Second Skin

“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 2:22 NIV

Did you realize that as reptiles grow, they shed their skin to allow for further growth? This is because, unlike our skin, a reptile’s doesn’t grow as they grow. Instead, snakes, lizards, and other reptiles must shed their skin regularly as their old skin is outgrown. (Technically, humans shed their skin too, at the rate of about 50 million cells a day.)

So then, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; what is old has passed away – look, what is new has come! 2 Corinthians 5:17 NET

As Christians, when we speak of being a new creation, it is important that we see ourselves as “reborn.” When we believe, we are as newborn infants, having restarted from a place of wonder and childlikeness, wholly dependent on the One who gave us rebirth. Having begun again in these new skins, we find ourselves in a constant state of spiritual growth, even as we continue in the constant state of physical decay in which our earthly bodies must endure.

The trouble here is that, like the reptile, our relationship with Christ (our new bodies) cannot grow beyond our spiritual skins. When once He found us and came to that dreadful place where He saw fit to rescue us, He gave to us then what the apostle Paul referred to as a deposit or “down payment of our inheritance” Ephesians 1:13-14. It was in that moment that Christ began His work within us, starting the lifelong process of sanctification to bring us into His spiritual likeness.

But, unlike the human body, our spiritual skin does not grow and stretch. Indeed, like that of the reptile, our spiritual skin must be shed as we outgrow it. Because if we remain in our old skin, we will be forever constrained to the boundaries of our previous self.

Instead, we must intentionally shed our old skin to allow our “new and improved” skin to be filled with new wine. (We should note here the parallel between the wine of the Lord’s Supper and the blood of Christ.) When Jesus uses the example of the wineskins above, He is speaking directly of this kind of process.

During our growth, we should never be satisfied that we’ve arrived, but instead we must remain humble and aware of God’s continuing work in us, and His regular efforts at growing us in His likeness.

To allow this, of course, we must throw off those things that “so easily entangle” Hebrews 12:1-2. Sometimes such things are simply old ways of thinking, and the immaturity that comes from lack of experience and ignorance. But sometimes, our old skin consists of the old influences or behaviors that were common to us when Jesus first stepped into our lives.

But when we watch Jesus in the gospels, we would see that He never stayed in one place. Though He ate and drank with sinners, He didn’t move in with them. Like He did with us, He came, He loved, and lifted them up. Then He said, “Follow me,” and He moved on. And while He did leave that deposit with us and continues to work in us, we must remain quite aware that His invitation was to “leave the world behind,” not to drop an anchor.

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.” Mark 8:34-35 NIV

To continue in our development, then, we have to leave behind much of the stuff held captive by our previous skin. And though the old skin sometimes comes off in one piece, often it falls off (or must be peeled off) in small patches.

But shed we must! For at any time, we must have the capacity to look at ourselves in the mirror and recognize that we have changed for the better, that we’ve grown. Acknowledging that change, we have to realize it’s time again to shed, and allow the new skin underneath to begin accepting what comes next. We eat and drink the Word of God, and we grow. Then at some point, we reach the point of saturation and maturity that demands that, before we can move forward to the next stage, we shed again.

But if we look in the mirror and are unable to see a spiritual change, then we must examine what we’re hanging on to that’s holding us back. For many of us, “there is a struggle between the person we used to be and the person we are trying to be.” ^a And that struggle exists because we are trying to keep a part of who we were and bring it with us into our new lives.

But as C.S. Lewis once noted, “If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.” ^b So when you yearn to be like Jesus, you literally “can’t take it with you.” There is no part of our old skin that we can take with us as a souvenir into our new skin. Like the booster stage of a spacecraft, if it is not discarded once the stage is complete, it becomes a hindrance that prevents the craft from moving into its next stage of flight.

Remember, the more we grow, the more wisdom and experience we gain. And who we become is no longer who we once were, and the perspective we once had that dictated the decisions we made are no longer relevant.

Therefore, we can no longer continue making decisions based on outdated information. Our own growth demands that we step away from those things that are no longer relevant. And if we force ourselves to stay in the place we’ve outgrown, what value do we have? What can Jesus do with that?

For without the continuing willingness to let go of our old skins, Jesus can never fill us up with the new wine He has prepared for us.

Because, as He said, it would just be a waste of good wine.