I want to show you something you can find in trash cans all over Connecticut. Empty bottles. In this case, an empty wine bottle. If you look at a bottle like this, really there's nothing wrong with it. It's not cracked. It's not chipped. Even the label's in pretty good shape. No foul odors. And yet there's no mystery why it was in the trash can. because it's empty. So whoever bought this wasn't interested in the bottle at all. He wanted the wine that came in it. What really matters is the full bottle. I bring that up because, obviously, the wine is more important than the bottle. And the bottle exists for the sake of the wine and not vice versa. And yet, if you didn't have the bottle, you wouldn't have any wine to enjoy, would you? So if the people who made this decided, well, the best thing to do is to go to 7-Eleven and buy those big Slurpee cups and try to ship it here and there, it never would have made it. They had to put the wine in something, and this has become over the years a pretty good something. Well, you might not recognize it, but this bottle is a 21st century dynamic equivalent to what in the first century? wine skins, because that's what in the New Testament era in the Middle East, they put their wine in. Jesus didn't talk about glass bottles, but I believe he did say something about wine skins. Here's what he said, no one pours new wine into old wine skins. Why not? He says if he does, the wine will burst the skins and both the wine and the wine skins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wine skins. When new wine is aging, it ferments, it's giving off gases. Evidently, those leather wineskins were somewhat elastic. They could expand and absorb those gases to some extent. I guess if you used last year's wineskin, there's no more elasticity. So when the new gases came, it ruptured. And you've ruined a perfectly good wineskin. And worse yet, all the wine spills out to the ground. The point he was making was pretty simple. There's some things you just don't do. There's some behavior. that's inappropriate. They were complaining because his disciples weren't fasting. He said, well, you don't fast during a wedding. And the bridegrooms here, they would fast when the bridegroom's taken away. It's just some things that are inappropriate. What we're going to talk about this weekend are bottles. We're going to call this a wineskin weekend. We're going to look at the basics of how the early church did things. So for the purposes of our time this weekend, we're going to look at bottles. I'm going to parallel the bottle to the practice of the early church. What do you suppose the wine itself would represent? Well, you can make it represent a lot of things. Let's start with true life in the New Covenant. This is being born again and filled with the Spirit. This is rivers of living water flowing from your innermost being. The wine is what any true child of God has. But then, more than that, as it relates to church, let's also let this wine stand for the people that make up the church. which is supposed to be a living organism. And so the wine can be life breathed out from the Holy Spirit into a body of people, God's family. We're supposed to have living relationships, aren't we? One with the other. Jesus said they'll know we are Christians by our Love. Okay, so that's very important. We're to love one another. We're to be involved in each other's lives. There's supposed to be confession of sin and restoration. It's invested love. It's intertwined lives. It's washing one another's feet. And when you think about Paul going around starting these churches, they had a certain wineskin that they used when they set these churches up, but the wine of relationship oftentimes was already there. Remember, these people mostly came out of synagogues. Most of the early church, they were Jewish Christians. Well, they'd known each other for years, maybe all their lives. They had pre-existing trust. relationships. So when the new covenant pattern of church life was there, they already had the wine. And so the reason I'm saying that is, even though I'm talking about bottles, the first thing you need to understand is, if any of this is going to be a blessing to you and your church, it presupposes that not only you personally, but the core people in your church have what? The wine! You got nothing if you don't have the wine, and everything we talk about this weekend belongs where? In the trash can! But no matter how perfect a bottle they can make, having a perfect bottle will not give you wine. And if you've got a bunch of strangers together that are all in the flesh, no matter how perfect you align it according to the New Testament, it's going to be a train wreck. So what matters is the wine. So I'm presupposing you've got the wine. I want you to know that if you're going to start a church, or maybe you've just started one, or just gotten involved with one, no matter how perfectly you do the bottle, the wine's what really counts. Some people go to the other extreme. They think if you have the wine, who cares about the bottle? They say you can have the Lord's Supper with a popsicle, and God won't care as long as you love each other. That's the opposite extreme. At one extreme, you've got people that approach the Bible like accountants do. They've got a form of godliness, but no power. It's empty. But you've got other people, they've really got the wine, but they have no use for what the Bible and Jesus and the apostles said about how to do church. So they start putting their new wine in, old wineskins, that actually start to hinder their walk with the Lord and their community together as God's people. So even though the wine is what really matters, as boring as bottles are, I'm going to have a session all day tomorrow on bottles because you don't want to put your wine in an open top Slurpee cup. It's got to be in something appropriate. So that's why we're going to pay attention to how the apostles set up churches. I want to show you another type of wine skin. Wine glass. Now that's a type of a wine skin as well, isn't it? specially designed wine skin. I'm not much of a wine connoisseur, but those guys who are, they really seem to get a lot of enjoyment out of that. If you look at a wine glass, there's quite a bit of thought that went into that. It's got a stem on it so that the heat from your hand doesn't heat the wine up. It's shaped like a tulip, so when they swirl it to aerate it, the bouquet is channeled so you can smell what's in it. And of course it's clear glass so that when you swirl it and you look at the legs, you can tell about the fermentation and the alcohol content in the wine. It's also clear so that when they hold it up to the light, they can tell about the clarity of it. So a lot of thought goes into the wine skin. Now how come it is, those wine connoisseurs, how come they're not all just sitting around drinking out of Super 8 motel cups? It'd be a lot cheaper, wouldn't it? Has the wine changed? Same wine, but somehow the enjoyment of it is affected, isn't it? So I'm going to say that this weekend, even though you really have the wine, I hope you do, you can do Super 8 Motel Cup Church, or you can do Wine Glass Church. Which would you rather do? The choice is yours. A lot of people don't think about the cup, but I think they're missing a blessing when they overlook the New Testament wineskin of the glass. And I said there's some kind of wineskins that are actually hurt. You walk with the Lord. Let's see if I can come up with one here. Now this is, this is the sack that the wine came in. Got a drink out of that? Let's try it. Pour that in, and it's going to hold for a little while. Like you said, a couple of sips, that's a foolish wineskin. Now see, it's starting to leak. Not many people are going to do this. You'd probably get it all over your shirt. Not only have I ruined a perfectly good sack, but I'm losing the wine, which really matters. So I'm going to go so far as to say there are some ways of doing church that are going to challenge your sanctification. and severely cobble you in your efforts to have meaningful relationship with other of God's people. This is why this becomes important. The new wine ought not be put into an old wine skin. That's why we're studying bottles this weekend. Does that make sense? Well, how were their church, churchy things, different than our churchy things? I brought a few props with me. Now this, private home. will represent the practice of the early church because they just happened to meet in private homes. In fact, they did that for a couple hundred years after the New Testament was written. And let's see, guess what that's going to represent? Church houses! That's the Western way of doing church. We don't have house churches, typically we have church houses. the early church was built squarely on the teachings of the Apostles, and I would like to think that every evangelical church is also quite concerned about having their theology built on the teachings of the Apostles, so I'm not saying that the theology of the evangelical church is wrong, but we have something that they didn't, and it's this. church history book because you see it has been 2,000 years since the early church was established and so we've got 2,000 years of church history that influences the way we do things that's just a fact question is is that good or bad hmm Jesus said it was to our advantage that he leave because he would send the Holy Spirit to God to send all truth. He said, I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away. For if I do not go away, the helper shall not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he, the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth. So there are good things and bad things, both that happen. Jesus also said there'd be wolves in sheep's clothing that would come. What you have, as you look in church history, is you see a bunch of bad guys doing things, but you see the Holy Spirit doing a bunch of good things. The last 2,000 years is the history of the Holy Spirit working in God's people to get us to where we are today. So, on one hand, we want to say, back to the Bible, but on the other hand, you also want to say, onward with the Spirit. We want to be taught by the Bible, but led by the Spirit. Even though this is a blessing, 2,000 years, that is a long time. So we're trying to look back. How did the early church do things? All that stained glass window kind of gets in the way sometimes, doesn't it? We just can't see it. We've got a lot of baggage that gets in the way. We've got to unlearn just to have a level field to understand what they did back then. So as we talk, some things, if you've never heard this before, can be kind of upsetting. Not because I invented it, but because you've never heard it. Scholars in every denomination agree on the way the early church did things. It's not a mystery. It's shocking, but it's not a mystery. So when the big boys and all these denominational churches all say the same thing about how the church in the first century did things, I feel pretty confident that's probably right. That combined with the fact that you can clearly see it in the New Testament. So even though it's shocking, remember, we didn't invent it. If we did, I'm sure it's wrong. Let me just contrast now and then, in case you've never heard this. See, I don't mind adding to what's in the Bible. I don't mean scripture, I mean practices. Guitars are in the New Testament. I bet you a lot of you use