“The Pharisees and their scribes began grumbling at His disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat and drink with the tax collectors and sinners?’”
Luke 5:30
O Poor Pharisee, stuck in your old ways of performing righteousness – making much of your displays of prayer and fasting. You think such efforts will make you acceptable to God. You have drunk your old religion of law for so long that Jesus’ words are impossible for you to understand. Your legalistic ways offer no categories for this new wine of gospel grace. You question why Jesus’ followers don’t act like other religious people? The Lord’s answer comes back in riddles, stories, and parables you cannot understand by your categories of duty and performance.
Understanding this new wine – the gospel of grace – requires a new heart, one that delights in mercy, not one that boasts in self-righteousness. The gospel of grace cannot be ascertained from a mindset of works. It is perplexing, unworkable and paradoxical to such an approach to religion. Even the fundamental practices of religion such as prayer are altogether different, and fasting is turned inside out and upside down. All things are made new. Prayer changes, they are not coins of merit tossed, as it were, onto scales of self-righteousness – rather they become responses of joy in the presence of the Bridegroom – or equally poignant cries of longing for His return. The paradox of the new gospel heart is that it is full only when it is emptied and it trusts solely in the faithfulness of God to fill it. Old wineskins try to preserve meager quantities of religious effort, which quickly run dry.
O my soul, do you not see the sin of the Pharisee in your own heart? Do you not see how often you make the fruit of God’s grace into your own meager attempts to gain God’s approval? Spit out that old wine! Throw away that useless garment! Yes pray, and fast – but not as a pitiful performance to be seen by man, or to make yourself feel like your duty has been done – but only to see and rejoice in more of the Bridegroom’s glory.
O God you have taught me that prayer and fasting are not self completing actions – they have another end beyond themselves, a goal they strain toward. They seek out the presence of Christ. Jesus, make me pray – make me fast such that I might have more of you. More joy in your Word, more anticipation of your return, more desire for heaven and the eternal rewards that will come from your own hand.
Sustain the means of grace in my soul, in Jesus’s name I pray, amen.
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