So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.(Matthew 7:12 – ESV)
This Golden Rule is the summation of all that had gone on before it, and we see that there is a road to this is as seen in the Beatitudes, where the Sermon on the Mount starts. The Beatitudes reveal 7 qualities that reflect the spiritual life God desires for His people. These 7 “blessings” are markers along the road to the Golden Rule. In order to be able to live out the Golden Rule as our rule of life, we need to follow along the path that these blessings point to.
5:3 – the walk starts with brokenness, realizing our lack of strength to live as we ought
5:4 – repentance towards God
5:5 – humility
5:6 – hunger for God
5:7 – merciful
5:8 – purity leads to vision, you can see the fruit, and we are being set free from selfish sins
5:9 – James 3:13-18 – we sow because we love as God intended as the Golden Rule teaches
10-16 – they try and douse your flame but it remains this is living it out
We have broken hearts because of misunderstanding these things, and we need God to help us in order to help others through these things. Do unto others as you would have wanted them to do back when you were in that situation, even when people didn’t do you right, now turn that around, Christian, and do others right, this is living the Golden Rule.
He loves us even though we mess up. God doesn’t mess up, but He allows us to go through trying circumstances, and so we often feel like He does mess it up for us, but so do we still love Him? We must admit that the answer is often no, not really, but the beauty of God is that He gives us a chance. Even when we fail on our end of the bargain He still holds up His and we can see that He loves us more than we love Him. He has a greater love and we worship Him for it and become more like Him because of it. We would do Him the ultimate wrong (If you could kill God would you do it, would we kill Him again?) and yet He does us ultimately right, we can learn to see as Paul did (Philippians 3:8) and as Jesus taught us (John 12:24).
2 comments:
This post was originally shown 9-22-09, but it didn't have the audio portion...
In other words, although we are mixing new posts with old posts, the old ones now have an audio, which also includes more information and discussion. You can hear these archived at SermonAudio, as well as at voiceofvision.org.
God bless you…
This is the second post in a series of three, taken from our 2009 Sunday sermon, "The Road to the Golden Rule"...
Post a Comment