Jesus’ New Wine, Bursting Old Wineskins

September 9th, 2026
by Kurt Olson

This is Part 4 of an 18-part series drawn from Kurt Olson's book, The Endgame of God. New posts publish every Wednesday at GoMultiply.org/blog.

Jesus Was Never Talking About Wine

Jesus' words about wineskins were never really about wine-making. They were about operating systems — and why the new wine of a multiplying movement of discipleship cannot be poured into rigid old religious structures.

In three of the four Gospels, Jesus warns us not to pour new wine into old wineskins (Matthew 9:17, Mark 2:22, Luke 5:37). "No one pours new wine into old wineskins," He says. "Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. New wine calls for new wineskins" (Mark 2:22). Now, do you really think Jesus was worried that His followers might not know how to ferment and store their grape juice? Of course not. Everyone in Israel already knew how to do that. He is talking about something far bigger.

He's Talking About Operating Systems

In Jesus' day, wine was made by adding yeast to fresh grape juice and sealing it inside the fresh skin of an animal. As the yeast turns the sugar into alcohol, it releases carbon dioxide gas, and that gas creates tremendous pressure. So the container has to be able to stretch. A new, supple skin can expand with the pressure. But an animal skin can only be stretched once. Pour that same fermenting mixture into an old skin that has already been stretched, and it will burst — and, in Jesus' own words, both the wine and the skin will be ruined.

So the teaching is not really about wine at all. It is about our spiritual operating systems — the way we actually function as His followers. Jesus was saying that the new wine of a rapidly multiplying movement of disciples simply cannot be contained in an old, rigid structure. If you try and blend the two you lose both.

"The Old Is Better"

In Luke Jesus adds a line that lands uncomfortably close to home for many in the church today: "no one who drinks the old wine seems to want the new wine. 'The old is just fine,' they say" (Luke 5:39). That is exactly how many sincere believers feel about the traditional way of doing church. They have tasted the old, they are comfortable with it, and they will not even consider a different way — even when the old way is producing very little fruit and making almost no disciples.

Please hear me: the "new way" God is restoring all over the world today is not new at all. It is the original way the New Testament church operated two thousand years ago. What is actually new — what you will not find anywhere on the pages of the New Testament — is the building-based, pastor-centered, Sunday-morning system most of us grew up assuming was the biblical, New Testament way of doing church.

Where Did That System Come From?

When Jesus taught about wineskins, Jerusalem alone had hundreds of synagogues, to say nothing of the synagogues in every other town in Israel at that time. And a synagogue was a religious building with a man in charge called a synagogue ruler who led it, weekly services on the Sabbath, prayers, Scripture readings, a sermon, an offering, announcements, chanting, and a benediction. Does that sound familiar? Our modern building-based church looks far more like the first-century synagogue system than it looks like the movement that Jesus started.

This matters, because Jesus' twelve apostles were Jewish men who were probably raised inside that old wineskin synagogue system. No wonder it took Him three years to mold them into new-wine disciples who could manage a rapidly expanding disciple-making movement. He had to re-form not just what they believed, but how they operated.

The Mud-Walled Church

Let me tell you about a moment that made this crystal clear to me. I was in northern Uganda, conducting a discipleship training retreat for the leaders of a rural network. We were meeting in a small mud-walled church building with a grass roof, and it was packed — it was designed to handle about fifty people but about seventy people had come to this training. So I asked them a simple question: "If each of you brought just one person to this meeting tomorrow, what would happen?" They looked around and said, "We wouldn't fit."

Exactly. And that is the whole problem in one sentence. The old, rigid wineskin of a building-based system would not be able to handle the pressure of real growth. It cannot stretch. Success actually breaks it. The very thing we say we want — more people coming to Jesus — is the very thing that rigid religious structures are least able to contain.

The Simple Test

Here is a test you can run on any ministry, including your own. Ask honestly: if our numbers doubled tomorrow, and doubled again next week, and again the week after — could our current structure handle it? If the answer is no, you are working inside an old wineskin system. Most of our systems are built to gather a crowd into one room, on one schedule, around one professional. They are built to add, slowly, not to handle multiplication.

What the New Wineskin Actually Is

So what is the new wineskin? It is not a bigger building. It is the whole world. It is any home, any workplace, any shade tree, any public space where two or three gather in Jesus' name. Imagine if every person reading this simply found one household with someone in it who is searching for God, and taught that entire household to be the church right where they are. We could add thousands of souls to the Kingdom without straining a thing — because the world is big enough to handle expansion, but buildings are not.

None of this means gatherings are bad or that your building is evil. I love the body of Christ gathered. But I am asking a structural question that most of us have never asked: does your approach have the capacity to multiply, or only to add? Because Paul says leaders were given "to equip God's people to do His work and build up the church" (Ephesians 4:12) — and an old wineskin keeps everyone dependent on the person up front, while a new wineskin releases every believer to obey and reproduce.

Run the test on your own ministry: if the people you reach doubled every week for a month, would your current structure be able to multiply with them — or would it burst? And if it would burst, what is the first thing that would need to change?