Matthew 7:7-12; A Gracious Community, Part 2

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Three weeks ago I preached on the passage that precedes this, matthew 7, verses 1-6.

Matthew 7:1–6

And leading into that passage, explaining what Jesus is trying to do, is point us to the law.

Actually, the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus' expansion, is expounding upon the law, and one of the things I said in reference to that is using a phrase that one of my old algebra teachers used when I was growing up is that when he was teaching a new concept, he would say now, this is extremely simple but it's not easy.

And I remember a 13, 14-year-old self sitting there thinking how in the world can those two things coexist?

How can something be simple and not be easy?

Well, the law is extremely simple, but it's not easy.

It's simple in the fact that it can be summarized in four words love God and love people.

But, as we saw in verses one through six, that it's not easy, jesus tells us that we are not to judge others, and when we judge people, we will be judged in the same manner.

He tells us not to go and try to remove the speck out of our brother's eye when we've got the log of self-righteousness in our own eye blindness, lack of self-awareness.

And then he also, in that last part he talks about the importance of being aware of the seasons in our lives and people that we engage with that may be hostile towards the gospel, and to refrain from sharing the gospel and sharing the kingdom with them for the glory of God and for their own good for that particular season.

So it's not easy, but here's the thing as we come here to this passage this morning verses 7-12, we have a ray of hope from our Savior Jesus, for those of us who are desperate and we feel the uneasiness of the law, that there is a God that we can cry out to, and not just any God, but God, our Father, who hears us and will give us exactly what we need.

So before we go to this passage verses 7 through 12, let's now go to God, our Father, and ask Him for His help.

Lord in heaven, our Father, we thank you that you have not left us to our own devices.

We thank you for your Son, jesus Christ, who is the truth, and for His truthfulness and for the way in which he has taken the mirror of your law and shown us how woefully short we have fallen from it, but at the same time that he has told us that we can cry out to you and to be heard and have our prayers answered to be made right with you and to be made whole and to experience true healing in our lives.

Lord, we thank you for this great promise.

We pray that you give us eyes to see and ears to hear your wonderful Word this morning.

We pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.

Hear the word of the Lord.

Ask and it will be given to you.

Seek and you will find.

Knock and it will be opened to you.

For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds.

And to the one who knocks, it will be opened.

Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone, or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent.

If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father, who is in heaven, give good things to those who ask Him?

Here ends a reading of God's Word.

I told the congregation at the first service that I had full permission to share this story, and I have permission from Jack, our youngest son, to share this, but when he was much younger, about six or seven years old and in first grade I had a real encounter with him about our inability to be able to save ourselves and be able to change our hearts.

Jack has three older siblings.

His oldest brother is seven years older than him.

Our other son is five years older and has a sister that's about almost seven years older than him.

Our other son is five years older.

He has a sister that's about almost two years older than him and he's had a scratch and claw for a lot of things that he's gotten in his life around our house.

A lot of times he's just right on the tail end.

He has to settle for what everybody else wants to do and sometimes it can lead to great frustration.

When he was little, this was a big, big deal.

One day after school they had come home and there was a particular snack that he wanted and somebody got the last one and this was enough to send him over the edge.

He got upset, got through a tantrum and in his tantrumrum he closed the cabinet door and closed it so hard that it broke.

I come home, I see what has happened and it's been explained to me by all of his siblings about what he had done and how he needed to be addressed and I go up to him.

I see what has happened.

I go on and I approach him and I did not go back onto my notes I'd taken from Paul David Tripp about appealing to his conscience, taking him to God's Word, addressing the needs of his heart.

I instead channeled my inner Bob Newhart and told him to stop it.

This has got to stop.

You've got to stop getting so angry.

You see what this does.

You see what it does to the dynamic of your relationship with your brothers and sisters.

You see what it does to the dynamic of your relationship with your brothers and sisters.

Do you see what it does to the things that the Lord has blessed us with?

And he looked up at me, a little first grader, with tears coming down his face, and he says I can't, I can't, I can't stop being angry.

I can't do this on my own.

I have tried.

Many people believe that the Sermon on the Mount is just a nice word from Jesus to give us some pointers on how we can live more orderly lives and be better people, be better citizens.

But nothing could be further from the truth, as Jason was preaching from one of the passages here in the Sermon on the Mount several months ago he was saying that one of Jesus' here in the Sermon on the Mount several months ago he was saying that one of Jesus' purposes in this, in expounding upon the law in the Sermon on the Mount, is for us to cry Uncle.

We're supposed to see, through Jesus' words, our broken lives and how we don't have a chance of standing up to any of this and doing any of it on our own power.

And if you haven't grasped this yet, I was going back through the Sermon on the Mount and just found a few bullet points of things that Jesus has called us to do.

And he says if you've already been angry with someone else, you've already murdered them in your heart.

If you have lusted after another woman, you have committed adultery in your heart.

We are not to retaliate against our enemies, but to love them and pursue them.

We must be perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect.

We are not to be driven by what others think or their praise.

We are not to give other things priority over God and we are not to be anxious, as we saw a few weeks ago when Martin preached on the very end of Matthew 6.

As we saw a few weeks ago, in verses 1-6 of chapter 7, jesus really turns up the heat with His warning about judging others, the hypocrisy we practice when being blinded by the log of self-righteousness in our own eye and we try to get the speck out of the other, while at the same time being warned not to share the gospel with those who are knowingly, outwardly hostile towards it.

But it's in the midst of this, with Jesus holding our feet to the fire, that he gives a ray of hope, that we can cry out to our heavenly Father as we feel the weight of the law coming down on us, that God will not only hear us but give us exactly what we need in the midst of this brokenness, and that is Jesus Christ Himself.

And to help us understand this passage verses 7-12, I want us to look at three things First, is our demeanor in our prayers.

The second thing I want us to look at is the one who hears our prayers.

And the third thing is the desired outcome of our prayers.

I have a good friend who I went to college with, who's a financial planner, lives down in South Florida where his wife, his family's, from.

That's what took him down there.

And by being in South Florida.

Being in that line of work.

He works with a lot of retirees.

He said one day he came into his office and he noticed from his secretary that he had an appointment set up with someone who wanted to come in and see him.

That he didn't know who he was.

And it came time for that appointment and this gentleman comes, walking into his office.

He's a very, from outward appearances, appears to be very, very put together.

He's probably in his late 60s.

And he comes in and as he sits down in front of my friend's desk he's got a handful or a stack full of manila folars with all sorts of different documents in it.

He puts them down on my friend's desk and looks my friend in his eye with tears going down his cheek and he says help.

What had happened was is this man came in after his initial cry for help, explained what had happened is that he was a self-made millionaire.

He had worked very, very hard to be able to establish financial independence so that he could retire, move to Florida, be able to do what he wanted to do spend more time with his children, with his grandchildren but never really had any professional financial planner come and speak into his life.

So he had all this wealth accumulated, was following what was going on with the news and in the late 90s put a great amount or a great majority of his funds into the dot-com stocks.

And many of you around here know what happened with that.

Many of you were victimized by that.

Many of you lost a lot of money through that.

So here it was in spring of 2000.

He comes in with his portfolio and it's worthless and he cries out help.

A self-made man has been brought to the end of himself.

A big thrust of the Sermon on the Mount is to demonstrate how worthless our spiritual portfolios are.

They're dot-com stocks.

They are worthless.

They are not even worth pennies, as some of Jesus' first words.

In the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount he says blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

In other words, there's no pride, there's nothing to commend ourselves before God.

You bring a worthless portfolio before God.

A few weeks ago, when we were looking at the portion of verses 1-6 where it talks about the necessity of removing the log from our own eye before trying to remove the speck from another, I took us to Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector and, if you remember, there are two men that went in and this parable went into the temple to go and pray and the Pharisee goes up.

He goes up to the very front.

He doesn't ask for anything, but he comes in and he commends himself on the basis of the fact that he's not like other men.

On the basis of the fact that he's not like other men.

He's not an extortioner, he's not unjust, he's not an adulterer and he's not like that tax collector over there.

And he fasts twice a week and he gives tithes on all that he gets.

The tax collector, on the other hand, is towards the back and he beats his breast, has nothing to say about it.

With his head turned down, he says have mercy on me.

He asks, he does not commend himself.

He asks one thing.

He asks for mercy, realizing he doesn't deserve it.

And, as Jesus said at the end of this parable, the tax collector walks away, justified, and not the Pharisee.

Kevin Van Hooser is a great biblical scholar.

He's a professor at Trinity Seminary right outside of Chicago, and I've seen this quote on a meme.

