Apostolic Transformation: New Wine and New Wine Skin

By Don Youts

In 'Apostolic Transformation' Minister Don Youts addresses the true crisis in the modern church. Over the years we have learned the traditions of a man-made Christianity. There have been reformations. But restructuring what already exists does not address the fundamental flaws of the foundation itself. Jesus was not sent by His Father to re-form Judaism, but to transform our understanding of God and His eternal design for His kingdom.

The history of the church is a wineskin that contains the religion of men but cannot hold the fullness of our Lord Jesus Christ. Will you unlearn what we have been given by men in order to accept the Truth our Lord Jesus has given us?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098310790

Book preview

Copyright ©2020 by Don Youts

11210 W 13th Ct N

Wichita, Ks 67212

[phone]

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All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author.

ISBN (Print): 978-1-09831-078-3

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-09831-079-0

Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. Please note that you will find variations in wording when I have used the online version of the ESV which is an edition from 2016.

Please feel free to contact me with your comments and questions.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Salvation: Entering the Kingdom of God

Covenants of God

Edenic Covenant

Noahic Covenant

Abrahamic Covenant

Mosaic Covenant

Land of Promise –The New Covenant

Ecclesial Christianity

Kingdom Christianity

Gifts of the Son Jesus

Gifts of Father God

Gifts of the Holy Spirit

Apostolic Christianity

Acknowledgements

How does one thank God for His giving me the greatest adventure of my life? I never intended to write a book . . . and yet He gave me that very task. Fortunately, He also provided many who have helped me complete this task.

There are those who have disagreed angrily with the lessons I’ve taught. Even they have been of great benefit in honing my thoughts and writing to greater clarity.

Of course, there have also been many who have given me encouragement and urged me on with the plodding work of organizing and communicating my thoughts. This work has unfolded over the last 15 years has been tested as I’ve ministered in small groups, churches, pregnancy crises center, homes, and so on. Quite honestly, many have rejected various parts of this Christian worldview. It is just too radical for their traditions of Christianity. But many have also accepted the challenge of examining God’s Word and have made choices to believe His Word rather than men’s traditions. Some of these have become the ecclesia of God’s Place Wichita and have accepted Paul’s design given in Ephesians 4.

My friend and spiritual daughter, Jane Beynon, has been an enthusiastic encouragement as she has provided her skills to the reading of the manuscript through many revisions. Tyson Youts, my son of my flesh and of my spirit, also spent hours wordsmithing with me on the final copy.

The entire body of God’s Place Wichita has been a holy laboratory for refining these revelations God has given us. Todd Igo, Lloyd Beynon, and Sean Conyers (elders at God’s Place Wichita) have given incredible kindness, support, and love through this wonderful adventure.

Of course, my loving wife, Edie, has had the patience to take care of me as I have focused on this undertaking. She has been most generous in her gift of grace to stand with me even when she has sometimes questioned my conclusions. Ultimately, she has had her own growth in wrestling with me as well.

Foreword

Old Man Cedar

My People, the Tsalagi [Cherokee for The People] have an ancient story about a young man who truly loved The People. Even as a very young man, he was always quick to help others with whatever they were doing in their lives. He didn’t look for what would bring himself admiration or appreciation from others. He looked for how he could make their lives better.

Having spent his entire life as a servant to others, he grew old and came to realize that the time would come for him to die. His only regret in dying was that he would not be able to take care of The People. And when Great Grandfather Spirit told him it was time for him to leave this earth to be with Grandfather Spirit, he was not unwilling. But he asked Grandfather Spirit for a gift that he could leave something for The People. Grandfather was pleased by his request and granted a great gift to the one who loved The People as much as He, Himself, did.

He granted the gift that the old man should forever be Old Man Cedar. He would always offer The People a reminder that no matter how stark the winter may appear, there is still the hope of life in his green branches. He would always offer the healing fragrance of cedar wood when The People needed comfort. His branches would buffer the winds in winter and would offer shade in the heat of summer. For all generations The People would be blessed by Old Man Cedar as a gift from Great Grandfather Spirit.

It’s a simple tale told among The People still today as a reminder that we, too, can be a gift of our Holy Spirit to leave something behind when He calls us to be with Him. We, too, can leave a heritage that lives long after we are gone. Jesus Himself tells us that we will do greater things than He had done. Each of us should leave the same heritage for those who come after us. Because of what we have done, those who come after us should expect to do greater things as well.

May this book be such a gift to all God’s People who are seeking to mature into the fullness of our Lord Jesus Christ. And may you be one of those seekers.

Introduction

Over the centuries, we have taken the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, which our Lord Jesus Christ came to proclaim to all mankind and have fitted it into the old wineskins of man’s religion that we call Christianity. To enter His Kingdom, we necessarily must destroy the old wineskins of man’s religion that we have so easily accepted. This is a daunting task since we have all been trained under the form of man-made Christianity.

