The Golden Rule
3596 words long.
Published on 2024-08-30
We strive to grow spiritually so that we may reach full maturity in the faith and be a source of light and love in this world. Jesus told us not to hide our light under a bushel (Matthew 5:15-16). If you take the basket off your head, is there any light there to shine? There is a simple test of whether you are a spiritually mature Christian. Do your thoughts, words and deeds follow the Golden Rule of Jesus Christ?
7 “Ask, and it will be given to you;
seek, and you will find;
knock, and it will be opened to you.
8 For everyone who asks receives,
and the one who seeks finds,
and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
9 Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread,
will give him a stone?
10 Or if he asks for a fish,
will give him a serpent?
11 If you then, who are evil,
know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more will your Father who is in heaven
give good things to those who ask him!
12 “So whatever you wish that others would do to you,
do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
13 “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide
and the way is easy that leads to destruction,
and those who enter by it are many.
14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard
that leads to life, and those who find it are few."
- Matthew 7:7-14
I believe that the Golden Rule deserves its appellation. It is golden. When it shines out from us it lights a path to guide the lost to safety. I did not always think that way. This article shares part of my journey toward understanding how profound are the words of Jesus found in Matthew 7. After being steeped in the negative philosophy of Job, Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, my approach is simple. I will catalog a few of my failures to understand and apply this glorious teaching and how those failures guided me to the truth.
This is the engineer in me speaking. Each time a machine or a system fails, we learn something useful about it. We learn the limits of its operating range. We learn how to improve it. So it is with the Golden Rule. It is not easy to follow. Each unsuccessful attempt to follow it teaches us what needs to change inside us so that we may do better the next time. Those changes must be made to:
- our mind, because we do not understand the details of how to apply the rule in a new situation
- our heart, because our values and priorities are not aligned with God's and we despair of ever measuring up
- our hands, because there is a lot for them to do and we must practice to use them skillfully
The Golden Rule makes perfect sense until you realize that it is sandwiched in between other sayings that deepen its meaning, from the "ask-seek-knock" part to the narrowness of the gate. We are told straight away that it will not be easy. Some obstacles I ran up against were:
- Failure
- Feelings of inadequacy
- Depression
- Laziness
- Pride
- Wrong values and Anxiety
- Wrong pursuits, lack of faith, insecurity and shame
- A fuzzy picture of God
These spiritual deficits made it hard for me to believe and live according to this rule and accept that it means exactly what Jesus said it means. To make the significance crystal clear, I begin with this conundrum. After I made major progress in understanding the Golden Rule in the early 1990's, I was convinced that I had just made a breakthrough and now understood one of the most important truths in Christianity. I was certain that - knowing this - there was nothing I couldn't do. I had no more questions for God and was content that I had mastered a truth so profound that I could move forward in victory and confidence the rest of my life.
Shortly after that, I was plunged into crisis after crisis, faced the magnitude of my ignorance, and set out on a road of constantly seeking God for more questions, more answers and an ever deeper understanding of who He is and how to love Him and my neighbor better. Over thirty years later, I retain my appraisal that the Golden Rule is profound and a useful guide to life. I have learned much in the intervening years. It is not a beverage that you drink from once and are forever satisfied. It is a spring you return to often to be refreshed and gain new insight. Now here is my golden rule journey.
Failure & Inadequacy
In the late 1980's I read The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Sermon on the Mount (in which the Golden Rule appears) figured prominently in his work. I tried to live the way he said a Christian should live and failed. (The man spoke against Hitler publicly and was executed for his courageous faith. He set a high standard.) My sojourn into legalism left me feeling inadequate. This was a good thing. If you never try to be perfect you will never reach your limits. If you never try to "Give to the one who begs from you" and "not refuse the one who would borrow from you" (Matthew 5:42) you will think it is possible without divine assistance to love your neighbor as yourself. You will not realize that Jesus was right when he said, "that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked." (Revelation 3:17b)
The challenge is to come to this point and plead with God for His resources to meet the need that surrounds you. The challenge is to not give up.
Depression
In the Fall of 1988, my pastor asked people to visit a woman in a nursing home who suffered rheumatoid arthritis. I refused. At this point I had been suffering depression for about ten years. I did not have the emotional stamina to visit the sick. I felt empty. I could not give to the one who was begging me for help.
The worship team at my church held a concert and sang contemporary Christian songs. Afterwards, they made a music cassette and I bought a copy. The pastor made another appeal to visit Janet. Two things had changed. One, I found out that the woman lived one block from my apartment. She was my neighbor and we are supposed to love our neighbor. Two, I had that music cassette made by the church. I visited her, prayed, read to her from the Bible and gave her the cassette. My visit lasted fifteen minutes.
In the verses before the Golden Rule, there are peculiar words. "Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?" On what other occasion do we hear of bread and fish? That would be when Jesus fed the five thousand. The disciples said they had nothing to feed the crowd, but Jesus pressed them further and they said that they had a few loaves and fish. From that tiny offering, Jesus fed the multitude.
