Luke 14:9-16

⁹and the boss will tell you, ‘Get up and give this person that good seat.’ Then you will feel ashamed, and you will have to find yourself an empty seat, and it will be down at the other end of the table, at the place for people that are not important.

¹⁰Instead of that, when you come to the dinner, go and sit at the other end of the table, then later the boss will see you there, and he will say, ‘My friend, you can have a better seat than that.’ And he will take you up to a good seat, and everybody there will see him do that, and they will respect you.

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.