“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7:12)
Now, even though it could feel like Jesus’ summary statement in Matthew 7:12 is the sort of thing you would find in All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, there is one little phrase that makes that impossible. It’s this phrase: “in everything…” This little phrase, just one word in Greek, captures so much.
Now, think with me about what it would look like for all of our actions to reflect this:
- what actions would we take in order to love others: our spouses, our colleagues, our children, our parents, total strangers, those in need?
- what actions would we hold back from in order to truly love and serve others?
Consider what it would look like for all of our words to reflect Jesus’ guidance:
- what words would we speak in order to truly love and serve others?
- what words would never cross our lips in order to truly love and serve others?
And then there are our thoughts, our inner meditations. Jesus once said,
“A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” (Luke 6:45)
We often talk about having a filter on what we say or do. It is good to have a filter, but what would it look like to let our thoughts and inner, unexpressed desires reflect Jesus’ teaching about treating others the way we would want to be treated. Consider with me:
- what do our inner thoughts say about how much we truly love others?
- what do we say in private about others that we would never speak in public? Why is there a difference?
And what about one more category that may seem strange. What about our non-thoughts; the ways we naturally see and evaluate people and situations without even thinking about it? What do our non-thoughts—our prejudices, assumptions, and non-cognitive ways of assessing people—say about our love or lack of love for others? How might our lives and interactions with others be transformed as we let God reach into and transform our non-thoughts?
Jesus tells us:
“In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7:12)
From top to bottom, from the inside to the outside, Jesus’ disciples live in God’s love and live with God’s love for others.
Here is one of the places where the golden rule is more than just activity, however. Jesus’ words push us into the territory of our hearts, where we encounter both the beauty and the deficiency within. As Jesus says in another place, “A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart” (Matthew 12:28, NLT). What we do flows from who we are.
Renovate 