My cassette, my prayer, and my brief visit were my five loaves and two small fish. What happened? After I left Janet, I wept. Then after the tears dried up, the Holy Spirit poured joy into my heart. That joy filled my heart for a week. I was also delivered from that decade of depression. To do unto others does not require that we have all that they need. All it requires is that we offer the little that we do have. The Lord can take that and multiply it until it meets that need.
Laziness and Pride
Around 1990, a friend extolled the amazing value of memorizing Bible verses. I had done it a few times, but it takes work and I was lazy. I was convinced there was a faster and easier path to Bible knowledge. To mask my laziness, I exchanged it for pride and mischievousness. I accepted the challenge but was determined to prove my friend wrong. I picked what I figured was the least spiritually valuable passage in the Bible to memorize. I figured that committing it to memory would produce no spiritual benefit and refute my friend's proposition.
The passage I chose was Joshua 12:7-24. It gave a list of the kings that Joshua defeated on the west side of the Jordan River. How could memorizing the names of long dead kings help anybody? It took me several days to memorize, but I succeeded. In order to make sure I didn't miss any kings, I counted how many there were so I could tick them off on my fingers. There were thirty-one kings. When I could finally do it without mistakes, I was cut to the heart. There are thirty-one days in the longest months of the year. Thirty-one kings defeated, thirty-one days in a month. God gives His faithful ones victory every day of the month.
Now that I knew that the power of God resides in EVERY verse of the Bible, I made a 180-degree turn. I selected another passage to memorize, one even I knew was worth memorizing. I decided to memorize the entire Sermon on the Mount, all three chapters of Matthew 5-7. It took months.
As I tackled each section of the sermon, I eventually made it to the Golden Rule. Had I learned my lesson and surrendered my pride? No! I laughed to myself like Sarah. There are many Bible verses with more subtlety, more poetry, and more power than the Golden Rule. Only naive, shallow people who are Biblically illiterate would call that verse "golden". The sophisticated, well-informed, deep thinkers would place other verses before that one on their list.
However, to memorize a passage, you need to read it over and over and over again. You are forced to learn the verses before and after it. In time, connections form and emerge from your subconscious. That is what happened to the Golden Rule. I noticed the part about asking, seeking and knocking. That explained my failure. We are not able to meet our neighbor's needs out of our own supply. We must continually seek from God the things that our neighbor needs so that we may help them. By faith, that means giving them what little we have in advance, trusting God to resupply us. That is the difference between people of the world trying to do unto others and Christians doing unto others. We have the storehouses of Heaven to supply us but they may only be requisitioned by faith.
With that realization, I considered what I was learning about the Golden Rule to be among my important discoveries of the faith. Having overcome depression and other spiritual ailments, I thought that I had it made. I should now be able to produce spiritual harvests on a regular basis and achieve great results. No further obstacles remained.
I was wrong.
Wrong Values & Anxiety
It was the early 1990's. The Golden Rule was not the only passage in the Sermon on the Mount that grabbed my attention as a result of my memorization efforts. Jesus told us in Matthew 6:19-21 that we are to pursue treasures in Heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy. Though I did not see the connection then, it is obvious now what was another cause of my failure to love my neighbors effectively and consistently. That part of the chapter deals with anxiety, which plagued me for decades. A major cause of anxiety is the fear that your needs - the things you treasure - will not be met. Fearing that, you refuse to give those things away to others. Remember Gollum from the Lord of the Rings? "My precioussss." No way anybody is going to pry that ring off my finger!
What is the problem with what Jesus said about the heavenly treasures? He didn't list them! That bothered me. I spent twenty years searching for them. No, to be more precise, I tried for a few months to discover a list of the heavenly treasures, gave up, then ten years later resumed my search. I now pursued the identities of the heavenly treasures with vigor for the next decade, until I had a workable list of ten and wrote The Endless Hunt to chronicle my discovery.
This connects back to Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. Why is the cost to follow Jesus so high? It is high because we must give up things that are precious to us. There are two steps we must take to deal with this. Jesus gave us the first step here:
Go and learn what this means:
‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’
For I came not to call the righteous,
but sinners.”
- Matthew 9:13
The first step is to love my neighbor more than I love my stuff and my time. I must become mercy-minded, not sacrifice-minded. The sacrifice-minded person thinks more about what they are giving up. The mercy-minded person thinks more about whom they are giving to. Jesus is our example:
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such
a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off
everything that hinders and the sin that
so easily entangles. And let us run with
perseverance the race marked out for us,
fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and
perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him
he endured the cross, scorning its shame,
and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
- Hebrews 12:1-2
Jesus thought more of the joy of seeing sinners saved than the pain of what he sacrificed. Jesus is mercy-minded. That means that Jesus placed higher value on his sheep than on his comfort. His values supported his actions.
The second step is go all the way and exchange your value system for Christ's. When you consider the things you surrender to be of little value but the things you gain to be of eternal value, what happens? The cost of discipleship goes down - way down!
