Matthew 7:9-12
The Golden Rule
9 "Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! 12 So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.
Jesus is LOVE and showed that in His Teachings...Jesus shows us the importance of love...Love is all about relationships, loving relationships...He not only wants us to love others but He tells us to love ourselves, or treat others they way you want others to treat you...And in the extreme and the extremely hard command, He also tells us to love our enemies...These are commands that Jesus teaches us...
Jesus tells us to treat ourselves the way we want others to treat us...This is a sign of love, and I believe this starts the process of loving and caring for others in our young years...Relationships start early in our lives...And throughout our lives relationships are so important...And the more loving the relationship or relationships we have the happier you are...If you have many unloving, conflicting, and confrontational relationships you will not be a very happy person...So it is good to start young as Jesus teaches us about love and to love ourself...
This process of loving yourself can be dampened and tainted when you are young...If you have parents who are always quarreling and fighting and in conflict with one another, then you can grow up confused about love...You may have been seeded with a confusing attitude and mind about love, and you need help fixing your negative thoughts on love...Young traumas happen often in families who do not make emotional connections with their children...These early problems can affect your future teen and adult relationships, but they can also be overcome...It's important to realize that as you age that many of your current relationship challenges happened early in life and were not a personal choice that you made...They are just coping mechanisms you hade to make if you lived in an environment of quarreling and arguing...But you do deserve love and peace...Some of the coping strategies you learned from childhood may have been appropriate in the past in your early years...So if you have been confused about love in your young life, you may need to learn about love through Jesus, or through books that speak on the emotional connections of parents and their children, or counseling -or a combination of all the things that help you learn more about love and how love should be in relationships...Let us remember, God wants His children to have love and peace...
So sometimes you must learn about love later in life, if your young circumstances have caused you issues...Young people who have tried to cope on their own, may not have learned the proper coping and loving skills they need and to have current positive loving relationships...Those who have experienced childhood abuse are vulnerable to developing mental health disorders that compromise emotional and behavioral stability, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and borderline personality disorder...These illnesses can present additional challenges to engaging in their new and current healthy interpersonal relationships...Just parents constantly quarreling can make children have higher stress levels than children who lived in more peaceful environments and in loving families...As a result, they frequently became tired and ill, they played less, and slept poorly...Overall, children did not ever learn about love or emotional connections with others...They have lived through the best way their young minds could through this constant family stress...Love may not been a reality for some children...
But as one reads about Jesus and how He teaches about love, we see that He can help these situations, and better manage them...And it starts with loving yourself...One way to get better is to work on a strong positive, nonjudgmental, and noncritical attitude...Do as best you can to have fewer and fewer negative and critical and judgmental toward yourself...And this again, starts with having a positive personal attitude, a better nonjudgmental approach to oneself, and not being critical of oneself...No one says that this is easy...
Minister Charles Stanley in a recent Sermon tells this us in summary: Life is all about relationships... Relationships are very, very important...Relationships with your family, your friends, your coworkers, and relationships with yourself; relationships with strangers, though it may be brief, and ultimately, your relationship with God...If you take relationships out of your life, what do you have?...Learn not only the importance of having healthy relationships, but also how we can foster healthy relationships...Minister Stanley goes on to say that Jesus in the Sermon in the Mount says in everything you do (and not just somethings), treat the people the same way you want to be treated...This is the Law and the Prophets...This reveals the very heart of God...It tells us how God wants us to treat each other...This tells us how God wants us live and treat others...Life is about relationships...Let us ask how do we treat others around us?...How do I want people to treat me?...How do want your friends to treat you?...How do you want strangers to treat you?...Make a list of how you want to be treated...We hurt each other, because we do not stop to think how we want others to treat us...Treat people the same way that you want them to treat you...Godly people, with Jesus living on the inside of us, makes all the difference in the world...You can't do this apart from the Father...It has become in our society more than one eye for an eye and more than one tooth for a tooth...It takes a personal relationship with God through Jesus because of our propensities of sin that Jesus can help us with this...Jesus empowers us to be thoughtful, kind, and forgiving...And He wants us to treat everyone the same way...It takes a relationship with our LORD...This does not guarantee you will be treated by others like you will be want to be treated....But God will have someone or many people treat in your future the way you want to be treated...When you and I obey this command you never come up short, it is never a failure, when you treat others the way you want to be treated...When you treat others the way you want to be treated, you will please the Father...You have the excitement of knowing God will be having others to treat us the way we want to be treated...The Father will bless us in a way we can never imagine...
Love and harmony on earth is strengthened by the Golden Rule...The Golden Rule teaches us to love ourselves, and in addition to love others, and to love God...Everyone of us suffer if we do not love ourselves, as stated, earlier...Let us start by loving ourselves, and then loving our neighbors and helping us get our world in a harmony of love...