Some teachings of Jesus feel simple enough to put on a bumper sticker, yet heavy enough to bend the whole direction of a life. Today’s verse is like that—a single sentence that asks you to pause and imagine how you long to be treated, then turn that same care outward. It is not a suggestion for “nice people,” but a kingdom command that reaches into every glance, every word, every choice.

More Than Manners: The Heart of the Law

Jesus says, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you. For this is the essence of the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12). He is not tacking on a bit of etiquette to the end of the Sermon on the Mount; He is revealing the core of God’s will that runs from Moses to the prophets. The call to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) and to “love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5) comes into sharp focus here: real love is willing to feel what the other person feels, then act for their good.

Paul echoes this when he writes, “Be indebted to no one, except to one another in love. For he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law…Love does no wrong to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:8,10). The Golden Rule is not a way to earn salvation; it is the lifestyle of those who have already been rescued by grace. When Christ rules the heart, He leads us beyond bare rule-keeping into a generous, creative love that seeks the true good of others, even when it costs us something.

Letting Christ Reshape Your Reactions

It is easy to admire the Golden Rule in theory and then forget it in traffic, at the kitchen table, or in a tense conversation. Jesus is asking you to stop living on reflex—defending, snapping, ignoring—and instead to step into someone else’s skin for a moment. Luke records the same command: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31). That means asking, before you respond, “If I were on the receiving end of these words or this silence, what would I need right now?”

This is only possible as Christ reshapes your mind and heart. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or empty pride, but in humility consider others more important than yourselves…Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:3,5). God promised, “I will give you a new heart…And I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes” (Ezekiel 36:26–27). The Holy Spirit does what your willpower cannot: He produces “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23), so that your reactions begin to look like Jesus instead of your old self.

Planting Seeds of Eternity in Ordinary Moments

When you live this way, small choices become eternal testimonies. A patient tone, a generous tip, an honest apology, a listening ear—these are not random acts of niceness; they are echoes of the Savior who loved you first. Jesus said, “A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so also you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are My disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34–35). We “love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19), and that love shows up in how we treat the people right in front of us.

Think of how Christ has treated you. “But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Once, you were “foolish, disobedient, deceived…hateful and hating one another,” but “when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us…according to His mercy” (Titus 3:3–5). Now, as one of His “holy and beloved” people, you are called to “clothe yourselves with hearts of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience…And over all these virtues put on love, which is the bond of perfect unity” (Colossians 3:12,14). Every time you choose to treat others as you long to be treated, you are sowing seeds that point back to the cross.

Lord Jesus, thank You for treating me with mercy I did not deserve; by Your Spirit, help me today to see others as You see them and to do for them what I would long to receive, so that my words and actions draw people toward You.

IT IS RARE that there is anything good in human anger. Almost always it springs out of unholy states of heart, and frequently it leads to cursing and violence. The man of evil temper is unpredictable and dangerous and is usually shunned by men of peace and good will.

There is a strong tendency among religious teachers these days to disassociate anger from the divine character and to defend God by explaining away the Scriptures that relate it to Him. This is understandable, but in the light of the full revelation of God it is inexcusable.

In the first place, God needs no defense. Those teachers who are forever trying to make God over in their own image might better be employed in seeking to make themselves over in the image of God. In the Scriptures "God spake all these words," and there is no independent criterion by which we can judge the revelation God there makes concerning Himself.

The present refusal of so many to accept the doctrine of the wrath of God is part of a larger pattern of unbelief that begins with doubt concerning the veracity of the Christian Scriptures.

Let a man question the inspiration of the Scriptures and a curious, even monstrous, inversion takes place: thereafter he judges the Word instead of letting the Word judge him; he determines what the Word should teach instead of permitting it to determine what he should believe; he edits, amends, strikes out, adds at his pleasure; but always he sits above the Word and makes it amenable to him instead of kneeling before God and becoming amenable to the Word.

The tender-minded interpreter who seeks to shield God from the implications of His own Word is engaged in an officious effort that cannot but be completely wasted.

Why such a man still clings to the tattered relics of religion it is hard to say. The manly thing would be to walk out on the Christian faith and put it behind him along with other outgrown toys and discredited beliefs of childhood, but this he rarely does. He kills the tree but still hovers pensively about the orchard hoping for fruit that never comes.

Whatever is stated clearly but once in the Holy Scriptures may be accepted as sufficiently well established to invite the faith of all believers; and when we discover that the Spirit speaks of the wrath of God about three hundred times in the Bible we may as well make up our minds either to accept the doctrine or reject the Scriptures outright. If we have valid information from some outside source proving that anger is unworthy of God, then the Bible is not to be trusted when it attributes anger to God. And if it is wrong three hundred times on one subject, who can trust it on any other?

