01.13. New Wine and Old Bottles
Chapter 13 NEW WINE AND OLD BOTTLES. In spite of the marvellous mental capacities of man, and of the wondrous discoveries and advancements the race has made in every line of knowledge; yet it is remarkable through what difficulties and oppositions, all these intellectual victories and onward marches to improvement had to come before reaching final success. Of course the great mass of mankind did not have these conceptions nor take part in the struggle to bring them to their birth and completion. There were pioneers of thought, just as there were explorers and openers-up of our country when it was a wilderness. The multitude in both instances stayed at home and furnished the criticizing, doubting and croaking. But even the leaders in certain lines of thought were dull enough when confronted with the teachings and discoveries of other realms and kingdoms concerning whose laws and phenomena they were themselves ignorant.
Certainly it was with a deep and far-reaching meaning that the Saviour once spoke about new wine bursting old bottles.
It seems that the new wine, even in the intellectual life, has a way of splitting and disrupting old mental receptacles and reservoirs. Men get accustomed to ways of thinking and doing, and do not want to be disturbed. So that a discovery which upsets ancient premises and conclusions, occasions a change of living, and ushers in the pain, worry and labor of novel situations and fresh adaptations, is anything but pleasing and popular at first to them, if indeed it is ever accepted.
We have a ministerial friend who had been preaching several years to an unmoved congregation. Moreover, this church body had been in a like condition through a number of preceding pastorates. One morning this clergyman told his astonished audience that they had been occupying the same seats and pews for years, and, for that matter, were in the same physical attitudes. That he was confident that several hundred had heard the gospel for the last twenty years through the left ear, while an equal number had received it through the right auricle. His earnest request now was that everybody in the house would change locations, and hear the truth from another angle, and listen to the Word from another part of the sanctuary. He felt confident, he said, that there would be immediate and great results. The idea was that people settle into habit ruts, and sink down in dry routines of life, into mental indolence and physical sluggishness, and become old bottles, and finally take a pride in being dried up, unyielding, unadaptable, and generally petrified.
Certain it is that the history of mankind confirms the words of Christ, who spoke of the bursting of old bottles under the working pressure of new wine.
It is well known by every schoolboy how the new wine of Copernicus, when he said the earth moved and the sun was the center of the solar system, cracked and split the ecclesiastical and astronomical wiseacres of his day. The discovery of the circulation of the blood was met by a storm of ridicule in the medical world. It is equally well known what a testing, trying time steam had to go through before the world accepted it as the great friend and helper of the human family.
It is said that when Fulton’s little skeleton of a steamboat went puffing and panting its way up the Hudson, it encountered a schooner coming down the river. When the sailors beheld this first of the steam kind with its black smoke and rattling noises, they thought it was the devil; and diving down into the hold of their vessel fell upon their knees and prayed the Lord for deliverance.
Then it is also related that a man with what is called a mathematical and scientific head, while admitting the feasibility of applying steam in many ways and directions, was showing by a great array of figures on a piece of paper that no vessel could ever cross the ocean with such power, as no ship hold could contain the quantity of coal necessary for the voyage; when just as he had completed the demonstration, lo! there was a smoke on the horizon, and here came a steamer into port from all the way across the sea. Of course this meant another old bottle had blown up. The telegraph, the telephone, the air brake, and every other great and useful thing had a time of it in coming into recognition and use, because of the old bottles in the world.
