Luke 6

Luke 6:31

The Golden Rule As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.—Luke 6:31.Boys and girls, did it ever strike you that we have all to live beside each other, and that if things are to go smoothly we must observe certain rules? Young people nowadays are trained to do all sorts of things —to play in orchestras—often with very fine results— to use tools, to manage horses, to control fire and even lightning. That is all very good and interesting; but surely it is more important that you should learn how to manage other boys and girls—learn, in fact, how to live beside them. You have brothers and sisters, schoolfellows, playfellows. How do you behave towards them?“As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise” These words uttered by Jesus Christ tell us that He had thought a good deal about the behavior of people to one another. They are “wise words” and have been named the Golden Rule.You have heard of an “unwritten law,” haven’t you?The Golden Rule is one of those acknowledged at most of our great public schools, and, when honestly acted up to, it results in a very fine type of boy.

Occasionally, however, a mere caricature of it is found to be the standard of school behavior. You boys must have heard something like this—“If you will back me up, I’ll do the same to you.” That is no Golden Rule, is it?You will notice it is not how your neighbors behave towards you that you are asked to imitate, but how you would like them to behave.

And that is a difficult thing to do, although at first it seems easy. One really needs the help of God to observe the Golden Rule.One evening an Indian chief was sitting by the fireside of a friend. They had been silent for a while, each one looking into the fire and thinking his own thoughts. At last the great chief asked his friend what he had been thinking about. “I have been thinking,” replied the other, “of something that was once said by the great Founder of the Christian religion, something so beautiful that we call it the Golden Rule.”“Stop,” cried the chief; “say no more about its good qualities, but tell me what it is. Then I shall be able to judge for myself whether it be good or not.” “Very well,” said the friend, “I shall tell you. The rule is that men should do to others what they would wish others to do to them.” “That,” replied the Indian, “would be impossible.” He rose and paced the room for about a quarter of an hour, then he came to a halt before his friend. “I have been thinking of what you have told me,” he said. “There is one way, and one way only in which that rule could be kept.

If the Great Spirit who made man were to give him a new heart, then it might be done—not otherwise.”Let me tell you of two people who practiced this rule.One was a soldier, the great General Gordon. It was said that he never thought of himself in following his Divine Master.

At Khartoum he was loved as a simple Christian man. On one occasion he was installed with a royal salute, and an address was presented to him. In return he was expected, to make a speech. His speech was as follows: “With the help of God I will hold the balance level.” That was fine, was it not? And in writing to his sister, he said, “Do you want to be loved, respected, and trusted? Then, ignore the likes and dislikes of man in regard to your actions; do to them as you would have them do to you . . . they may despise some things in you, but they will lean on you, and trust you, and God will give you the spirit of comforting them.

But try to please men, and ignore God, and you will fail miserably, and get nothing but disappointment.”The second person was a nurse—one who gave her whole life to help sick people. Not only did she care for their bodies, she cared for their souls, she spoke to them about Jesus Christ.

When people asked her how she could do so much, she said, “I try to put myself in the place of these poor men, see with their eyes, and feel their wants and difficulties as if they were my own; and then God puts into my heart the words which will reach their hearts.”Once there was a terrible explosion in the city where she nursed, and many people were brought to her hospital. Somehow she succeeded in putting the right spirit into many of the poor sufferers. “Sister Dora,” one of them said, “I want to be dressed very bad, but if there’s any wants you worse, go to them first.”When Sister Dora died the people wanted to have a statue of her, “We want it,” they said, “so that when people ask, ‘Who’s that?’ we shall be able to say, ‘Who’s that? Why, that’s our Sister Dora.’”One such little “sister” could bring a healthy tone into a whole school. You know how a bright sunny day helps to make the earth beautiful. It is in the power of every boy and girl to bring sunshine—to help their brothers and sisters and companions, and, like Sister Dora, to heal and to make them happy.Boys and girls, this is the true art of living with each other. Ask God to help you to practice it.

