person of honor would eat reclining. Now whether they stole that from the Jews in Passover or whatever, who knows. But again, some interesting symbolism that the seat of honor, they would eat reclined. Whether it was a king or whether it was a very well known person, it was a seat of honor and they would recline.

So either way, either way, there's some serious symbolism of royalty and freedom. In the Gospel of Luke, in the Gospel of Mark and in the Gospel of John's accounts of this interaction with Jesus and the Pharisees and the scribes, there's some real freedom language and symbology here. And it might take us a little bit to see it, but I promise you they knew that was their culture, that was their time. They were close to the Pesach season. It wasn't Pesach, but it was close.

They knew some sort of symbolism was being shown here to them. And that symbolism was either freedom, I'm here, I'm going to set you free, or that they were all kings with him. Either way, this would be like going into the south part of Oklahoma City to one of the worst places that's only open till about 4am in the morning and throwing a banquet. That's what this is like the tax collectors were the lowest of the low. They were not liked.

And Jesus is dining and symbolizing a Passover motif and a motif of kings and freedom with the sinners, not with the Pharisees. Okay, the Pharisees, maybe they were booked. Maybe it was going to take another month to get on their calendar. But the Sadducees weren't available. What about the Essenes?

Everybody's got a love for the Essenes now. What about the Essenes? No, he went to the group of people that nobody gave any love to, nobody gave any credit to, nobody would waste their time. Think of the beggars and the homeless people and all these people, the sinners who were outside the temple, who people would, the zadik would come every day and walk past them. They knew who they were.

They knew that person had leprosy. They knew that person was an adulteress. They knew that person was skimming money off the top. They knew all of those things.

And Jesus is dining with them in what appears to be symbolism of freedom.

Then Jesus says, I have not come to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance.

Man, I love the Christmas season because we get to think of a mighty king as a baby boy. And yes, I understand theoretically, probably tabernacles. That's why I listen to it. From tabernacles till the end of the year, I'm just covering all calendars. But I like to think of the baby boy because that was revolutionary.

But that baby boy got aggressive. And that baby boy wasn't all mild manner. He gets aggressive in this statement. The Pharisees and the scribes were considered to be the righteous. And they're in the room with the filthiest of people.

And he goes, I didn't come to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance. He did not differentiate between the Pharisees, the scribes, or the sinners in the room. I came to call the sinners to repentance. He lumped all of them together. That's an aggressive statement.

Those are fighting words. That's a gut punch to self righteous people.

They considered themselves to be righteous. Yet Jesus did not throw categories. He said, all are sinners and have called you all to repentance.

His call was not to nullify some oath or to debate on the nuance of a commandment. It wasn't to do any of that, but to repent.

And here you thought I was going to come back with some sort of like feel good message. Now that we're in the end of the year fundraiser. This is the best message you can ever have to feel good. Because everything changed the moment Jesus said, hey, look, there's a way out. Repent.

The kingdom of God is at hand. It's better than any Lamborghini in a cop car. Elias.

This is the stage for the Wineskins parable. This is what was happening in that room, in that space. The old isn't what's happening here, boys and girls. It doesn't matter what you think about your righteousness or about your Torah observance or your feast observance. It doesn't matter how righteous and holy you think you are, how good you think you're doing it, if you are not experiencing and witnessing God's power, presence and majesty in your present life, your present circumstances right in front of you.

The last thing you need to do is to go back to your old wine.

It's multiple times throughout the interactions with the religious leaders where Jesus says, why do you keep looking over there when I'm right here?

Guys, we have a tendency to do this. I just wish our Thanksgiving could go back to what it was like in 2013. 2013 was so good.

Pack it up, boys and girls. Go home. Don't ever come to Thanksgiving again. 2013 was as good as it gets. We can't do anything different.

So you're telling me that Jesus Christ came and took on flesh? He died, or he gave his life in a manger, died on a cross, resurrected, outpoured his Holy Spirit so that the best we could have ever had was at Sinai, or the best we could have ever had was at 2013, or it was in October of 2015. I don't believe that. Hogwash.

If you're holding on to the old wine and what's happening behind you and you're not looking for Jesus in front of you, you've got the wrong God.

And I can say that guilty Jesus says we need to repent through repentance, there's this transition period. I've repented before the Lord. The moment I repent before the Lord, that doesn't mean that I stop my alcoholism or I stop my greediness. No, there's a period of time where you're walking in a practice of abstinence. The Lord can reinstill through his Holy Spirit, deliverance in you.

You cannot deliver yourself, but you can't abstain yourself. That is our part in it. Through repentance, there's a transition period where Jesus says, I will take your sickness, I will take your infirmities. I Will take your sin and I will heal you.

