Disciples Encourage Each Other—Luke 17:1-10

Please read today's lesson here: Luke 17:1-10

I told you before that Jesus did not coddle his disciples. He never tried to make their lives easier. But he knew that the road of discipleship would make their lives more significant, and more satisfying. Nothing really worthwhile in life comes without some sweat.

The first lesson in today's passage is about encouraging other disciples, those whom Jesus here calls "these little ones" (v. 3). You see, all of us who have sought Jesus' forgiveness and invited him into our lives as Lord, thus becoming his disciples, have also become "like little children", as Jesus once put it. We have decided to unlearn the unhelpful habits of our earlier lives and "start over" a new life with Jesus like little children—with so much to learn! As such we are vulnerable. Another disciple, or another person who poses as a disciple can so easily disillusion us about following Jesus. They can do it by their own lives. They can profess one thing, but do another. And when one of us discovers it, we may be shocked, and say "Gee, I wonder if all 'born again' Christians are just putting on an act like this guy is!" A disillusionment like that can cause a new disciple to be tempted to give up the quest. That is what Jesus calls here "stumbling". Any disciple or apparent disciple who does something to overturn another disciple's faith or his determination to follow Jesus, has committed a terrible sin. Jesus uses a shocking image for his punishment. It would be better for someone to tie around his neck a huge millstone and throw him into the sea to drown!

Now, please! Do not think that this means that if you unwittingly relapse into some vestige of your previous life—say, you drop a bicycle on your toe very painfully and you sream an obscenity—in the presence of another believer, you have committed some sort of unpardonable sin! Far from it. If that happens, of course, you should apologize to your fellow disciple and ask Jesus for forgiveness. But this is not an unpardonable sin. The only unpardonable sin is not believing in Jesus as your Savior.

But Jesus used such a powerful image in order to stress to us how important it is for us to encourage each other by our lives and words. As disciples of Jesus, we grow in community as well as in private. That is why the New Testament puts such an emphasis on our behavior in community: our prayers for and with each other, our worship together with other believers, our teaching each other.

This then leads to the second lesson (v. 3-4): alerting each other to weaknesses and forgiving others for things they say or do that hurt you. This first duty is the hardest thing for me to do. Because I myself usually react angrily when anyone points out a sin or weakness in my life. I say this ashamed. If I react so, I reason, how can I expect another believer to react humbly and take my words of criticism any other way? Yet God asks us to "be our brother's keeper" in the sense that we pray for each other and do whatever is necessary to help each other in the road of discipleship. The second part, forgiving those who offend us, is also extremely difficult. Yet in the Lord's Prayer we ask God to forgive us our sins "as we have forgiven those who sinned against us"! Wow! And if we refuse to forgive others, God will not forgive us! Jesus once told a parable about a man who owed a huge amount of money—say like a million dollars. The debt came due and he could not begin to pay it. He fell on his knees and begged the creditor to cancel the debt, and—amazing mercy— the creditor did!

So what did the forgiven man do? He promptly went out and forclosed on a poor man who owed him 30 dollars! When his own creditor heard about it, he went to the man and told him he was reinstating the debt and would have him thrown into prison, because he was so merciless to his debtors after he himself had been forgiven.

This is a powerful lesson to us. God has forgiven each of us all our sins and granted us eternal life as his own children. How can it be too much for us to forgive an insult by another believer. Jesus was ask how many times we had to do it to a given brother or sister, and his answer was "seventy times seven", which was simply an expression for innumerable times. god's forgiveness to us was unlimited; so should ours be to others.

This seemed impossible to Jesus' hearers, so they asked him "Increase our faith!" (v.5). Jesus' answer was that it doesn't take an enormous amount of faith to keep his commands. If you have only faith the size of a mustard seed (thought to be the smallest seed on earth), you can command a mulberry tree to uproot itself and be hurled into the sea, and it will do it (v. 6). This simply means that even only a little faith has limitless potential—not for doing magic tricks, but for doing God's will!

The final lesson (v. 7-10) has to do with God's expectations of disciples. When the disciples asked Jesus to increase their faith, the implication was that fulfilling his commands was impossible for ordinary disciples, and that Jesus needed to give them special powers to do it. Implicit in this wrong attitude was that when they obeyed him, it was a special accomplishment on their part that deserved special commendation from God. Jesus wanted to scotch that idea quickly! Jesus' story concerns a man's servant who having worked all day in the field, comes in to the master's house. The master doesn't say "Oh, you poor servant. Come, sit down and eat!" Instead, he says, "I'm hungry. Get me something to eat." Is this cruel? By no means. The home owner is the employer. The other man is his servant. The latter is being paid to work, not to be served. So Jesus concludes: When you have done all that you were told to do, say: 'We are not special. We have only done what we were supposed to do."

Self-pity is the most insidious temptations used by Satan on disciples of Jesus. "I have worked so hard", we complain. As though many, many other people do not work that hard every day. God loves us. He is not just a cold-hearted employer. Yet we, for our part, must not think that God owes us special thanks just for doing what he asks of us. He is God; we are his creatures. He is our loving Father; we are his children who owe him obedience and respect. Let's not get our relationship with him topsy-turvy!