Verse of the Day for April 16

Jesus is being asked why his disciples do not fast like everybody else, and he answers with two pieces of household advice about cloth and wineskins.

No man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred.

The bottles are skins. A new skin is supple and stretches as fermentation produces gas; an old one has already stretched to its limit and hardened there.

So the problem is not that the old skin is dirty or defective. It worked perfectly for the wine it was made for. It simply has no give left.

And notice what is lost when the fit is wrong: both. The wine is spilled and the bottles are marred. Forcing new work into old structures damages the work and the structure together.

Which is why renewal so often requires changing an arrangement that was, in its own season, genuinely good.

People resisting change are usually not resisting the wine. They are protecting a skin that once held something well.

You may need a new arrangement, not a better attitude to the old one.