This isn't every other week or every other month. I gotta bring the same turtle dove. I gotta bring the same cow. I gotta do. Has he forgiven me?

Has he forgiven me? Has he says I will do this. I will do this.

A wineskin is pliable. It stretches, it's moist, it's flexible, it's filled with wine and it expands. The wine ferments and it ages. And as the wine is poured out of the wine skin, it becomes brittle, hard and it shrinks back down.

How many of you have seen an 80 or a 90 year old person who looks like they're in the prime of their life? An Arnold Schwarzenegger, like Ein Boff? Like even some of the greatest, biggest, bulkiest people, as they get older, shrink, their muscles get weaker.

There's a few anomalies out there, but most of them have really good plastic surgeons.

We are the wineskins.

Jesus was not trying to teach these people how to ferment wine. They already knew what they were doing. This is Israel. If you've ever had any Israeli wine, it's pretty decent now. I've never been to Israel, but I do like it when people bring me Israeli wine and I'm not even a wine guy.

But we're the wineskins. As we get older, our human bodies, they break down, they cut easier.

Where the wineskins. So how do you recondition a wineskin? This was not where I was going with this message this week, but this is where the Lord wanted me to go. You have to drain out all the old wine. If there's any old wine that's left in the wineskin, it will contaminate the new batch.

So you have to completely drain it out. You can't have old wine in there. You've got to be emptied and poured out. Once it's empty and poured out, then you submerge it in water.

I'm just going to let this one marinate for a second. I'm going to submerge you in his presence. You submerge it in water. Once you submerge it in water, you have to pour and fill the interior compartment with oil. And then you have to massage oil and anoint the exterior of the skin with the oil, massage it in and out.

And this is a process. It doesn't happen overnight. It is a process that takes time. But once that is done, you pour the oil out and the wineskin has been reconditioned from an old brittle wineskin. To be able to be receiving of New wine.

Jesus says, no one puts new wine in old wineskins. Why? If a wineskin has not been reconditioned, it is brittle. And when you pour the new wine in, it will ferment and it will bust the skin. And both the wine and the skin are destroyed.

You have nothing.

You cannot put new wine in an old wineskin unless the old wineskin has been reconditioned. Jesus says, you must repent. You must pour out the old wine of your flesh. You must go into the water and be baptized or submerged. Then I will anoint you with oil.

The 23rd Psalm tells us that he anoints our head with oil. The oil is the power of His Holy Spirit. The oil in the feast of Dedication, even though it is said to have not been able to be documented and that it's a myth, the oil of the Menorah that lasted for eight days, that was him. That was his presence. That was his spirit.

That was him who allowed that oil to happen. It was him. We must be anointed and filled with the oil of the Lord, the Holy Spirit. Guys, you're the wineskins.

I am a wineskin. You're the ones being reconditioned. Just like Jesus came to give these people an opportunity.

You wouldn't be at this banquet. You wouldn't be here talking to these people. You wouldn't even heal them. You wouldn't even waste your time on them. I'm here to recondition you so I can fill you with my spirit.

And I'm not going to put my new wine in your old wine skin.

Jesus knew the hearts of men. He knew your heart in this room. He knew whatever your old wine was that you would want to hold on to that. That's safe. It's better, it's safer for me to understand that if I cease from my work at 4pm on Friday and I don't work again until 4pm on Saturday, I'm safe.

I'll figure out how to wrestle with that whole Jesus is my Sabbath thing later on. But I kept the Sabbath. It's a whole lot easier for me to say, you know, what If I bring two turtle doves at 3pm on this day and I give it, I can absolve myself versus looking in the mirror in the morning and saying, you know, I repented of it, but you know, I turned right around and did it last night. You ain't fooling anybody, you know, you're not even fooling yourself. So why do you think you're fooling the Lord?

Everybody's got old wine. He's not going to allow you to have his power and his presence in you if you're holding onto your old wine. And don't you think that you can take his new wine and try to say, oh, it was like the old wine? Never in the history, the Bible never tells us in the future that there will ever be a time where God took on flesh and offered us a way back to the Lord. Spotless, through one act, one time cross.

Jesus went to aggressive lengths in these conversations with the most wisest, most knowledgeable teachers, leaders, influencers, to say, wrap it up, boys. Everything you know is here.

Everything you've been looking for, everything David told you about, everything Moses wanted you to participate with. Remember Moses? And the Lord wanted to come down and talk to the Israelites. And they were like, man, you go up and see me. This time.

God said, no, I'm not giving you an option. I'm coming down to see you. And he came. That's not old, that's new.

