“Thank You, Jesus, for promising to be with me to the end of time. Thank You for laying down Your life for me. Help me to be faithful to You today, as You are faithful to me.”
Reflection
I have written a lot about the “Golden Rule”—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s an important lesson; maybe the most important lesson in the entire Scriptures, but the paragraph just before this one is what caught my attention this morning:
Do not give to dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you. (Matthew 7:6)
So what is “Holy”? What are our “pearls”? Who are the “dogs”? The “swine”?
God is Holy. Our faith in Him must therefore be holy. Our faith is the greatest “pearl” I can think of. The “dogs” and “swine” must be those who willfully, knowingly, deny the gift of faith, and in fact go out of their way to ridicule it.
When we forget our faith (“throw it to the dogs”) and get pulled in by the forces of the world, we are “throwing our pearls before swine”, and we risk losing the gift altogether. This is what we have to safeguard against. Our best defense is a good offense. The best offense is to know the love of Jesus and to share that love with our neighbor. There will be those who are not receptive to the message. This is not to say we should not try to evangelize those who do not know Jesus. Rather, it is that we need to realize that there will be some who simply don’t want to hear His voice through us. In this case, it is simply better to walk away and let the Lord turn their hearts toward him through our prayers, or we run the risk of being “devoured” or “trampled” by them and the ways of the world, rather than walking in the light of Christ.
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