Tuesday: You Shall Love Yourself, or Your Neighbor as Yourself?
WEEK 18
TUESDAY
YOU SHALL LOVE YOURSELF, OR YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF?
James 2:14-17
We are pondering two principles in the pages of the New Testament: to each according to need and from each according to ability. It is interesting that the most bitterly anti-Christian movement in the world today has adopted from Christianity these two basic principles, which are the most worthwhile things in their movement. These two things are making the movement float. Take them out, and the movement will sink.
It is interesting that the Communists in Russia have put into their constitution, in quotation marks, this statement of the New Testament: “If anyone will not work, let him not eat.” Perhaps they think it was from Lenin! Don’t tell them it was from Paul; they would probably take it out, if possible!
But the further question arises: Can these two principles fit into a free-enterprise economy? Not if free enterprise is based on “loving yourself”—a pagan principle. But it can fit into it if free enterprise is based on “love your neighbor as you love yourself”—a Christian principle.
It is an interesting and important fact that industry is putting those two principles into operation. Profit-sharing and labor-capital management are more and more being applied. And when they are applied, relations between management and labor are better and production goes up. On the basis of trial and error these principles are proving to be better operating principles. They put oil in the industrial machine—oil where there was sand before. In other words, life is rendering a Christian verdict. Life says, “Work life in a Christian way, or life won’t work at all.”
Take the principle “If anyone doesn’t want to work, they shouldn’t eat”—is life approving that? Yes. For if you don’t work, you aren’t healthy. We used to say, “That man is well off; he doesn’t have to work.” Result? The man who doesn’t work gets nervous and upset, gets into the hands of a psychiatrist, who sends him to a sanitarium, where he is put to work at occupational therapy to regain his health!
O God, you are driving home certain lessons, and those lessons are inescapable. Help us to learn them not the hard way but your way as seen in the kingdom. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I must be creative if I serve the creative God; if not, I decay inevitably.