tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-124530682011-04-21T17:55:10.093-07:00shared stories of learning to run fast and free in God's Kingdomraminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05838895467409536918noreply@blogger.comBlogger11100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12453068.post-1114532496272138742005-04-26T09:19:00.000-07:002005-04-26T10:31:00.236-07:00l like to drink wine. the red kind that tastes like wood, the kind that after you swig it you make a sophisticated face and say something about it's undertones. what amazes me about Jesus is that he looked at stuff like wine and saw pictures of His Father's Kingdom. he tells this amazing story that has been changing the way that I think about my life with God. he says that His Kingdom is alot like Wine, and if we want to know what life is really like we cannot be like old wineskines, but we have to become new wineskins. <br /><br />At first this throughoughly confused me because i just drink wine not make it in my basement next to an airhockey table. So i did some research on wine making in the ancient palestian judean culture. I learned that they made wine in dead goats. let me explain. the took the goat skin, with the fur on and everything, sewed it up and put the grape juice and fermenting agents in the skin and let it do it's thing. in the process of properly aging the juice would turn into wine and press the goatskin, aka wineskin, into a firm and fixed shape. So there's the result of the wine making goat industry, Wine to drink and rigid wineskins.<br /><br />what jesus said was that you cannot take new wine and put it into old wineskins, if you do the old wineskin will burst since they are no longer elastic enough to expand and take the shape of the new batch of juice as it transforms into wine. <br /><br />he said this to the religious people who thought they had nailed down how to live with God. the problem was exactly their certainty about things, they had become rigid, stuck, pre-formed into what they did, how they lived and what they thought about God and life. the wine was fine by them as long as it fit into their skins, their paradigms, their practices. <br /><br /> Jesus was trying to tell them that His kingdom is alot like the New wine. it needs to be held in elastic, supple, moldable containers. Containers that are willing to stretch to contain the living, dynamic reality of God's Kingdom on earth. He teaches us that God's Life in Us, fills us, forms us, gives our lives shape. not the other way around. Jesus wanted them and wants us to be elastic, to not live in ruts of religious behavior but free ourselves to let the substance of His Kingdom form the soft shell of our humanity into the shape of His choosing. <br /><br /> I am seeing just how easy it is to get rigid and funky. to do things without knowing why or really wanting to. to be a hard stinky goat skin. Today i am letting God shape me, letting him form my day, form my mind, form my heart around the substance of his totally competent love. New wine find this goat soft today, denali is waking up....it's time to go....live well<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/12453068-111453249627213874?l=raminrazavi.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>raminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05838895467409536918noreply@blogger.com5