Jesus answered them, “How can you expect wedding guests to mourn as long as
the bridegroom is with them? The time will come, when the bridegroom will be
taken away from them, and then, they will fast.

No one patches an old coat with a piece of unshrunken cloth, for the patch
will shrink and tear an even bigger hole in the coat. In the same way, you don’t
put new wine into old wine skins. If you do, the wine skins will burst and the wine
will be spilt. No, you put new wine into fresh skins; then both are preserved.”

Reflect

God doesn’t want to make us comfortable. He wants to make us holy. Being a
faithful Christian requires that we reach out beyond the boundaries of our comfort
zone, even to the margins where those rejected by “polite society” dwell. Trying to fit a
life of discipleship and the wonder of God’s love into our expectations is as futile as
trying to put new wine into old wineskins. The new wine would continue to ferment
and expand, causing the old wineskins, already stretched to their limits, to split, spilling
the wine.

In the same way, the call to love as God loves us fills our hearts beyond their limits.,
breaking them open to pour out love on all our brothers and sisters. We can, of course,
choose to live within our comfortable limits – loving those who love us or who are like us
– but if we move beyond our own comfort, we grow closer to God.

© Copyright Bible Diary 2023