"Knock Knock" Matthew 7:7-11 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Matthew chapter 7, verses 7 through 12 is where we'll be this morning.

Matthew 7:7–12

7 through 12.

I'm going to look at verses 11, but I want to read through verse 12 to give you the context here.

Jesus says, 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.

The one who seeks finds.

The one who knocks, it will be opened.

Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone.

If he asks for fish, shall 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?

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

This is the word of God, and I pray that He seals it in your heart and convicts you with it and encourages you to grow more like Christ.

How you view a person colors how you view a gift that person would give you.

You interpret the gift based upon your knowledge and your affection for the gift giver.

Let me give an example.

If an older, wiser pastor was discipling me and he gave me a book on leadership, I would receive it with a heart of gratitude and think, oh, how kind it is that you are taking an interest in my life and encouraging me in this way.

I'm very grateful for it.

I would appreciate that gift.

If, let's say, my mother-in-law gave me the same book on leadership, I would be filled with gratitude for it because I'm a Christian.

If somebody that was underneath me at work gave me that same book, I would grow a little bit more in skepticism, right?

Like you don't give your boss a book on leadership.

What if you were at a restaurant and you ordered an ice cream Sunday with extra whipped cream and the waitress brings out a salad with a dressing on the side?

You would probably not receive it well.

But what if you were at home and it was dinner time and you asked for a Sunday, an ice cream Sunday with extra whipped cream, and your wife brought out the salad?

You would receive it probably.

This has never happened to me, but I'm imagining I would probably receive it with a little bit of gratitude, knowing it's dinner time, it's not ice cream time, my wife wants what is best for me.

I'm thankful for the salad.

Thank you for looking out for me.

My love.

I think that's what would go through my heart.

You understand that how you view the gift giver colors how you view the gift.

That reality is in the background here in Matthew 7.

Now, the beginning half of Matthew 7 is very much horizontal.

Jesus is talking about conflict that happens on the horizontal plane, interpersonal conflict.

To make the most sense of Matthew 7, verses 1 all the way through 12, you really need the contrast between horizontal and vertical.

Matthew 7:1

Horizontal is the other people in your life, your family members, your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, people you know and you interact with.

That's horizontal.

And there is conflict there, there is strife there, there's sin there.

That's at the horizontal level.

And there's the vertical level, your relationship with the Lord.

You look to God, you pray to God, you're praying up to God.

God is giving you grace from heaven.

That is a vertical interaction.

Matthew 7, verses 1 through 12 describes the conflicts in living in a horizontal world where you do have conflict with your neighbor.

Matthew 7:1–12

You know you're supposed to help brothers and sisters in the Lord that have sin in their life, you're supposed to help them remove that sin, that sin to you.

You look at the sin in their life and it's like a giant log coming out of their face.

So you try to help them with their sin.

The problem is that you've got a log coming out of your face.

The two of you guys can't even touch each other's eyes with your logs everywhere.

You have to take out your own log to work on the speck in that person's eye.

That person doesn't think you took out the log in your eye.

He's upset about your log, you're upset about their speck.

It's a hot mess.

On top of that, Jesus says, you're supposed to not cast your pearls before swine, not give what is holy to the dogs.

So you've got to discriminate here.

Is this a person I'm supposed to help with their sin?

Is this a person I'm supposed to deal with my own sin before I help them?

Or is this a person that is a dog and I don't want to help them at all?

It requires wisdom.

And the kind of the baseline assumption here is that the people you interact with have specks in their eye.

Some of them have logs in their eye.

Some of them are hogs and dogs.

On top of all that, you have verse 12.

Verse 12 says, you need to treat others as you want to be treated.

Whatever you wish others would do to you, do also for them.

Well, that's impossible.

Because, and I mean this with all due respect, you want to be treated very, very well, don't you?

Like you're pretty arrogant when it comes down to it.

You want everybody to treat you like royalty.

You're the king or the queen in your own mind.

And so Jesus turns that around and says, as you want others to treat you, you treat them that way.

Well, that's impossible.

You would want others to give everything they have to you.

You can't give everything you have to everybody else.

You'd have nothing left.

Especially when the intro to this is that you don't want to give anything to dogs.

And before you can even identify somebody as a dog, you've got to work on your own log.

