When Jesus Christ was asked about the greatest commandment in the law, He answered concerning the second great commandment: "And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:39). <\/p>\n
Jesus also gives us a principle we can use to evaluate our "success" in following this second great commandment: "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things" (Matthew 12:34-35).<\/p>\n
The Proverbs tells us: "Death and life are in the power of the tongue" (Proverbs 18:21).<\/p>\n
Benjamin Franklin, one of America's founding fathers, once wrote: "A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over." He was referring to the effect our words can have on our relationships.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, encouraging words of comfort, recognition, praise and even correction are words of life, strengthening our neighbor. Several of Solomon's proverbs tell us a lot about this aspect of our speech.<\/p>\n
What we say or don't say should be characterized by love of neighbor. Words of praise for a good deed or a job well done, words that help our neighbor cope with some emotional challenge are examples.<\/p>\n
How "well" are we loving our neighbor? One way to measure our "success" is to examine our words. <\/p>\n
With these thoughts I wish us all a rewarding Sabbath!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Jesus Christ was asked about the greatest commandment in the law, He answered concerning the second great commandment: "And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:39).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sabbath-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}