Christ Church Leavenworth
Matthew 7:12
8/30/26
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OT READING: Leviticus 19:35-37
NT READING: Matthew 7:1-14
The Golden Rule of Marriage
READING OF THE TEXT
Our text this morning is Matthew 7:12, these are the words of God
“Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
May God bless the reading of His Word, let’s pray.
PRAYER
Our Father and our God, we come before You this morning through Jesus Christ, our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit. Thank You for Your Word. Help us to hold it in high and reverent esteem this morning, persuaded that by it we live and not by bread alone. We ask these things in Jesus’ Name, amen.
INTRODUCTION
One of the earliest lessons we all learned was some version of the Golden Rule. It may have been framed in the negative, as in, “How would you like it if someone did that to you?” or it may have been stated in the positive, as in, “Treat people the way you want to be treated.” But either way, you came into contact with this teaching which, like the ocean, is shallow enough in some places for a child to play in it, yet deep enough in other places for an adult to drown in it. So, let’s dive in.
Do you wish others were more patient with you? Then be more patient with them. Do you wish others would pay more attention to you? Then pay more attention to other people. Do you wish others thought more about your needs than their own? Then think about the needs of others more than you think about your own. This is the teaching of all the Law and the Prophets. Now, the Law and the Prophets say a lot of things about a lot of things, so this isn’t the only lesson you can learn from them, but it is the one thing every thing they say is aimed at – e.g., if you learn from the Law that marriage is between one man and one woman for one lifetime, that is good, but if you do not treat your spouse the way you would like to be treated, what good is it? All the rules are measured by the Golden Ruler. So, when Jesus says that the Golden Rule is the Law and the Prophets, He is not dismissing their details; rather, He is highlighting the principle behind every detail.
PRINCIPALS BEFORE PRACTICALS
And this is not the only time He did that. In Matthew 22:36 Jesus was asked which of the commandments was the greatest. Keep in mind that the Old Testament contained roughly 613 commandments, 248 of which were of the positive “do this” variety and 365 of which were of the negative “don’t do that” variety, which works out to about a don’t a day. That is a lot of do’s and don’t’s, so which is the greatest? This is how Jesus responded in :37-40, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” Love God and love your neighbor is a perfect summary of the Old Testament. We know this because Jesus was perfect and that is how He summarized it. So, putting it all together, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is loving your neighbor as yourself and all of this ought to be born out of a love for God.
Please note the order: “love your neighbor as yourself,” follows “love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” It follows necessarily and chronologically. Just as works must follow faith, loving your neighbor must follow loving God. If your love for God is not followed by a love for your neighbor as yourself, it is not the love of God. That is not the golden rule, that is fool’s gold. It may look like it has some value, but it doesn’t. It looks good on a necklace, but it doesn’t spend in Heaven.
Consider 1 Jn 4:20 “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” So, the biggest problem with saying that you love God and not following that with a love is that it is a lie... you don’t actually love God. You might think that you do, but you don’t. You might know that you are lying or you might be lying to yourself. But loving your neighbor as yourself must follow a love of God: by necessity and in that order. You cannot truly love your neighbor without loving God first and you cannot truly love God without loving your neighbor next.
So, it is not just a matter of having them both, it is a matter of having them in the right order. You cannot order your affections whichever way you like. “Inordinate affection” is a sin, and we are commanded to put to death in Colossians 3:5. When our affections are out of order, even if they are all good, the result is sin. They do more harm than good when they are out of order. If you love your neighbor first, you will, as a consequence, hate God… and your neighbor as it turns out. You end up saying things like “love is love.” Now, that might sound like a nice thing to say, until you consider it from God’s point of view. God, who is Love, hates counterfeits. Flying trans flags outside your church, ordaining perverts as pastors inside them, and passing measures that approve of gender-affirming care for the sexually confused are all the result of putting a neighbor before God. But enough about the PCUSA. Love is not love. God is love. And when you do not begin with Him, you end in celebrating sin. But when you begin with Him, you know how to truly love your neighbor.. and then you end up actually doing it.
THE GOLDEN RULE’S NEIGHBORS
This is where our NT reading is instructive. The Golden Rule was not uttered in isolation. It was said in the context of the Sermon on the Mount which itself is a part of the greater ministry of Jesus, about which John says the number of books that could be written is inestimable. Furthermore, if the Golden Rule is a faithful summation of the entire Old Testament, as Jesus said it was, then it certainly can serve as a golden ruler to faithfully measure the verses that surround it.
So, let’s walk through Mt 7:1-14, beginning with :1-2. “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” We should not judge others in a way that we would not like ourselves to be judged. This is the Golden Rule in its legal form: judge others the way you would like to be judged because the way you measure others will be the way you are measured. Elsewhere, Jesus goes on to say that even the way you forgive others is the way you will be forgiven. We reiterate this point every week when we sing the Lord’s Prayer. “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Think about what you are saying. “God, forgive me the way I forgive others.” So, what are you asking God to do if you are not forgiving others? That’s right. You are asking Him NOT to forgive you. The forgiveness you give is the forgiveness you receive. So, the stingy should expect to come up short and the generous should expect to get more than enough. The hard to impress should not expect God to be easily impressed by how hard they were to impress, but those who cover the sins of others should expect to have their own covered. For better or for worse, “the measure you use will be measured to you.”
EQUAL WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
This ties into our OT reading from Leviticus 19:35-36a “You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measures of length or weight or quantity. You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin: I am the Lord.” This idea is not a one verse wonder, it is all over the place – e.g. Deuteronomy 25:13-16 “You shall not have in your bag two kinds of weights, a large and a small. You shall not have in your house two kinds of measures, a large and a small. A full and fair weight you shall have, a full and fair measure you shall have, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. For all who do such things, all who act dishonestly, are an abomination to the Lord your God.” Proverbs 11:1 “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.” Proverbs 20:10 “Unequal weights and unequal measures are both alike an abomination to the LORD.” Proverbs 20:23 “Unequal weights are an abomination to the LORD, and false scales are not good.” Ezekiel 45:10 “You shall have just balances, a just ephah, and a just bath.” Micah 6:11 “Shall I acquit the man with wicked scales and a bag of deceitful weights?” God’s love of equal weights and measures is all over the Scriptures. That is why the Lord hates it when someone puts their thumb on the scale and that is why the measure you use will be used to measure you. Do not, like Belshazzar, be found wanting by your own balances.
This is why the phrase, “by what standard?” is such an important rejoinder to remember. It destroys the false idol of false balances. A false balance either treats a lie as the truth or it treats the truth as a lie. And so, you must always, at every turn and in every situation, resist the temptation to put your thumb on the scale. If the sheer number of warnings about it are any indication, this is a temptation that can happen to anyone at any time in any number of scenarios. So, start by being willing to concede the point as a possibility. Is it possible that you have been putting your thumb on the scale? Yes. OK, so how would you know if you have been doing that? Return to the standard. Study it. Meditate on it. Pray about it. And if you’re ready to get real, ask those around you. Ask them if they see any logs in your eye? Ask them to check for specks and then brace yourself for some honest feedback. As I said, concede the point in principle. Do not ask it rhetorically, like, “I don’t have any specks in my eyes, do I?” That begs a certain kind of answer. That is not the question of someone who really wants to know the answer. So, if you ask, then ask, and make sure you’re ready to listen …and then take notes.
BACK TO THE GOLDEN RULE’S NEIGHBORS
That gets us back to :3-5 of Mt 7, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.” The liberal impulse is to say, “Just let bygones by bygones.” But that just leaves specks, logs, and bygones in everyone’s eyes which is more like blindness than enlightenment. Ignoring everyone’s sin leads to a world full of people who cannot see very well. So, we must resist this temptation while also being on guard against the legalistic impulse to look for specks and logs where there are none.
Would you rather look good because you can’t see very well or would like to see well enough to work on how bad you look? We all should want our neighbors to have bright, clear eyes. Even if that means they see our flaws more clearly. The problem is not that you notice other people’s specks, the problem is being more concerned with their specks than you are with your logs. If you don’t like people raising their voices at the dinner table, it hardly serves your purposes to shout that at everybody at the dinner table. If you don’t like it when people blow things out of proportion, it hardly makes your point to blow up about how EVERYONE is ALWAYS doing that. A little speck in your eye can seriously blur your vision and one of the most common specks we all have is that of trying to zoom in on the specks of others. A good way then to make sure everyone gets the specks out of their own eyes is to regularly ask others about yours. This creates an environment where the standard is wanting all the specks removed, not wanting to find more specks to point out.
If you had something in your teeth, would you want to know? Now, you might be embarrassed if someone had to tell you that and you may have preferred to discover that fact on your own, but even if you had, you would wonder how long it’s been there and who had all seen it in the meantime. You need to be the kind of person who thanks people for pointing out the food in your teeth. That is a good way to love your neighbor because it makes it easy for them to talk to you when they see something else that is off. They know that you are more committed to being corrected than you are to feeling like you are correct.
:6 “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.” You cannot treat a dog like a person. I know this is controversial for some reason in our day and age, but it bears repeating: you do not love a dog by treating it like a person. You love a dog by treating it according to its nature. Dogs do not by nature appreciate holy things. A dog does not value the waters of baptism anymore than the water in your toilet. It’s not a bad dog for not doing that, however, it’s just a dog. The same can be said for pigs. What do pigs want? Food. So, if you throw a pearl before a pig, don’t expect them to say, “Thank you!” It might sniff at it, but it probably won’t eat it. It might by accident if it lands in the pile of slop, but it won’t eat it on purpose. Why? Pigs don’t value pearls, they value food. Now, you could argue that a pearl could be traded for food and you’d be right, but you’d only say that because you’re not a pig. That is why you thought of that and the pig is off in the mud somewhere. So, what does any of this have to do with the Golden Rule? Good question. It has to do with recognizing the frame of the one with whom you are dealing. Ignoring someone’s frame is a great way to NOT love your neighbor.
THE GOLDEN RULE OF MARRIAGE
Here is where the rubber will begin to meet the road for most of us this morning. Let’s start with you, husbands. You do not love your wife as yourself by treating her like a dude. You cannot simply say, “Well, this is what I would want, so, I will do that for her.” Some things do not translate – e.g. guys often bond by calling each other names and making fun of each other… I would not recommend doing that with your wife. She is not a bro… and praise God for that, right? I am guessing some of your favorite things about her are things that make her different from you. That said, some of the times we are most frustrated with her are those times when she is not reacting the way we would or the way a man would. But you did not marry a man, you married a woman. So, you cannot criticize her for being different from you when the whole reason you married her is because she is different from you. Yes, that means sometimes you won’t understand what she meant, but that just means you need to pay better attention in class.
Look at 1 Peter 3:7 “Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.” Men, your wife may be difficult to understand sometimes, but you are the one responsible for doing the hard work of learning how to translate her into a language you can understand. The good news is that the Bible has much to say about women in general, so that is enough to help you get started, but the difficulty is that every woman is unique and speaks her own dialect, so you cannot simply copy and paste everything across the board. You will have to study your own wife by living with her in an understanding way. You do not want her to be easier to understand, like a guy. In your more frustrated moments, you might think that would make things easier, but in those moments, you aren’t thinking about how homosexual that is. You want your wife to be more like a guy? No, you don’t. And if you do, shame on you. Repent. Be a man and learn how to love a lady. Stop being lazy.
Your wife is the weaker vessel. Why are you trying to make her do all the heavy lifting? Pull your weight. Her being the weaker vessel is not a statement of value, it is a statement of fact. And if it were a statement of value, it would actually run the other direction. After all, which is weaker: plastic tupperware or fine china? But which of those is more valuable? So, being weaker does not mean being less valuable and in many cases, it actually means being more valuable. But in any case, it certainly means that you treat them differently.
You can toss your tupperware in the sink, but you can’t do that with your china. Unless you want to be somebody who used to have nice plates. You might display your china on an open shelf, but you wouldn’t do that with your tupperware. Unless you want to be somebody who used to have friends. Here is where loving your neighbor as yourself requires more wisdom than the equality cult requires. They would have us set our dinner tables with tupperware and keep our leftovers on fine china in the fridge, but that is not what the Golden Rule requires. It does not mean that everyone should be treated the same, it means that everyone should be treated according to their frame. This is not just essential for her sake, it is for yours as well. Note what Peter points out here: “your wife is an heir with you of the grace of life,” and if you fail to treat her as such, “your prayers will be hindered.” If you ignore your wife, God will ignore you. D.L. Moody once said it this way, “If a man doesn’t treat his wife right, I don’t want to hear him talk about Christianity.” And neither does God. Get your house in order, men.
Ok, wives, your turn: 1 Peter 3:1-6 “Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct. Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious. For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord. And you are her children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.” Ladies, when something is off, I know you want to talk about it, but what is the first thing Peter says to do? Be quiet. That isn’t to say that you should never talk to your husband or express your concerns to him. On the contrary, it is to say that you should not so flood the market with your words, that you run down their value. What does Peter say? If you have a problem with your husband, what is the first and best way to win him over? With a strong argument? No, with a gentle spirit. Again, this is not God telling you that you cannot or should not express your concerns to your husband, it is Him saying that there is a better way of doing it. If God was trying to give you a cheat code for communicating with your husband, would you want it? Then stop arguing with the Word of God and listen to Him if you want your husband to listen to you. You want to start with words when you should begin with your demeanor.
So, do you have something that you think he needs to hear? Do not think of him like one of your girlfriends or get frustrated with him when he doesn’t act like one. You did not marry a pair of ears, you married a man. He has ears, of course, and he should take the time to use them, but you can make it easier or harder for him to want to listen to you based on the way you behave. If you are not pleasant to be around, you are easier to ignore. If you need a hug, stop acting like a porcupine.
If you want to be looked at, you spend a lot of time in front of the mirror; but if you want to be listened to, you should spend more time in the Word. Don’t get me wrong, husbands like looking at their wives and we appreciate the effort you put in, don’t stop doing that. Peter is not saying that beauty is of no value, but he is saying that the packaging should match the product. Do not invest all of your energy into advertising, make sure you are investing in the substance. Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, but the hidden beauty of the heart is imperishable. A gentle and quiet spirit is easier for a man to hear than an abrasive and loud one, even if it is all dolled up. Loud women are harder to hear. As Chesterton once noted, "When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her." Raising your voice does not give you an advantage, it exposes your weakness. The St. Bernard is not afraid of the toy poodle, especially when it barks at him. But no good man wants to fight a woman. He wants to fight for her, not against her. So, if she harangues him with her temper or her tears, he might give in, but not because he heard her, but because he didn’t want to listen to her anymore.
So, ladies, do you want to get your way or do you want your concerns to be heard? If you want to love your neighbor, you will need to be like the holy women of old and dress like they did, not according to the latest fashions, but according to good ol’ fashioned submission. Sarah called Abraham, “Lord.” Not all caps LORD, as in God, but lowercase lord, as in, “master.” Men run on respect. Of course, they need to be loved, but if you try to treat them like a woman and love them into listening, they won’t hear you. If you want a man to listen to you, respect him with your conduct and respect him with your responses to his words and you will gain an audience with him. But if you plow forward doing unto him exactly as you would be done by, he will not hear you and you will feel like he’s not listening and both of you will be frustrated. He is not your girlfriend. He is your husband.
Now, ladies, if all of this sounds scary, it’s because it is. Peter points that out, but don’t be afraid of doing things God’s way. Do not treat your husband like a woman or resent him for not being more like a woman when it comes to listening. Resist the temptation to mother him or to manipulate him to where you think he should be. Winning him over without words is not Peter’s way of endorsing the use of the silent treatment. Winning him without a word is Peter’s way of saying, “Be so kind to him that he wants to rise to the challenge of deserving such a woman.”
If you want others to take your frame into account, guess what? You’re going to have to take other people’s frames into account. After all, that is how God is with you. He remembers your frame. He knows, better than anybody, that you are nothing but dust, and yet He does not treat you like dirt. Thanks be to God! He also does not treat you like an off the rack person. No, He considers your frame and how it was hand-tailored for you. Now, go and do that for others. Consider their common frame as a fellow image-bearer and their unique frame as a child of God. They have sins that are common to all men (1 Cor 10:13) and they have besetting sins that are unique to their frame (Acts 17:26), just like you. Remember that. This is not a command to treat everyone the same. On the contrary, it is a command to treat everyone with equity, which is not the same at all.
ASK OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM ASK YOU
:7-8 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” If someone wanted something from you, what would you want them to do? Ask, right? You wouldn’t want them to steal it from you and you wouldn’t want them to be mad at you for not giving them something they never asked you for. If you love someone, you want to do nice things for them. Finding out what they like is not a burden, it is a blessing. When someone is special to you, you like finding out what is special to them. So, give that gift to others. Ask them for what you want. Do not make them guess. Those who ask, after all, get an answer. Those who seek find something out. Those who knock have found the door. So, answer others as you would like to be answered and be as easy to figure out as you would like others to be. You cannot withhold yourself and then be shocked that you feel like others are holding out on you.
:9-11 “Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” Some of you don’t want to ask for bread because you’re worried you might get a stone in return. But maybe that’s because you’ve been giving stones to others who have been asking you for bread. You know that if others treated you as you’ve been treating them, you would be in bad shape. So, if you’ve been giving serpents to those who have been asking for fish, knock it off. If others are trying to get you to understand them and instead of trying to understand, you have tried to make them feel bad for wanting to be understood, you have been giving stones and serpents to those who were simply asking for bread and fish. You have been multiplying the wrong things and the only miracle in it is that anyone is still willing to put up with you. Loving your neighbor as yourself is not simply doing the things you like, it is considering what they like and then doing those things, even when they aren’t your favorite things to do.
:12 “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” In the Devil’s Dictionary, the ol’ reprobate, Ambrose Bierce, defined the “selfish” as follows: “selfish, adj. devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.” In other words, the selfish look only to their own interests and are not at all interested in the interests of others. Everyone is selfish to a certain degree, but those we call “selfish” ignore that. The Biblical solution to avoiding this is showing other people how to think of someone other than themselves. To break the cycle, someone has to go first and Christians are called to lead the way. Everyone wants to do the easy thing, but Christians are called to do hard things, not simply because they are hard, but because they lead to glory.
:13-14 “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” Are you sometimes hard to love? Sure. And in those moments, what do you want others to do? Remind you how hard it is to love you? Make you wonder if you are worth all the trouble? No! You want them to do the hard work of giving you the benefit of the doubt and the even harder work of believing the best about you even when you’re at your worst. So, go and do that for others. You can’t do the bare minimum for others and then expect them to go the extra mile for you.
As you contemplate how to put all of this into practice, remember Jesus. He forgave those who wronged Him and died for those who killed Him; He was loyal to those who betrayed Him, and loved those who despised Him. He is our neighbor, our brother, our Lord, and our Savior. He is our King and He is kind. So, go and be kind to one another, just as God in Christ has been kind to you.
The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of our God remains forever. And this word is the good news that has been preached to you.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
PRAYER
Heavenly Father, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us. Help us to love others as You have loved us. Give us grace as we give grace to others and build us up into the image of Your Son as we offer up the words of the prayer He taught us to pray singing…
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