There's a lot going on.

And this is why there's this horizontal conflict in the world.

You seem to always be at conflict with those around you.

Now, some trials come in life through health reasons or providential reasons.

That's not really interpersonal conflict.

That's a lot of trials in life, is cancer and health issues and providential job locations and stuff.

But a significant part of your life is defined by the interpersonal conflict, the horizontal conflict, living in a horizontal world.

And it is an impossible task.

It is an impossible task to help people get specks out of their own eyes with logs and ears to identify the hogs and dogs and to treat everybody like you would want them to treat you.

It's just you're launched out in this task that is impossible.

But God doesn't launch you out into this task without resources.

He launches you out into this task by giving you and promising you infinite resources.

He promises that he will help you navigate horizontal conflict with vertical grace.

So you're out there trying to navigate this horizontal world, but God is giving you access to vertical treasure in heaven, that you call to God for help to navigate the horizontal world, and he responds by giving you what you need.

James says it this way: that you need wisdom to navigate, don't judge other people, don't show favoritism, don't let the rich person sit in front and banish the poor person to the back.

Don't show preference to the people who are landowners over-the-day laborers.

That's James.

James says, you're gonna need wisdom to navigate this, and you want wisdom, you ask God for wisdom, and God richly gives you the wisdom you need for those circumstances.

So God tells you to act about favoritism and then gives you wisdom to do it.

God tells you to take the log from your own eye before you work on the speck in your neighbors, and then gives you the wisdom to do it.

God tells you to treat others as you want to be treated, and then gives you the wisdom to make kind of a triage here and know who you're supposed to be interacting with.

This is all God ordained wisdom that comes as a response to you asking for it.

And if you don't ask for it, don't be surprised when you don't have it.

You have not, James says, because you ask not.

So while you have an impossible task, God also gives you infinite grace to navigate it if you ask for it.

He will respond.

So let me give you an outline to navigate this passage this morning: solving horizontal conflict with vertical comforts, that God will give you this task to navigate your horizontal relationships, but he gives you the task with this vertical comfort, this vertical treasury of riches, of grace and wisdom and knowledge and understanding, the fruit of the spirit, which is what you grow in as you're living this horizontal life.

You grow in love, joy, patience, kindness, peace with your neighbors, gentleness, self-control.

You're growing in all that, which produces an atmosphere of peace around you.

That comes from God giving you his spirit, causing you to grow spiritually, to navigate verses 1 through 6, and then verse 12.

Now, how does Jesus describe this?

This really is an incredible passage of scripture.

It's an incredible promise, isn't it?

That God will give you what you ask for to navigate this world.

There's no other promise like that.

That whatever you ask to help navigate the world, God will answer and give it to you.

That's a very extreme promise.

It's tough to imagine a greater promise than that.

Ask for it and you get it.

But it's exactly the promise that God gives us.

Well, this promise is structured so intricately by Jesus with rhetorical precision.

He really builds his argument.

We're going to stop, start kind of at the end of it in verse 11 with the contrast.

There's a contrast that's undergirding this whole thing.

The contrast is between those who are evil and God who is good.

He says in verse 11.

If you then who are evil, and the contrast is your father will give you good things.

That's both in verse 11.

This contrast begins with Jesus saying that you are evil.

I know you were not out there on the Sermon on the Mount.

You weren't out there at the plains of Galilee when Jesus preached this 2,000 years ago, and so he wasn't directly talking to you, but it applies to you.

You're caught up in this.

You are born in sin.

You are born as an offspring of Adam.

You are born with a sin nature, so you grow up loving sin and serving sin and pursuing sin.

That's why you are designated as evil.

And Jesus says, You who are evil.

One thing to just notice in this: being evil is not inherently part of being human.

Adam was truly human, Eve was truly human before they sinned.

They were not evil, they were good and truly human.

Jesus is truly human and is not evil.

He has no sin in him.

But everybody else, every other human being after the fall, not counting Adam, Eve, and Jesus, every other human being is evil.

So when Jesus says, you who are evil, he's talking to everybody.

This is the doctrine of total depravity, that every part of us is tainted, marred, disfigured, obscured by sin.

You can put whatever word you want in there.

