As I ended the last issue of the article, I suggested that besides embracing the mind of Christ as seen in how He prayed, we need to embrace the mind of Christ as seen in how He behaved, namely in how He treated others. We can come to this understanding by looking at the Gospels and seeing how He acted.

The Gospels tell us that the only persons that He directly confronted were those who professed that they were the leaders of the Jewish faith but who were hypocritical, that is they did not live in accord with the faith that they professed. However, even those people, if they reached out to Him for help, He helped them. He even attempted to teach those who were critical of His behavior – criticizing Him for curing people, for example, on the Sabbath – by showing them that their religion was meant to first have compassion for those who were suffering instead of judging them to have offended God in some way.

We see in the Gospels that He did not turn His back on any of those that His society had scorned because of what they believed, who they were, or what they were suffering. Recall that He accepted the Samaritans, the lepers, the Romans and the disabled. These were all people that the leaders of His faith rejected and judged. It must be remembered that His society was formed around His faith.

This is not necessarily true in our modern society. We see that our society judges and rejects certain groups of people. Some very right-winged Christian factions also reject certain groups of people. All of this is not in keeping with the mind of Christ. He didn’t even reject the adulteress when others wanted Him to agree to her stoning.

So if we put on the mind of Christ we must be ready to accept all persons, even if they don’t live in the manner that we accept as our way of living. The only person that we should be willing to judge is ourself! We must only ask this important question: How am I living up to the teachings of Jesus, Who I believe was and is my God incarnate. I do not judge others! Why? Because only God alone can judge and, interestingly enough, He chooses not to judge but only to love.

Our society is so filled right now with hatred and anger that we have to make a special effort to put on the mind of Christ and make an effort to live as He lived.