I'm your father. I'm your savior, I'm your provider. I'm Mashiach. I've come. I must recondition you.

You are hard, you are brittle, and you are on the verge of bursting and being destroyed. And I've come to recondition you.

I spend so much time this week crying because I had so much success in life with the old wine. Made a good salary, hundreds of thousands of people we influenced monthly, and yet I never felt the presence and I never saw the presence of the Lord in anything we did. I'm not going to say he wasn't. I'm going to say I didn't feel it and I didn't see it.

And I was crying this week because I didn't realize I was an old wineskin. And I didn't realize that the Lord had been trying for these past years to recondition me. And that every time he tried to dunk me in water, I tried to say, no, Lord, I'm cold. We're good. Every time he tried to anoint my head with oil or fill me with his power or his presence, I was like, oh, but, Lord, I gotta stop, you know, because Sabbath is coming.

Or, you know, the commandment says this.

There was literally nothing you could do. Not your father, not your mother, not your grandfather, not any line of any lineage. There was literally nothing you could do that could get you back to the Lord.

There was temporary things. There was foreshadows of things.

But I understand why the Israelites rebelled I understand why the Israelites struggled, because how long, Lord? How long? How long until you save us? How long until you put an end to this? How long till you stop the suffering?

How long, Lord? How long? How long until we get into the promised land? How long, Lord? How long until we get something other than manna, Lord?

How long? How long? How long?

We're very, very blessed. We live in a time, in an age where we have the inspired testimony of men who walked as apprentices of Jesus to tell us all these things. And I believe it's in the Gospel of John at the end where he basically. And then this is the Chris version. He basically says, and these are just a fraction of what Jesus did.

If we were to record everything he did, everything we saw, there wouldn't be enough paper and space on the entire globe to account for it.

We're the old wineskins. And we argue over whether Jesus had the right to do this as a high priest, or whether we should do this or we should do that, rather than falling on our knees and rejoicing over the fact that we even get an opportunity to talk to him, that we even get an opportunity to be in his presence, that he decided to leave his throne in the heavenly realm and come to talk to a wretch like me, ransomed captive Israel. He only came for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Yeah, it's true. And then he went to the cross and he sent out his apprentices for everybody.

He was the first military warrior to really say, my desire is no man left behind. It's not enough to come to the Sabbath church, or to come to Sunday church, or do your things and carry around your new wine. You might be okay right now, you might get through. But sooner or later, as that wine dries up, as that wine stales, interestingly enough, when you open the wine, I looked this up, and the wines are different. You have different berries and things.

But almost every wine that is open will go stale in one week. The other irony is most of your reds, not all your reds, start to actually become sour on the third day. I'm just saying three and seven. It's not like that's the Lord's numbers or anything like that. I spent so much time crying this week, Worship team, you can come back.

Because they didn't realize that I was holding on to that last little bit. I didn't realize that last little bit in that wineskin was going to be stale by the time I tasted it. And the Lord came in and he showed me this and it made a whole lot of sense to what the Lord's been doing in my heart, in my life.

You can't force the new covenant into the old covenant. The old covenant, which is with an S plural, whether it's David, Abraham, whether it's Noah, the multiple covenants that happen, those can build and foreshadow to the new covenant. But the new covenant was different. The new covenant was everlasting. There will be no other covenant in which we will be atoned by the blood of Messiah.

It's the new covenant. Moses, Abraham, Noah, Adam, they were all foreshadows of Jesus. Jesus is not a foreshadow of them. Jesus didn't come so that the moment we could be baptized and find salvation in the King, to turn into the pharisaical leadership that he was in opposition with at that point in time. No one puts new wine in old wineskins.

It's not like he said on this one instance, you can put new wine in old wine skins when xyz. He was aggressive and emphatic. New wine doesn't mix with old wine. Don't go into your cellar and get that sutter home and dump it into the 1928 bottle and try to fool somebody. It doesn't fool anybody.

They don't mix. New wine. Old wine don't mix. He came so that we could be new wineskins, baptized in the water, anointed by his oil, filled with the Holy Spirit so that we could burst forth with the fruit, his wine, to change the world.

Your salvation wasn't for you.

It was for somebody else. It was an opportunity for you to leave your old, come into the new and go minister the new to somebody else, to be Jesus to somebody else. I want to tell you, at this church, first and foremost, it starts in your home. You don't minister in this church in any capacity unless your home's in order. Doesn't happen.

We're not going to have men and women standing on the stage who go home and abuse mentally, verbally, whatever. It's not going to happen. Not here. Jesus came to set free, not enslave.