I don't know exactly where it was in his book or if he said it at a conference somewhere.

But it says this Pride doesn't listen, it knows.

And if I were to take that and give a little bit of a twist with saying, within the same spirit of that, pride doesn't ask questions, pride knows, pride knows.

Our pride will send us to hell faster than anything else imaginable.

It's our brokenness that God is calling for.

It's our brokenness that Jesus is helping us to see here in the Sermon on the Mount.

One of the things that often get asked, especially by parents or other people that have a loved one that's struggling, is they'll say hey, jamie, you need to go and speak to so-and-so.

And I'll tell them.

I said listen.

I said I would be more than happy to speak to them.

I said but they've got to be in a place where they want to come and talk to me, otherwise it's going to fall on deaf ears.

And maybe not only will it fall on deaf ears but it could actually push them further away, because what happens in counseling is that someone has to feel their brokenness.

They have to feel that need before they come in, before they've pushed their pride away to listen to what you have to say.

Our pride must be dealt with.

We must feel our need of Jesus and this is what he is talking about, he said and those who are spiritually bankrupt.

We are called to ask in a persistent manner, as we see in verses 7-8.

Ask, and it will be given to you.

Seek and you will find.

Knock and it will be opened to you, for everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and the one who knocks it will be opened.

Many of us here in this room have had life threatening situations with our loved ones.

Some of you are in that stage right now, or perhaps you've been the one with a life threatening illness.

What happens when you're diagnosed with something?

You start calling people.

You think of other people that you know, that have been through the same thing, or know someone that's been through the same thing.

You start calling physicians and that starts to build up a network and you start to find out about this person in this state or probably maybe even somebody who's in another country, and you go great distance asking, seeking and knocking.

It's this persistence and this is what jesus is calling us to do in relationship to our salvation ask and seek and knock, and it's in the perfect tense.

There's not a sense in that.

We ask and seek and knock and we've been there and done that and gotten the t-shirt.

This is something that's going to perpetuate itself until Jesus returns or we go to be with Him.

As the third verse in the hymn Rock of Ages says Nothing in my hands I bring Simply to Thy cross.

I cling Naked, come to Thee for dress, helpless, look to Thee for grace, foul I to the fountain, fly.

Wash me, savior, or I die.

We have an absolutely worthless portfolio before the Lord, but if we come to Him admitting our brokenness, our utter need of Him, he will indeed wash us.

Well, there's the one who hears our prayers.

Jesus is saying that those of us who are evil, if we are ones who are willing to give good things to our children, how much more so will our Father in heaven give what we need and give us good things?

As I was thinking through this, this is a general statement.

Obviously, we perhaps know situations from people that we know in our own lives or watch the news, where there are people that have been maliciously mean and harmful to their children.

But as I was thinking about this, and how this speaks to me is, I've made a lot of mistakes as a parent.

There's no doubt I've done some things that have been harmful to my children.

I've done some things which I need to ask forgiveness from my children, but to the best of my knowledge, I've never done anything in a malicious manner as far as I know, it depends upon me.

As many bad things as I've done, it's always at least in that moment I wanted to do what was best.

And what Jesus is saying here is if you are evil and you desire good things, how much more so your Father in Heaven and as I look at this, I was thinking about evil.

It's almost like if I were to put this in a translation how I preach this to me.

It's almost like Jesus is saying if you mixed bag temperamental, inconsistent, moody, self-loving, forgetful fathers out there, give your children good gifts, do you not believe that your perfect, all-knowing, loving Heavenly Father will not give you good gifts?

Do you not believe that your perfect, all-knowing, loving heavenly Father will not give you good gifts?

He's arguing from the lesser to the greater here, and we often take this word Father for granted in reference to God, but this is a somewhat scandalous reference to the God of Abraham, isaac and Jacob.

This is new.

This would have sounded scandalous to the people around there, but through Jesus we have access to Him.

He commands us to come to Him, he hears us and he gives us what he needs.

And this word Father is actually tantamount to a term of endearment that we use today to refer to our fathers.

Most of us don't refer to our fathers as fathers.

We call them Daddy, we call them daddy, we call them dad, we call them papa, things of that nature and it denotes the approachability that we have and the love of our fathers towards us.

There are some objections that people raise, and Jesus is pointing us to prayer and some will say well, how in the world could we possibly bend God's will towards ours?