Sin distorts everything you do, it affects everything you do, it poisons everything you do.

Total depravity doesn't mean that everything you do is only evil, but it means that everything you do has evil in it.

That sin corrupts even your best actions.

How do I know that?

Well, this would be one example right here.

When Jesus says, you who are evil, in the analogy here, who's he talking to?

He's talking about parents who feed their kids.

Children are the most innocent of human beings.

The Bible refers to babies and little ones as innocents.

It doesn't mean they don't have a sin nature.

Of course they have a sin nature, but they have an innocence to them.

They don't rightly comprehend the distinction between good and evil, or as Jonas says, they don't know their right hand from their left.

They don't know good from evil.

They're just little babies.

Of course, they love sin, they're sinners, but there's an innocence to them.

In a very real sense, you can measure the health of a society by how they care for their children and their infants.

Do they exploit them and abuse them?

That's a depraved society that deserves God's judgment.

Do they guard them and protect them?

That's a virtuous act to do.

So at a very basic level, there's an innocence that comes with children.

Now, the most virtuous thing a parent can do is like take care of your children.

Don't abandon your children.

That's bad.

But feed your children, that's good.

So Jesus here is latching on to this idea that parents should feed their kids.

That's a good, noble thing to do.

But he talks about the parents who do that and describes them as evil.

They're not evil because they're feeding their kids.

They're evil despite the fact that they're feeding their kids.

Despite the fact that they do somewhat virtuous things, they're still morally and categorically evil by nature of Adam's sin being imputed to them.

People are wicked.

Every person is wicked.

And that's why on the horizontal plane there is so much conflict.

I mean, this world is great and beautiful, and everything about life is awesome.

It's all the people keep messing it up.

That's Jesus' point here.

People are evil, he says.

But even an evil person feeds his kids.

Again, total depravity doesn't mean that everything you do is only and entirely evil.

Total depravity means that everything you do is tainted by evil.

It's tainted by mixed motives and mixed affections and pride and arrogance.

I mean, you you see a woman, an old lady crossing Braddock and Backlick with a shopping cart full of things and bags, and the walk sign is changing, and so you help her across the road.

It's a very virtuous act.

But even in that, you have mixed motives of pride and arrogance and you know all this other stuff that you don't even know about.

Like some of that stuff is deep down in your heart, and it's hard for you to discern and dissect.

Even virtuous things are obscured with evil in your life because we are sinful.

This is Genesis 6, where Yahweh says he looks at man's heart and saw that the thoughts of his heart were only evil continually.

The flood didn't change that either.

The flood didn't wash away depravity.

The thoughts, the depths, the deceptions in our heart, they are tainted by evil all the time.

All the time.

That's why we have interpersonal conflict.

What a contrast with God, Jesus says.

Our Father who is in heaven gives good things.

He's able to give good things because God is good.

Every part of God is good.

Everything God does is good.

All of God's thoughts and actions are always and only good.

He's not capable of evil.

Back in James 1, where James is talking about wisdom to navigate these horizontal relationships, he says every good and perfect gift comes from God, in whom there is no variation and no shifting of shadows, no change in him.

There's nothing, anything less than good inside of God.

He is always good all the time.

He's the measure of goodness.

God is not good because he conforms to an external standard of goodness.

Like I'll say the Ten Commandments are a standard of goodness.

God is not good because he conforms to them.

It's the other way around.

The Ten Commandments are a measure of goodness because they conform to God.

God is a standard of goodness.

He defines what is good.

And he is the only true source of goodness in the world.

Something is only good if it corresponds to God's nature.

If I want to know if I'm taller than my brother, I would get back to back and measure myself against my brother.

That's how we would figure it out.

If I wanted to know if I'm taller than my dad, I would get back to back and measure myself against my dad.

If I wanted to know if I was taller than my dad, I would not measure myself against my brother.

That wouldn't make any sense.

It would not elucidate anything.

If you want to know if something is good, you measure it against God, not against something else.

We slip into this so all the time.

We say, oh, that person is such a good person.

They just don't know the Lord.

There's a sense in which I know what you mean.

I'm not gonna, I wouldn't correct somebody who says that.

I mean, I know what you mean.

You mean that person does good things.

