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BY PASTOR BRANDON YOUNG
We easily forget food items in the refrigerator. As you clean out the old items, you notice many of them expired more than a year ago. We throw the old items away and we replace them with fresh, new items. We would never buy a jar of new pickles, take them out, and place them in the outdated jar. You may ask, “Brandon, what’s your point?”
Jesus said in Matthew 2:21-22, “No man also seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment: else the new piece that filled it up taketh away from the old, and the rent is made worse.22 And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles.” Wayne Manning explained this Biblical illustration when he said, “The comparison is a very apt one when we think of the properties of wine and wineskins. When wine is new, it is in a state of fermentation. It bubbles and expands as the fermentation gases are released. A fresh, pliable wineskin can absorb such expansion and slowly age — with the wine until the fermentation process is complete. To put fresh wine into an old wineskin, however, is asking for trouble. The old wineskin has assumed a definite shape and is no longer pliable. It is fixed and somewhat brittle. The activity of new wine will stress it beyond its ability to yield. And so, both the wine and the skin are lost. We can’t put new ideas into old mindsets. We can’t get new results with old behaviors.”
We never should try to blend the old and new things. God wants to do a new thing in 2022, but we must make room by identifying what we should discard from our lives. What is old in your spiritual refrigerator? What needs to be discarded as soon as possible? I am certain you have already identified things that you need to release! Don’t allow Satan to convince you to hold on to the grudges, hurt, anger, frustrations, division, confusion, and problems from year’s past. It is time to allow God to do a new thing in your life, home, and marriage in 2022.
Isaiah 43:18-19 proclaims, “Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.” God commands us to forget this spiritual clutter that prevents us from receiving. It is a great time to evaluate our lives and determine what is old and what is not working. We need to bring those things to the Lord expecting him to replace them with new things that work. This process begins with repentance. Repent means to change your way of thinking. The underlying Greek word is a form of metanoia, which means to undergo a fundamental change in one’s mind or character. I want to encourage you to take a spiritual inventory of your life, and God will point out things that need to go. Once we rid ourselves of these items, God will begin to do a new thing. There’s no limit on the new God will do in 2022 if we rid ourselves of the old things.
(Brandon Young is pastor of the Harmony Free Will Baptist Church, Hampton.)