Gus was excited! He was ready for the Grand Opening of the Food Bus by Gus!
To attract customers, he decided to have a sale, free refills on French Fries!
People lined up to buy food, and soon a young girl brought her French Fry bag back for a free refill! Gus had been making French Fries so fast that he had not let all the cooking oil drain off them, the bag was soaked with oil! The bag was slippery, but Gus held it firmly as he filled it up with French Fries again.
Then it happened… the oil-soaked bag broke and the French Fries all fell on the floor of the food bus! Without a moment of hesitation, Gus tore off a piece of duct tape and fixed the tear in the bag!
Gus then filled the bag again…and the bag tore again and more French Fries were on the floor of the food bus!
Gus tore off another piece of duct tape and was going to fix the bag again when the girl suggested that maybe it would be better if Gus used a new bag. This was a great idea! Gus filled a new bag with French Fries and the girl happily went and ate them.
More people came to get free refills on their French Fries, but Gus had learned his lesson, he put new French Fries into new bags, and not one of them broke!
At the end of that busy day, Gus had some time to think about all that had happened and all that he had learned that day. Gus remembered that Jesus had told a parable about wineskins bursting, so he got out his Bible and looked it up.
In Luke 5:36-38 Jesus says:
He told them this parable: “No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no none pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins.”
In Bible times wine was kept in leather bags, called wineskins. As the wine aged, it expanded and stretched the wineskin. The wineskin did not break because it was new and could stretch, but if wine was put into a used wineskin the wineskin would already be stretched-out and it would be weak. The old wineskin would break!
Gus could also remember a time when he tore the knees in his favorite pair of jeans. He tried to fixe his jeans by sewing patches onto the knees, but the first time he washed the jeans the patches shrunk and looked awful. When Gus wore those jeans, they looked funny and the first time he bent his knees, the patches ripped out of the jeans and made a bigger hole than had been there before! The jeans were ruined!
Jesus used this parable to teach the people that He had come to earth to make a new way to connect with God! People could not pay for their sins or stop sinning, but Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins!
Gus wrote in the Gus-Bus Eternal Journal:
Jesus used the parable of the Cloth Patch & the New Wineskin to try to teach people that He came to earth with a new way get right with God. Before Jesus came to earth, God gave people a lot of rules to live by and many sacrifices that they had to make when they broke a rule (these rules and sacrifices are found in the Bible in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy). God wanted people to see that it is impossible to live perfectly, and it is impossible for any sacrifice we make to forgive our sins. But the people missed the point, instead of learning that it was impossible to live perfectly, and to pay for their sins, they began to compete to see who could live the most perfectly. Instead of turning to God for help, they tried to prove that they were better than other people. Unfortunately, many people still try to do this today. Jesus came to bring a new way! Only by believing in Jesus and coming to Him for forgiveness can we ever be right with God. We need to leave the old way of trying to get to heaven by obeying rules, and trust Jesus to save us because only He could pay for our sins.