Practicing What I Didn’t Get to Teach in BC
In my quiet time with the Lord this morning, I read this from William Jay’s devotional Morning Exercises:
A natural man is only concerned to escape from trouble, but the Christian is anxious to have it sanctified and improved. He is commanded to hear the rod. While God chastens he teaches. I must therefore be in a learning frame of mind. I must say unto God, “Show me wherefore thou contendest with me.” “I will hear what, by this event, God the Lord will speak.”
In my recent post JOMO NOT FOMO, I shared something of the same idea as a result of the providential curve ball which landed me in an Idaho hospital with aspiration pneumonia. Part of the joy of missing out on teaching at the church camp in Canada was the benefit of a sharpened focus on hearing what God is saying and doing in the change of events. I alluded to a conversation I engaged with my hospital roommate who just so happened to be suffering with head and neck cancer–the very same kind which afflicted me back in 2005. How my health troubles were “sanctified and improved” by that encounter centered on one of the messages I planned to give at the camp from Matthew 7:1-12.
Jesus closed his teaching on how to engage others constructively in relational conflicts with the well-known and so-called Golden Rule. “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Before I can share about the Golden Rule joy I gained from missing out in Canada through my roommate story, I need to unpack the message content from the talk I never gave, but Jesus led me to practice.
The Golden Rule has been called “the Everest of all ethical teaching.” The Reformed Study Bible entry notes:
This principle was stated in a negative form by various ancient thinkers as, “Do not do to others what you do not want done to you.” Jesus makes it a positive obligation, a requirement to proactively do for others the good one wants for oneself. Here it appears after the discussion of God’s goodness and His willingness to give.
Because God is this good to you, go and do likewise with others! Jesus stresses the importance of embracing this Golden Rule ethic in all our relationships at the end of v. 12: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (emphasis added). In other words, this MO in treating others matters so much as a professed kingdom follower of Jesus because it distills into one sentence the essence of everything taught in the Old Testament. This is Leviticus 19:18 in action: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” Jesus put it this way when asked which is the great commandment in Matthew 22:37-40: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” The Golden Rule puts radical greatest-of-these-is-love into action.
Ken Sande suggests asking ourselves some helpful questions to evaluate how well we do or do not embrace this: “Would I want someone else to treat me the way I have been treating him? How would I feel if I found out people were saying about me what I’ve said about her? If our positions were reversed, how would I feel if he did what I have done?”
Questions like those in application of the Golden Rule with my challenging middle-of-the night hospital roommate made all the difference in whether or not I sanctified and improved that trial and, as a result, more thoroughly experienced the joy of missing out.
Lest this turn into an interminably long post, the rest of the story must wait for the next edition!