Luke 17:1-17

¹Jesus said to his followers, “You know, there will always be somebody that will try to make you go wrong and do bad things, but God will punish the person that does that.

²If anyone gets a little one to do something bad, God will properly punish that person. Suppose somebody will get a big rock and tie it to that person’s neck and throw him into the sea and drown him, that will be bad for him, but not as bad as the trouble God will give him for getting that little one to go wrong.

³So be careful.” Then Jesus said, “If another Christian does something bad to you, and then they say, ‘I’m sorry, I will not do that again,’ then you have to let it go. Don’t think about any payback.

⁴Maybe they do that a lot, like 7 times in one day, and each time they turn around and say they are sorry. If they do that, you have to let it go every time.”

⁵The 12 close followers of Jesus said to him, “Show us how to trust you properly.”

⁶Jesus said, “You know that plant called mustard? It has very little seeds, but they grow into a big plant. Well, if you really trust me, even if it is just a little bit, you will get stronger and trust me more. Then if you say to that tree, ‘Get up out of the ground and go over there and throw yourself into the sea,’ that tree will do what you tell it to do.”

⁷And Jesus said to his followers, “You know about bosses and their workers. Maybe a worker is digging the ground to plant seeds, or maybe he is looking after sheep. When the sun starts to go down the worker comes back to the house of his boss. That boss doesn’t say, ‘Sit down with me and we will have dinner together.’

⁸No. The boss says, ‘Get my dinner ready for me. Then put on clean clothes and bring me my dinner. After I finish eating you can get yourself a feed.’

⁹That boss never says thank you to his worker. You see, his worker just did what the boss told him to do. He didn’t do anything more.

¹⁰Well, it is the same with you. You are my workers. When you do what I tell you to do, just say to yourselves, ‘We are not special people. We are workers that only did what our boss told us to do.’”

¹¹After that Jesus kept going along the road to the city called Jerusalem, going from Galilee country into Samaria country.

¹²He came to a community, and he started to go into it, but 10 men met him there. They all had a bad skin sickness, so they didn’t come close to Jesus, but they stood a little way from him and shouted to him.

¹³They said, “Jesus, Sir, please be sorry for us.”

¹⁴Jesus looked at them and said, “All right. Go to the leaders of our Jewish ceremonies and let them look at you skin.” So they started to go to those ceremony leaders, and while they were walking along they got better. Their skin was good again.

¹⁵One of them looked at his skin and saw that it was good again, so he turned around and came back to Jesus. He shouted, “God is really good and really great.”

¹⁶And he got down on his knees in front of Jesus, to show him respect, and said, “Thank you, Sir.” This man was not a Jew, like Jesus and his followers, but he came from the Samaria tribe.

¹⁷Jesus asked the man, “I made 10 men better, didn’t I? Where are the other 9 men?”