Daily Devo w/ Pastor Eric September 14, 2021
“Tarnishing” the Golden Rule
Matthew 7:12, The Message “Here is a simple,
rule-of-thumb guide for behavior: Ask yourself what you want people to do for
you, then grab the initiative and do it for them. Add up God’s Law and Prophets
and this is what you get.
This is the message version of the
Golden Rule. Every religious and
philosophical tradition has a version of this (if some reason, you’re feeling
especially geeky like me, there is a great Wikipedia article on it). It is a universal truth. As I reflect on it today, a couple of things
occur to me. You can twist the “rule”
into something Jesus never intended. I
can treat people the way I want to be treated as a way of getting them to treat
me the way I want to be treated.
Granted, it doesn’t always work, but it probably works a good percentage
of the time and it beats the alternative.
To see it that way misses Jesus’s point.
When I think about how I want to be treated and extend that to others, I
am forced to remember that they are a human being just like me. And often, that is what I need to do, because
I have put that other person in a category different from me so that I can
justify treating them differently than I would like to be treated.
The other thing that strikes me
today is how powerful it is to hear Jesus, who is God become human asking us to
treat each other (and Him for that matter) like we would want to be
treated. Jesus is asking us to do what
he did first as God. God becoming human
is God thinking about what he would need in our place and then giving to
us. I love thinking about that.
Question: Who do you
know that practices the Golden Rule well?
Prayer: God, thank
you for being good to us. Help us to be good to you and all the other people
you have made. Help us live the Golden Rule as you intended. Amen.
Prayer Focus: Pray for over 100,000(including an
alarming number of children) Americans diagnosed with Covid-19 yesterday and
the last several days.
Song: The Golden Rule – This one has a VBS feel to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment