Changing Our Wineskins

USGN article
by Terry Franklin
June 1998

Many of you who read this are traveling gospel singers and have, no doubt, experienced a startling thing happening in churches across America in the past two years: There is a change taking place. There is a new thing going on. But along with this change comes challenge. Almost every church is in transition. We have had pastor after pastor say, essentially, the same thing: "Some of our people want to taste the new wine of what God is doing . . . while others are simply content with the way things have always been."

Many are just like the old wineskins in Matthew 9:17, old and brittle-stretched out and expanded to the point where they cannot expand any farther. They can't seem to stretch any more to receive the new thing that the Lord is doing in our day. Fellow wineskins!, I'll admit that sometimes I don't feel I can stretch any more, but God is able to make us, or I should say, remake us, to be able to receive the exciting things He is doing in 1998.

When I was a kid I wanted a baseball glove very badly. One day I found an old Rawlings glove lying on a dusty shelf that my dad had used back in the early 1950's. It was hardened and dry-stiff as a board. Dad suggested that I get some Neatsfoot oil and begin to rub it into this glove. When I did, the glove came back to life! It was the softest, most pliable baseball mitt I have ever seen.

Gang, the Holy Spirit is the oil that softens us up to be able to receive the fresh work the Lord is doing right now. I don't want to be one of those "dry bones" type Christians that the book of Ezekiel talks about, turning my back on the future and always looking in the past and reminiscing. But I want to set my face like a flint toward the future saying "Come Lord, fill me and use me to do all You've called me to in the 'last days harvest'."

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©1998 Terry & Barbi Franklin.