Jesus Makes All Things New

[0:00] 33 in the church Bibles. They said to him, John's disciples often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees. But yours go on eating and drinking.

[0:19] Jesus answered, can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and in those days they will fast.

[0:35] He told them this parable, no one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one, otherwise they will have torn a new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old.

[0:51] And no one pours new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out, and the wineskins will be ruined.

[1:03] No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins, and no one after drinking old wine wants a new, for they say the old is better.

[1:14] Great, thanks Jack for reading there. Thanks Rob for leading. What a joyous evening. Well done for being here on a particularly chilly Glasgow evening. Just a quick notice for the church family, slightly unscheduled, but Dennis Bovey, a long time standing member of our evening service, and a faithful prayer warrior on Wednesday mornings, has his 90th birthday tomorrow.

[1:39] So, Dennis, if you shake your hand there, do chat to Dennis afterwards. Round of applause. And then let me pray for us as we start and pray for Dennis.

[1:52] So, Father, we thank you for the great big family that we are. We thank you for old and young alike. We thank you for old timers and new folk, Father. And we thank you for Dennis.

[2:03] We thank you for all his service and all his prayers for us, all his care and attention. And please speak to us now through this word. this evening. Amen. Great.

[2:15] Well, let me ask you, how do you feel about change? How do you feel about the new? And we're in that season where we have to contemplate the change and the new.

[2:29] We're heading into an election. An election's really a chance for you to either choose something new, to opt for change, or to leave things as they are.

[2:43] And the Christian life is really all about change. It's all about being changed. And at the heart of this passage tonight that we heard read by Jack, Jesus is announcing that he has come to bring change.

[3:00] That he has come to bring about something new. And that's really the point of our talk this morning. So it's a one-point talk this evening even that Jesus has come to bring about something new.

[3:16] I'll just remind you of the context in Luke if you haven't been with us before. Jesus has just announced his great election manifesto in chapter 4 verses 18 and 19.

[3:28] I'll read that for us. You can turn back one page. The Spirit of the Lord is on me in verse 18. Jesus says, Because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

[3:39] He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind. To set the oppressed free and to proclaim the year of the law's favor.

[3:52] And it really is. They really are some glorious promises by Jesus aren't they? I wonder if you noticed this NHS top trump there. What does he say?

[4:03] Recovery of sight for the blind. For those who are blind. That's the kind of promise that politicians would love to make. Jesus says, I can do it. And then he goes on to say that he has come to proclaim good news to the poor.

[4:20] The poor there, although he may mean financially poor, but he's particularly speaking about people who are spiritually poor, people who need their sins forgiven, people who need change, who need to be made new.

[4:43] And so up to where we reach in our reading this evening, we see a bunch of most unlikely people being made new. we read of a man being healed of leprosy.

[4:55] Then we read of a man who's had an impure spirit taken out. And then we read of a paralyzed man, someone who is spiritually poor, who has his sins forgiven in chapter 5, verse 24 there.

[5:14] Well, it's one thing for Jesus to change and forgive a paralyzed man's sins, but Luke, the author anticipates our objection there, and that is how many sins can a paralyzed man really do?

[5:30] He's paralyzed. Come on, Jesus, if you are promising change, if you are going to make us new, why, let's give you a real challenge, let's give you a real sinner to make new and change.

[5:45] And so if you imagine the worst kind of sinner that you can today, someone who's completely ostracized and outside the community, that's who we meet in the next story of Jesus healing, of Jesus calling the tax collector.

[6:02] And they were on the complete outside of society at that time. And what do we read? Jesus calls him in verse 27 of chapter 5. chapter 5.

[6:14] Jesus says, follow him. And then we read that glorious verse, 28, that Levi, the tax collector, got up, he left everything, and he followed Jesus.

[6:26] So Jesus can change even the worst of us. And my dad, he was a criminal lawyer in South Africa, and he dealt a lot with tribal violence.

[6:37] And I remember his mantra from when I was absolutely knee-high to a grasshopper, high, and his thing was people never change. They always remain the same from everything he'd seen.

[6:48] That's what he said. But Jesus says he can change people. He can make them new. And so Jesus restates his election manifesto in the verse immediate before our section tonight, verse 32.

[7:03] I have come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. And the righteous there, they really, they were like the religious elite of those days.

[7:16] They were perhaps Pharisees and scribes, maybe vicars, maybe folk who speak up the front, the holy men, as it were. But the righteous there, how Jesus used it, might include any of us here tonight who think we can be right with God, not on his mercy, but how we behave and what we do.

