THE CATALYST THAT IS COVID-19
One of Jesus’ most puzzling riddles is recorded in all three synoptic Gospels;[1] we’ll use Matthew’s narrative for our purposes here because…well, because it’s about how he met Jesus—and the controversy their encounter immediately ignited. Even if this story is familiar to you, take a moment and read through this story, imagining all the characters, social nuances, religious customs, and try to make sense of what Jesus is saying:
As Jesus passed on from there, He saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, ‘Follow Me.’ So [Matthew] arose and followed Him. Now it happened, as Jesus sat at the table in the house, that behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Him and His disciples. And when the Pharisees saw, they said to His disciples, “Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
When Jesus heard, He said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”
Then the disciples of John came to Him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but Your disciples do not fast?”
And Jesus said to them, “Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast. No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and the tear is made worse. Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”[2]
Even if you’re brand new to the Bible, you’ve heard of Matthew. You read his name the moment you open to the New Testament. He’s referred to throughout the Gospels and is responsible for the lion’s share of what we know as the “Sermon on the Mount” (ch. 5-7), “Olivet Discourse” (ch. 24-25), “Great Commission” (28:18-20) and more. Tradition holds that he ministered in Jerusalem following Pentecost for a season before taking the Gospel to foreign fields. We don’t know where he died. The Matthew we know is not the Matthew we meet in the tax booth. He was then a young man, unschooled in grace, something of a thief against his own people[3]—and he was prime material for the ministry team Jesus was building, island-of-misfit-toys style. Matthew’s invitation to follow Jesus, to join His ministry and leadership team, ruffled the feathers of everyone in ear shot, bringing us to this very peculiar riddle about old and new wine—because (in Luke’s account) Jesus explicitly affirms the fact that old wine is better.
Better than what?
Than new wine. Young wine. Immature wine.
Everyone—Jesus especially—knows old wine is better,[4] which is what makes this riddle so perplexing. We’ll return to this in a moment.
I asked you in the second article in this series what you/your church community would do if revival hit tonight and God added 3,000 people to your midst. Think seriously about this, because that’s messy. Growth is wonderful. We want growth. We just also have things like Proverbs 14:4 in Scripture: “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant increase comes by the strength of the ox.” Meaning this: you can get by without shoveling dung out of your stable if you don’t have an ox. But the moment you have work to do, you really have work to do.
Pentecost was a hot mess—a glorious mess, but an absolute mess. So what did the apostles do? What did the 120 Christ-confessing disciples at the time[5] do to disciple these 3,000 new believers? There’s a good chance Stephen was one of these three thousand. In any event, he was a “young Christian” when he was killed.
We know a few things from the records of New Testament Scriptures and church history: the disciples didn’t grasp for seniority (a marked change from wrestling on the road over who would be the greatest and most glorified)[6] and weren’t threatened by Stephen’s assassin when he rocked up with enlightened eyes. In fact, they endorsed him in a leadership position and simply encouraged him to care for the poor.[7] We know Ephesus was a large church that met corporately and met in homes throughout the week—ultimately, this is how they met and stewarded the rapid growth of what became a huge community.[8] Ephesus was the original megachurch, and Jesus loved her.[9] And we know a staple in the culture of disciple-making communities was something beautifully simple: the dinner table. Paul referred to Aquila, Priscilla, Nympha, Phoebe, Philemon, and more (though you may notice many of these names are of women) as people who hosted meetings in their homes to create an environment where young disciples could be nurtured into leaders.[10]
Let’s return to the old wine/new wine riddle. People who had been practicing spiritual disciplines for years were bewildered (at best) by this Man from Nazareth who spoke and taught with authority,[11] healed people crippled by lifelong afflictions,[12] and forgave sin.[13] Rumors would soon circulate that He stilled a storm on open water.[14] And here He was, getting so entangled in the lives of immature, godless hedonists that the nation thought He might be one of them.[15] Their offense produced questions:
“Why is Jesus hanging out at the bar every night?”
Doctors don’t try to heal the healthy. They focus their attention elsewhere.
“Okay, but we fast. Why don’t you guys fast?”
They will.
Do you know it takes seven years for a grapevine to produce fruit that can become wine? This is the long game. It takes patience. It takes time. It takes work. It takes growth. Jesus couldn’t take His rowdy drunkards and insert them into the stoic routines of guys who had years of practice, discipline, prayer, and study behind them. Matthew, John, James, Peter—the lot of them—were new wine. And Jesus said plainly, “If you try to stick these guys in your existing system, it’ll break them. I need to nurture them first.” Is old wine bad? Of course not. Jesus didn’t rebuke the disciples of John the Baptist for fasting. He simply said, “Give these guys time to grow.” And then He spent years providing the context for them to grow—and three years later, these new wineskins were the ones with fire above their heads, speaking in tongues to the whole of Jerusalem. They were the ones baptizing the 3,000 who came to faith in a day. Figure that leadership strategy out. Jesus is different. His strategies violate our instincts.
