How We Want to Be Treated (20 Oct. 2013)

Cliff Loesch

October 20, 2013

Matthew 7:12

How We Want to Be Treated

You know the Golden Rule, of course. I don’t mean the one that says, “He who has all the gold, rules.” You’ve heard that one before, too—but that’s not the golden rule I’m talking about (even though there may be a little truth to that one). I’m talking about the real Golden Rule—the one taught by Jesus that says, “In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you.”

I remember the first time I heard that Jesus was not the first one who said this. I was a little shocked by that thought. I had only heard it as coming from Jesus. It is one of his core teachings—and I thought it was originally and uniquely his.

But Confucius said something very similar to the Golden Rule in Ancient China: “What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.” And you can find similar statements from Ancient Babylon, Egypt, and India—as well as from some early Greek philosophers.

It may be the case that Jesus was the first

The Golden Rule (30 Dec. 2012)

Cliff Loesch
December 30, 2012
The Golden Rule

I recently finished reading a novel called The Good Son, by Michael Gruber. The central character in the book is Sonia Bailey Laghari, an American woman who married a Pakistani man. After living for a while in Pakistan she did some traveling through parts of Asia and the Middle East and ended up in Switzerland where she became a trained therapist. As one reviewer put it, the plot “jump starts when Sonia, now living in America, leads an international team of academics back to Pakistan for a peace conference that gets ambushed by terrorists en route to its meeting spot. As it turns out, Sonia is more than the terrorists bargained for…”