A New Wineskin
Anna, the prophetess mentioned in Luke 2:36-38, was a unique and unusual woman for her time. First, she was called a prophet/prophetess, the only named female prophet in the New Testament. Luke tells us she comes from the tribe of Asher, making her one of the few people in the New Testament with a tribal description. Her extreme age also distinguishes Anna. She was married for seven years, and depending on which translation you read, she was either a widow for 84 years or is now 84 years old. She could conceivably have been over 100 years old, an amazing feat in itself.
But what sets Anna apart from so many others, even people today, is the freshness of her zeal for God and her passion for His ways, no matter how many familiar things she had to let go of.
As a young widow, Anna could have easily lived from a place of sorrow and grief that grew into bitterness. She could have held onto her old way of life that would have closed doors to anything else the Lord wanted to do through her. But she did not. She chose God and His plans and purposes over anything else.
In Luke’s account she never leaves the Temple (v. 37). She worships night and day, fasting and praying. She is available every hour of every day, yet she has not become weary. She is mobile, articulate, alert, spiritually discerning and unselfish. Her vision aligns with God’s vision. She never once holds onto the old wineskins, but passionately pursues God. Her intimacy with Him, through her constant prayer and fasting, kept her in sync with God’s heart, so much so that God allows her to meet the Savior, baby Jesus in the Temple.
At the 2017 50th Anniversary Global Aglow Conference in Richmond, VA., Dutch Sheets said,
A new wine skin has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with the heart.
God spoke to me a couple of decades back, maybe somewhere in the late ‘90s. He said to me, ‘You are well on your way to becoming a wise old wine skin.” You can have wisdom, but not have current revelation. An old wine skin is not a person who is unsaved, and it is not a person that does not like God anymore. It is a person that cannot receive the new. They have not stayed flexible enough to embrace the new and flow with it.
I started watching and I found wise, very wise, old wine skins with great wisdom from yesterday. But today’s wisdom is yesterday’s revelation processed over time to become wisdom. But there is revelation for today that will be tomorrow’s wisdom.
I do not want to harp on this too much, but well done, leadership of Aglow, for remaining a fresh wine skin that can move in both wisdom and revelation.
How well are we receiving the new? How passionately are we willing to release the old and familiar when God tells us to let go and follow His Holy Spirit?
We are the new, according to 2 Corinthians 5:17.
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away;
behold, new things have come.
New means something that is different from the former or old. It also means something that is different than what has previously been in existence. New implies something that is fresh or never before used or seen. To be new implies that what is has never been before.
In 2008 Graham Cooke gave a prophetic word to Aglow and one part mentions us becoming a visual aid in the earth. If you think about God standing in our future and speaking back to us in the present year of 2008, He was saying, you will become something new, fresh, something never before seen and you will be a visual aid for all to see the pattern to follow.