Good is defined by corresponding to God's character, God is good, and they imitate some good things in God's life, even though they don't know the Lord.

That's common grace.

There can be quote unquote good people in the world by common grace.

I get that.

But do you remember the rich young ruler who came up to Jesus and said, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Jesus rejected his presupposition.

I'm sorry.

Did you just call me good?

Nobody is good except God alone.

He makes the guy intersect with that, interact with it in his mind.

If nobody is good against God alone, except God alone, how can Jesus be a good teacher if he's not God?

His teaching has to correspond to God's nature because he is God.

So if you turn around and say something, you know, trite like, oh, the Bible is a good book, I just don't know if Jesus is God, or Jesus is a good teacher, I just don't know if I want to listen to all that he says or bow my knee or worship him or whatever, but he has good things to say.

Who are you to decide what good is?

You're measuring against yourself there.

God alone is good.

That's what Jesus says here, that the Father is the one who gives good gifts.

Only God is good, and something is good if it corresponds to God's nature.

It is good for parents to feed their children.

Why?

Because God is a heavenly father who feeds us, who gives us what we need.

So it is good for parents to care for children because God is good and cares for his children.

That's the contrast.

People are evil, God is awesome.

Contrast.

Second, comparison.

People are evil, God is awesome would have been a shorter summary of that, but I like filling it out.

Comparison.

You have the contrast?

The comparison now is between how parents provide for their children and how God provides for us.

The comparison begins back up in verse 9.

Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?

So you need a little bit of cultural contextualization here.

Ancient Near East, bread is nutritious, bread is a staple of life, bread is good.

It'd be the most basic thing to ask for.

If you're hungry, you ask for bread.

This is very different in the American world.

Now your kid might ask for bread and you would say, oh no, no, no, because you're thinking of like white bread or wonder bread or like Panera bread or all those kinds of breads that are like not good for you.

Like, you know, there was a time when bagels were good, and now bagels have like cinnamon toast crunch all over the top of them.

You know, your kid asks for that for breakfast, and you're like, probably not.

But this is not this world.

In this world, if a kid asks for bread, that's a nutritious thing for him to ask for.

It's the most basic thing you would feed them.

It's not the kid trying to get, you know, lucky charms, it's the kid just asking for food.

So the kid asks dad for bread.

The bread, as nutritious as it was back then, had one downside to it.

Bread in the ancient Near East looked a lot like rocks.

They're there look like hockey pucks, so to speak, but but brownish, that was bread.

Small little loaves.

And so this would be a funny dad joke that you could imagine.

The kid asking, Dad, could I have some bread?

And the dad hands him a rock.

Ha ha ha ha, that's funny.

Um, but you wouldn't actually expect the kid to eat the rock.

It's a dad joke, and it'd be funny one time.

Generally speaking, as the kids ask for bread, the dads give them bread.

Not a diet of rocks.

As entertaining as that might be.

Jesus' point, if your kid asks you for bread, you're going to give him bread.

Not something that looks like it.

And then he goes to the fish.

Your kid asks you for a fish.

In Galilee, where the sermon is preached, there's the Sea of Galilee there, there's fish in it.

They're called St.

Peter's fish, although they weren't called St.

Peter's fish here in Jesus' lifetime for chronicle chronological reasons.

I'm sure you can figure that out.

Uh they're glorified tilapia, basically.

And they'd be served in a basket, and they'd have like a little cloth over the top of it to keep the fish smell out and the flies away, and you pull back the cloth, and you see the scales of the fish.

It's pretty obvious it's a fish.

But you know what else has scales like that?

A snake.

And so again, a funny dad joke.

Your kids ask for fish, and you hand them the basket and they pull off the blanket, and at first glance it looks like a fish, but then lo and behold, that was a snake coiled up and it slithers out on the table.

Probably less funny for your family than the rock one.

People yell, run to the house.

You don't get fish.

There's lots that could go wrong.

Jesus' point is if your kids ask for fish, you're going to give them fish, not a basket of snakes, even though it might look like a fish.

And Luke adds a third illustration.

Well, Jesus adds a third illustration.

It's recorded in Luke, but not in Matthew.

The same sermon, remember, is recorded in Luke.

After this, Jesus said, Who of you, if your kid asks for an egg, would give them a scorpion?

