January 06, 2015
Consider Others
During a church visit the
preacher sought me out as soon as I walked through the door and introduced
himself. I extended my hand, but he declined because he was recovering from the
flu which is reaching epidemic status in the community. While there was no outward
evidence that the pastor had been ill, or that he might still be contagious, he
sat aside ambition and used caution. Even in little things Paul reminds us, “Do
nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider
others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not
only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil 2:3-4
NIV).
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Gail;
-----Our five senses bring us into direct contact with the physical world. We invest too much attention into them. Indeed they bring us shapes, sizes, distances, placements, smells, flavors, temperatures, textures, and sounds. But anyone who has contemplated the world through the frame of mind of a cat knows how little understanding arrives through sensations alone. Beyond it is the rest of what can be known only throw much thought and imagination given to all of the corollaries of those sensations.
-----Some people spend no time at all correlating their own emotions with expressions observed in others. They don’t imagine their feelings of hardships or joys. To them, other people are like dispensers from which things can be gotten by the pressing of buttons or pulling of certain levers. Fortunately there are fewer who dispense with even the decorum of pulling a lever and merely break open and take all they can from others. Then there are the worse who do ponder and imagine the feelings of others, and who aim to create the worst feelings in others they possibly can. At any rate, going from just seeing another person as only a mobile object to knowing and understanding the feelings and emotions inside others as we do inside ourselves takes mental effort.
-----You’ve quoted one of the most fundamental elements of righteousness, of the new life in Christ, and of what will be natural to us throughout our eternal bliss, which is recognition of just how starkly real other people’s inner being is and how important the goodness and well being of it is to them just as our own is to us. It is from this element that Christ presented the second most important commandment: love your neighbor as yourself. You know your own feelings by merely sensing them. To know your neighbors feelings you must study, explore, confirm, and imagine, because we have no direct nerve extending into other people’s feelings.
-----Therefore, looking beyond our own interests to those of others is indeed a frame of mind. There must be mental engagement to notice interests of others. And once other people’s interests and feelings have been mentally discovered, they must be imagined before they can strike us with all the vividness and reality of our own. For most people this thought might seem too elementary and a waste of time. But its real utility is not in that it is, but it is in that the more we use it, the more compelling of our attention and time and effort are those interests and feelings of others.
-----So, Paul’s call for us to “Have this mind among yourselves,” is a call for us to elevate ourselves above the level of a cat’s mere existence by thinking carefully and honestly about what others are. And then a whole new dimension is added when considering that God knows every thought of every person and that every creature is laid open and bare before the Lord. Thus Christ was not simply engaging literary technique when He said, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.” (Mat 25:40) God does not have to imagine the inner being of others; He feels it like they do. So when you feed them, you feed Him, when you cloth them, you cloth Him. He feels every heartbeat of it! If you want to touch Him, touch them. If you want to take interest in Him, take interest in them.
-----I speculate this might be much of what Paul meant by “the mind of Christ” at I Cor 2:16.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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