Friday Nasiha

Al-Tawba (Repentance)
Chapter 9: Verse 111

The Supreme Transaction:
"Verily God bought from the believers their selves and their possessions in exchange for Paradise."

People ask: “Everything will leave our hands, perish, and be lost. Maybe there is a way to make it eternal, to preserve it.?” While engaged in such thoughts, they suddenly hear the Quran’s heavenly voice say: “There is a beautiful and easy way that offers five advantages or profits.” What is this way? To sell the trust - your body, spirit, and heart, and so on, as well as your outer and inner senses (e.g., sight, taste, intelligence, imagination.) – to its real owner. The resulting five profits are:

First Profit: Transient property becomes everlasting. This waning life, when given to the Eternal and Self-Subsistent Being of Majesty and spent for His sake, is transmuted into permanence and gives everlasting fruits.

Second Profit: The price paid is Paradise.

Third Profit: The value of each bodily limb and sense is increased a thousand fold. For example, if you sell your eyes to its All-Seeing Maker and use it on His behalf and within His limits, it rises to the rank of a reader of the Great Book of the Universe, a witness of the miracles of His creation, a blessed bee sucking on the blossoms of Mercy in the garden of this world.

Fourth Profit: If you do not rely on the All-Powerful One of Majesty, trust in and submit to Him with full confidence, your conscience remains troubled by vain torment, pain and regret, all of which destroy your understanding.

Fifth Profit: Those who unveil the true nature of things and experience the truth agree that the reward for worshipping and glorifying God performed by your limbs, senses, and faculties will be given at the time of greatest need, in the form of Paradise’s fruits.

If you refuse, you suffer the following five-fold loss:

First Loss: Your beloved property and off-spring, your adored self and its caprice, your foolishly loved youth and life all are replaced by pain and sin.

Second Loss: You are punished for betraying the trust, for you wrong yourself by using the most precious tools on the most worthless objects.

Third Loss: By debasing your precious faculties to a level much inferior to animals, you insult and transgress God’s Wisdom.

Fourth Loss: In your helplessness and poverty, you shoulder life’s heavy burden and continually groan under the blows of transience and separation.

Fifth Loss: You convert the Compassionate One’s fair gifts, meant to be used for laying the foundations of everlasting life and blessedness in the Hereafter, into ugliness.

Why do many people not want to sell? Is it so hard? By no means! The resulting burdens are not hard. The limits of the permissible are broad and adequate for your desire, and so you do not need to indulge in what is forbidden. The duties imposed by God are light and few. To be His servant and soldier is an honour beyond description.

Source:
"Humanity, Belief, and Islam" - Said Nursi pp. 40-48

The Garden of Charity

The Messenger of God, peace be upon him, said: 'Every Muslim must give charity.'
Some people asked: 'What if he has no money?'
He replied: 'He should work with his hands, and meet his needs as well as give charity to others.'
They asked: 'What if he could not, or did not, do that?'
He replied: 'Then he should assist a needy person in distress.'
They asked: 'What if he could not do that as well?'
He replied: 'He should then teach good things.'
They asked: 'And, if he could not do even that.?'
He replied: 'Then, he should refrain from harming anyone. That too, would be charity on his part.'

(Bukhari, Muslim: Abu Musa Al-Ashari)

Source:
"Gifts From Muhammad" - Khurram Murad, p. 31