The Greatest Sadaqah Jariyah Is How You Treat Your Family - 5/29 - 30 Verses For 30 Days 2022
Verse 85 of Surah Nisa'
Salamun ʿalaykum wa rahmatu Allah, and welcome to our fifth clip of the month of Ramadan.
Today insha Allah we'll be discussing a verse from Surah An-Nisaʾ. This is verse 85 and it says: “Man yashfaʿ shafaʿatan hasanatan yakun lahu nasibun minha, wa man yashfaʿ shafaʿatan sayyiʾatan yakun lahu kiflun minha, wa kana Allahu ʿala kulli shayʾin muqita” (4:85) (Whoever intercedes for a good cause will have a share in the reward, and whoever intercedes for an evil cause will have a share in the burden. And Allah is Watchful over all things.)
In this verse, Allah Subhana wa Ta'ala is explaining one of His universal roles, or rules rather. And that rule is that if you set a good custom, if you influence someone in a positive way, and that person then takes that custom, that habit, that heritage that you have left behind, and acts upon it, because you had a role to play in all of this, Allah Subhana wa Ta'ala is going to be rewarding you. And similarly, if you leave behind a bad custom, a bad habit, a bad influence, well, then this is going to be something that you will be punished for, because you are the one who played this role.
Normally we think about this verse of the Quran and this principle as a whole, and what comes to our mind is things that we can do in order to be able to gain Thawab (rewards) after we have left this world. So someone might think about for example, sponsoring Quran books for example, or sponsoring a particular part of the Masjid for example and so on and so forth. Or someone might think about, you know, building a hospital, for example. These are all very good examples, there is no doubt about it, and they all have their rewards.
What I want to do for a moment in today's clip is for us to take a little bit of a different angle when it comes to this verse of the Quran. The Quran is saying those things that you leave behind, those habits that you leave behind, those customs that you leave behind, those things that happen after you're gone, good or bad, you will either be rewarded or punished for them. Instead of thinking of these things as external things, things that we build or tangible things that we can touch with our own hands, I want us to think about them in terms of influence. Influence is one of those things that remains after you are gone. The influence that you have on the people around you is something that remains, even after you are gone. So the same way I could build a masjid and people could come and pray there after I am gone and that has its great reward, I can also influence someone, and that influence will then remain with that person.
And if you think about it, and what Islam kind of points at and teaches us, is that the greatest influence that you can possibly leave behind is the influence that you have on your immediate family and your immediate loved ones. Those individuals are the ones who are going to be heavily, heavily influenced by you. We live in a society today where we're taught that influencing others has to do more with numbers and whatever the case might be, and likes and shares and things of that nature. The reality is, the people who are immediately around you, the people who are spending time with you every single day, they are the ones who you will have the greatest influence on. And even some verses of the Quran point this out, right?
The verses of the Quran tell us, go and protect your own families from the Hellfire. So, instead of just thinking about it from an external sense of let me build this or build that or sponsor this, and these are all great and we should do them, we also have to think about it in the sense of the influence that we have in our families. Hence, the good Akhlaq (ethics/manners) that I have in my family, and the good tone that I speak with my family with, and the kindness and compassion that I show within my household, this influence will remain with my wife, with my husband, with my children, with my parents for many, many years after I am gone.
And hence, this effect might be deeper than any other effect that I can create. So we need to take a look at this and think about the normal interactions that we're having within our household more so from the perspective of everything that I am doing, I am building a heritage so that the people after me, they remember me in this light and it influences them in a positive way.
What will happen to my child if he remembers me as a religious person who had amazing Akhlaq? That influence on that child will be deeper and greater than anything that child will ever come across in his or her life. Right? What type of influence will I leave behind if I have good Akhlaq with my spouse, with my parents? So this is where the depth of your influence is going to show itself more than anything else. The external things that we do, they might have influence on a higher number of people, and they have their own place and their own role, but the influence you have in your own household. It might be three, four, five individuals, but the influence is much, much deeper.
So, from now on, when we think about how we interact with one another, don't just take it as: well, we are just spending some time with each other. Think about it as: you are building a heritage, and this is how people are gonna remember you afterwards. And if you do something good right now, they will remember you as a religious person doing something good, and the impression that this leaves on them, in terms of their faith and practicing their faith.
