As we walk with God, we face moments of God’s deep searching, moments in which we want things to live that were not truly born of God. Even though God is not really in them, we feel a grieving in our hearts, a reluctance to relinquish them. This is what Abraham faced with his son Ishmael.
God had promised Abraham that he would have a son, but Sarah had been unable to bear children. So Sarah gave her maid Hagar to Abraham to bear children for her, and Ishmael was born (Genesis 15:1–5; 16:1–2, 15).
After thirteen years, God appeared again to Abraham and told him that his heir would be born to Sarah. Abraham cried to the Lord, “Oh, that Ishmael might live in Thy sight!” (Genesis 17:18.)
A year later, Sarah gave birth to Isaac. After Isaac was born, Sarah insisted that Hagar and her son be cast out, saying, “The son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son.” Abraham was greatly grieved because he loved his son Ishmael very much (Genesis 21:10–11).
Abraham was a man of great faith, but he was still strongly attached to Ishmael. Like Abraham, we also must say, “O God, help us to let go of the things that are not of You, the relationships that are not wholly of You, the Ishmael things that linger on. Bring forth the true child of promise; bring forth that which is really good.”
And yet we cling to the old. No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better. Luke 5:39. It is more seasoned; people become accustomed to it.
The new wine may not be stable yet, and they may not know how to handle it. In the days when people used animal skins to store wine, they never put new wine into old wineskins because they did not know what it would do.
The new wine was liable to ferment a little more and burst the old, inflexible wineskins (Matthew 9:17). May the Lord give us the grace to abandon the old and cling to the new, even if it is not what we understand or want.
There is a stable quality to the old wine. It keeps things running smoothly, in a set pattern. Many preachers will not serve the new wine to their congregations, because if they do, they cannot control them as well.
If this new wine is served, it may break up the churches. A few denominational men found this to be true when they opened their hearts to God in the Charismatic movement. Their churches started splitting up, for these men had turned God loose on their congregations.
If you want to keep things in a set order, you don’t serve anything alive to a congregation. It must be thoroughly dead before you serve it—highly flavored, highly spiced, but thoroughly dead.
That is what is often done with our food. Flour mills remove the germ and everything that is alive from the wheat and keep the part that is dead. Then the bakeries can turn out bread in little loaves that all look just alike.
When the unstable qualities of live food are left in the flour, they do not know what the bread will do. How will there be conformity in the house of God unless the power of God and the gifts and the ministries are taken away from the people? How will you get a big worldwide church going unless you take all the life out of it? Then what you have is bricks, and what you build is a tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9).
O God, deliver us! We want that new wine of the Kingdom! We will choose to walk in a church that is set in the will of God, and we will stand and speak the Word of God until the walls of Babylon crack and crumble (Jeremiah 51:6, 8–10; Revelation 18).
We shall speak the Word of the Lord, and the power of God will be loosed. We shall answer to no human being except the Lord Jesus Christ as He guides us. We shall not be afraid of any innovations that come out of the Word just because men have not walked in them for centuries. We shall be justified by the fact that God is turned loose on His people again. God is happening to them. And we shall no more cry, “Oh, that Ishmael might live in Thy sight!” We shall not weep for Babylon. We say good-bye to Babylon.
Is your heart yearning for the new wine with all of its unstable, explosive, life-giving qualities? Oh, for the new wine to bring an end of everything that is on the human plane and bring us into the realm of spirit to worship Him in spirit and in truth! (John 4:23.)