But as a pastor of this church, if I realize this week that I had old wine in my old wineskin, then I'm betting that every person in this room has something that they're holding on to.

And sooner or later, if you don't pour that out, allow the Lord to submerge you in his water, to recondition you with his oil of His Holy Spirit and fill you with his new wine, you're not just hurting yourself, you're hurting your children, you're hurting this community and you're hurting every other person that you will engage with out there. This world doesn't need to know about the fact that Jesus was born at tabernacles. That's not in the top 10 right now. I say that because that's the season we're in. They need to know that as depression rises.

Thank you, Kim. As depression rises in the month of December, that I can't offer you a solution, but I can invite you to engage with someone who can give you a solution. That's Jesus Christ. Yeshua Hamashiach for the marriages that are broken during this season, for the families that cannot come together in this season, for all the people who are out there being self righteous, trying to put the new in with the old, this season God is about restoration. God is about healing.

And it starts through repentance. Maybe, just maybe, we need to repent from, distance ourselves from our family. Maybe, just maybe, we need to repent for that thing we hide in our closet. If Eminem can clean out his closet, how much more should the followers of Jesus?

If you want the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit in you, you have to first pour out that old wine. Maybe it's a lot, maybe it's a drop, but you cannot recondition the skin until it's poured out. And Jesus is trying to recondition each and every one of us in this season. And if he's reconditioning us in this season, that means he has a calling and a power and a presence and a majesty to send us in the next season. But as long as we keep holding onto that wine, he is not going to violate your free will.

The Lord came so that you could have life and life above abundantly.

I haven't seen a lot of that in the Torah Observant walk for many, many years.

So I'm making an adjustment. I've been making an adjustment. I'm just going to go a little bit harder this year than before. I love the tour and I'm not, not keeping the tour. It's not like today I'm going to go out and get a ham sandwich.

It's not what I do, but I'm going to be Jesus Observant. I'm going to be Jesus pursuant. I'm going to be Jesus roots that just came to me trademark that one Jesus Roots probably already taken because Jesus was a first century Jew and if I follow with my eyes on him, I think It's a lot harder to become like the Pharisees. When we start looking at the Pharisees and we start looking at the Sadducees and we start looking at 1st century Judaism and 2nd century Judaism and 7th century Judaism and all these things, we're looking at men. And I'm not saying that's wrong, because men are used and women are used to teach us.

But Brent said it in his message, you don't study the opposition. You studied the real deal. So I'm running after the cross harder than ever before this year. It's an invitation for you to run with me. I understand if that's not where you want to go, and that's totally fine.

No hard. No hard feelings. I'm not going to hate you. You're not going to get kicked out of this church. You might leave on your own.

But we are going to pursue Jesus and the cross harder than ever before this year because some of us have to pour out the old oil in order for the Lord to fill us with the new oil. Because until we're filled with the new oil, we don't have any power or any presence or any calling to actually do what he told us to do, which is to go preach the gospel to the lost. It's awesome that we can talk Hebrew and Greek in here, but he didn't command me to teach Hebrew or Greek. He didn't even command you to learn Hebrew and Greek, which is somewhat of a fallacy because they all spoke Hebrew at that time, or Aramaic or some element of it. I acknowledge my fallacy.

But there is a explicit commandment to go preach the gospel and make apprentices of Jesus. There's an explicit instruction to do that so we can become a church that's like, got all these people and we're like, yeah, we're doing great. We're doing great. Awesome. We know the Hebrew and the Greek and the Aramaic.

And I can say it backwards and forwards and can spell it and I can put it in pictures. I don't care. There are people who are going to sleep in sub frigid temperatures over the next 24 to 48 hours who need to feel the warmth and love of Jesus. And guess what? You know how I know?

Because I am not sleeping in frigid temperatures. And I felt a different warmth with Jesus over the last 30 days than I have in 42 and a half, Perry. The one years of my life.

We're gonna sing the song Make Room.

And I'm asking you to make room in your heart in your mind. I don't care how awesome your relationship is with God, it can be better. I'm asking you to talk to the Lord whether you do that on your knees, you do that sitting down, you do that standing up, you do that when you're driving to work. Whatever it is you're working out, whatever it is, I'm asking you to ask the Lord. Maybe you do this in your quiet time too, and you'll do it verbally, but I'm asking you to mentally ask the Lord, do I have any old wine that needs to be poured out that I need to put on the ground so that you can recondition me, you can fill me so that I can produce new wine?

The sermon on the go what are you going to go do? Tell somebody how to hold on to the old wine or fill them and show them how they can be filled by the new wine and the power and the presence of Jesus Christ. Yeshua ha Mashiach Stand with me and respond.