Gospel Living

21  No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. 22  And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins. Jesus explains why religious motions provide no lasting help for the individual by following up His discussion on fasting.  His two parables demonstrate that one cannot simply add fasting or ritual or ceremony to a sinful life to make it whole.  While it may appear to work for a while, the end result is worse than the first.  In doing so, He reveals an important aspect of His ministry. Jesus didn’t come to simply sew new laws on our unregenerate lives .  Even the heavens wear out like a garment (Ps 102:26), and Scripture reveals that our hearts are “desperately sick” (Jer 17:9).  Jesus says in Matthew 15:19, “For out of t...

“I have baptized you with water,  but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” It may surprise you to think that John’s baptisms changed nothing spiritually within a person.  It’s true that they represented repentance, but they didn’t wash away sins and make people new.  John points us to the true, saving baptism—the one we must be plunged into—the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The followers of Jesus waited the length of Jesus’ ministry for this to be fulfilled.  Nearing Pentecost after His resurrection, He told His disciples that they would soon “be baptized with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:5).  After Acts 2, the term “church” appears to describe believers.  Pentecost is thus remembered as the time when the church began. Some can claim membership in the church and not be baptized in the Spirit.  In Acts 8:16, we see that that someone can only be “baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus” without the baptism of the Spirit.  Only a true ...

I have to point this out in relation to the post on repentance: