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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Dr. Wes Bredenhof > The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have done unto you | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) Psalm 147:1-3 Psalm 147:4-6 Psalm 119:4-6 Hymn 1 Hymn 41 Scripture reading: Matthew 7 Catechism lesson and text: Lord's Day 42 and Matthew 7:12 |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
The Golden Rule is undoubtedly one of the most famous passages in the Bible. Its wisdom and righteousness are universally acknowledged. No one doubts that it’s a good idea to treat others as you would want to be treated.
But why is it called “the Golden Rule”? While it’s hard to say for sure, it may go back to a Roman emperor who reigned during the early 200s after Christ. Severus Alexander didn’t claim to be a Christian, but he was friendly towards the Christian faith. He was familiar with Christian teachings. He commanded that the rule found in Matthew 7:12 be painted in gold on his palace and on public buildings. So some say this is how it came to be known as “the Golden Rule.” At any rate, we can all agree that this rule is gold.
It’s interesting that our Heidelberg Catechism refers to this rule when it covers the Eighth Commandment. It could have been mentioned with the Sixth Commandment or with the Seventh, maybe even with the Ninth. But here it is in regard to the Eighth. That means we’re thinking especially about applications of the Golden Rule that have to do with property and business. Certainly there are other applications too, but this afternoon we’ll limit ourselves to the scope of the Eighth Commandment as it’s summarized for us in Lord’s Day 42.
So I preach to you God’s Word this afternoon on the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have done unto you.
We’ll look at the:
- Basis of this command
- Fulfillment of this command
- Applications of this command
- Challenges to this command
A quick Google Search will tell you the Golden Rule isn’t unique to our Lord Jesus. You can find a form of it in the apocryphal book of Tobit. There was a Jewish rabbi named Hillel – he died in AD 10. He said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour; that is the whole Torah, while the rest is commentary. Go and learn it.” Other versions are found with Greek and Roman philosophers and further afield in ancient Indian and Persian writings. So the Golden Rule itself isn’t unique.
Yet Christ does bring the Golden Rule in a unique way. The clue is in the little word “so” at the beginning of verse 12. That word is sometimes translated as “therefore” in other passages. It tells us there’s a connection to what comes before. What comes before somehow forms the basis for the Golden Rule.
In the verses right before verse 12, Jesus was speaking about the generosity of the Father. He encourages us to ask, seek, knock. The Father is good and he loves to give good things to those who ask him. The Father is gracious and generous with the way he interacts with his children. This is something we value for ourselves. Who wouldn’t want to have a generous Father who loves to give good things? You want that done unto you. So now, Jesus says, let that direct how you interact with other human beings around you. Since you appreciate the generosity and graciousness of your heavenly Father, go and be generous and gracious to the people he brings across your path.
So in the teaching of our Lord Jesus, the basis of this command is unique. It’s based on who God is towards his children in Christ. It’s based on our experience of who God is and the way he lavishes good things on us in abundance, and especially the gift of eternal life in his presence. We’ve been richly blessed by him and we like that. We want more of that. That drives us then to look outward to others and what they’d like and what they’d want more of.
Jesus says that the Golden Rule is “the Law and the Prophets.” That makes this saying incredibly weighty. Everything in the Bible to do with your relationship with fellow human beings can be summarized with “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” But what does God expect from us in terms of our fulfillment of this command?
To answer that, we need to go back a bit in the Sermon on the Mount. At the end of chapter 5, Jesus summarized the demand of God’s moral law. It’s in Matthew 5:48, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” When he said that, he was drawing on what the Old Testament said in Leviticus 19:2, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” Holiness and perfection are related concepts. God is holy, perfectly holy and he requires the same from each one of us. If we are to be holy, we need to be perfect, which means perfectly keeping “the Law and the Prophets.” Which in turn means perfectly keeping the Golden Rule. God’s law demands that you always and in every way do unto others as you would have done unto you. Or as it’s also expressed in Leviticus 19:19, “you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” God’s law says this has to be kept perfectly and if it isn’t, there are eternal consequences.
We all know that we fall short of fulfilling this command perfectly. I don’t always think of others and put myself in their shoes. I have a selfish streak. I’m falling way short of what God requires in his law.
Here in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ is portrayed as a kind of new Moses. There are many similarities between the Sermon on the Mount and when Moses delivered the law of God to Israel on Mount Sinai. But right now I want you to see that our Lord Jesus isn’t only the greatest Law-giver, he’s also the greatest Law-keeper. Every place we’ve fallen short, he hasn’t. And that’s good news for sinners like us.
