Progress is a funny thing. Take computers, for example. When computers first became a prominent part of modern life in the 1960’s, they were monstrous things that took up entire rooms and stored their data on paperboard punch cards and reels of magnetic tape. And so we thought it would always be: if you look at episodes of the original “Star Trek” TV show—set some 200 years in the future—computers were still the size of railroad boxcars.

Flash forward to 2002, and see the present reality. We have computers capable of tasks Captain Kirk never dreamed that sit on a desk or fit in a briefcase. Just in the past decade, computer technology has leapt forward exponentially. Today I carry in my shirt pocket a personal digital assistant that holds four times as much information as my first home computer, a 1988 vintage Apple Macintosh. My new PC has a hard drive 40 times the capacity of, a memory 16 times as large as, and a “brain” that processes information eight times faster than, the laptop I acquired just four years ago. And it’s already obsolete, compared to some of the latest hardware in the electronics store.

Still, many things haven’t progressed at the same breakneck pace. Science fiction writers in the early 20th century envisioned our present as an age of flying cars, lunar colonies and lifelike robots. Well, the functional basics of an automobile haven’t changed substantially since the days of Henry Ford, men last walked on the moon 30 years ago, and the only place you’ll see a realistic human-appearing robot is at Disneyland. Many of the once-predicted advances of science remain hundreds of years away, if they are likely to occur at all.

Why has computer technology developed so rapidly, while other areas of science and engineering have puttered along, relatively speaking? It’s hard to say, but part of the reason is that we didn’t realize how much we could do with computers, and we learned that we couldn’t do as much in other fields as we might have thought. Take medicine: smallpox was eradicated, measles and mumps nearly so, but we still can’t do anything about the common cold.

Jesus spoke this parable to His disciples: “No one puts a piece from a new garment on an old one; otherwise the new makes a tear, and also the piece that was taken out of the new does not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved. And no one, having drunk old wine, immediately desires new; for he says, ’The old is better’” (Luke 5:36-39).

Sometimes old things and new things are incompatible. Well-worn cloth can’t be patched with new, unshrunk material. New wine, in which fermentation is just beginning, can’t be secured in aged and brittle wineskins. In the computer field, they call it “backward incompatibility” when files from a previous version of a program don’t work with the upgraded model.

But as Jesus shows, the fact that something is new doesn’t mean it’s better. Vintage wine is a vast improvement over the fresh crush. Meat and cheeses are aged to gain character and flavor. Literature and music have their classic compositions that have not been superseded by more recent works. And, generally speaking, attempts to update the classics or recast them in modern style or setting are miserable failures. Sometimes, “the old is better.”

We hear much clamor these days for the “new” in religion: new methods, new worship styles, new approaches to the Scriptures. Not everything “new” is bad—Jesus and the New Testament writers used the vernacular and illustrations of their day to speak to their audiences—but all too often the hue and cry for the new and different is merely an attempt to avoid responsibility for the tried and true. There is nothing wrong with framing the lessons of the Bible in ways that people living in modern society can understand. But we cannot alter the unchanging and unchangeable word of God in an attempt to appeal to the Athenian mindset, which rejects everything “old” and seeks only that which sounds like “something new” (Acts 17:19-21).

Change can be positive, even necessary. As followers of Christ, we are challenged to mature and grow (1 Peter 2:2, 3:18; Ephesians 4:15-16). But there is a difference between growth and change for the sake of change. We must avoid trying to patchwork into the “old” gospel our “new cloth.” Time marches on; technology advances; but as Solomon observed, “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10). The sins that condemned men and women to hell in the first century A.D. still condemn them in the 21st. The prescription for salvation remains the same (Acts 2:38; Mark 16:16; Acts 22:16; 1 Peter 3:21). Some things never change.