Wrong pursuits & pursuits wrongly pursued
Around 2012, as I completed The Endless Hunt, I discovered one last treasure to add to my list. That treasure was the Glory of God. From my reading of Moses and C. S. Lewis, I found that they placed supreme value on the Glory of God. It was at this point that the profound power of the Sermon on the Mount took hold of my life. My life changed in ways taught by Jesus in that sermon BUT AT THE TIME I DIDN'T KNOW THAT!
Having concluded that I had for decades undervalued the Glory of God and not knowing how to change that, I surrendered. I had no idea how one goes about seeking the glory of God. Thus for three years I prayed and fasted one day a week with the same prayer, one borrowed from Moses, "Lord, show me your glory."
Why did I do this? I had no great history of fasting and didn't know what it was supposed to do or how it worked. If you look back in Matthew 6, right before Jesus talks about the heavenly treasures and about anxiety, he talks about fasting.
I didn't notice that until this week! The Holy Spirit took words buried in my heart by the crude act of memorizing the Sermon on the Mount decades before and guided me to obey them in the pursuit of spiritual treasure. As a result, my desire to read the Bible, study the Bible, pour out my heart in prayer to understand its words, find wisdom and share it with others burgeoned. Those words and how they might transform me and others around me are now more precious to me than anything else in all the world. By prayer and fasting God helped me to reorient my value system. The work is not complete but progress is now more rapid than before. The cost has become manageable.
Lack of faith, insecurity and shame
Even as the Lord gives me insight, I do not forget all my folly and sin. Am I mistaken? Are the ideas that come to me and which appear in my works merely my own or has the Lord shared them out of His good grace?
I proofread my writing. Ever time I do, I find errors. Some are just spelling and grammar. Some are substantial. With every book I write, I correct ideas from my earlier work as I grow. That means there are ideas in those books that come solely from me and they are wrong. That is undeniable. Does that mean that nothing I have learned is from God?
I am not a prophet like those in the Bible. Their words were perfect. What I do cuts me to the heart. I do know the Fear of the Lord. To mislead or manipulate others, that temptation to rule over others and be like God, I inherited from Adam and Eve. I fight against it. Where is my assurance? What promise do I claim? How can I move forward with research, analysis and writing and not collapse under the weight of doubt and fear? I can do it because of that same Sermon on the Mount:
Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread,
will give him a stone?
Or if he asks for a fish,
will give him a serpent?
If you then, who are evil,
know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more will your Father who is in heaven
give good things to those who ask him!
I have prayed to the Father for bread. I have prayed to the Father for fish. He will never give me anything but good gifts. That is the basis of the faith that propels me forward. Unlike some of my recent insights into the Golden Rule that came very recently, this one has been a rock for me for a long time.
A Fuzzy Picture of God
I didn't know why fasting worked until this week in August, 2024. There are other reasons why my searching for ways to bear fruit and do unto others was retarded. The search must engage your whole person. The search must also engage the whole of God. To do this, you must know yourself and you must know God and you must know them both deeply. It all has to do with asking, seeking and knocking.
We are a union of mind, heart and hand. Our mind includes our intellect, speech and memory. That is the part of us that must do the asking and receive the answers that are given. The Son of God is the person of the Trinity with whom we engage when asking.
Our heart is the part of us that must do the searching and finding. Deciding what is treasure and desiring it and deciding what is trash and discounting it are functions of our heart. The Holy Spirit is the person of the Trinity with whom we must engage when searching.
Our hands are the part of us that must do the knocking and opening. Submitting to discipline, training our bodies to serve others and focusing our strength on doing what is good is the function of our hands. The Father is the person of the Trinity with whom we must engage when knocking.
Only when the faith of mind and heart is completed by acts of sacrifice is our pursuit of God complete. Only then will we receive, find and fling open the door to the blessings we need to love our neighbor as ourself. That door is the narrow gate few can find. My progress has been slow. After every step I take in the right direction I see that another of the instructions was plain. All are listed out in an orderly sequence. There was never any dark mystery or fiendish riddle barring my way. How could this truth resist a mind trained in physics and math at one of the finest universities in the world? Do not underestimate the difficulty and simplicity of this faith.
Neither should you minimize the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. Beyond all your wrestling with words, all the cries of your heart and all the offerings you've made, the love of God exceeds all. It is not proportionate, it is abundant. In Luke, there is a variation on the passage about asking, seeking and knocking. It goes beyond the gift of material blessings like bread and fish:
If you then, who are evil, know how to give
good gifts to your children, how much more
will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit
to those who ask him!
- Luke 11:13
When you give money to the poor, what is it is transformed into? Generosity. Goodness is the heavenly treasure that you store up. Every material thing you can give becomes a spiritual thing. That is how you complete your asking. If you want the Father to send you the Holy Spirit, Jesus says you just need to ask, but that asking is with more than words. Then when the Father sends the Spirit, your light will shine like gold.