[7:42] And it might include any of us. So recently I've been watching Prime Suspect. It's a bit of a legal drama. It's a bit dated now, early 90s. Anyone know?

[7:53] Maybe. And I love it because I grew up in the 90s. And so it's a bit of nostalgia TV for me. It's filled with bad 90s dress scents, Nokia 91 10s, the original one, not the re-released one that was released quite recently, Nokia.

[8:08] And Ford Capris, if you know your cars, the Mustang of Europe. No nods, yes, maybe, right? And it's a bit of a gritty drama. And the star of the show, Helen Mirren, interviews this bad guy in the show.

[8:21] And it's a really bad, bad person. They're someone who's abused children. And this person says, well, he's speaking about another abuser.

[8:33] And he says, well, at least I'm not like them. They're a really bad person. I don't do the kind of things that they do. And you can see what the character's saying. He's saying, at least I'm not like them.

[8:45] I don't need to change. I am a righteous person. But at the heart of the Christian life, the heart of the Christian gospel, is change and admitting that we need it.

[9:00] at the heart of this passage this evening is Jesus saying that he has come to bring about change and to make things new.

[9:11] Our passage starts with the righteous of Jesus' day. That's the Pharisees and the scribes criticizing Jesus for his disciples' behavior in verse 33.

[9:24] I wonder if you've closed your Bibles. You might just look down with me there. Open them up and look down. They said to him, John's disciples often fast and pray and so do the disciples of the Pharisees.

[9:35] But yours, they go on eating and drinking. And they're criticizing Jesus and his disciples for their behavior. And you can see why.

[9:45] Because, well, Jesus' disciples are doing something new, something out of the ordinary. They're eating and drinking. Everyone else was fasting and praying.

[9:59] Jesus' disciples, they were challenging the status quo. And they weren't doing what everyone else was doing, fasting and praying.

[10:09] And why do they criticize them? Why do the righteous criticize Jesus and his disciples? Well, in one sense they are challenging the status quo. And the new always brings a challenge, doesn't it?

[10:22] The Pharisees in those days they had life good. They didn't like change. They didn't want to be challenged. But in another sense they're the righteous. They are confident in being right with God by what they do.

[10:38] All their fasting and praying and religious observances, going to synagogue, going to church, and getting others to do the same. right with God.

[10:51] They did not believe in God. And so what did they do? They criticized Jesus and his disciples. And Jesus' disciples here, they're feasting, they're eating and drinking because they know that they are sinners.

[11:06] And they know that no amount of things that they do, no religious observance, no fasting or praying are going to make them right with God.

[11:17] They need something new. They need to be changed. And in Jesus they had a new way to be right with God. Not a judge who would reward them according to how they behave, but a savior who would in God's mercy forgive their sins.

[11:39] And then the passage goes, then Jesus goes on to describe that promised savior in a new way, in a way that's never before seen in the Christian scriptures, in the Bible, in the Old Testament.

[11:52] And Luke does that because he wants to make the point here that Jesus is doing something new and he describes Jesus as a bridegroom. So I'll just, verse 34, can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while he is with them?

[12:13] And weddings really are fantastic things. We had some great weddings here last summer. I can see some nods. A lot of you would have been up there, some good keilies, some good abundance of feasts, abundance of beef if I remember correctly.

[12:27] I went to a wedding last summer, it was brilliant. My friend, he was an old banker and so he had tons of red wine there. It was an amazing wedding, tons of cheese, amazing food.

[12:39] And the best bit about the wedding was after the wedding, we went back to the bridegroom's house. He had given the keys to his best man and the best man wandered down into the cellar and started getting out all the really good plonk.

[12:54] And it was just an amazing wedding, an amazing feast. And you see, a wedding is a picture of what it's like to be in the presence of God's Savior, to be with Jesus.

[13:07] And we remember the wedding in Cana in Galilee, and how he supplied an abundance of wine. And then we think of all the funerals that Jesus ruined.

[13:19] We think of how he raised a little girl, Talitakume, and how much the people then would have rejoiced. And then in Luke's gospel, we've seen throughout it Jesus' disciples eating and drinking.

[13:34] Luke's gospel is really a collection of feasts with Jesus. Jesus. And then we think of the final great picture of what heaven's going to be like, a marriage supper in Jesus' presence.

[13:48] And Jesus can do all of this because he is bringing about something new. And then Jesus goes on to tell them of when the righteous, the righteous there, will take away the bridegroom.

[14:04] They will take away Jesus and they will crucify him because they hate the new and they love the old. So verse 35, but the time will come when their bridegroom will be taken away from them and in those days they will fast.

[14:22] And in those days, Jesus says, is the time when the only true righteous person who has ever lived in history, Jesus, is murdered and crucified.

[14:35] And at that time, then his disciples fasted. And they fasted not to be right with God, but to mourn their sins, how they abandoned Jesus on the cross, and to mourn their Savior's death, and to pray that he had returned.

[14:55] In a sense, verse 35 is a bit of a shock. If you can imagine going to a wedding and in the midst of a wedding, the bridegroom is carried out and taken to prison and executed, that would be a great shock to you, wouldn't it?

[15:08] It would be absolutely shocking. A couple of years ago, my friend tells the story of his brother, and his brother got married, a glorious wedding, and they went on honeymoon to Mozambique, and it wasn't the commercial part of Mozambique, it was the northern part of Mozambique, the part of Mozambique that you can only get to by driving south from Kenya.

[15:31] Crystal white beaches, no roads, elephants, lions on the beach, beautiful. And they were driving around in their 4x4, and the 4x4 slipped, tipped over, and the bride, first week of her honeymoon, had died at the time.

[15:49] And it's a dreadful tragedy. It's horrendous. And it reminds us of that verse that we read in Joel last week, in Root Studies, of how we mourn like a virgin in sackcloth, grieving for the betrothed of her youth.

[16:08] And that really is a picture of us mourning our sin, of us mourning our rejecting our Savior and God as sinners.

[16:19] sinners. But Jesus says here that he has come to bring something new in the midst of that great sadness.

[16:29] And then he goes on to tell a parable starting in verse 36 of how the new is not accepted by the old.

[16:41] And the parable is really just three pictures there, each beginning with no one. I'll read it out there. So verse 36, no one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch up an old one.

[16:52] Otherwise they will torn the new garment and the patch from the new will not match the old. And then again, and no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise the new wine will burst the skins.

[17:05] The wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And then finally, and no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say the old.

[17:18] is better. And that last bit there, verse 39, of no one wanting to drink wine, the old one wants the new, for they say the old is better. That's really how old folk always look back to the old days and say those were the good days.

[17:33] You don't know what it's like. Those were the days. And it's not really saying that those days were particularly good, but it's saying they reject that's what is new.

[17:46] new. And here Jesus isn't commenting on the Old Testament, on the Old Covenant, but he's making a comment about the religious elite of his day who used the old as an excuse to reject the new, the new thing that God is doing and was doing then in Jesus, in his mercy.

[18:10] And the parable there, verse 36, is really just an unpacking of that verse 35 that speaks of the bridegroom being taken away.

[18:22] Jesus is trying to explain that, of why it is the religious elite and holy men of those days, the Pharisees and the scribes, reject the need, of why they reject the bridegroom and reject Jesus and have him taken away.

[18:42] So let me ask you, now this evening as you're sitting here, do you love the new or are you still trying to be right with God on the basis of your own best efforts, clinging to the old?

[18:58] So maybe you're sitting here tonight as someone who trusts Jesus as their Savior. Let me ask you, how do you need to change this week to live more in line with the new?

[19:13] What are the sins that you need to turn away from and mourn this week like a virgin mourns her betrothed being taken away?

[19:25] How do you need to be comforted and consoled that Jesus is making all things new? That he calls even the worst of us new and calls us to repentance?

[19:41] Maybe you're sitting here this evening tonight and all of this is quite new to you and then you might wonder how is it that I might change and accept this new thing that Jesus is doing as Savior in forgiving our sins?

[19:55] Well right at the end of Luke's gospel the resurrected Jesus after his crucifixion appears to his disciples and he summarizes the whole of the Bible in one line and I'll just read it chapter 24 verse 45 to 47 I'll just read it for us this is what it is written Jesus speaking here the Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead and the Messiah there is really Jesus speaking on himself on the third day and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations beginning in Jerusalem when he talks about repentance he literally means to change one's mind about everything to turn 180 degrees from the way that you're going and to walk the exact opposite way to acknowledge that you've been wrong that you cannot do it in your own strength you can't be right with God in your own efforts and to accept that you need to be changed that you need forgiveness and in that moment all the grief all the tears all the fears all the heartaches all the sorrows all the regrets that you've ever had in life will be washed away and you'll be made new in Jesus and welcomed into that great heavenly banquet that wedding feast as beloved and precious friends of the bridegroom let me close for us as we pray so father we thank you that you've sent Jesus to call us to be changed to bring in the new please help us to live in the light of that new thing each and every day amen amen confidence so let's go to