Take COVID-19, for example. Most of you reading this have been pushed out of your standard expression of “church” for several months now, or you’re still working through how to accommodate pandemic sensitivities. I’m not here to get in a debate about whether you should defy state orders to not gather. I am here to say this: You’ve got Sundays down pat. That’s fantastic. So what do your Mondays-Saturdays look like in terms of making disciples who make disciples? Because, much like the early church, “success” isn’t based on the number of bodies in the room. “Success” is defined by whether or not your community is marked by high obedience to Jesus, is highly reproducible, and can stand on its own. I don’t have a problem with large corporate Sunday morning gatherings. But if your discipleship community disintegrates because you can’t gather on a Sunday morning, something is wrong. What if by some crazy circumstance, heavy persecution hit the American church and public corporate gatherings were eliminated forever? Pastors, are you shepherding your flock in a way they can handle that? Can they thrive? Because the guys in Jerusalem did.
Success is not based on bodies in a room. Success is based on whether or not disciples make disciples who can stand on their own, make more disciples (highly reproducible), and are highly obedient to Christ. It’s Jesus or bust. We’re in this thing for eternity.
God will bring growth—what we call “revival”—because He’s preparing the world for the return of Jesus, and He does not delight in the death of the wicked.[16] I invite you to examine COVID-19 as a catalyst for this growth rather than an obstacle to this growth—because if the wedding feast and sea of glass are going to be as crowded out as the Bible says they will be,[17] then there are quite a few young grapevines about to produce young, new wine coming our way. And that new wine won’t fit into the wineskins we’re using now. So we need new wineskins. And I really, really encourage you to fast—literally, fast. Pull a Daniel fast until you hear from God[18]—because I don’t think Jesus is applying the pressures of 2020 just so we can go back to business as usual in 2021. That would be a failure on our part. Don’t “bide time” until you can go back to your regularly scheduled programming. Ask God for a strategy with this in mind:
If you randomly plucked someone out of your congregation and set them alone (or say, with a buddy because “two-by-two”)[19] in a city/small town/insert-place-here, would they 1) remain highly obedient to Jesus (to begin with, are they now?), 2) effectively replicate and make new disciples who are also highly obedient to Jesus, and 3) could they do this without your help? Can they stand on their own two feet? If they were thrown in prison, have you trained them to disciple everyone in the cell with them? Or are they just getting by one Sunday at a time?
Get a vision for the Matthews in your midst—because God may well make them leaders. Get a vision for the Pauls in your city—because they may well be the apostles God will use to turn your state (or country) upside down.[20] And ponder what could’ve been running through Peter’s head when he said, “Brother, you’ve got a mandate from the Lord. I’m assigned to Jerusalem. I’m not going to bear down upon what He’s telling you to do in the nations. Just remember the poor.”[21]
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? They are servants through whom you believed, and each has the role the Lord has given. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So, then, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. Now he who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we are God’s coworkers. You are God’s field, God’s building.
According to God’s grace that was given to me, I have laid a foundation as a skilled master builder, and another builds on it. But each one is to be careful how he builds on it. For no one can lay any foundation other than what has been laid down. That foundation is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, or straw, each one’s work will become obvious. For the day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire; the fire will test the quality of each one’s work. If anyone’s work that he has built survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will experience loss, but he himself will be saved—but only as through fire.[22]
Brother X. is the Director of Global Catalytic Ministries. He lives and serves in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Meet X. and his ministry family in Sheep Among Wolves Vol. II. Support the leaders of the Iranian disciple-making movement here. Sign up for resources on how to make disciples who make disciples here.
[1] Matthew 9:9-17; Mark 2:14-22; Luke 5:27-39.
[2] Matthew 9:9-17, NKJV
[3] Jewish tax collectors under Roman occupation served the Empire and often took extra commissions for themselves. They were tools of the foreign rulers, and despised as traitors by their own people. Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10) is another example.
[4] John 2:1-11
[5] Acts 1:15
[6] Mark 9:34; Luke 9:46
[7] Galatians 2:10
[8] With an approximate population of 250,000 at the time, this port city was a diverse and thriving standard on the existing trade route. Paul, Timothy, John, and Mary (mother of Jesus) all lived and ministered there; Paul himself spent two years teaching publicly in Ephesus (see Acts 19). Christianity soon became the official religion of the city (see https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/ephesus#section_5) and was the subject of the first letter in Revelation two.[9] Revelation 2:1-7
[10] Matthew 18:20; Acts 2:42-46; 5:42; 20:20; Romans 16:1-27; 1 Corinthians 16:19; Colossians 4:15; Philemon 1:1-2;
[11] Matthew 7:28-29
[12] Matthew 4:23-25; 8:1-17; 28-34
[13] Matthew 9:1-8
[14] Matthew 8:23-27
[15] Matthew 11:19
[16] Ezekiel 18:23; 33:11
[17] Revelation 7:9
[18] See Daniel 10:1-12
[19] Luke 10:1
[20] Acts 17:6
[21] Galatians 1:18-2:10
[22] 1 Corinthians 3:5-15, CSB
