New Wine

October 30

Others mocking said, “They are full of new wine.” — Acts 2:13

Scripture reading: Acts 2:13–41

This new wine has a freshness about it! It has a beauty about it! It has a quality about it! It creates in others the desire for the same taste. At Pentecost, some saw, but three thousand felt, tasted, and enjoyed. Some looked on; others drunk with a new faith never before seen—a new manifestation, a new realization all divine, a new thing. It came straight from heaven, from the throne of the glorified Lord. It is God‘s purpose to fill us with that wine, to make us ready to burst forth with new rivers, with fresh energy, with no tired feeling.

God manifested in the flesh—this is what we want, and it is what God wants. All the people said, “We have never seen anything like it.” (See Acts 2:7–12.) The disciples rejoiced in its being new; others were “cut to the heart, [crying out] to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Men and brethren, what shall we do?’” (v. 37).

What shall we do? Believe! Stretch out! Press on! Let there be a new entering in, a new passion to have it. We must be beside ourselves; we must drink deeply of the new wine so that multitudes may be satisfied and find satisfaction too.

The new wine must have a new wineskin—that is the necessity of a new vessel. (See Matthew 9:17.) If anything of the old is left, not put to death, destroyed, there will be a tearing and a breaking. The new wine and the old vessel will not work in harmony. It must be new wine and a new wineskin. Then there will be nothing to discard when Jesus comes.

For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17)

The Spirit is continually working within us to change us until the day when we will be like Him:

[The Lord Jesus Christ] will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself. (Philippians 3:21)

I desire that all of you be so filled with the Spirit, so hungry, so thirsty, that nothing will satisfy you but seeing Jesus. We are to get more thirsty every day, more dry every day, until the floods come and the Master passes by, ministering to us and through us the same life, the same inspiration, so that “as He is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17).

When Jesus became the sacrifice for man, He was in great distress, but it was accomplished. It meant “vehement cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7); it meant the cross manward but the glory heavenward. Glory descending on a cross! Truly, “great is the mystery of godliness” (1 Timothy 3:16). He cried, “It is finished!” (John 19:30). Let the cry never be stopped until the heart of Jesus is satisfied, until His plan for humanity is reached in the sons of God being manifested (Romans 8:19) and in the earth being “filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14). Amen. Amen. Amen.

Thought for today: Our end is God‘s beginning.