When you look at this picture, what do you see? Look again, carefully.
Obviously, it’s a glass filled to overflowing. That’s positive, surely? “My cup overflows”, said David, the one-time shepherd boy who became one of the most celebrated kings in Ancient Israel. God pours his abundant blessing upon his children even beyond their capacity to receive. For me, this is a reminder that I should do everything I can to enlarge my personal capacity and be trusted by God for what I do receive. If I continue to overflow, it ought to be for the benefit of others. In that sense, having more than enough for myself is a good thing.
But that is not what drew me to this image in the first place. It highlights a serious problem I have observed and personally experienced in church life. And that’s the way God is being limited to the size and shape of the human structures we give him to work with.
Jesus spoke of the need for new wineskins for the new wine of the Kingdom. The old, fragile and brittle structures of the religion of his day were totally incapable of containing what Jesus had come to inaugurate. To attempt to re-use old wineskins for the wine of the new season is not only an inadequate response, it is also tragic. In Jesus’ analogy, the wine bottles made from animal skins were useful only once. Old wineskins already stretched to capacity, simply could not contain the new vintage that expanded during the maturing process. They would simply burst and the wine would be lost.
Despite this warning from the lips of Jesus, every generation seems to make the same mistake. We think the organisational structures we build to contain the Holy Spirit are sacrosanct. We treat them as ever-enduring. Perhaps they once were adequate containers as we attempted to steward a particular move of the Spirit. But they are never more valuable than the wine itself.
Structures are important. There’s no escaping them. It’s our responsibility to build them. But it is also our responsibility to make sure that they do not limit what God has given and what God is doing.
If, at any point in time, we discover our structures cannot handle the greater things, or the newer things God is introducing, it is time to change them. This applies to what God is doing through individual ministries as well as through corporate bodies such as church communities and denominational organisations.
I have seen great ministries curtailed or worse, destroyed simply because the structures that were imposed upon them were wholly inadequate. History is also a testimony to previously dynamic movements becoming empty and dead monuments for the same reason.
It is time to stop trying to contain the work of the Holy Spirit. God is on the move and we must move with him.