• Healing the paralytic

The Son of Man has power to forgive sins and to heal.

• Call of the tax collector
• Dinner at the tax collector’s home

I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners.

• Question about fasting

New wine is put into fresh wineskins

• Healing the blind
• Healing the demoniac
• Teaching in the synagogues

They are like sheep without a shepherd

The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few ~ pray to the lord of the Harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.

Mark adds (rather, Matthew moves to Chapter 12 in his story) the passage about picking grain on the sabbath – ending with this quote:

The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath, so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.

Where do our ways of doing thing in the church interfere with the next generation’s ability to reach people with the Gospel? How do

• our worship style,
• our education forms,
• our language,
• our structures,
• our images and metaphores
• our assumptions and expectations

keep others from hearing Christ call them to repentance and new life?

How am I like the Pharisees, because I set up barriers and fences around the church or the gospel, assuming some people can’t or won’t or shouldn’t receive?

How are you like them?

In the passage of the wine and wineskins, one application is that the gospel is the wine, and a fresh presentation of the gospel to the next generation requires a fresh vessel, a fresh vehicle to transport it. That in no way demeans the old wine and old wineskins. We simply must acknowledge that with each new generation, with each new harvest, we may need new vessels to carry the same old message of salvation.