This isn't a time or place to get into it, but we believe that the Bible teaches, to use a fancy word, that there is human causality, that there is some play in there where God can hear our prayers and he can use them for His glory and for our good.

But what we see here is that our prayers aren't necessarily meant to bend God's will, but to bend our wills towards Him.

Sin is rebellion and declaration of independence from God.

We just celebrated Independence Day, on July the 4th, where we staked a flag of independence told England we don't need you, we're going to go and do our own thing.

Sin is staking a flag of independence.

It's a declaration of independence from God.

You don't know what's best for me.

I'm going to go and do my own thing.

And it's made a wreck of things.

We see that.

We see the horrible fruit of it from the Sermon on the Mount and how far short we fall of God's glory.

But prayer, on the other hand, is a declaration of dependence on God and as a means of grace, the Holy Spirit works through us to enunciate the things that we're not able to put into words.

And through that means of grace, god also changes us and as we delight ourselves in Him, he will give the delights of our heart.

Not our hearts as we come to Him, but he gives us the delights of our hearts as he changes our hearts more and more into His image.

There will be some people that will say that prayer doesn't work.

I've been praying for X, y and Z for so long and God just hasn't seemed to answer it.

Well, sometimes a non-answer is God's answer to the prayer.

It's a demonstration of His love for you, and I was somewhat hesitant to bring this up, but it's like the song from the great theologian Garth Brooks Sometimes his greatest blessings are unanswered prayers.

We can look back on our lives and we can give thanks that God did not answer some of our prayers in the ways that we desired.

Some will say that prayer isn't necessary, in the sense that there are many people who have great blessings and they never, ever, pray.

Think about many of the friends and many of the acquaintances you have that have all the resources you can possibly imagine.

Their kids seem well adjusted, they have no problems, they have a steady source of income and they never pray.

They never go to church, they never acknowledge God and some of them just outright say that God doesn't even exist.

The Bible says that there is such a thing as common grace, that the rain falls on the just and the unjust, and we also need to understand that this command to pray and that God will answer our prayers does not mean that he is to be treated like a genie in the bottle to give us whatever we want whenever we want.

Imagine what a wreck that would make of our lives if we got whatever we wanted whenever we wanted it.

So what are we to make of this.

How are we to reconcile the fact that Jesus says he will give us what we ask for while at the same time knowing that there are certain instances when we won't get what we ask for?

John Stott, the famous English theologian and pastor of the 20th century, said that we need to see that there are two aspects of God to understand we come to Him in prayer.

First is that we see Him as God is the Creator.

He's the One who's created all things that are seen and unseen.

All things were created by Him, through Him and for Him, and in Him all things consist.

But we also have to see that he is also our Redeemer and there is a salvation that he has accomplished through His Son, jesus Christ, and for those who come to Him by faith.

We'll have that apply through the work of the Holy Spirit and it will change us.

So what I'm saying is we go to God as a Creator.

There are certain things that we do ask for and we're commanded to do that.

In the Sermon on the Mount, in the Lord's Prayer, in the previous chapter, we're called to do that.

God wants us to go and do that, but he may or may not answer it.

I can't promise you that if you pray to be healed of a disease that God is going to see fit to do that, we can pray for that.

I can't promise you that if you pray for your marriage to be restored, that it will be restored.

We hope that it will, but it may not happen.

And the list goes on.

You may not be able to get the job that you prayed for or acceptance into a school that you applied for, and the list goes.

You may not be able to get the job that you prayed for or acceptance into a school that you applied for, and the list goes on and on and on.

We don't know whether God's going to answer those things, but when we see God as our Redeemer, what he's accomplished through Jesus Christ, the promise that he has made here, is to give us what he has done through Jesus Christ.

And it is a sure thing.

If you want Jesus, you can have Jesus.

By God's grace, you will become co-heirs with Jesus and will rule with Him over the new heavens and the new earth.

It may not change your circumstances right now and what you're going through, but it's what he gives us through Jesus Christ.

He will give us a new heart.

He will give you His Spirit.

He will give us a new heart.

He will give you His Spirit.

He will give you His righteousness in terms of justification, that he closes with Christ's righteousness and he looks upon us as though we'd never sinned nor been a sinner.

He will continue to work righteousness in you to renew us more and more into His image and then, when we go to be with Him forever, he will complete the good work that he has begun in us through glorification.

Righteousness is what we truly need and it is something that we absolutely positively cannot live without.

