What does Tribe teach about new wine?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on new wine starts with a question Jesus was already answering: why do your disciples live differently from everyone else? Brian walked the room through the moment in Luke 5 and Matthew 9 where followers of John the Baptist challenge Jesus on fasting, and showed that Jesus was not being evasive. He was drawing people into something deeper. The specific meaning of new wine, Brian taught, is the new covenant Jesus came to establish, a way of being made right with God through faith rather than law-keeping. Matthew 5:17 sits underneath all of it: Jesus did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. As Brian put it, the rest of the world is still reaching for something else: "The rest of the world is drinking old wine. The old wine of what? Tradition, legalism, the law, work-based things."
The series moved in its second week to the container, the wineskin itself. Brian used Nicodemus in John 3 to put a face on what happens when a person stands in front of something genuinely new from God but can only interpret it through old categories. Out of that live conversation came a working definition: the wineskin represents a person's capacity to receive and adapt to a new work of the Holy Spirit in their life. Brian ran what he called a stretch test, naming real places where an old wineskin shows its brittleness, whether church has to look a certain way, whether the Holy Spirit is believed to still move in power, whether there is room for the full picture of Jesus. The point was not abstract. Brian says, "A new wineskin will cost you."
Running underneath both messages is something Brian kept returning to about why any of this is hard to receive. Without the Holy Spirit, a person cannot clearly see or want what God is doing. And for people who have been in church a long time, the truth of the new covenant can slide past without ever landing. Brian pressed the room to let scripture make what he described as the drop from the head to the heart, saying, "It is not until God's word makes that 18 inches drop from your thinker into your knower that it has any ability to change your life."
Taught from Luke 5:33-39 · Matthew 9:14-17 · John 3:1-21 · Matthew 5:17 · Romans 3:21-23
“If this is a place where a culture is created that we wear masks and that we can't be real and vulnerable, heaven forbid that this place be a museum of exhibits for saints.”
From New Wineskin, New Capacity
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 5:17
17 Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- November 18, 2024 New Wineskin, New Capacity Brian Hunter walks through John 3 and the story of Nicodemus to ask one pointed question: what is the condition of your wineskin, and is there room for what God is pouring out?
- November 11, 2024 New Wine Jesus explains new wine and new wineskins in Matthew 9 and Luke 5. Brian Hunter leads a conversation on what it means to receive the new things God is doing.