INTRO

Great Grandma’s Pot Roast

SCRIPTURE

Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. So they came to Jesus and said, “Why do the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples don’t fast?” Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them they do not fast. But the days are coming when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and at that time they will fast.
No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and the tear becomes worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skins will be destroyed. Instead new wine is poured into new wineskins.”

PRAYER

STUDY

Verse 18

Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. So they came to Jesus and said, “Why do the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples don’t fast?”

First things first: who are the Pharisees? If you’ve been coming to church for any length of time, you’ve heard the word. But everyone talks about them with so much and with such confidence that you sorta feel like you should probably already know who these guys are.

So what do you do? You do the same thing I did throughout Bible College. You pretend that you do know. And always talking about them just vaguely enough that you don’t ever commit to have any actual first-hand knowledge, and you get by repeating things you’ve heard others say. But then, you start getting over-confident in your fakery. No one is calling you on it. In fact, you’re pretty sure you heard someone repeating something you fully make up to someone else. Yeah, then you start really leaning into it. You start looking like this…

[[[ Rockford Files – Computer Gibberish 1 ]]]

Yeah. You know what’s up! You a high roller now you got that strut. Yeah, I know what a Pharisee is… well… I don’t… but you don’t know that. And you don’t know enough to tell me I’m wrong. Then it happens…

[[[ Rockford Files – Computer Gibberish 2 ]]]

Awkward.

So let’s try to avoid finding ourselves in that all-too-common scenario and look at who the Pharisees actually were.

The Pharisees were initially formed in the mid-second century BC from a group of scribes who devoted themselves with a particular fervour to the Scriptures. Now, from the outset this sounds like a good thing, and it probably would have been if they had stayed there. But instead of standing under the authority of the Scriptures, they began to use the Scriptures as a foundation upon which they could build their own thing. They were so concerned about breaking the Law of the Torah that they began making new rules to protect them from getting too close to the original rules. And these new structures became traditions, and the traditions started to gain equal weight with Scripture. Eventually they went so far with the rules, that they perverted the law from something that was designed to protect and demonstrate the Holiness of God, into something that was a heavy, burdensome weight for the people. A 613-pound weight. And it is worth noting that while the Pharisees were a relatively small religious group – accounting for only about 1% of the population – they had incredible amount of influence in the culture.

• John the Baptist’s disciples are questioning Jesus??
• History of fasting and what it represented in the Old Testament.
  • Additional optional, personal fasts
  • Influence of the Pharisees
• Last week they’re mad He’s eating with sinners. Now they’re mad He’s eating at all!
  • This is clearly a flock of Karens … Kens.

VERSE 19–20

Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them they do not fast. But the days are coming when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and at that time they will fast. 

• Traditional Jewish wedding party.
  • Fasting in the pocket
• A coded allusion, made more prominent by the passage of time:

Isaiah 62:4–5

Never again will you be called “The Forsaken City” or “The Desolate Land.”
Your new name will be “The City of God’s Delight” and “The Bride of God,” for the Lord delights in you and will claim you as his bride.
Your children will commit themselves to you, O Jerusalem, just as a young man commits himself to his bride.
Then God will rejoice over you as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride.

Verse 21

No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and the tear becomes worse. 

• “pull away” uses the same Gk root as “taken from them” in vv 20.
  • A violent tearing

Verse 22

And no one pours new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skins will be destroyed. Instead new wine is poured into new wineskins.”

• Explain this parable
• Jesus is doing a new thing
  • Not building on top of the Pharisees’ work
  • Not even really building on top of the Old Testament
  • Fulfilling the OT to bring in a brand new Covenant

[[[ MIB II – New Hotness ]]]

CONCLUSION

• Comfortably Numb
  • Rogers Waters’ inspiration
  • Going through the motions
  • speaking of going through the motions…
• FROM THE POCKET: Fasting
  • To deny the flesh and feed the spirit.
  • To seek God… God is literally with them.
• This is not actually about fasting.
  • They think Jesus is a fraud because He doesn’t try to appear holy
• Rules are easy.
  • They become a comfortable repetitive pattern.
  • It’s simple and it’s safe.
  • Rules turn the world into an array
    • black-and-whites
    • yeses and nos
    • dos and don’ts
• God doesn’t want to to make a checklist these can result in legalism like we saw with the Pharisees or a false sense of security like we see in this clip from the Simpsons.

[[[ Simpsons – Perfect Father ]]]

• Imagine if we did that?!
  • The Christian Stool
  • These legs are not ends in themselves!
  • They are in service of growing in our relationship with God

Friends, let us not allow the stuff of Christianity to get in the way of Christ in our lives.

Keep an eye on your motives because you can’t checklist your way to heaven.