The instructed Christian knows that the wrath of God is a reality, that His anger is as holy as His love, and that between His love and His wrath there is no incompatibility. He further knows (as far as fallen creatures can know such matters) what the wrath of God is and what it is not.

To understand God's wrath we must view it in the light of His holiness. God is holy and has made holiness to be the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe. Sin's temporary presence in the world only accents this. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death. The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, hal meaning well, whole. While it is not wise to press word origins unduly, there is yet a significance here that should not be overlooked.

Since God's first concern for His universe is its moral health, that is, its holiness, whatever is contrary to this is necessarily under His eternal displeasure. Wherever the holiness of God confronts unholiness there is conflict. This conflict arises from the irreconcilable natures of holiness and sin. God's attitude and action in the conflict are His anger. To preserve His creation God must destroy whatever would destroy it. When He arises to put down destruction and save the world from irreparable moral collapse He is said to be angry. Every wrathful judgment of God in the history of the world has been a holy act of preservation.

The holiness of God, the wrath of God and the health of the creation are inseparably united. Not only is it right for God to display anger against sin, but I find it impossible to understand how He could do otherwise.

God's wrath is His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a mother hates the diphtheria or polio that would destroy the life of her child.

God's wrath is the antisepsis by which moral putrefaction is checked and the health of the creation maintained. When God warns of His impending wrath and exhorts men to repent and avoid it He puts it in a language they can understand: He tells them to "flee from the wrath to come." He says in effect, "Your life is evil, and because it is evil you are an enemy to the moral health of My creation. I must extirpate whatever would destroy the world I love. Turn from evil before I rise up in wrath against you. I love you, but I hate the sin you love. Separate yourself from your evil ways before I send judgment upon you."

"O Lord,- . . in wrath remember mercy" (Habakkuk 3:2).

Who is he that saith, and it cometh to pass, when the Lord commandeth it not? - Lamentations 3:37.

Let me remind you how a strong wish for a thing that seems desirable always lends to confuse to a man the plain distinction between right and wrong; and how passions once excited, or the animal lusts and desires once kindled in a man, go straight to their object without the smallest regard to whether that object is to be reached by the breach of all laws, human and Divine, or not. If a man is hungry, and bread is before him, his mouth waters, whether it is his own or other people’s. Excite any passion, and the passion is but a blind propensity towards certain good, and has no question or consideration of whether right or wrong is involved at all. Habit familiarizes with evil, and diminishes our sense of it as evil. A man that has been for a half-a day in some ill-ventilated room does not notice the poisonous atmosphere; if you go into it, you are half-suffocated at first, and breathe more easily as you get used to it. A man can live amidst the foulest poison of evil; and, as the Styrian peasants get fat upon arsenic, his whole nature may seem to thrive by the poison that it absorbs. They tell us that the breed of fish that live in the lightless caverns in the bowels of some mountains, by long disuse have had their eyes atrophied out of them, and are blind because they have lived out of the light. And so men that live in the love of evil lose the capacity of discerning the evil. And he that walketh in darkness becomes blind, blind to his sin, and blind to all the realities of life.

Then is it not true, too, that many of us systematically and of set purpose continually avoid all questions as to the moral nature of our conduct? How many a man and woman never sits down to think whether what they have been doing is right or wrong, because they have got, deep down, an uneasy suspicion as to what the answer would be. So. by reason of fostering passion, by reason of listening to wishes, by reason of the habit of wrong doing, by reason of the systematic avoidance of all careful investigation of our character and of our conduct, we lose the power of fairly deciding upon the nature of our own acts.

In order to secure habitual godliness, you will want manly strength and vigor, because you can get no hold of an unseen God except by a definite effort of thought, which will require resolute will. There we touch on one of the reasons why much modern Christianity is so feeble. We do not screw ourselves up to think about God and Christ in our daily life. So the truths which we believe slip from our slack grasp before we know that they are gone. A conjuror will put a coin in a man’s palm, and shut his hand upon it, and say, "Are you sure you have got it?" "Open your hands." It is not there. That is how a good many of you lose your religion; you think you have it; you once had it. The last time you looked at it, it was there. It is not there now. Why? Because you have not added to your faith strength, and made the efforts of mind and will which are needed in order to keep hold of the things which have been freely given to you of God. Do not spend your time upon merely trying to cultivate special graces of the Christian character, however needful they may be for you, and however beautiful they may be in themselves. Seek to have that which sanctifies and strengthens them all. Faith is the foundation, godliness the apex and crown.