Luke 7:13Plain English VersionJesus saw the mother, and he felt very sorry for her. He told her, “Don’t cry.” See the chapter |
So Jesus said to him, “You Pharisee mob are like somebody that cleans the outside of cups and plates, but doesn’t clean the inside. You see, you only do good things if people can see you, like you are good on the outside. But you are really dirty on the inside. Yes, inside yourselves you are greedy, and you are always thinking in your heads about doing very bad things.
Jesus said to him, “You and your mob are wrong. You say one thing, but you do something different. You work for yourselves on our rest day, right? You know, you keep cows and donkeys tied up in your yards, and every day you untie them and take them out to a water-hole, to let them drink. You do that on our rest day too.
Jesus said, “You know that plant called mustard? It has very little seeds, but they grow into a big plant. Well, like that, if you trust me properly, even if it is just a little bit, you will get stronger and trust me more. Then you will do powerful things, like if you say to a tree, ‘Get up and throw yourself into the sea,’ then that tree will do what you tell it to do.”
But later, at his house, Zakias stood up and said to Jesus, “Listen, sir, this is what I am going to do now. I am going to split up all the things I own into 2 heaps, and I will give one heap away to poor people. And as well as that, I’m going to give money back to those people that I cheated. I am going to give them back 4 times as much as I took from them.”
Just before that, a young man died in that town. He was the only son of his mother, and her husband was already dead, so she had nobody left to look after her. A big mob of people were with that mother, and they had the young man’s body on a stretcher. They were taking it along the road out of the town, to bury it. And at that same time, Jesus was going into that town on that same road.
More and more people were following Jesus, and his special workers were baptising all those people. Jesus himself didn’t baptise anybody, just his special workers did that. Then Jesus’s enemies, the Pharisee mob, they heard that Jesus had more followers than John had, so they started to watch Jesus. Jesus heard that they were watching him, so he left Judea country, and he went north to Galilee country.
The next day, some of those people were still there. They looked around for Jesus, but they couldn’t find him or any of his followers. Some other boats from a town called Tiberias came to the place where Jesus thanked God for the food and fed all the people, so the people got into those boats and went over to Capernium, to look for Jesus there.
Christian friends, we are going to tell you now about people that have already died. We don’t want you to be sad when you think about them. Other people, that don’t believe in Jesus, they don’t know what will happen to them after they die. So when their friends die, they get really sad. But if our Christian friends die, we don’t have to be really sad like those other people. Listen, we want you to understand this properly.