Since the birthing of the ecclesia, we have had only one major work of reformation through Martin Luther and John Calvin. The entire movement known as the Reformation was focused on reforming the established Roman Catholic Church. The very meaning of the word reformation is the restructuring of what already exists. It does not address the fundamental flaws of the foundation itself. Jesus was not sent by His Father to re-form Judaism but to transform the very foundation of our understanding of God and His eternal design for His kingdom.

Jeremiah 1:10 gives us God’s directive on our task of replacing the old, reformed structure of manmade Christianity with the God–ordained form of His Kingdom:

"See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms,

to pluck up and to break down,

to destroy and to overthrow,

to build and to plant."

Will you pluck up, break down, destroy, and overthrow the Christianity of man-made religion? Only then will we be able to build and to plant. Will you unlearn what we have been given by men in order to accept the Truth our Lord Jesus has given us? Because of this fatal error in our wineskin foundations of man’s religion, we have never been able to fully know His design. In 2 Timothy 3:7, Paul declares that we are always learning and never able to arrive at the knowledge of the truth. Can we at least see that if our foundations are flawed with men’s religion, we cannot have the foundational knowledge of God’s Kingdom?

In Matthew 9:16–17, Jesus compares the old ways of men’s religion to the profound transformation required for the new wine and the new wineskin:

No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.

We must have both His new wineskin and His new wine to live into and to proclaim the fullness of our Lord Jesus Christ. His new wine is spiritual transformation by the gift of the Holy Spirit. That gift is not just the Pentecostal outpouring of a new baptism (salvation Christianity). It also includes the radical and complete transformation of our hearts to receive the covenants of God written into our hearts (covenant Christianity). It is also the birth of the church (ecclesial Christianity) as the transformed people of God, then it is the transformed structure of governance (kingdom Christianity). We are finally sent into this world to overthrow all the works of Satan (apostolic Christianity).

His new wineskin is the external structure that gives the shape and form to that Spirit in us. We must return to His design to receive this transformation. We must pluck up, break down, destroy, and overthrow the very foundations of man-made Christianity in order to build and to plant according to the work that Jesus was sent to accomplish. Jesus is the new wineskin. He is the very form and structure that we, too, must have if we are to contain the new wine.

Wine has no form without a wineskin to hold it. The old wineskin was the Old Covenant given to Moses as the Law. The Law was the form by which everything had to be shaped and molded. The old wine was God’s requirement for absolute and total obedience to that Law. It included the system of priests, celebrations, Holy Days, and sacrifices. To be included as a people of God, we had to conform to the wineskin of His Law.

The new wineskin of the New Covenant given through Jesus Christ gives us a new form. Jesus Himself is this new form. In our new birth, we are made into new creations and conformed to the very image of Jesus Himself. The new wine is the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which also filled Jesus. With both this new form and new wine, we are transformed by the renewing of our minds to comprehend and implement the mature gospel of all these identified foundational components. Only then do we have complete apostolic transformation. We simply cannot do the work of representing our King Jesus if we leave any of them out of our message or out of our lives. Father God desires the complete maturity of His messengers instead of some partial successes in any of these areas. He requires a fullness of Christ for us to complete His work.

Men have tried to put the new wine of the very person of Jesus into its old forms of man-made religion of rules and laws that continue to condemn us. Even the Reformation of Luther and Calvin only re-formed the old wineskin of the existing Roman Catholic Church. Neither of them went so far as to return to the complete transformation of the hearts of men to conform to the very image of Jesus. He alone is the new wineskin and the King who rules His Kingdom.

These are the five sequential layers in understanding this transformation of salvation, covenants, ecclesia, kingdom, and finally establishing the fullness of Jesus in the apostolic design for God’s people.

Salvation Christianity

The very first part of laying His foundation must be to unlearn a gospel we have been misled to believe: that salvation is about a new set of rules we must obey and rituals we must perform to have eternal life. There is a shadow of truth in that message, but only a shadow and not the substance of His Gospel! We will unlearn and disassemble the false doctrine of salvation. Then we can discover the substance of His salvation gospel of being born to a God who is our Father, rather than just a god that we have created to satisfy our God-given desire to be eternal beings.

Jesus’s message of salvation was founded on the necessity of being born to a new father who gives us His identity and His very nature and character. It is in receiving that new father that we are ‘saved’ from the old ways we have lived. With that transformation of a new father, EVERYTHING about us is changed to conform to HIS IMAGE. Obviously, if we are made in His image and His likeness, we will only want what He wants. We no longer have the nature to sin because He does not have that nature. We would truly desire His kingdom and His righteousness rather than our pleasures and comfort. We would no longer see ourselves as sinners but as the fully redeemed children of the Most High God.

Any other view of salvation is less than His design.

Covenant Christianity

If I have the same nature and character as my father, then I need only know more about Him to also know who I am. God established His covenants as the major markers or signposts of His own I Am identity. Both the Old and New Testaments are nothing more than His covenant promises. The word testament literally means covenant. When our new father, Father