When it comes to the Golden Rule, Jesus was the only human being who has ever fulfilled it perfectly. He always did unto others as he would have had done unto him. He showed perfect love for God by doing what God requires, and he also showed perfect love for fellow human beings. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than at the cross. Christ was never a sinner, but we can imagine him thinking something like, “If I were a sinner, and I needed to be saved, I would want someone to do this for me. I would want someone to suffer and die for my sins. If I were a sinner, I would want someone else to take the wrath of God I deserve.” And so the cross is the ultimate fulfillment of the Golden Rule.
Jesus not only showed us how it’s done, but in doing so gained our salvation. His obedience to God’s demand for perfection? That’s ours when we rest from our efforts and place our trust in Jesus. His suffering to pay for all the times we haven’t perfectly followed the Golden Rule? That’s ours when we cling to him and the work he did in our place. It’s in this way that the Golden Rule drives us to the gospel of what Christ has done.
Then having done that, we come back to the Golden Rule as a guide for our thankfulness, a way to express our love to God for the salvation we have as a gift. We come back to the Golden Rule as disciples of Jesus who want to follow him and be like him. We come back to the Golden Rule as those united to Christ, as those who want to bear much fruit as branches grafted on to the vine.
And that gets us into applications of this command, particularly applications related to the Eighth Commandment, “You shall not steal.” We’ll take our cue from what God forbids, as outlined from Scripture in QA 110 of our Catechism.
When kids are teenagers, sometimes they get a thrill from stealing from stores. Sometimes it’s not even because they want what they’re stealing – sometimes it’s just the challenge to see if they can get away with it and then brag about it afterwards to their friends. Maybe they justify this bit of fun by saying, “Oh, it’s just something little. I’m sure the store won’t notice.” This is obviously a crime, but it’s also a serious sin. When it comes to the Eighth Commandment, it’s helpful to think about it in terms of the Golden Rule. If you were a store owner, how would you feel about young people coming into your store every week and stealing your stuff? If you were the store owner and you knew it was happening, would you say, “Oh, it’s just something little, I’ll let the kids have their fun”? Do unto others as you would have done unto you.
Let’s take the question of used vehicles. My Dad always told me, “You’ll never make money on a car.” And so far, he’s been right. But of course, after we buy a car and have had it for a few years, we want to sell it and we want to get as much money for it as we can. Sometimes people will lie about mechanical problems a car has when selling it. Or they’ll cover over the problems somehow so they’re not right away evident. They hope the person buying it won’t notice the problems. And if they don’t, well that’s their fault for not looking closer. This is what our Catechism means by “deceptive merchandising.” You can deceive by lying outright, but you can also deceive by failing to tell someone something they ought to know about what they’re buying. Again, put yourself in the shoes of the buyer. How would you feel about buying a vehicle and then discovering that the seller lied to you or covered up various problems? As Christians, we’re to be honest people in all our business dealings, and we’re to deal with others as we’d like to be dealt with. We appreciate people being honest and upfront with us, so we should be the same as disciples of Jesus Christ.
Let’s go to the workplace. You’re working for somebody else. Your employer has agreed to pay you a certain amount for a certain amount of work. Your employer expects you to do what you’ve agreed upon. But imagine a workplace where three times a week the manager starts an hour after you do. He won’t notice if you sleep in and you’re 20 minutes late on those days. So three times a week, you show up late. You’ve just stolen an hour of your employer’s time. If you owned your own business, would you appreciate it if employees were cheating you out of time they said they’d be working? Would you appreciate them for time they haven’t worked? Do unto others as you would have done unto you. It’s part of having a good Christian work ethic.
On the other side of the equation, what about being an employer? It happens that employers cheat their employees out of their pay. The employee worked a certain number of hours, but the employer fudges the numbers and doesn’t give what’s owed. Again, if we’re Christians and we remember the Golden Rule, we’re not going to be doing corrupt business practices like wage theft. After all, we wouldn’t want it done to us, would we?
If we put all this positively, we would like people to respect our property. So we need to respect the property of others. We would like people to deal with us honestly. So we need to be honest. We would like people to keep to their agreements, so we need to keep to our agreements. Deal with others as you would like them to deal with you. It’s not complicated, but it sure is challenging.