Luke 6:41

The Right Kind Of Eyes And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?— Luke 6:41.I am going to speak today about the right kind of eyes.You know there are a great many people in the world who have some defect in their eyes, and who cannot see properly. Some of these people are sensible and wear eyeglasses or spectacles which help them to see things in the right way; but many of them do not know that there is anything wrong with their eyes, and they imagine that it is the other people who are seeing wrong. Some people are color-blind and will tell you that a thing is blue when it is green; some see things larger or smaller than they are; and I once knew an old lady who saw things double! If one boy walked down the street past her window she declared that two boys had gone past, and she got quite cross if anybody contradicted her!Jesus once preached a sermon about bad eyesight.He said that some people went about trying to pick little motes out of their brother’s eye, and all the time they did not seem to know that there was a beam blurring their own vision. Now what are motes and beams?A mote is just a little speck of dust, so tiny that you can hardly see it; a beam is a log of wood some inches thick and several feet long, the kind of log that would be used for supporting a floor or the center of a roof.Perhaps someone will say, “How could a great big log of wood get into anyone’s eye?” Well, that was just a way of speaking in the East. The Rabbis had a saying about a mote and a beam, and so, when Jesus wanted to draw a contrast, He used a picture or parable, as we say, that the people could understand.

On another occasion, you remember, He spoke about swallowing a camel, but of course it would be quite impossible to swallow a camel wholesale.What did Jesus mean when He spoke that parable about motes and beams? He meant that there were many people going about the world picking faults in others, and all the time they were quite unconscious of their own much greater faults.

The very fact that they were looking out for other people’s faults made them blind to their own.There are many reasons why we should not pick faults in others. Let me give you three.1. We are not perfect ourselves.—The Indians have a proverb—“Said the sieve to the needle, ‘ You have a hole in you.’” Just fancy the sieve, riddled with holes, having the impertinence to criticize the needle! Let us make sure that we are not the sieve and the other boy or girl the needle. It’s just a case of the mote and the beam over again, or the pot calling the kettle black.2. We do not know enough to judge.—Once, among a great crowd of people in a French town, a man named La Motte trod upon the foot of another.

The man who had been hurt turned round quickly, and aimed a violent blow at La Motte’s head. But La Motte said quietly, “Sir, you will surely be sorry for what you have done when you know that I am blind.” The man reddened with shame.

He had taken La Motte to be a rough and rude fellow. He had judged without knowing, and his judgment had led him to do a mean act.We may be making just the same kind of mistake about other people. We may be seeing in them faults that they haven’t got at all. It is very, very easy to do so. You know how often you are blamed for things you never even thought of doing.3. Fault-finding does an infinite amount of harm—it does an infinite amount of harm to others, and it does an infinite amount of harm to ourselves. It does an infinite amount of harm to others. How many of you like to make a snow man in winter-time?

One of the best ways to form the body of the man is to make a little snowball with your hands, and then lay it down on the ground and roll it over and over in the snow. You know what happens. The little snowball grows bigger and bigger until it is big enough to form the body of the man. Now that is just the way with another’s faults when we begin to notice them and speak about them. They grow bigger and bigger in our imagination, until at last they are so big no one would recognize them as the original faults.And fault-finding does an infinite amount of harm to ourselves. It leaves stains on our own character. We cannot criticize others without becoming a little harder, a little more unkind. It twists our nature until we grow crooked and deformed.

It spoils our eyesight until we are able to see only the ugly things about people.Do you know the story of the man who lived in a room with two windows? One window looked out on a bright flower garden and, beyond that, to a splendid view of moor and river; the other window looked on to an ugly backyard. One day this man invited a friend to see his beautiful view. The friend went to one of the windows and said he did not see anything that he could admire. Can you guess the reason? He was looking out at the wrong window.If we want to get a beautiful view of things we must look out at the right window, we must look out for the good points in our friends, and not for their failings.

It is told of Peter the Great of Russia that when he heard anyone badly spoken of he would say, “Tell me, has he not a bright side?”“But how,” you ask, “am I to see the beam in my own eye? How am I to know that it is there?

It is impossible for a person to see his own eye.” Just think a minute. If you wish to see your own eye what do you do? You look in a mirror. And that is just how we are to discover the beam in our eye. We are to look in the mirror of Christ’s perfect life. If we look long enough into that mirror we shall see ourselves so black that we shall never again wish to pick faults in others. (The texts of the other sermons in this series are Exodus 23:9; 1 Samuel 3:10; Psalms 24:4 (2), Psalms 34:13; Proverbs 6:13; Malachi 1:13; 1 Peter 3:4; 1 Peter 5:5.)

Luke 6:44

A Bramble Bush A bramble bush.—Luke 6:44.I wonder how many of you have been brambling, or are going to bramble, this autumn? If you haven’t brambled, you have missed a great deal of fun. Only you must be properly prepared for your expedition; otherwise the fun may end in tragedy. The best way to get ready is to put on your very oldest clothes and your very shabbiest boots; for brambles have a nasty way of fastening themselves to garments and scratching ugly marks on shoe-leather. When you are properly rigged out, you set off with a tin pail or a basket. You spend a glorious afternoon hunting and scrambling; and you come back at night tired but triumphant, with purple lips and fingers, and with a quantity of splendid fresh air in your lungs.Now there are one or two things you may have noticed while you were a-brambling.The first is that if you want to be successful you must be prepared to take some trouble and to bear a few scratches.

For brambles aren’t so easily picked as strawberries. Some of them may be within our reach,but a great many more will be just beyond us, so that we have to push into the bushes, and stand on our tip-toes,and get our legs pricked and our hands torn.

But we don’t mind, do we? Not a bit! It’s all in the day’s fun, and the brambles are worth it even though we do have to get thorns extracted with horrid sharp needles when we go home.And do you know, boys and girls, that you will find more and more as you grow up that the things that are most worth doing and having are the things that we have to take trouble about? It doesn’t matter whether it is a game, or a lesson, or a bit of work: it is the things that we have to make an effort to accomplish that are most worth while in the end, provided of course we are striving after really good things.Did you ever hear the fable about the Swiss clock .that wanted to get rid of its weights? It had ticked away quite cheerfully on the wall, year in, year out, marking the time and striking the hours. But one day it woke with a headache and it began to feel sorry for itself.

It complained of the two dreadful weights it had to carry, and it said that it was quite sure it could work much better if these were taken away. Well, the owner of the clock removed the weights, and what do you suppose happened?

Why, the clock immediately stopped dead! It could neither mark the time, nor strike the hours, nor tick a single tick without the weights that it fancied were hampering it.Now sometimes when we have a stiff lesson to prepare, or a difficult bit of work to do, or when we have to practice hard at a game and don’t seem to make much progress, we are tempted to think, What is the good of it all? But it is just these weights that are helping us to get on. By accepting and making use of them we are gaining knowledge, and we are gaining something much more valuable than knowledge. Some people call it character and others call it “grit.”Why, the bramble itself can teach us a lesson in this way, for it “sticks in” in order to climb. If it were not for those very prickles that annoy us the bramble would be condemned to sprawl about on the ground.

But by the help of its thorns it seizes hold of the branches of sturdier bushes and so lifts itself up into the air and the sunlight which help its growth.But there is another thing that you may have noticed about the bramble. If you want to find the biggest and juiciest berries you must sometimes stoop.

Very often the best are to be found underneath branches quite close to the ground. It may be because the moisture helps the fruit to swell or just that other people have forgotten to look there.And isn’t it just like that in life, boys and girls? Sometimes we find the best people in the lowliest places; often the most beautiful virtues grow in the most lowly soil.When Ian Maclaren, a great Scottish writer and preacher, was a small boy he went to stay with his uncle in the country. When Sunday came he went to church, and as it was Communion Sunday he sat in the gallery and watched the elders reverently carry round the bread and wine. He was greatly impressed with one old white-haired man who was dressed all in black and who had a beautiful benevolent face. When he was playing on the road on Monday morning he was surprised to see the same old man, wearing shabby, patched clothes, and breaking stones by the roadside.

He ran to ask his uncle about it, and the uncle replied, “Yes, that is old John. He is only a poor old stone breaker, but he is the most Christ-like man in the congregation.”And, boys and girls, by looking for beauty and goodness in unexpected places we are following in the steps of Jesus, who saw good and beauty in the things and the people that others despised.There is a beautiful old legend which tells how one evening Jesus came to a town where a crowd had gathered round the body of a dead dog.

The dog was covered with wounds and besmirched with dirt, for it had been dragged through the streets of the town. The crowd looked upon it with disgust. One remarked upon its torn skin, another drew attention to its bloodstained limbs, and a third pointed to the mud which covered it. Then a stranger said, “Look at his teeth! Are they not whiter than pearls?” And the crowd drew back amazed. Then one among them spoke: “This must be Jesus of Nazareth, for He alone could have seen beauty in a dead dog.”