The Promise | Mark 2:21-22

The Way to Trust | Scene 3, Day 8 | Mark 2:21-22

“No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.”

Mark 2:21–22

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There’s a framed sketch hanging in our master bedroom that shows a young child, crouched in the dirt, playing with a stick. Below the image, it says,

One hundred years from now it will not matter what kind of house I lived in, how much money I had, nor what my clothes were like. But the world may be a little better because I was important in the life of a child.

My wife gave it to me years ago, around the time of our moves to Nashville and Atlanta.

Receiving it initially felt like a gentle stick to the ribs. Over time, though, my attitude toward it changed. Now, it’s one of my favorite things.

When we moved to Atlanta in 2012, our kids were 10, 9, 7, and 4. Unlike Texas, where every residential property has huge privacy fences, much of the Atlanta suburbs have small or no fences. Just open properties where kids could roam.

We’d just settled into our home in East Cobb when one day, a neighborhood boy rang the doorbell. “Can your son come out to play?”

We’d never met him or his family. It felt like 1955 and Wally Cleaver was at my door.

We loved it.

My older son Christian began a friendship with Bradley that lasts to this day. They’d run around the neighborhood, biking, playing in dirt, all the stuff that people lament kids don’t do anymore.

It was sometime around that moment when I first voiced, “these are the good old days.”

For years, I’d been striving. Trying to make a business work. Building a platform. Chasing a workable family budget. I wouldn’t have said this, but I was still operating from an instrumental kind of life.

Even after February 27, 2011, I was still carrying that mindset. The mind and heart shift didn’t happen overnight. But slowly, things were beginning to change.

One day, I mentioned to my bosses the name of the pastor of what was, at the time, the largest United Methodist congregation in the United States. He’d recently left his relationship with the United Methodist Publishing House (where I’d worked) and moved to a much larger and more prestigious secular publishing company, HarperCollins, in part because his book sales were so far above any other author’s.

My Presbyterian bosses had never heard of him.

Whoa… I thought, maybe the Methodist influencer world I’d left was smaller, more parochial, and more ephemeral than I’d ever realized!

… Which also meant that all of the influence I’d been pursuing may have also been much smaller, more parochial, and more about my own success than I wanted to admit.

My wife had been trying to tell me this for years.

She even had a tee-shirt that said, “It’s all about the children.” In an era when women have more opportunities than perhaps at any point in the past, her choice to be fully invested in motherhood during this time in her life and their life felt particularly countercultural. Here choice to stay home was actively reorienting our family around a different set of values. And her little framed sketch was saying the same thing.

My friend and colleague Arthur Jones later introduced me to a concept from author David Brooks in his book The Second Mountain, which contrasts

● Achievement values, which are about yourself: grades, money, influence

● Legacy values, which are about others: purpose, character, relationships, community

One of the life visions my wife and I have always shared is of a future surrounded by our children and their families. I’ve had a vision of an elderly version of myself since I was young: I picture a big outdoor spring banquet, long tables full of food, lawn games nearby, everyone together, laughing, all in one place. My wife and I want to make our home a place people can always come to—a headquarters, as one of my daughters now calls it—a place where they are unconditionally loved.

In fact, just the other day two of my young adult children told me how friends of their commented that they loved coming to eat dinner at our place, because they can relax and feel loved and safe. That’s the goal. The telos.

In our story, Jesus is describing a parable about wine and wineskins:

“No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.”

The New Testament uses two Greek words for “new.”

• Neos means recently created, an upgraded version of something you already know.

• Kainos means unprecedented, or something completely different.

Neos new is like saying your old daily driver vehicle is breaking down, so you decide to buy a new one. Kainos new is like saying your old daily driver vehicle is breaking down, so you decide to teleport to work. The wine is neos or freshly made. But the wineskins must be kainos: not just a younger version of the same thing, but an entirely different container.

Jesus doesn’t fit into the old containers. He isn’t offering an upgraded version of religion or asking people to try harder at what they were already doing. He’s offering something completely unprecedented: himself. And that requires a completely different orientation.

Trying to follow Jesus with the old mindset—striving, performing, measuring success the usual way—doesn’t work. The wineskins burst.

In my first era, I was trying to pour new wine into old wineskins. I was following Jesus, but I was still living instrumentally—platform, achievement, success. Eventually, it couldn’t hold. My skin burst. I needed a different way of seeing and living.

The famous theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once visited America and expected to find the best example of Christianity in the great cathedrals of New York, with their prestigious platforms and influential leaders. Instead, he said the truest expression of Christianity he encountered was in small rural chapels in Alabama, where sharecroppers and descendants of slaves—people who had suffered deeply—were filled with a strange, resilient joy.

That’s kainos. Not improved circumstances, but a different reality altogether.

In my first era, I was looking for Christianity in big rooms and big stages. But Jesus was showing it to me somewhere else—kids ringing doorbells, bikes left in yards, dinner tables crowded with sweaty children, laughing and exhausted from play.

That framed sketch on my wall remembers my own kainos moment: The realization that 100 years from now, very little of what we call “success” will matter.

Jesus is making all things new—not upgraded, but unprecedented.

Life can be tough. Good days turn into bad ones, and sin and loss hurts us and those we love. We still ask, “Why, Lord?” But even now—right in the middle of it—Jesus is introducing another reality. A way of living that isn’t driven by fear, striving, or comparison.

When you orient your life around Jesus’ presence instead of your own achievement, things begin to change. You will see it in your daily experience. Your values. Your priorities. Your joy.

Life in the New Creation starts with presence, not performance. As we learn how to abide in this reality, we discover: these are the good old days.

Pray

Jesus, I’ve been trying to pour Your new wine into my old wineskins. But You’re offering something completely different. Teach me what it means to live in the New Creation. To value legacy over achievement. To be present instead of performing. Amen.