Let’s look at a couple of the challenges to this command. Scripture says in Philippians 2:4, “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” However, in our day, many people turn that principle right upside down. Oftentimes we do too. Now it sounds like, “Let each of you look only to his own interests, and not to the interests of others.” This phenomenon is known as narcissism, an obsession with self.
There’s a personality disorder that goes by this name, narcissistic personality disorder. That mental health issue takes this phenomenon to a whole new level. But many of us are struggling with just garden variety narcissism – an inflated view of yourself, a tendency to see yourself as the center of the universe. Everyone else around you is just a means to an end, and that end is always about you. If we’re giving in to the temptation to narcissism, the Golden Rule is bound to be out the window. Because the Golden Rule is about others, looking to the interests of others, thinking about what others would want. Narcissism turns us inward. The Golden Rule wants to turn us outward.
What’s the opposite of narcissism? I’d suggest to you that it might be empathy. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and have some kind of understanding of where they are, their perspective. When you have empathy, you can more easily implement the Golden Rule. When you have empathy, you don’t have to be a shop owner to realize that stealing from a shop owner hurts his business. When you have empathy, you don’t have to be the victim of a corrupt used car salesman to understand that no one appreciates being ripped off when buying a used vehicle. And so on.
So how do we get away from narcissism and move towards the kind of empathy that helps us follow Christ’s Golden Rule? First, we have to acknowledge our problem. Let’s be honest and confess to God that we do struggle here. So often we’re putting ourselves first and not thinking about the interests of others. We confess and we seek forgiveness from our Father through what Christ has done for us on the cross. He will forgive you. Our Father loves to be generous with his forgiveness. Second, we have to plead for God to change our hearts with his Holy Spirit. He is sovereign over everything, including our thoughts and our desires. The Holy Spirit can begin turning us outward. He has the power to do it and he will. Third, we have to look to Christ as our pattern. That’s what Philippians 2:5 tells us to do. We’re to have the mind which is ours in Christ Jesus. He humbled himself. He put himself aside and put others first, even going to death on a cross. Paul says there that we’re to reflect him. As he fulfilled the Golden Rule, we’re to go and do likewise. We won’t perfectly fulfill it in this life, but with the help of the Holy Spirit we can begin to.
Another challenge to this command has to do with misunderstanding it. When Christ said, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you,” he was assuming that what you would want done to you would be according to God’s will. So, for example, we can’t take the Golden Rule and apply it to Medically Assisted Dying or euthanasia. We can’t reason, “I would want to be able to end my own life if I had a terminal illness, so I should support others who want to do the same.” No, that’s sinful reasoning because God says our lives belong to him and only he is allowed to determine when our days are over. As another example, you might want something sexually immoral done to you, so should you do something sexually immoral to someone else? Obviously not, because God’s Word says we’re to abstain from sexual immorality – we saw that last time when we looked at 1 Thessalonians 4:8. So it’s a challenge to make sure we don’t abuse the Golden Rule by bringing our own sinful desires into the equation. What we would want done unto us has to be lined up with what God would want for us to want done unto us. The Eighth Commandment tells us God doesn’t want for us to want to be robbed. I would not want to be robbed and that desire lines up with what God wants for me. So then just like I don’t want to have people steal from me, then I don’t steal from others.
Loved ones, if we live by the Golden Rule, whether when it comes to property or business or whatever, if we live by the Golden Rule, a lot of ethical issues will resolve themselves for us. We don’t even need to get the advice of others. It’s no wonder that people have looked it as such a pearl of wisdom from our Saviour. When you’re faced with an issue in buying or selling or doing business, you can always ask yourself, “What would I want done to me in this situation?” Then you take the answer and that’s how you proceed. That works in other areas of life too. It’s not easy to implement, but it’s the right thing to do, the thing that honours God and shows our love and gratitude to him for the salvation we have in Christ. AMEN.
PRAYER
Heavenly Father,
Thank you for the wisdom and good instruction of your Word. We give thanks for the Golden Rule given by our Lord Jesus. Father, we confess to you that we are too often selfish and we forget about this rule. We have so often put ourselves and our wants and desires first. Please forgive us because of what Christ did for us on the cross. We ask you to renew us with the Holy Spirit so we can follow this rule like our Lord Jesus did. Please let your Holy Spirit turn us more and more outward. As we look to Christ our Lord, grant us more love and empathy for those around us. Teach us and lead us also with regard to business dealings. Help us to deal with others as we would want to be dealt with. Help us to always be honest and fair, whether we’re employers or employees.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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