There is only one Rule in our house, isn't there? Do you know what that rule is? It is, "I will not hurt myself."
What do you think this rule mean? It doesn't stop any of us from banging our heads on cabinet doors, or falling down while we're skating, does it? So what does it really mean?
Do you remember how you felt when you stole the cupcakes from the grocery store? Do you ever want to feel like that again in your whole life? That hurt a lot, didn't it? So you learned that stealing things hurts you, didn't you? Didn't you wish I would spank you or scold you or do something to punish you for it? Didn't you wish somebody would punish you for what you did? Well, somebody did. You did. Each of you did it for yourselves.
The way you felt inside was punishment enough for anyone! You see, stealing other people's things is not very loving, and when you steal something, you put up a dam around your heart, and stop up a little bit of the love that God is pouring into you. God's love didn't stop coming in, but you blocked off one of the places - your hands - where it spills out of you.
And like I've always told you, when you don't let God's love pour out of you as fast as it comes in, you get all clogged up inside. So when we say we won't hurt ourselves, maybe what we really mean is that we aren't going to do anything that will clog up our spring from God.
Does it hurt just as bad when we don't do something that is loving as it hurts when we do something that isn't loving? Like when we refuse to share our toys because we're afraid someone will break them or lose them? When we do that, it means that we love the toy more than we love the person who wants to play with it.
Some toys are just more fun than some people, aren't they? And when that happens, of course we're going to love the toy more than the person! That's only natural, I think. Everybody does that, even when they get all grown up.
So why do we feel bad about it? Maybe we're letting our love of the toy get in the way of God's love for people. You see, God doesn't love toys. Human beings make toys, and that's why human beings love them. But God makes people - and that's why God loves them. So when our love for the toy gets in the way of God's love for people, what do you think happens?
We get all clogged up inside. We're not letting God's love out. We hurt ourselves when we do something that keeps God's love from springing out of us - and we hurt ourselves when we don't do something that would let God's love come out if we did do it. It kind of sounds like we can't help hurting ourselves, doesn't it? Is there anything we can do that won't hurt us?
Right! We can get out of God's way! That's why you can't hurt someone else. Hurting someone else isn't very loving, so when we hurt someone, our hands or our words are not letting God's love out. We're putting up a barrier around our hearts again. That means that when we hurt someone else, we're hurting ourselves at the same time - and breaking the rule.
Sometimes it happens that what we feel like doing is not the right thing to do. That's normal, I think. Everybody wants to have his own way about things. That won't change when you grow up, believe me! What we want to do and what is right to do are sometimes two different things.
That's the reason there are so many rules in the world. People want to do things their own way, even if it isn't very loving. So there are laws that say you'll go to jail if you steal, and other laws that say you can go to jail if you do this or that or something else. But the only people who need to worry about all those laws are the people who don't let God's love spill out of them.
If you obey the rule not to hurt yourself, you won't do any of those things anyway. But if you break our rule, then you have to obey all the rules of the country and the church and the state and the county and the city and the school. That's a lot of people making up a lot of rules, isn't it?
There are also a bunch of laws that are not very loving all by themselves, and those are the laws you have to watch out for. You might get in trouble with the law if you do a loving thing for someone, and that loving thing happens to be against the law.
That's what happened to Jesus. He was trying very hard to tell everyone that all anyone had to do to be a child of God was to let God's love come into their hearts and out of their hands.
But the government thought its rules were more important. Governments still think that! So if you do something loving, and if you get into trouble with the law for doing it, remember that the same thing happened to Jesus.
When people don't know how to let God's love spill out of them, they have to have laws to keep them from hurting each other. And then when they break those laws, the government has to punish them. That's just how governments are. They can't make exceptions, not even for Jesus, because they have to be fair to everybody even when it isn't very loving to be fair.
Do you understand now why the most important rule in the whole world is not to hurt yourself? And do you understand that the only way you can ever really hurt yourself is to let yourself get all clogged up inside because you let what you wanted get in the way of God's love? And do you understand that being loving and doing the right thing is not always the same as obeying the law?
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