Well, thank you for your warm welcome. I saw that it's been 17 years since I was in this pulpit last and how quickly, frighteningly quickly those years have gone by. And I want to draw your attention to this passage then that I read in your hearing, Mark's Gospel, Chapter 2. And just let's refresh ourselves with verses 18 to 22. And this is the passage I want to open up. Mark chapter 2 and verse 18. The disciples of John and of the Pharisees used to fast. And they come. And they say unto Jesus, why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, but thy disciples fast not? And Jesus said unto them, can the children of the bride chamber fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they can't fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days. No man can also seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment, else the new piece that filled it up taketh away from the old, and the rent is made worse. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles, else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilt, and the bottles will be marred. But new wine must be put into new bottles. Now there is no more important question than the question of what is true religion. There are many religions in the world, many religions in the British Isles these days. And many horrible things are done. in the name of religion. Now, that's not a new phenomenon, it was also the case in Jesus' day, perplexity as to what true religion was. And there was a dominant group called the Pharisees that had been about 200 years in the land and they would very quickly tell you what true religion is. There are two ways, they said, in which you showed that you had the true religion. You added firstly to your life certain practices. You went to the synagogue on the Sabbath and you fasted each week. You didn't eat pork because it was unclean. You ceremonially washed and let the air dry your arms before you ate. You added to your life such things as that. And we see that, don't we, all around us. People have added beards and turbans and black clothing. Those things, they add to their lives and they are the marks then of true religion. And then also, secondly they would say, you also remove from your life certain practices. You don't mix with unbelievers. You don't visit them, you don't go to their parties. You don't pick ears of corn as you walk through a cornfield and rub it and eat the ears of corn on the Sabbath day. You don't doctor on the Sabbath day. You don't heal on the Sabbath. So you give up certain practices and then you add other such practices and that's the mark, that's the evidence, the proof that you have true religion. Now the Lord Jesus was obviously an enigma to these truly religious people. He was certainly religious. He preached. He was a holy man. But he didn't do any of those things. None of those additions and none of those subtractions. And he didn't teach his disciples. that true religion and holiness consisted of adding certain of those things and taking away those things from their lives. And when he spoke of what true religion was, and he would often much more talk about what true religion is rather than negatively dismiss false religion. He did so in these terms. True religion is experiencing peace and joy from trusting in a saviour whom you know who is your teacher and your protector and provider and the Lamb of God. And that's the sort of thing that he would say in different ways all through the three years of his public ministry. And so one day he was challenged. It's early on. This is Mark 2. He's beginning. It's his first months of his public ministry. And the Pharisees then come to him and they challenge him and they say, you're not fasting. And you don't teach your disciples to fast. Your relative John the Baptist, he fasted and he taught his disciples to fast. Why? What's wrong? And Jesus' answer was a fascinating answer. He says, is a wedding a time for mourning and fasting? All right, you're all sitting there in the reception. Having gone through this now in the last couple of months, weddings are something very fresh to me. My wife died a few years ago and I've remarried. And you know, the waiter comes round and he comes to the table and he says, soup or melon? He looks and they're all in black and the women have veils on and they're sniffing and they say, nothing thanks for us. And then he comes to the second course and he brings a bowl of green peas with a lump of butter on it and steaming hot and a jug of gravy and fresh cut beef and roast potatoes and they say, not for us. You don't want anything. No, thanks, they say. No, thank you. And their heads are down. And the bride's father, who's paid for this meal for everyone in the wedding reception, is apoplectic. And he tells his new son-in-law to go and talk to these people and urge them to eat. This is not a funeral. He says, this is a wedding. It's a time for rejoicing. But he can't persuade them at all. What a bizarre phenomenon. The press gets hold of it. Reuters gets hold of it. A wedding that was turned into a funeral. Now there's a time for sobriety and a time for seriousness. Jesus says there'll be a time when the bridegroom isn't with you. be arrested, he'd be taken from you, snatched away from you. The two men on the road to Emmaus, they were in no mood for rejoicing as they walked on that road. Their lover, their dearest friend had been taken from them. But while it's a wedding day, well, they make fun of the bride, the groom, the best man, the father of the bride, he says things about his daughter and we all laugh and then the best man teases the bridegroom and there's joy and there's festivity and there's a keli afterwards and so on. It's a happy day. It's a humorous day. It's a celebration. It's a feast. And if we want to talk about what real religion is, it's not the black suit. and the black tie and the black beard and the black heart. That's not a good symbol of what real religion is. From heaven he's come, our bright group. From heaven he came and sought us to be his holy bride. With his own blood he bought us and for our life our savior died. He came to deal with our ignorance and he teaches us, he says, what the real life is. He came to teach us what the duties of a bride and a groom are, how children should be raised, what our functions are in the church, what a pastor must do, what a neighbor must do. He must love his neighbor as himself. He teaches us. He comes to our weakness. and our helplessness and we can't face the future. We're getting weaker and old age and he comes and he says, but I'll be with you. He'll shepherd us and lead us and strengthen us and he comes to deal with our guilt. And He's taken to Himself the guilt of our sin. He's become the Lamb of God and the Lord has imputed our guilt to Him and we are forgiven because of union with Jesus Christ in His righteous life and His atoning death. This is real religion. It's receiving Him into our lives as many as received Him. To them he gave the right to be called God's children, God's sons and daughters. We are given that privilege. So the first thing that Jesus does is he explains to them what true religion is. It's enjoying him as our God and our Savior. And then he gives, secondly, a word of caution. Be careful, he says, what you add to your lives. He says in verse 21, no one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth onto an old garment. Because when you put it in the wash then on wash day and clean it and in the old way there with a stick and with some salt and some soap and so on, whatever, Jesus saw his mother do so often. then it shrinks perhaps to a half or a quarter of the size it was before it was attached to the trousers of his half-brothers and the knee patches of his sister's dresses and so on. There were no sanferized cloth, pre-shrunk cloth in the first century. What you added made things worse. Now that's his point. And we've observed that, how people have been in trouble and they've added things which have made things worse for them. Here's a couple and they're going through a difficult time in their marriage and they go to a counselor and he's hopeless. He suggests they begin some bizarre behavior, that they add that to their lives. They think it's scandalous what he's suggesting to them. Untoward behavior. to spice up their marriage and it makes things worse. The tear between them is worse. Or their parents and a boy starts acting badly as a teenager, is defiant, he stays out late at night and they go to a counsellor about him and the counsellor is very free and says, oh well, let him do it. He's going through a phase if he's drinking, if he's mixing with gangs. If he's wearing clothes with slogans, oh, well, don't worry about it. He'll grow out of it. Until one day there's a doorbell, and there are policemen at the door, and the boy's in deep trouble. And you allowed him. You stood back. You didn't warn him. You didn't plead. You didn't weep over him. You didn't speak seriously to him. You didn't plead with him. You didn't point out to him. He added those things to his life which have been a disaster for him. Or there are people in a church and there's a party then and they sort of meet together and they grumble about the situation in the church. There's no life in this church. There's no vitality. It's all so sluggish. We need new songs, we need new music, new clowns, new groups, a band, a humor. Things should be shorter. And they keep on and threaten to leave. And so people give in to them. and then the people who are being the backbone of the church, then they are marginalized. The people who have given and prayed for the church for a long time and there's decline and division because of what's been added to the church. Jesus says all garments need old cloth to repair them. Old truths, you know, we say, if it's new, it's not true. And if it's true, it's not new. It's there, it's been given to the Church for 2,000 years in the New Testament. Think of conscience, conscience is God's monitor that tells you what's right and commends you when you do what's right and warns you when you do what's wrong. You've got the old voice there. You always listen. And ever let your conscience be your guide. Or then there's the message of the Bible. It's been for 2,000 years the basis of law and education and the attitude to sickness. It's created in Europe and in Britain in particular values that are enormously important. It's the message of Jesus and his apostles. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. You know the message. We deserve eternal death because we are sinners. But Jesus Christ, because He loved us, became the Lamb of God and died for us. That's the old, old story of Jesus and His love. And those who know it best are hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest. You need a rediscovery of the old cloth. to patch up, then thread bare religion. Paul tells Timothy, preach the word. That's what you've got to do. Don't be ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It's the power of God unto salvation to all who believe. It's the balm of Gilead. It's the rose of Sharon. There's a fragrance from the presence of the Spirit and of Christ when we gather in his name. It's a feast day. Sunday is the feast day of the congregation. And then the third thing that Jesus says here is that new wine skeins then are needed for new wine. No one pours new wine, verse 22, into old bottles, old wine skins. The wine will burst. the skins, the bottles and the wine skins will be lost. He pours new wine into new wine skins, alright. You see the picture, you carefully skinned the sheep you had slaughtered and there were certain orifices where the legs and the anus and the head had been and you sew those up very tightly and you cure the leather that's there and when it's new it's supple and so when it's ready you put the new wine in and new wine expands. If you put it in old wineskins, the old wineskins are dry and brittle and they crack instead of expanding and the wineskins are destroyed and the old wineskins are for water, they're not for wineskins. So Jesus is talking here about people who think of religion as adding something, some new power to your life. Here's a person and They think that they'll have church going. Okay, I'll go to church on Sunday. So it'll be a break. It'll be different. It can make the day different and so on. And I don't depreciate going to church for any reason. Come to a gospel church. Come and hear the Word of God. It's a divine instrument for conversion and for sanctification. And you need that mysterious influence that one Christian has over another. and our indebtedness to other people and the example of Jesus Christ, of God living in people, what it does. But it can be just an addendum, some addition that you add to your life, you yourself haven't changed. Your thinking and your values, you get it from the newspaper, you get it from television, you get it from the ethos of the 21st century in England. And that's not a Christian ethos. Here's her husband and wife and they're having marital difficulties and they read an article in the Reader's Digest and it talks about the importance of church attendance for husbands and wives and that the statistics for divorce by husband and wife who go to church are much less than those who never go to church. And it's true. And they say, okay, we'll go to church on Sundays. But that's all they do. They don't understand the message. They don't look for a church which honors Jesus Christ and believes his word. They just go along to church. They've added something. Church attendance. Or a person can add philanthropy to his life. He's prospered. I know a man who bought land in Texas when it was two cents an acre and now it's two dollars an acre and he's become multi-millionaire as the Americans say and there was a friend of mine he was a pastor Don McKinney in a church in Louisiana and there was a woman in the congregation and her father was this multi-millionaire and she tried to talk him about the gospel he didn't want to know he just lived for his money and she asked my friend if Ron would go and see him. She said, you can meet him on a Monday morning in the main street at the bank. The bank closes Monday mornings just for him because he has such a huge account there. He always arrives at 11 o'clock. So he was very nervous, he told me, and he went along and he stood there on the pavement at 11 o'clock. Cadillac arrived and the chauffeur opened the back door and the man got out. And Ron said to him, hello, I know your daughter and your daughter's pastor. And you know how God has been so good to you. And he looked sternly back at Don. He said, I've been good to God. I've built a wing of the local hospital. I give a scholarship to the local school. Two children every year go off to university with the money. I've built a dormitory for the university. I've been good to God. Thank you. And off he went and left down there like that. This man was generous. He's philanthropic, we said. He'd added that to his life, but his heart There was no inward change. It was simply an outward addition to his life. You know, some people are wonderful neighbors and you're glad of them. They believe in the good neighbor policy. You give your key to them, you go off on holiday and they'll water your plants and you need them to be watered. days like this, they look after the cat when you go off for a day or two. You say to me, I couldn't have a better neighbor and I'm so glad that you've got a good neighbor. But these are people who think because they've added good neighborliness to their lives that all is well, but their lives are unchanged. Here's a man and he sits in his front room, he looks through the French windows and he's got a crab apple tree and there it is, the little apples, they're useless. You can't do anything with them. The blossom helps to... encourage the blossom on the real apple trees to grow. That's the only thing you can say. He gets fed up with them. So one day he buys a gross of Cox's Orange Pippins and he spends the day tying 144 apples to the Crabapple tree. He has a shower afterwards and he sits in his seat looking out over the garden and he sees this tree now transformed. covered in dozens and dozens, over a hundred apples there on the tree. What sort of tree is it? It's a Crabapple tree. It always will be a Crabapple tree. That's what it is. And one day, he'll have to take those apples off it again. He's just added some things to it. Jesus' point is you don't change a person by certain additions or abstractions. A young man sees an old jalopy, he's got a friend selling it for a few hundred pounds. Oh, he sprays it yellow and he puts zebra seat covers on it. He has a wonderful hi-fi system. You can hear him coming from a mile away and he planes the head to increase the compression ratio. What has he got? He's got an old jalopy. Still, that's all it is, souped up, but an old jalopy. Do you see what Jesus is saying? That real religion isn't adding certain things to your life. like church attendance or not taking drugs. That isn't what real religion is all about. Why do people make a mistake in thinking like that? Well, they make that mistake because they misunderstand the nature of the problem that all men and women face. They assume that men are under the judgment of God because of their sins. They lust, they lie, they cheat, they steal, they get drunk, they profane the name of the Lord, they desecrate the Lord's day. And then they think, ah, if only we can give up these things, then all will be well with us for eternity. But you're not under the condemnation of God because you sin. Does that surprise you? You're under the condemnation because of your sinful nature. Because you're a sinner. You're alienated against God. You don't like God. You're at odds with God. You don't like him overbearing and telling you how to live your life. We are by nature the children of wrath. God's wrath from heaven is on us. Because of our natures. Because of our opposition to him. Because we bite it off and spit it out and do it our way. You don't become the children of wrath because you sin. You sin because You are a child of wrath. Why does a child have measles? Does he have measles because he's covered in measles spots? Oh no. He has spots because he has measles. We sin because we are sinners. When a child has a high temperature, then we know it's ill. It isn't ill because of the temperature. The high temperature is a symptom, it's not the cause. And when we take the child to the doctor, we don't expect the doctor to attack the temperature. We expect some antibiotic to affect the virus, the bacteria, the infection that's causing the temperature. The doctor gives the child a course of antibiotics. The problem, you see, is not today in structures. That's why people have gone into politics over the last hundred years. Because, like Charles Dickens in his novels, and children do it for GCSEs and A-levels, they read his books, his wonderful stories, and he sees What's wrong in institutions, and in structures, in schools, and in orphanages, and in banks, and mines, and businesses, in the law, and in parliament, and in government, and in the church? But Christians are much more personal. And they say our hearts are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. That we have a heart of stone. That from the womb we've gone astray telling lies. That our sins are like scarlet. Every imagination of the thoughts of our hearts is only evil continually. God makes most pessimistic analysis of the human condition. I could give you statistics, I suppose, if I wanted to weary you about knife crime and about prisons and how many people are in prison and how many crimes are then solved by the police. sexually transmitted diseases and pornographic material, much more. It's all very bleak than ever before. But those things are symptoms. They're measles spots. They're not the disease itself. The real problem lies in the hearts of men and women. Shedd, the great theologian, said the most important conviction that any person could have is a conviction of sin. King David had it, didn't he? Why had he committed adultery? Why had he arranged a murder? He said, because I was shapen in iniquity. In sin did my mother conceive me. Psalm 51. He didn't blame Bathsheba and his upbringing or the temptations that he had because of his absolute monarch powers. He went back to his father Adam. and the depravity that's come upon the whole human race, the bias. My daughter in London has five boys. I've never seen her sit the five boys down and say, I'm going to teach you today how to stamp your foot, how to say no, how to be mean to your brother, how to defy your father and mother, how to use bad language. They do those things naturally because their hearts have a bias. towards those things. David didn't become a sinner. He always was a sinner. There never was a time when he wasn't a sinner. In sin did my mother conceive me, he says. And that's why I did that horrible thing against Bathsheba and against Uriah. You know the word sinner has now become sanctified. People feel good. People feel modest. Yes, I'm a sinner. Not like religious people with their high and mighty ways. I'm just a simple down-to-earth sinner, that's all. The best people, American presidents, will say that they're sinners. It's been perfumed, that word, so let's find another word that'll get under your skin. You're depraved. Try that for size. We reserve it for the worst people, don't we? The people about whom you say, well, I may be a sinner, but I'm not like him. But God says the seeds of every sin are in your heart. And if you had been in the condition and under the pressure and in the environment that those people were in, that's where you'd be. That's what you'd have done. You'd be a David. You'd be a Bathsheba. You would. I'm Adam. I am. He's my father and I'm like him. I listen to the voice of the serpent and I defy God. My brothers, Noah, the drunkard. Lot, the incestuous father. Abram, the liar. Joseph's brethren. I'm hating people in my own family. Moses, the angry and violent man. David. Judas, the betrayer. Peter, the denier. And Paul, the proud, cruel, egotist. I'm... That's who I am. That's who I am. That's who you are. You're a sinner. like those people, then the problem is you can't stomach that analysis. You go to church and you want a happy message, and I want happy messages in church. And you want a blessing, and I want a blessing in church. But I can't get at the blessing until I first acknowledge what God says about me. That I have come short of his glory. That's what he says. I'm worse than anything you can imagine. And the cost of redeeming me and redeeming you was stupendous, unimaginable. God had an only begotten son. The father, the son, the Holy Spirit, the three there, the three in one God. He didn't send an angel into the world. He sent his only son, born of a virgin, born in a stable, living 30 years in the humility of a backward little village and then preaching for three years and dying on the cross as our substitute. But that, the Son of God becoming the Lamb of God to redeem us from our sins, that's the message. so that we go to God and we say to God, God be merciful to me, a sinner. Jesus says in this chapter, I didn't come to call the righteous. I came into the world, I had good news for sinners. I came to summon sinners to come to me. People who've seen, they've sinned. When they've stood before the norm and the standard of God, how far they'd fallen short of it. So true religion, Jesus says, isn't adding going to church or turning over a new leaf and being a better person. That's not what true religion is. And it's not giving up certain things that are bad. Do give them up, but that doesn't make you a child of God. I heard a man, he was from Kerfilly, and he was saying how one morning in the winter, he took his little baby out in the prom and took it for a walk to the park. And he was walking around the park and he noticed there was a grove of sycamore trees, 12 of them in a circle. And none of them had leaves on them except one. And one tree was covered in dead leaves. All the others, it was leafless. It was February. And then he saw the chief gardener and he talked to him. He said, that's a funny sight, those 12 sycamore trees there. That one tree is covered in leaves. None of the others. That's a dead tree. That tree was struck by lightning last August, and it's dead. You see, there's a mechanism on a tree when the autumn comes. It's called abscission, and it sort of cuts off the leaf and the leaf falls off because snow on it would destroy the branches and it helps the tree to survive and protects it from damage and insects and so on. A live tree sheds dead stuff. Imagine then the next morning the gardening boys meet there under this chief gardener and he says, well, I've got a special task for you today. And another person says, I don't know how many people come to me and they say about that tree and its leaves and why, you know. Get the ladders out, the aluminum ladders, and I'll give you the scissors, prunings, scissors and I want you to take all the leaves off, the dead leaves off that tree. Oh, no boss, no. Yeah, we've got to have it done. It's just ridiculous like this. So, the boys get their ladders and they start at the bottom and they cut the leaves off, or branches, they do it on both sides and they work away until four o'clock and every leaf is removed from the sycamore tree. He's very pleased with them and he says, okay, you can have tomorrow morning off. Oh, thank you boss. Now all the trees look the same, don't they? They've all lost their leaves. But 11 of them are alive and one is dead. Maybe that one tree that's dead is you. You shed some things from your life. You don't watch certain programs on television. You stop smoking and you don't read certain books and magazines or go to certain websites. You've cut things out of your life but your heart hasn't changed. You need a new heart. That's the promise of the new covenant. A new heart I will give them. I will write the things of my law on your heart, God says. A religious man came to see Jesus and he cut a lot of things out of his life. And he knew that Jesus was a greatly respected man. No man can do the things that you do except God be with him. And Jesus said to him, not well done, everything is alright. He said, I tell you the truth, no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again. That's what Jesus said. My grandson runs Bryn Mawr Gwraes, the Christian Conference Centre in Ballach. And he was telling me that he was preaching recently in one of the little churches that there are Welsh-speaking churches in Merionethshire. And he was preaching on the new birth, and there was a lady who was looking back, hard-faced, shaking her head. She didn't want this new birth teaching. Gwydion hadn't invented it. I hadn't invented it. It was Jesus, wasn't it? John 3.3. No one can see the Kingdom of God unless he's born again. He was an old wineskin, wasn't he? Nicodemus. He needed to be born again. It was a veneer, his religion. I'm asking you, with any of you, is your religion a veneer? There was a little girl and she was admiring a vase of flowers and there were roses out and some were buds. And so she took a bud out and she tried to open it and pulled the leaves and then the flowers and tried to open it. And when her mother came in, she was in tears. She says, I thought I could help it to bud and look, I've destroyed it. And her mother said, yes, it has to open from the inside. And the grace of God comes inside us and changes our hearts, changes our values, changes our aspirations and our hopes and our desires. The Holy Spirit comes to indwell us and we have illimitable access to Him. We have Jesus. there with us day by day. Well now then, how is it with you? Have you seen that religion isn't just removing the measles spots of sins from your life and adding respectability to your life. That's not what religion is. Religion is an inward change. A change which only the grace of God can give. Not what these hands have done. can save this guilty soul? It's not that. Not all my sweating and toils and tears. Nothing in my hands I bring simply to thy cross I cling. I look to Jesus Christ. Have you looked to him? Have you started to speak to him? That's where it starts isn't it? To talk to him about your life and what you're doing with your life and your hopes for the future. you need of some mission control with a leader and some authority and power and energy which is from outside and you need that inside you and you need inward washing and inward cleansing and you're going to talk to God and you're going to ask God and you're going to keep talking to him and keep asking him until you have the inward witness of the Holy Spirit until you have an inward assurance that that saviour is your saviour now. That's the gospel. That's the nature of true religion. Not the additions and the subtractions. But saying, oh, what a friend I have in Jesus Christ. He's my teacher. He's my protector. He's my great high priest in the right hand of God. Oh, take him with you. Don't let another day go by without him. Take him. How it deals with God now. Let us pray together. Our heavenly father, we come and we thank thee for Jesus and his words and his pictures. And we can identify with them and we understand them so clearly. And we pray that every one of us here may have a new heart and a new nature and we may have a new birth and become new creations and all things become new. And we have new strength to serve Thee and love Thee all our days. New patience, new kindness, new thoughtfulness. Oh, grant those mercies to us all, Spirit of the living God. For the glory of Jesus our Savior we ask it. Amen.