Luke 14:11-18

¹¹You see, if you try to make yourself important, God will make you ashamed. But if you make yourself not important, God will get people to respect you.”

¹²Then Jesus talked to the boss of that house. He said, “Whenever you put on a lunch or a dinner, for other people to come and eat it with you, don’t ask you family, or your friends, or the rich people that live near you, to come to that meal. If you ask those people to come, later they will ask you to come to eat a meal with them. That will be the only pay you get for feeding them.

¹³Instead of that, ask poor people to come and eat with you. Maybe they are crippled, or blind, or they can’t walk, so they can’t get jobs to get some pay, so they are too poor to put on a meal for you.

¹⁴There’s no way they can pay you for that feed. But God will make you real happy. On the day when God will make everyone alive again, at that time he will pay you properly for that good thing you did for those poor people.”

¹⁵One of the men sitting there heard the words that Jesus said, and that man said, “It will be real good to be at the dinner that God will put on for all his family.”

¹⁶Jesus told him this picture story. He said, “An important man put on a big dinner. He asked a lot of people to come to eat that dinner with him.

¹⁷When all the food was ready, he sent his worker out to tell them to come. He said to each one of them, ‘You can come now, the dinner is ready for you.’

¹⁸But each one told him they couldn’t come to that dinner. One of them said, ‘I have bought a garden, so I have to go and look at it. Please tell your boss I’m sorry, but I can’t come to his dinner.’