We are each born knowing everything we need to know how to do in order to obey God. His children are born in his image. As babies, we are born already knowing how to love in the most immediate and instinctive way. We are born loving ourselves. If we need something, we demand that the little person we love above all gets what he or she wants. Love for ourselves is instinctive. So when Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves and to treat others as we want to be treated, we already know how to do that.
Love is not something beyond our understanding because first we loved ourselves. We need only attempt to love that which is outside ourselves the way God intended for us to do and God gives us the spiritual strength to go with it to make selfless love possible. Despite all our other flaws that may be overlaid upon our character, love is still there. The Golden Rule activates the love we already know how to give and turns it outward. It even feels right to tear down the flimsy walls built by sin and love someone besides ourselves. We do this because we are designed to love, not just ourselves, but everyone and everything else.
God's plan was a brilliant plan and as it turns out, a person has to work very hard to escape the inevitable attraction of being good. It feels so right to be good. The Ebenezer Scrooge story resonates with us because we all have been something of an angry sinner at one time or another and we have or may soon discover how wonderful and how right it feels to surrender our anger and hate and to drag out the love that God buried deep inside us at the very beginning and to give it some exercise.
How cool is that?
© 2017 by Tom King
© 2017 by Tom King
