What Does Gift Mean in the Bible Read through 2 lenses

What a mind extends is what opens the way before it. Give from love, and love goes ahead and makes a place; give attack, and attack arranges the world that meets you. The mind is forever setting the terms of its own welcome, because what it holds out is what it will be shown in return. Nothing comes to it that it did not first offer.

The true gift asks nothing and costs the body nothing, for it is only the willingness to see another as innocent. That single offering brings the mind into the presence of everything real, because it has finally stopped defending its separation.

• Gift: the mind's extension of itself, love or fear held out, which prepares the world that comes to meet it.
• Great men: the truth and reality the mind draws near to once it gives from love, the presence of what is changeless and whole.

The house is the body and the whole ordered self that lives within it. When greed takes hold, it stirs disorder through every room of that house, setting the lower appetites against the higher and leaving the man divided against himself. The reaching for more unsettles the very frame it means to enrich.

To hate gifts is to refuse the bribes that bind a person to the outer world, keeping the inner house clean of what would hook it. The one who wants nothing that would enslave him lets the life-force move freely, and so the man lives: his house stays whole because nothing outside has bought its center.

• House: the body and the ordered inner self, the dwelling where all the faculties live together
• Gifts: the outer bribes and attachments that hook a person and pull his center away from himself