Matt.9:14 Then the disciples of John *came to Him, asking, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but Your disciples do not fast?” 15 And Jesus said to them, “The attendants of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. 16 But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results. 17 Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”
We live in the time of the Great Delay. The time between Jesus’s first coming and His second coming leaves us with a sense of celebration, expectation, and mourning. Even though we have His presence with us and in us, we mourn (long for more of the experience of His presence). We see through a glass darkly, and even though we can’t see Him face to face, in an unfiltered way yet, we are to still mourn for all of His presence we can know now, until the Then. Jesus always responds to our longings, and encounters us again, and again, at deeper levels satisfying both His heart desire and ours. What these verses prepare us for, is not just to have a heart that mourns for more (for the fresh wine of a new and deeper encounter of His Spirit and thus His presence) but also to realize for the New Wine to come, there must be a new Person to pour Himself into. New Wine can’t come to old wine skins. He doesn’t want to just do patch work on old garments. Instead, as we mourn for more, He will change us so that we as new wineskins can contain a new filling. The longing heart doesn’t just get filled, though that does happen; the longing heart has to go through new repentance, brokenness, and surrender, so that we become new wineskins made ready. When we think about revival on a personal, corporate, or geographic level, we usually think about the glorious outpouring, but before there can be a new and glorious outpouring there must be a lot of dying to the old. God longs for Longers, and it’s the Hungry who are filled, but be prepared for the emptying that comes with longing, for the New can’t be poured into the old.