Matthew 23:19 · World English Bible
Matthew 23:19 Meaning You Blind Fools
You blind fools! For which is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifies the gift?
What does Matthew 23:19 mean?
The altar is the head, the skull that holds the Christ force within a person, and it is the altar that makes any offering holy, never the offering by itself. To fix on the gift while ignoring the altar is the blindness of those who tend the outer act and forget the inner center that gives it worth.
From the Esoteric reading below.
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The same verse, read by one tradition.
Esoteric
ESOTERIC
Esoteric
The altar is the head, the skull that holds the Christ force within a person, and it is the altar that makes any offering holy, never the offering by itself. To fix on the gift while ignoring the altar is the blindness of those who tend the outer act and forget the inner center that gives it worth.
Whatever a person brings, the devotion, the effort, the surrender of the animal nature, takes on value only from the Christ force enthroned in the head that receives it. The gift laid on that inner altar is consecrated by the place it rests, not by its own size. What sanctifies the offering is the higher center within the head, and so the center is greater than anything set upon it.
Altar: the head, the skull that holds the Christ force within a person Gift: what a person offers up, the surrender of the lower nature laid on the inner center
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Live Matthew 23:19 today
- Before you start work today, take ten seconds to settle and remember who you want to be while doing it. The same hours land differently depending on what receives them.
- When someone close to you does something small for you, a text, a coffee, a ride, receive it fully instead of brushing it off. Being well received is what makes a small thing worth something.
- On a day when your effort feels too small to matter, do it anyway without measuring it. The worth of the offering was never its size.
Where are you measuring your effort instead of where you are placing it?
The same truth in other traditions
Hinduism · Upanishads
The fire does not become holy from the wood you feed it. The wood becomes holy from the fire.
Sufism · Rumi
Pour the smallest cup into the sea and it is sea now. The size of what you bring is not the question; where you bring it is.
Zen
A student asked how much practice was enough. The teacher said the bowl does not decide the taste of what you pour into it.
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