Category: Colossians

If you think humans are naturally good people who just need kindness and smiles to be okay, you’ve clearly never watched Super Nanny.

My wife and I are expecting our first baby in October, so, naturally, we’ve been looking to Super Nanny Jo Frost for all our discipline training. Kidding! (kinda)

Regardless, we’ve watched a lot of the show, and there’s a constant theme running through basically every episode: nearly every parent whose home has descended into kid-induced chaos shares this behavior: they all want to be their kids friends more than they want to be their parent. They never say no, they spend thousands on their kids more than they should just because the kid wants more stuff, and they give them food with the same nutritional value as whatever you’d find on a random trip to the local landfill. And they do all this because they don’t want to have to hear their kid scream. “I’ll give you whatever you want! Just stop crying!”

They do a pretty good job of following the American version of the Golden Rule:

“Don’t do anything to others that you wouldn’t want them to do to you.”

The Golden Rule

That’s how most of us have learned it, right? According to the way we teach our kids, this is as high as it gets – nothing is more important. The “gold standard” is that we should keep away from doing anything we wouldn’t want others to do to us. Or, put the other way – we should only do to others what we would want them to do to us. If everybody just acted kind, we wouldn’t have any problems.

This rule seems pretty simple, right? Pretty easy? Well, it’s exactly what all the parents on Super Nanny are doing. I wonder what they’d say if we asked them how easy it is to follow this rule.

It’s not. That’s what they’d say. They’re drowning – all they ever do is give their kids what they want but the problem is none of the kids have the ability to know and value this fact: sometimes what we want has to take second place to what we need.

The problem with seeing the Golden Rule the way we do has a few sides to it, so the rest of this article is going to tackle each one and offer what I think, and most importantly what God thinks, is a better alternative.

Side #1: Wants Trump Needs

Let’s face it: when it comes to choosing between what we want and what we need, we let our wants trump our needs more often than not. We’re really good at pushing off responsibilities and indulging our desires. We’re really bad at getting the work done and relaxing afterward. Work is not easy. And we don’t like not easy. So even though we may need to get up and out of bed and get our day started so we’re not late to work, we want to sleep another 15 minutes. So we do. And the cycle repeats itself all day long. Before we know it, that pile of dirty dishes has been sitting in the sink for 10 days.

This makes our version of the golden rule exceptionally difficult. It’s what we see playing out on Super Nanny; if the only thing our friends ever do to or for us is what we want, our jacked-up wants will ruin everything. If I want my friend to let me drive his 1969 Mustang at 100mph in heavy traffic, and he lets me, he shouldn’t be surprised when I total it 2 minutes into the drive. If I want to be able to make fun of my “friends” for their mistakes, I shouldn’t be shocked when they eventually boil over and snap back at me, or when their ability to make and maintain friendships is broken in the future. I may want it, but I don’t always accurately estimate the cost.

Other times, I desperately need things I would never want. Surgery for a broken bone is excruciatingly painful, which is why they have to knock you out to do it. But if I was so scared of the IV needle that I refused the surgery, I’d have to live with a broken arm and the issues it caused as it healed without the surgery for the rest of my life.

We may like to let our wants trump our needs but if we live like this and only ever give people what they want, what we actually end up doing is hurting each other unnecessarily.

Side #2: Jesus Never Said It That Way

Most people attribute the original Golden Rule quote to Jesus. But there are others who said versions of it literally hundreds and thousands of years before Him; Rabbis like Hillel, Greek philosophers like Socrates, Aristotle – even Confucius had his own iteration of it. Multiple humans have believed the idea that we ought to treat each other the way we want to be treated. And while Jesus may not have been the first publicly-recorded teacher to teach this idea, His version escalates the issue to a stellar level that all the rest don’t even come close to.

The version of the Golden Rule from an ancient teacher that comes closest to Jesus’s version is from Aristotle. A student once asked him how we should treat our friends. Aristotle replied: “As we would that they should act to us.” According to Aristotle, this kind of behavior only applies to our friends.

But look at what Jesus actually said:

“⁷ Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you. ⁸ For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. ⁹ Who among you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? ¹¹ If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him. ¹² Therefore, whatever you want others to do for you, do also the same for them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 7:7-12 CSB

The verse that actually contains the Golden Rule is book-ended by God Himself. Verse 12 starts with a “therefore,” and every time you read “therefore” in the scriptures, you need to back up and find out what it was put there for. In this case, it makes verse 12 a stamp of practical action on verses 7-11: your God is good and you should seek what’s on His heart.

The end of verse 12 makes the Golden Rule a kind of headline for the Old Testament: treating others with the behavior you would want is the banner over all of God’s instruction for the world prior to Jesus.

These two ideas are inseparable from each other. To leave either on their own creates even more problems.

If all you do is seek what’s on God’s heart without putting any of it into practice, you become a Pharisee; AKA you care a lot about God’s word but very little about the people He died to save. If all you do is treat others how you want without seeking what’s on God’s heart, pain and chaos will ensue (as we just observed with Super Nanny above).

Jesus’s Better Alternative

When we seek what’s on God’s heart, what we end up wanting for ourselves is what He wants for us. This becomes our basis for how to treat others. And unlike Aristotle’s teaching, it’s the basis for how we treat all others, not just the ones we like or who we consider friends.

“¹ So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. ² Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. ³ For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Colossians 3:1-3 CSB

It’s not easy to seek what God wants. Centering your life around the idea that you’ve already died and your life isn’t your own is crazy difficult. It almost sounds morbid. But it’s essential. It’s what we need. Any “friends” who don’t get this will only end up using us for their own desires. Any time we call ourselves a “friend” but we don’t get this, we’ll just end up using them, too.

Fake friends are the kind who let you have whatever you want. They are afraid of the pain of confrontation, so they flatter us and avoid difficult conversations, letting us do what we want and be what we want and ignore what we actually are. And most likely, when times get hard and we need them to stand by us, they ghost us and are nowhere to be found.

Real friends are literally the opposite. They know who we are: very good creations of God Almighty, who have been poisoned by sin, in every part of our lives, making us not good at all. They know we’ve been bought with a price; by the blood of Jesus. And they know that every second we spend living like that’s not true only further injures and imprisons our souls. They see us dousing ourselves in gasoline and lighting ourselves on fire in stupidity and they offer to be the water hose we need to put out the blaze. The question becomes which we will love more: life with the fire or without it. The help from the friend with the water is only beneficial if the fire dies, and often we don’t want it to. We’d rather keep it alive.

So what are your friends giving you? Water or gasoline? You will be the average of the five people you pay the most attention to. So check your own life – do an inspection. Are there destructive fires raging all around you? Do your friends fuel them bigger and brighter and more detrimental or do they help you put them out? Do you even want that fire to go out?

The fire of God is good – a passion for His name and His glory and a relationship with Him is good. A fire without Him, however, is terribly bad. Are you willing to put the fire out, to kill it and receive the life-giving relief of the Living Water of God? You have to decide, and whatever you decide, be consistent. Follow through and let your friends have the hard conversations that you need. As you seek what’s on God’s heart, you’ll find that you’re beginning to want those conversations more and more.