What does Tribe teach about wineskins?
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 wineskins starts with a simple question: what is the actual condition of your wineskin right now? Drawing from Matthew 9, Luke 5, and John 3, Brian has built a picture of the wineskin as a person's capacity to receive and adapt to a new work of the Holy Spirit in their life. The new wine, specifically, is the new covenant Jesus came to establish, a way of being made right with God through faith rather than law-keeping. Broadly, it is any new way God is moving. The wineskin is what either holds that or cracks under it.
Brian used the story of Nicodemus to put flesh on what Jesus meant. Nicodemus was standing in front of something genuinely new, miraculous signs he could not explain from within his existing framework, and Jesus kept offering him the same new wine from several different angles without softening it to fit Nicodemus's categories. Out of that discussion came a point that stayed with the room: a wineskin is not meant to hoard. It is meant to pour out, and a new wineskin filled with new wine is meant to be given away. Brian also ran what he called a stretch test, naming things that reveal whether a wineskin is soft and supple or brittle and used up, whether church has to meet in a building on Sunday morning, whether the Holy Spirit is allowed to move in power today, whether there is room for the full picture of Jesus. Each of those, Brian said, is a place where an old wineskin will crack.
The cost is real. Brian said plainly that "a new wineskin will cost you." Part of what makes the old wine so comfortable, the tradition, the law, the work-based ways of trying to earn God's approval, is that it is familiar. Luke's version of the passage closes with a line Matthew does not have: no one who has been drinking old wine wants the new, because they say the old is better. Brian noted that without the Holy Spirit, a person simply cannot see clearly enough to recognize or want what God is doing. The invitation at Tribe is to stay honest about where you actually are, because as Brian put it, 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.
Taught from Matthew 9:14-17 · Luke 5:33-39 · 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.