CTS Radical Christianity | Radical Discipleship

When Jesus said, "No one pours new wine into old wineskins" (Luke 5:37-38), He was introducing a new kind of disciple. The old religious container — the Pharisees' rigid, brittle system — could not hold what He was pouring. Radical discipleship is the new wineskin. It begins not with a new program but with a single, hard sentence: Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me (Matt 16:24). This unit follows that sentence through three movements: the new wineskin Jesus brought, the cost He named, and the counterfeit the world keeps offering instead.

1. New Wine, New Wineskins

The image is from the kitchen, not from a theology classroom. New wine ferments. The sugar in the juice becomes gas, the gas expands, the container has to stretch. A fresh leather wineskin gives a little as the wine breathes, then a little more, then settles when the fermentation finishes. An old wineskin, used up and brittle, has no give left in it. The same pressure that a new skin absorbs splits an old one open. The wine ends up on the floor and the skin ends up in the trash. Jesus' point is not about wine. His point is about people. The disciple He is making is fermenting; the disciple cannot be contained inside an old religious system that has no room left to stretch.

The context in Matthew 9 makes this concrete. The Pharisees were complaining about two things. First, Jesus was eating with tax collectors and sinners instead of with respectable religious people. Second, His disciples were not fasting on the days the Pharisees fasted. Both complaints are about containers. The Pharisees had a fixed shape for what a holy man should look like, and Jesus did not fit it. Rather than asking whether their shape might be wrong, they concluded He must be wrong. That is what an old wineskin does. It does not stretch to receive new wine; it splits, blames the wine, and throws it away.

Faith in Christ behaves like the wine in those milk jugs. It is alive. It is expansive. It does not sit politely inside whatever religious shape the disciple grew up in. The new wineskin of radical discipleship has to stretch. Stretching is painful — that is the part nobody volunteers for. Many believers reach the first stretch and decide they would rather have an unbroken old skin than a new one full of strange pressure. The wine spills. The skin is intact but empty. This is the most common kind of failure in church history: not heresy but rigidity, not denial but stiffness. The Pharisees were not bad men by the world's standards. They were religious men whose containers could no longer hold what God was pouring.

2. The Cost

The cost Jesus names is not abstract. Deny himself — the self is the largest obstacle. Take up his cross — and a cross in the first century was not jewelry; it was the instrument of public, shameful execution. Roman crucifixion was reserved for slaves, rebels, and the lowest criminals. When Jesus said take up your cross to a Galilean crowd, they understood Him to be talking about literal death and literal disgrace. There was no devotional softness in the image. He was naming the price of becoming His disciple, and the price was everything.

Jesus did not require of His disciples anything He had not already done Himself. Though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich (2 Cor 8:9). The Lord of glory left the throne. He took a body. He took a stable for a birthplace and a manger for a crib. He had no house during His ministry, and as far as we can tell He had no savings; He had a nice cloak that someone had given Him. He had no horse, and had to borrow a colt for His final entrance into Jerusalem. He had no grave, but had to borrow one when He died — though He did return it three days later, only slightly used. Every choice He made was a downward step. Luke records the turning point in His ministry in a single sentence: He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51). He knew what was waiting there. He went anyway.

The disciples followed the same pattern, slowly at first and then completely. They sacrificed their jobs at the start — nets dropped on the beach, a tax table abandoned in mid-collection. They sacrificed their reputations next, walking with a teacher the religious authorities openly hated. By the end of the first century, most of them had sacrificed their lives. James was beheaded (Acts 12:2); church tradition, well-attested though not itself Scripture, holds that Peter was crucified and Andrew and Thomas died as martyrs as well, Thomas as far away as India; only John lived to old age, and he lived it in exile on Patmos. The standard for radical commitment did not change between Jesus and the apostles. Whoever wants to come after Me still means deny self, take up cross, follow.

And the same standard reaches farther back. Abraham was willing to lay his only son on the altar. Peter and the apostles stood before the Sanhedrin and said we ought to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29), knowing exactly what the consequences would be. Across the testaments, the disciple's mark is the same: there is something more valuable to him than his own life, and he knows what it is. The cost is named in advance, accepted in advance, and paid out across the years one obedience at a time.

3. The Counterfeit

The enemy of radical discipleship is not atheism. The enemy is materialism — the slow, cheerful substitution of things for the soul. Materialism is what makes the rich young ruler walk away from Jesus sorrowful, after asking the right question and receiving the right answer (Matt 19:22). It is what causes the seed of the word to be choked in Jesus' parable of the sower (Matt 13:22). It is what Charles Colson named when he wrote that we must first repent of idolatry, of having embraced the false gods of modern times, like materialism, power, success, and personal autonomy. Every standard the world uses to judge a man is the opposite of God's measure. To be great in the world, you must be powerful; to be great in the kingdom, you must be a servant. The world and the kingdom run on opposite currencies, and the disciple chooses which exchange rate his life will use.

The trouble is that materialism dresses up well. It usually does not look like greed. It looks like security, like responsibility, like being a good provider, like wanting the best for your children. It accumulates one defensible decision at a time until the wineskin is full of things that are not wine. Jesus' question in verse 26 is one of the sharpest in the Gospels: what will a man give in exchange for his soul? The honest answer in most lives is a long list of small things — none of them worth what they cost, all of them assembled into something that was. The disciple's first task is to refuse the trade before it is fully made.

The Russian girl is not making a political argument; she is making a discipleship argument without using the word. She had been in a place where people had less and meant more to each other, and she had been in a place where people had more and meant less. Given the choice between the two, she chose less. The Lord's standard runs in the same direction. Materialism is not condemned because possessions are wicked but because possessions are heavy. They occupy space in the wineskin that was supposed to hold something else.

There is a counterfeit version of radical commitment in every age. In ours, it is often a political or social cause that demands the language of sacrifice while offering none of the soul-saving substance. The world has its own martyrs, its own missionaries, its own crusades. They are not the same thing as a disciple of Jesus. A radical without Christ is still serving an idol; the only difference is which one. Karl Marx is the obvious modern example — a deeply embittered man whose system promised the redemption of humanity through economics and produced graves in Russia, China, Cuba, and North Korea instead. He was radical. He was not a disciple. The cross he asked his followers to bear was someone else's, and the kingdom he promised never came. Jesus is more revolutionary than Marx; the difference is that joining His movement is voluntary, and the cross He asks His disciples to carry is the same one He carried first.

Radical discipleship is the new wineskin Jesus brought to replace religious rigidity. Its cost was named in advance: deny self, take up cross, follow. Its great enemy is materialism, the slow accumulation of things in the space the soul was meant to occupy. The Pharisees had old wineskins, the disciples had new ones, and Jesus walked between them looking for any container willing to stretch. The same Jesus still walks. The question every reader of Matthew 16 eventually has to answer is the question He asked the rich young ruler: what will you give in exchange for your soul? The disciple who has answered it once will keep answering it for the rest of his life, one obedience at a time.