Luke 16:12 · World English Bible
Luke 16:12 Meaning If You Have Not Been Faithful
If you have not been faithful in that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own?
What does Luke 16:12 mean?
The mind imagines that some things belong to it and others belong to a stranger, and this line drawn between mine and yours is the belief in separation itself. How it treats what it calls another's, whether with care or with grasping, reveals which teacher it has followed, for love makes no such border and sees one shared inheritance.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Luke 16:12 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
The mind imagines that some things belong to it and others belong to a stranger, and this line drawn between mine and yours is the belief in separation itself. How it treats what it calls another's, whether with care or with grasping, reveals which teacher it has followed, for love makes no such border and sees one shared inheritance.
The mind that guards a fence around its own can never come into what is truly its own, because its real inheritance is not private. Innocence and peace are held in common or not at all. A mind faithful to a brother's good discovers it was tending its own the whole time.
Another man: the brother the mind has set outside itself and made a stranger, though he holds the same self it seeks.
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Live Luke 16:12 today
- Treat one thing that is not yours as though it were, the shared office kitchen, the rental car, the hallway in your building. Leave it better without telling anyone you did.
- Do a piece of someone else's work carefully today, the handoff, the file you are passing along, the meal you are cooking for someone with particular tastes. Make it good for them, not just finished for you.
- When you are rushed and the thing in front of you belongs to someone else, a borrowed laptop, a colleague's project, your partner's plans, slow down rather than speed up. Hurry is where the fence gets built.
Where have I drawn a line between what is mine to care about and what is not?
The same truth in other traditions
Confucius · Analects
Do not do to another what you would not want done to you. There is no line in that sentence between your good and theirs.
Hinduism · Upanishads
The wise see themselves in all things and all things in themselves, and so cannot do harm, because there is nowhere for harm to land that is not home.
Judaism · Pirkei Avot
Four kinds of people are described by how they hold property, and the pious one says: what is mine is yours, and what is yours is yours.
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