them in your churches, don't you? But we haven't just added to how the early church did things. The hard part is we've done the exact opposite at almost every major point. That's the problem. Let me start with the models they had. house churches, we have church houses. So what? Well, if you're only going to meet in a private home, that's going to limit how big your church can get. Buildings can be as big as the architect can imagine it, cathedral sized. So right away you see that in the New Testament individual congregations were smaller rather than larger. Now I've done study on floor plans of first century houses and the Romans commenced to build houses from England all the way through to Iraq and from Italy down to North Africa. We got the floor plans for a lot of these things and there's several of them they know for a fact had church meetings in them. The house churches would put scenes from the Gospels and different things on the walls and in the floors. So, they know Christians were using these houses and they would modify the houses to accommodate the church. So, smallish instead of bigish. It's the main contrast I want to draw here. Let me just say, by way of illustration, there was a Roman outpost city along the Babylonian River in a city they called Dura-Europos. It was like a fortress city. That was on the frontier. It wasn't on the way to anywhere. Nobody wanted to live there. It was just abandoned, covered with sand and forgotten until 1921 when this British officer found it. You know how Pompeii, everything's just perfectly reserved because of the ashes. Well, this city is that way, because nobody ever built on top of it. Well, there's a lot of houses there, there's houses everywhere, but what's key here is, it was a house church, they know for a fact it was, because of the Christian stuff on the walls. Now this is before Constantine, completely illegal, yet it's in a Roman garrison town, it's a military town, and it was on Wall Street. They had a wall, it was outer defense wall, and then this house inside the wall. Well, after years went by, the Romans decided they needed a thicker wall, so they built another wall over here. And they bought all the houses on Wall Street and filled it up with rubble, so they could have a thicker wall and a bigger platform for the military maneuvers. So this house is preserved. It's just there. So there were two rooms, and they knocked out the wall between them. And they put benches all along the walls. They said it's very unusual. You don't see that in first century Roman houses. And of course, there's the Christian stuff on the walls. Well, the meeting room they met in was 16 feet by 42 feet. That will hold easily 65, 75 people. So I think when we talk about New Testament house churches, you don't want to thank us four no more. You don't want to thank your family and the next-door neighbors. But neither do you want to thank thousands and thousands, not hundreds of hundreds, scores of people, 20, 40, 60, 80, a healthy group. Think of all the activity that's going on in 1 Corinthians 14, all the things that are being contributed to that church meeting. That's more than just three guys sitting around. There's another house church in Lovingstone Villa, Kent. And this was a Roman villa, and again, same thing had happened. Some Christians had gone in there and modified a room and done the Christian mosaic thing. And when the Romans pulled out of England, this house was burned down and never rebuilt. Well, their meeting room was 16 feet by 32 feet. And one final one in Pompeii. These Roman houses were pretty typical. By the way, they didn't like windows on the outside of their houses because of burglars. So the outside was no windows. The windows were on the inside, and they would build courtyards. Usually it's like a figure eight, the zeros being courtyards. The windows were on the inside of the house to the courtyard, and they always had four-sided porches where just the middle was open to the rain, and it had a pool down the bottom. And so, anyway, these houses are everywhere. That's called the atrium area. That'll hold a fair number of people. Between the two atriums especially, there's a center room there that they never had doors on. They had either curtains or folding doors, but that could be opened up so you would have a pretty big area. A single atrium of a home in Pompeii was 28 feet by 20 feet. That's even bigger than a typical double garage. You're talking scores of people. So, I'm just saying smaller instead of a thousand of your closest friends. their churches were like families. In China, most Christians do house church. They don't call it house church, they call it family church. The problem when we start building these big buildings, the more people that are there, the more formal it is, the less you know everybody, and it becomes, instead of like a family, really more and more like a club, or worse yet, a business or something. And so, over here in the smaller church, your pastor is like a father figure, But over here, depending on how big the church is, he's more and more like the CEO of a corporation or president. So it just changes. Now over here in the smaller church, the goal was mutual edification, a lot of one-anothering. You can't do this with hundreds of people. So you have to go to the theater format. And it becomes a worship service. You know, you go to a old-timey full service gas station, they come out, they do it all for you. Well, this is what happens in the big church. They do it all for you. And you talk to a guy that goes to a big church. What church do you attend? It's like watching a show. You attend a movie. You don't participate, you attend it. Well, that's not right, because New Testament meetings were not worship