Descending even to lower planes, and smaller affairs, it is still the same. The first man who hoisted an umbrella over his head was nearly mobbed. While the use of suspenders for the upholding of pantaloons met with a storm of ridicule and denunciation. Many pulpits were especially bitter, and accused every preacher who wore "galluses," as being filled with pride, haughtiness and vain glory. In the ecclesiastical world, the melodeon or organ was the new wine that split the old bottle of the "Tune Lifter," whose repertoire consisted of four or five hymns and the doxology. In the religious and spiritual realm, a genuine revival is certain to burst the old bottles of formality and a lifeless ritualism. When Luther poured the new wine of justification by faith, into the old dried up ecclesiastics who preached salvation by works, there was a great rending of ancient ministerial skins and explosions of a hidebound churchianity. When Wesley emptied the new wine of sanctification by faith, on the old cut and dried Church of England and the ceremonialisms of his time and day, countless bottles of the ancient pattern blew up, while there was enough of salvation allowed to run to waste sufficient to have saved a thousand worlds. To this day, the old bottles are in the way of a genuine Holy Ghost revival, and the reception of full salvation by the churches. As we have marked them before us ranged on the shelf, or more correctly speaking, sitting in the pews; the yellow skin, dead-looking eye, severe mouth, flinty brow, dry speech and cold, impassive countenance, all declared the correctness and faithfulness of Christ’s words in his use of the descriptive words, Old Bottles. The sweetness and power of God’s great truths and blessings are too much for them. So they explode, get mad, quit the meeting, abuse the preacher and evangelist, leave the church, raise a storm and go to pieces generally.
We never yet held a revival meeting but from twenty to one hundred old bottles would burst as we tried to get the wine of a full salvation into them.
We might well be discouraged, but we thank God in the same community there are always new bottles that can stand God’s truth, and the whole truth at that, and want it poured into them. The New Bottle stands for recently regenerated, and also those who by prayer, Bible reading, obedience to God and faithful living have kept their freshness and newness through years of dryness, while other converts and church members become hard, cold, and dry.
There is a way of walking with God after the New Birth, where the follower of Christ remains a new bottle after the flight of years. He grows in grace, advances in all the light he has, and only waits for fuller knowledge, to be cleansed from all sin and possess a holy heart. We find such Christians everywhere. And as Lydia’s heart opened to the preaching of Paul, so their loyal souls turn readily, gladly, and thankfully to the proclamation of a Full Salvation, or Holiness by faith in the Blood of Christ.
It is evident from Scripture as well as life itself, that the time for the reception of the wine of Sanctification is at a period close to that of justification and regeneration. It was only a few months after leaving Egypt that God’s people were brought up to Kadesh Barnea, and Canaan was in full view. It seems to be the will of God that the wine of Holiness should be put into New Bottles. So Paul exhorts a church to forget the first principles and to go on to (be borne on immediately into) perfection. While those Heaven-taught men, Wesley and Asbury, urged upon their preachers that the young converts should be led at once into the experience of Holiness or Entire Sanctification. They dreaded and had but little confidence in the Old Bottles. And so does every one of reading, reflection, observation and spiritual discernment. The Old Bottle is in the way of the world’s progress; and it also prevents the salvation of the nations.
God buried nearly a million of them in the sands of Arabia. It had to be done to bring the New Bottles into Canaan.
Alas, for the Old Bottles. They are everywhere. In the churches and colleges, in the pulpit and pew, in the Board of Stewards and the Ladies’ Aid Society. And they are nothing but bottles. They have nothing in them but wind. If they were filled with old wine it would be all right. But they have none of the old elixir, nor can they stand the new wine. Here and there they sit in lines and rows, dry looking, yellow skinned, with sucked-in sides, and having in them only a little hot air or nothing at all. To pour the wine-like truth of God into such people is to be rewarded in a few days with a series of loudmouthed explosions and general blowing up.
It is this ecclesiastical phenomena which causes the appearance in the church paper, or the utterance by the lip of various chief rulers in the synagogue, of that threadbare well-worn, time-smoothed saying, that a certain evangelist, or a certain revival meeting, had split the congregation, offended and driven away some of the best people in the membership, torn everything to pieces and ruined the church forever. The real history of the case was, and it will so appear at the Day of Judgment, that Holiness was preached in a formal, worldly church, and as the wine of Full Salvation was poured out on the choir, Ladies’ Aid Society, and Board of Stewards, some Old Bottles exploded!
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