Rachel Held EvansCaring for the poor, resting on the Sabbath, showing hospitality and keeping the home–these are important things that can lead us to God, but God is not contained in them.
About This Quote
In the Bible, Jesus teaches that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. In Luke 10:27-37, Jesus tells a parable about a man who has two friends. In this parable, the man tells his two friends that he cannot repay them for their help, but asks that they do him a favor. He asks that they forgive him for his debts and evil deeds.
He asks that they pray for him and care for him in his time of need, and do this until he repays what he owes them. The two friends agree to do these things for their friend until he repays them. In the end, the friends all go home, but after a few days come back on their own to find out how their friend has been doing.
When they find out that he is doing well and even paid off all his debt from all the previous years of sinning and not paying back what he owed, both of the friends wanted to go and give him money and gifts. They were happy to see that he was doing well and felt that it would be an insult if they didn’t go and give him gifts or money for helping them out in the past when they needed money to pay back debts they owed. These two men didn’t know what had happened to their friend in between when they last saw him and found out he was doing well so they wanted to shower him with gifts and money all because of what had happened in the past.
This is why we never need worry about God being in these things like caring for our neighbors and showing hospitality to guests at our house because we don’t need God in order to love or give alms or show kindness or show hospitality. God is not contained in these things; we need God in order to be able to say we care for our neighbor as ourselves because if we don’t truly care for our neighbor as ourselves then we cannot truly be like our neighbor is like us when we are doing these things for each other.
Source: A Year Of Biblical Womanhood
Some Similar Quotes
- And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
- Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves.
- No woman wants to be in submission to a man who isn't in submission to God!
- His hands are holding my cheeks, and he pulls back just to look me in the eye and his chest is heaving and he says, "I think, " he says, "my heart is going to explode, " and I wish, more than ever, that I...
- Why is there ever this perverse cruelty in humankind, that makes us hurt most those we love best?
More Quotes By Rachel Held Evans
- Like all who search for truth out of fear, I desperately wanted someone else to tell me exactly what to do.
- God's ways are higher than our ways not because he is less compassionate than we are but because he is more compassionate than we can ever imagine.
- What a comfort to know that God is a poet.
- Caring for the poor, resting on the Sabbath, showing hospitality and keeping the home–these are important things that can lead us to God, but God is not contained in them.
- (About changing faith) At our best, Christians embrace it, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then.