services. They were, in fact, participatory. So in the New Testament, you got a little bit from a whole lot of people. But in our Western church, we got a whole lot from just a couple of people. Well, that's backwards from the New Testament. Do you see what I mean about we keep doing things? We do them opposite. In the early church, they did the Lord's Supper every week. How about the church you grew up in? How often did you do it? A lot of Protestants do it monthly or quarterly, don't they? Now in the New Testament, though, guess what? They did it as an actual meal. The Lord's Supper was called a supper because it was a supper. They had the bread and the wine, but they had a supper. Well, we got rid of that, didn't we? What can we get rid of and still call the Lord's Supper? Well, they've stripped it down to the bread and the wine and you just get a little taste of that. We don't make it a supper anymore. We've changed that. In the New Testament, the Lord's Supper looked back to what Jesus did on the cross, but also looked forward to his promise to come back and eat it again with us. And they celebrated it like rehearsal dinner for the marriage banquet of the Lamb. It was a wedding feast. It was a time of joy and fellowship. Does that describe the way this church does the Lord's Supper? No joy. No fellowship. Every head is bowed. Every eye is closed. It's rugged individualism. It's introspection. It's really like a funeral. You've often got the lights turned down and the organs playing funeral music. And the deacons are like pallbearers. And down front, you've got what seems to be a body covered in a white shroud, don't you? It's very much a funeral. Because this only looks back to the cross. We've stripped out the parts where Jesus said he should look forward to him eating it with us. So we just keep getting cheated, I think. Also, some of the scholars, and me too, argue that church government in the New Testament was elder-led congregational consensus, where you try to get everybody on board with decisions, unity. The bigger the church is, the harder that becomes, because there's too many lines of relationships to work, the love starts to be lost, it becomes more cold and informal, so they revert over to elder-ruled churches, government by command rather than consensus. So that's a change, it's a departure. That's really the only thing they can do. The early church is all about relationships. This, typically, is all about programs. It's different. Also, I think in the New Testament, they made a distinction between a church meeting, which is always small and it's participatory, it's not centered on any one person, it's every week, and a ministry meeting, which was occasional, secondary, dominated by one person, and could be thousands of people. Actually, a lot of good stuff comes from this. The trouble is, they call it church. Well, there's nothing that looks like that in the New Testament. What does look like this is like Paul renting the lecture hall of Tyrannus for evangelism, or the apostles going to the temple courts for evangelism. Bill Gaither come to town to rent a coliseum and have a big praise hoopla. That's great. It's not church, though. Oh, and Billy Graham used to go around doing evangelistic crusades. Fantastic! Thousands of people. But was that church? This is ministry of evangelism. See, you got usually some gifted pastor at the head of these things. Sometimes they do worship, sometimes they do teaching, sometimes it's healing ministry, whatever it is. Sometimes it's evangelism. Problem is, they call it church. And the thing that really is church, they don't do it all. Or if they do have it, they call that a cell group or something. They get it all mixed up. So we would say this is primary and this is secondary. And what we've done today is completely reverse that. We make it like this, don't we? So you draw a distinction between the two. The Church of History, these people, have said when they look back at the New Testament, it doesn't really matter how they did things. We don't care. We can do what we want to. I don't see that written down anywhere, but by our actions, that's what we've said, isn't it? So what we do now, we go pick cafeteria style. Oh, I like this, not like that. Maybe this thing. We left the rest of it behind. I'm arguing for a little consistency. I'm going to try to convince you tomorrow that the apostles and Jesus would have wanted us to do church the way we see it in the New Testament, in all areas, not just a few of them. And that the burden of explanation ought to be on the people who deviate from the New Testament, not on the ones who want to keep it. It's never wrong to do things the New Testament way. The scholars are going to agree with what I'm going to tell you tomorrow. That's not controversial. So, our conference this weekend is going to be about divine patterns. It's going to be about wineskins. And we're going to advocate historic Orthodox Christianity poured into the wineskin of apostolic patterns. So apostolic teaching wrapped up in apostolic tradition. I've given you the big picture and those are the topics we'll talk about tomorrow. That's the overview. We try to set the parameters for what's important and what isn't. You can do Super 8 Motel Cup Church, or you can do Wine Glass Church. Which would you rather do? The choice is yours. This message was produced by the New Testament Reformation Fellowship, reforming today's church with New Testament church practices. Permission is hereby granted for you to reproduce this message. You can find us on the web at www.ntrf.org. May God bless you as you seek to follow Him in complete obedience to His Word. May your faith in the Lord Jesus be strengthened and your daily walk with Him deepened.