Old and New Christianity

 

Luke 5:17-39

 

In verses 17-26 JESUS healed a lame man by declaring his sins were forgiven; then He challenged the Pharisees because they were thinking He was a blasphemer for telling the man his sins were forgiven. To prove He had the Authority to forgive sin He told the man to take up his bed and walk and the man did so.

 

In verses 27-28 JESUS calls Levi to leave his trade as a tax collector and to be His disciple and Levi did.

 

In verses 29-32 Levi gives a banquet at his house in JESUS’s honor and there was a large group of tax collectors and others at the table with them. The Pharisees and their Torah teachers protested indignantly saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” JESUS answered them, “The ones who need a doctor are not the healthy but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but rather to call sinners to turn to GOD from their sins.”

 

In verses 33-39 JESUS tells the parable of the torn coat and the new wine. You cannot patch the old coat with material from the new coat or both will be ruined; you cannot put new wine in old wineskins or both will be lost. He makes the point that many prefer the old rather than the new.

 

Throughout His ministry in Israel JESUS challenged and chastised the religious leaders for their selfrighteousness and hard hearts and that from John The Baptist they rejected what GOD was doing in Israel. We have the same issue today many Christians want to hold onto their old religious ways while some try to mix the old and the new; the Spirit with the format.

 

The new is only better in the sense that it is what GOD is doing now, what He did one hundred years ago was for that generation. The problem is not that GOD is doing something new now; the problem is that people who want to hold onto the old and reject the new become religious and resistant to The SPIRIT and that many who embrace the new reject the old outright.

 

There was a series of TV commercials for a car brand that said, “It’s not your father’s Buick!” That is true for every generation of Christianity. How GOD is reaching this generation of lost is different than how He reached earlier generations because of the circumstances in which each generation lives in. Each generation has to except the validity and differences of the others! The new generation of Christianity cannot reject the earlier generations of Christian experience with GOD and the older generations of Christianity cannot reject the new Christian experience with GOD. When we do we become the self-righteous, hard hearted, religious people who stop hearing from GOD. We become the Pharisees!