And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.
Luke 6:31, Mark 12:31, Matthew 22:39, Matthew 7:12, Luke 10:27, and Leviticus 19:18
In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus clearly states that all the law and the prophets hang on the Greatest Commandment and the Golden Rule and that no other command is greater. In fact, this rule is God’s requirement for how we should treat everyone.
First, understand that everyone is an individual with their own preferences. How they like to be treated may be different than how you like to be treated. You need to get to know them to learn their individual preferences so you can treat them as they would like to be treated.
Second, treat everyone with respect. Not just your friends or those senior to you. You must treat EVERYONE with respect. Show kindness and demonstrate empathy. Unlike Jesus, you do not know the life history of an individual. You don’t know their past experiences. Some people have never known love and kindness.
Avoid or Minimize Harm
Do no harm is a simple principle, but often unrealistic. Most actions will benefit some and hurt others. For example, feeding and sheltering homeless people can hurt the businesses near where the homeless live. However, inaction may cause more harm. Hungry people with inadequate shelter may die in cold weather or violent storms.
Do judge or reject others who do not conform to your beliefs. For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God.[i] Recall the story of Jesus and the adulteress in John 8. When the crowd brought her before Jesus, He told them that whoever is without sin should throw the first stone. When the crowd disappeared, Jesus asked if anyone had condemned her. The adulteress answers no and Jesus replies that He does not condemn her either. Jesus then tells her to go and sin no more.
Help and Support Others
3 Don’t do anything for selfish purposes, but with humility think of others as better than yourselves. 4 Instead of each person watching out for their own good, watch out for what is better for others. 5 Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus:
Philippians 2:3-5
Besides treating everyone with respect, kindness and empathy, you also need to help others. Don’t just watch out for yourself, you also need to watch out for others. Provide help, guidance and support as needed by others. God wants what’s best for all his children. He wants everyone to love God and their neighbors. If you love God, you must do your part to help others become loving neighbors.
A Cokesbury Adult Bible study[ii] talked about a dean’s address to incoming students at veterinary school. The dean mentioned that the students had worked through high school and college to get a high GPA to get into veterinary school. Now that they were here, GPA did not matter. Their goal should be to help each other succeed so that they all became veterinarians. Our goal should as Christians should be to help everyone while avoiding/minimizing harm. Each of us must do our part.
Triage/Prioritize Your Help
Charity begins at home. So does the Golden Rule. Treat your immediate family with respect and help them. Put your spouse first. Help your parents and children. Then expand your efforts to help your neighbors, church, and community. Concentrate first on basic needs: food, water, sleep, and shelter.
Abraham Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs[iii] with five levels.
- Physiological needs
- Safety needs
- Love and social needs
- Esteem needs
- Self-actualization
At home and in our church, Christians in the USA are usually working on higher level needs. But others in our communities may have a hard time meeting their physiological and safety needs. Christians should help the people in their community and the rest of the world with the basic needs. According to the UN World Food Programme, a global food crisis exists with 319,000,000 people in 67 countries facing acute hunger, including 1.9 million people in the grips of catastrophic hunger.
Individually, most of us cannot address the unfilled basic needs in the rest of the world. But we can influence our government to support the rest of the world. The US incinerated nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food designed for children under 5 in July 2025. US taxpayers reportedly funded both the purchase cost of about $800,000 and the disposal cost of $130,000.[iv] About the same time, US also reportedly destroyed nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives targeted for poor countries at a cost of $167,000. These contraceptives would have prevented unwanted pregnancies resulting in unsafe abortions and children in families who could not afford to care for the children. MSI Reproductive Choices, a non-profit organization, offered to repackage and ship the contraceptives to countries in need, but their offer was declined.
We live in one of the richest countries (and predominately Christian) and should be leading the effort to address starvation, shelter and safety; not paying for the destruction of supplies urgently needed elsewhere. We need to support the needy throughout the world rather than giving tax breaks to the ultrarich.
Christians Behaving Badly
“Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?
1 Corinthians 6:7
Christians have acted badly since the Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus Christ. Paul chastised the Corinthians for filing lawsuits in secular courts. During my lifetime, we have seen clergy sexual abuse cases and other clergy covering up the abuse. More recently, Christians are defending their right to not to call students by the student’s preference. The failure to address students by the preference violates the Golden Rule and is a sin. According to Jesus, it would be better to hang a millstone around these teachers’ necks and be drowned in the depths of the sea than prejudice these students against Christianity.[v]
One scripture passage often quoted is Jesus’ response to the Pharisees when they asked about divorce. Jesus replied paraphrasing Genesis 2:24 and then added a warning: “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” Many interpret these verses to mean only a man and a woman may marry. But Jesus did not limit it to only a man and a woman. If God joins LBTQ+ together, man may not sunder the relationship.
Paul deemed it better to resolve matters within the church or to accept the injustice and suffering. He considered taking Christian issues to secular court to be a “defeat” and poor witnessing to the world. Christians should act as Jesus instructed and turn the other cheek.
What Would Jesus Do?
God sent Jesus to proclaim the coming of the Kingdom of God and to start us on the path towards his Kingdom. Jesus used a bottoms-up strategy, appealing to individuals rather than courts and governments. With the exception of the temple moneychangers, Jesus treated everyone with respect, including an adulteress, tax collectors, Pontius Pilate and even Judas Iscariot, his betrayer.
What Should Christians Do?
Christians should treat everyone with respect and love in accordance with Jesus’ commands: the Golden Rule and Jesus’ new commandment to love one another just as Jesus loves us. For it is by our love that people will know us as Jesus’ followers.[vi] We should also help others not only survive but also become better people and better Christians.
[ii] Cokesbury Adult Bible Studies, Living Faith, Teacher, July27, 2025, page 93.
[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
[iv] https://apnews.com/article/emergency-food-aid-usaid-hunger-aefb584b52cc43e43e5552986363c387
[v] Matthew 18:6, Mark 9:42, and Luke 17:2