Jesus said to his disciples:
"Do not give what is holy to dogs, or throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them underfoot, and turn and tear you to pieces."
"Do to others what ever you would have them do to you. This is the Law and the Prophets."
"Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many. How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life. And those who find it are few."
These quotations are all from the Sermon on the Mount which also contains the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer, the Our Father.
The first quote is on the dignity of man. You are a worthwhile being. You must treat yourself with respect. One must treat oneself with respect. You are the home of your soul. Your soul is the speck of life created in you by the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life. Do not abuse your body, the temple of the Holy Spirit.
And the second quote is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do to you. Jesus says that the Golden Rule sums up the Law and the Prophets.
The third quote tells us that discipline is essential to any argument. As the way we conduct our lives is our argument at to why we should be admitted into Heaven. So we must discipline the way we live that life. Remember when we studied Shakespeare and learned about the sonnet and then we had to write our own sonnets. They had to be in iambic pentameter, be fourteen lines and rhyme (the octet abab cdcd and the sextet efef gg in the Shakespearean sonnet or the octet abba abba and the sextet cde cde in the Italian sonnet). And they would be on some abstract theme: Love, our love for our Father or our Mother or some idealized person of the opposite sex. It seemed so difficult to cram that huge abstract thought into the sonnet form, but when you did it, you realized that the stricture of the form made the expressed thought more powerful. So here this is the argument of Jesus. When we take our life through the narrow gate and down the constricted road we are on the way to eternal life.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta was asked by an acquaintance, "Why do you care for these people? They are dirty, they are sick, they are poor, and they are dying." Mother Teresa's answer was, "I am preparing them to meet the Lord Jesus Christ, to meet my God and their God."
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