Scorpions have that iridescent color.

At nighttime, they they look white.

They sometimes sleep with their full their tails folded back on top of them, their legs touch tucked in.

If you were to see a sleeping scorpion at night, it would look very much like an egg.

Your kid asks you for a scorpion, you don't hand him a b uh your kid asks you for an egg, you don't hand him a basket of scorpions.

The rock thing might have been scary.

The snake thing might have been the rock thing might have been funny.

The snake thing might have been scary.

The scorpion thing would be deadly.

He wouldn't do that.

The worst parent in the world wouldn't do that.

Here's the comparison.

If you as a parent wouldn't provide rocks, snakes, and scorpions, do you think that God is going to answer your requests with what you need?

That's the comparison.

Isn't God better than we are?

That's why it started with the contrast.

God's better than we are.

So when we ask him for something, of course he's going to give us what we need.

When we open our hearts to our children, just as evil human beings, we open our hearts to our children.

Don't we think a drop of the good motivation in caring for our children is divine, comes from God.

As the Father cares for us, we then in turn care for our children.

As we are doing that, caring for our children, you have to recognize that the cord of that action goes all the way back to our Heavenly Father who cares for us.

So that's true then.

It forces you to just have this basic sentiment in your mind, this basic question.

Does God answer your prayer requests?

I mean, yes or no.

And if the answer is no, why bother?

But if the answer is yes, God does answer our prayer requests, does he answer them better than your parents do?

Does he give you something that's actually good and nutritious and helpful for you?

Yes.

Yes, he does.

And that leads to the third structure of Jesus' argument here.

We saw the contrast, the comparison, finally the confidence.

The confidence.

When you understand this comparison, especially in light of the contrast, that leads you to having confidence in God and his goodness.

The confidence is seen in verse 7.

Ask and it will be given to you.

Seek and you will find.

Knock and it will be opened to you.

Notice the increasing intensity of these words.

Asking is about as passive as it can be.

Seeking is a little bit more active.

You had to get out of your chair.

Knocking is aggressive.

So if I'm in the kitchen and I'm looking for green chili, I could ask my wife, Deedra, where's the green chili?

That's asking.

What I'm communicating with is I'm kind of hoping she'll come find the green chili.

And she says, Oh, it's in the refrigerator.

Now I'm seeking.

Now it's more aggressive.

I'm seeking.

I'm grabbing the refrigerator.

I'm opening it.

I'm looking for it.

See my see my more seeking role?

Asking, very passive.

Now I'm on the hunt.

I can't find it.

I remember seeing some in the neighbor's refrigerator.

Now I go and I knock on the neighbor's door.

Do you have any green chili I can borrow?

Do you see the progression?

Asking, very passive.

Seeking, more active.

Knocking, as aggressive as it gets, versus breaking into the house.

I mean, that would be the next step.

That same pattern is here in our prayer requests.

You ask God for help.

You pray to him.

And you remember Matthew 6, of course, says the Lord knows what you need before you even ask.

But you ask anyway, because he knows what you need.

It's great.

It's like at Starbucks when you order the same thing every day, you show up and they got it ready for you.

Like, how'd you know?

Because you order the same thing every day.

Yes.

But you still have to ask for it.

Still got to ask.

You know what you need, but you have to ask for it.

That's asking.

The seeking is you're on the hunt now for it.

God, I need help in this situation.

Yesterday I prayed, Lord, I'm in a difficult situation, difficult horizontal situation.

I'm asking for grace.

And now the next day is here.

And you're talking with that person and there's that conflict there.

Now you're seeking the Lord's will.

You're praying things like, Lord, if you want me to address this, open up the opportunity in the conversation.

If you want me to address this, bring this other person along.

If you want me to address this, Lord, I'm seeking help in how to navigate this situation.

Please help me.

I'm seeking right now.

And finally, the knocking, where you're knocking on the door of the Lord.

God, you gotta open up the door.

I need help.

I'm pounding on the door here.

Help me, Lord.

It's an increasing assertiveness to your prayer requests.

And all of these are modeled in the Bible, by the way.

Already from Matthew 6.

You can ask the Lord for things.

Matthew 21, verse 22.

