The Old Is Good Too

 Luke 5: 33-39

The Question about Fasting

³³ Then they said to him, “John’s disciples, like the disciples of the Pharisees, frequently fast and pray, but your disciples eat and drink.” ³⁴ Jesus said to them, “You cannot make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? ³⁵ The days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.” ³⁶ He also told them a parable: “No one tears a piece from a new garment and sews it on an old garment; otherwise the new will be torn, and the piece from the new will not match the old. ³⁷ And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. ³⁸ But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. ³⁹ And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, ‘The old is good.’”

Not everything "new" is necessarily better than the old, and as Jesus also points out, to mingle the old with the new doesn't always work. How interesting it is to see that the new wine in the new wineskins doesn't make it better, and that the old, time-tasted and aged with with experience is preferable.  Careful "tasting" must go on, lest we fall prey to every new fad or fashion. If we look at the results of "relaxed" or, in some cases, "non" standards we see that often enough the "old" standards make more sense for stability and continuity than the new. Prayerful discernment is necessary lest we fall into the error that "anything goes".  Let us not be too hasty in patching the old with the new, nor mingling new standards with those that have survived the test of time. We might discover that the "old" are refreshingly new and make more sense than the untested new.

Bro. Rene