Loving Well in the Kingdom of God

By Steve

Yesterday at church we looked at Luke Chapter 6. Jesus says a lot of amazing things in that chunk of scripture, but there is one point that I want to follow up on here in our Kingdom Thoughts. The point is this, that love in the Kingdom of God is different than love in the world. The biggest difference is what I would call the law of reciprocity. A mainstay in our society is the idea that I will treat you the way that you treat me. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch your. If you are nice to me, I will be nice to you. This “law of reciprocity” is an important part of what keeps our society intact. However, as the people of the Kingdom of God, we have a different standard. We are to treat people the way we want to be treated. By that I mean we are to initiate love, not just respond to it. We are to be kind to everyone, not just to the people that are kind to us. It is a completely different concept than the one that most of us are used to. We treat others right, regardless of how they treat us. All of us probably need to take a pretty good look at how well we are doing in this area of our lives. I would guess that we are way more influenced by the “law of reciprocity” than we are the “golden rule”.