The Congregation, The Club And The Church

The Congregation, The Club And The Church by Santosh Poonen

“New wine must be put into new wineskins” (Luke 5:38).

I would like to share with you in this little book, something that the Lord has been doing in my life over a period of many years. It is a way of life that has become very precious to me because, like everything of eternal value, experiencing it has involved sacrifice.

If we really seek to understand the teaching and the life of Christ, it will bring us to a cross – a cross where we will have to give up some cherished things that we value and we will have to make sacrifices in many areas. Then what the Lord wants to teach us will become a reality in our lives – and we will fulfil the whole plan of God for our lives.

Building the New Covenant Church is an area that God has made very precious to me. The path to it is, however, a very, very narrow one.

The Only Thing that Matters

Jesus said that new wine must be put into new wineskins. The new wine is His life that He wants to give us through the Holy Spirit. The new wineskin is the New Covenant Church that He wants to build through us, in which this life is to be manifested.

If we sincerely seek to live this New Covenant life, we will discover that we have to peel off many layers of selfishness (like the layers of an onion), as God shows them to us a little at a time. The same is true, when we seek to build a New Covenant Church.

The old wineskin is a church built on human traditions rather than on God’s Word. This also has many layers. As the Lord shows us those layers we must peel them off. Unfortunately, many Christians who seek to build New Covenant churches stop short at some point – when there are many layers of the old wineskin still to be peeled off. They have peeled off only some of the obvious human and denominational traditions that they have grown up with. But the Lord wants us to get rid of the old wineskin completely. He wants His new wine to be contained in a totally new wineskin.

For many years, I knew the teaching about the new wine and the new wineskin and what it really meant to build the Church as the body of Christ – theoretically. But all of it was only head-knowledge, accumulated by hearing more sermons about it than others had heard. Growing up, I heard sermons about the New Covenant by my Dad every Sunday. I also heard him at home, Monday through Saturday. But all of it was still only in my head. It took many years for those truths to descend from my head to my heart, when I finally realized that this was the only way that I could serve the Lord.

Jesus is the only Person for me in my life now. Every other relationship comes out of my relationship with Him. And, therefore, building the Church as the Body of Christ is the only thing for me in my service for the Lord now.

Why did our Lord Jesus choose the way of the cross every single day of His earthly life? The Bible says that it was because of “a joy set before Him” (Hebrews12:2).

What was that joy set before Him?

In John 14, we read Jesus’ parting words to His disciples before He went to the cross. I really appreciate the fact that the apostle John took five chapters to tell us the parting words of Jesus at the last supper. There Jesus said, “Arise let us go from here” (John 14:31). He was going to His crucifixion. But before saying that, He said, “That the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father gave Me commandment even so I do” (John 14:30).

That was His joy – the joy of always being in submission to His Father and thus being in fellowship with Him, as it had been for Him from all eternity. So, Jesus went to the cross first of all, out of love for His Father and submission to His command – and then out of love for us.

I want to emphasize this point because that is the only way we can build His Church as well. All desire to overcome sin and to do the Lord’s work must come first from a love for the Father leading to obedience to His commands – and secondly from a love for people. We need to have compassion for people, if we are to build the Church. But before that compassion, there must be a love for our heavenly Father – a passionate love that makes us want to obey His commands.

These are the two vital requirements needed to build a New Covenant Church: Love for the Father and love for others. These can be represented by the two planks of the cross – the vertical plank and the horizontal plank. With just one of those planks – the vertical or the horizontal alone – you don’t have a cross.

In the cross, we see a beautiful picture of the two-way relationship that defines how we should carry the cross every day of our lives.

In the subsequent chapters, I want to point out what it means to have both planks of the cross in our lives, and how these two together can help us build New Covenant Churches.