I had an old pastor friend who would say this often to his congregation.

He said, from an eternal perspective and this sounds a little bit counterintuitive to us he says but from an eternal perspective, from an eternal life perspective, you can go without food, you can go without water, you can go without water, you can go without oxygen, but you cannot live without righteousness.

Only that can come through Jesus and what he's saying right here with regards to asking and seeking and knocking, and the doors will be open to us.

That door is Jesus.

If you want Jesus, you can have Jesus.

Like I said a little while ago, there are a lot of things that we can pray for, and I can't promise you you're going to be able to get them or not.

But if you pray to Jesus, ask Him for forgiveness, he is faithful and just to forgive you of your sins and cleanse you of all unrighteousness, he will give you His Spirit as a deposit guaranteeing the things to come.

He will never leave you nor forsake you.

I promise you.

If you want Jesus, you can have Jesus.

As we think about this, what is the desired outcome of our prayers?

Getting saved is a big deal.

Knowing where we're going to be headed for all of eternity is very important, but there's a way in which God's kingdom comes to earth now, as we pray in the Lord's Prayer, and what we have to understand is that we are not only saved from our sin, but we are saved from ourselves Left to our own devices.

As Steve said a little while ago, everything gravitates towards us.

When anything happens around the world, anything that happens in the church or anything that's happened in our school or our neighborhood, what's the first question that we ask?

What does this mean to me?

How is this going to affect me?

As a child of the late 70s and early 80s, I was captivated by the space shuttle launchings and landings and anything else that had to do with space and astronomy.

And one of the things that was so fascinating to me when I was growing up is how, with its full payload, how the space shuttle could weigh 2.2 million pounds but yet could get up to speed fast enough to not only get up off the ground but to be able to get through the Earth's atmosphere and the gravitational pull.

And be able to do that was with 7.8 million pounds of thrust from its rockets.

You throw that word astronomical around, but that's a lot of force.

Apart from God's saving grace, apart from His Holy Spirit, we are like a 2.2 million pound space shuttle and we will gravitate back down towards ourselves.

The Holy Spirit in God's work and god's presence in our life gets us beyond ourselves to do what we were created to do, and that is to love god and love other people, and that's why the golden rule is where it is.

This is the desired result is that we would turn, and we would turn back to God and we would, through His restored image, would love others and love Him.

So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets.

In some other literature it says do not do what you wouldn't want to have people to do to you.

But Jesus is positively saying proactively do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

I made reference to Luke 18 a little while ago with the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, and in that same chapter of Luke 18, we see the power of Christ at work within one man by the name of Zacchaeus.

Zacchaeus was a wretch.

He was a scum of the earth according to the people that were around him.

He was a tax collector.

He took from people.

He was a thief.

He took more than his fair share.

But what happened with Zacchaeus?

Zacchaeus found Jesus.

Zacchaeus was restored to a relationship with his Creator.

And what did we see Zacchaeus doing?

We see him going out and seeking reconciliation with those that he had wronged.

Loving God and loving others that's what Jesus can and will do in our lives through His grace and work in our lives.

In closing, as I was thinking about the simplicity of the law to love God and love others, the relative simplicity of prayer, I was thinking about a story I heard about Dr Frank Barker, who was the planner and pastor of Broadwood Presbyterian Church for many, many years.

He was a very wise man, very godly man, and he got asked to come to someplace I forgot exactly where it was.

They wanted him to come and talk about ministry and talk about church planning, and somebody had asked him this elaborate question Several people in this room.

They had everything mic'd up, had the cameras going and they asked this question.

Everybody leaned in ready to take notes, and his answer to this question was pray.

Many of you in here can hear him saying it and they were like no really, what should we do in this situation?

Pray, this is what Jesus is calling us to do.

Leave our worthless portfolio behind, come to Him, pray, admit that we can't, knowing that Jesus can, and he did, and he will give His righteousness to you so that you stand before God as though you had never sinned nor been a sinner, and you can, by God's grace, become more and more like Him as His Spirit works in your life, preparing you to go and be with Him for forever.

Let us pray, lord in Heaven.

We thank you for your great work in our lives, for your grace that you have shown us through your Son, jesus Christ, and we pray now that you would work through us as we come and partake of this means of grace, this Lord's Supper, that you have used to communicate your love towards us and for us to confess our faith to you.

We pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.