Daily Bible Reading 25th May 2026 // Luke 5:33-39
33 And they said to him, “The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink.” 34 And Jesus said to them, “Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? 35 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.” 36 He also told them a parable: “No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. If he does, he will tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. 37 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. 38 But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. 39 And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’”
These verses record three parabolic illustrations given by Jesus in answer to criticisms made of Him by the Pharisees. We need to look at them - and we shall understand them best - in relation to what precedes them, viz., the conversion of Levi and the feast which he gave in celebration of it. The scribes and Pharisees uttered their criticism of Jesus' disciples because of their - and His - participation in Levi's feast, and our Lord's reply was surely significant in this light. For Levi's conversion was the marriage of a soul with the Saviour, and this is what they were in fact celebrating. If there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth, it cannot be out of place for such joy to be expressed on earth also! 'Rejoice with me', says the Shepherd, 'for I have found my sheep that was lost'. The illustrations about the garments and the wine have the same kind of force: the nature of what had happened to Levi is well expressed in them. The miracle of regeneration, of newness of life, had taken place, and he was a new creation. It was not a matter of patching up old clothes, or using old bottles; he had received a change of raiment altogether. Christ did not come to patch up our broken, torn lives; He came to make us new men. He had not come to call Levi to a better way of living, but to an altogether different way of living. Our Lord's final word in 39 has its own peculiar force. The previous illustrations show how impossible it is to link the new spirit of the gospel with the worn out forms of Judaism; but this word shows how natural it is for those who have been nurtured in the old to prefer it (in their blindness) to the new - and, indeed, how much easier it is for someone not hidebound by old and hoary tradition (like the scribes and Pharisees) to respond to the new message.