Matthew 21:22

Whatever you ask of the Lord in prayer, you'll receive, assuming you ask in faith.

Deuteronomy 4 is Israel settling into the promised land.

God makes a covenant with them in Deuteronomy 4 and says, if you seek me, you will find me if you seek me with your whole heart.

That's going to be the pattern of their life.

It's not asking before the river, like God give us grace across the river.

You can do that.

This is more active.

This is the whole time in the promised land.

You better be seeking Yahweh's face because if you're not, you'll fall under his curses and judgment, and the nations of the enemy nations will rise up and attack you as a sign of God's judgment.

That's the cursing that's connected in Deuteronomy 4.

You seek them, you find them.

You don't seek them, you won't find them.

Proverbs 1.28 says something similar.

It gives a negation.

The fool will seek God and will not find him.

Proverbs 128 says.

The fool looks for God, comes up empty.

Comes up empty.

I remember somebody who told me Matthew 7, verse 7, asking it'll be given to you.

Matthew 7:7

They decided to put that to the test.

And they prayed to God that they would win the lottery the next day.

And that way they would know God was true in Matthew 7, 7 is true.

And they played the lottery the next day and they did not win.

Therefore, God must not be true.

That is the perfect example of Proverbs 1.28.

The fool will seek the Lord and not find him.

Because he's looking in the wrong places.

You can't fill your lungs with the air that God gives you.

Fill the body that he gives you with energy from the food that he gives you and the family he gives you and the friends he gives you and the world he gives you, and all the beauty of the world that he gives you, and everything good God gives you, and he gives you all these good things to point to him and be like, But if I don't win the lottery, I don't believe then the gift giver.

The fool will seek the Lord and will not be able to find him.

And yet the Bible calls us to seek his face, 1 Chronicles 1 verse 10.

1 Chronicles 1:10

To seek his help in 2 Chronicles 20.

Ezra, before he set back into Jerusalem, remember, sought the favor of the Lord in Ezra 8.

Psalm 27, we seek the beauty of the Lord.

One thing I ask that I desire, I would seek the Lord and see his beauty in his temple.

1 Peter 3, Christians are to seek the Lord and the peace that he gives us.

Psalm 34, seek the peace of Yahweh.

Colossians 3, this is probably the best one for Christians.

We seek the things above.

We set our minds on the things above.

We seek the things of heaven, not the things of the earth.

Paul says, we seek a better country, not this world.

And so if you're seeking the Lord, that starts to frame the other things that you're looking for.

Your prayer requests get shifted if you've got the Lord as your destination rather than all these horizontal things.

You start to pray about vertical things that get your eyes off of the horizontal.

You're seeking a country better than the horizontal.

Knocking.

That's a very commentators point this out, and I think it's true.

The knocking is a very hospitable kind of language.

Somebody knocks on your door, you open your door and you invite them into your house.

When you're knocking on the Lord's door, Jesus says, Whoever knocks is gonna, it's gonna be open to them.

That's what he says in what, verse 8.

Everyone who asks receives, the one who seeks finds, the one who knocks, it will be opened.

When you seek the Lord, he invites you into fellowship with him.

He opens the door of his house, he opens the door of his kingdom, so to speak.

We'll get to that in two weeks in verse 13.

He enters the gate to his kingdom, and you can come fellowship with him if you knock.

He sought through faith.

And you cry out to him in faith, and he opens his arms to you and he receives you.

The Lord invites everybody into a relationship with him that comes to him through faith in Jesus Christ.

That's the knocking and receiving.

And so you reverse engineer this.

You're in horizontal conflicts.

Let's start here.

Are you in a right relationship with the Lord?

Are you seeking the Lord?

Have you repented from your sin?

Have you given your life over to Jesus Christ?

That's the knocking part.

Now you're seeking to be at peace with all people around you.

You're seeking all the 12 verses I read about seeking the peace in the church, the peace in Israel, the peace in the world.

Are you seeking peace around you?

You're in a right relationship with God, knocked, opened up, invited in.

Now you're seeking peace.

And now you're asking for help in the day-to-day interactions you have.

You're asking, do I let love cover this or do I confront this?

The answer, by the way, is almost always let love cover.

Do I let love cover this?

Do I confront this?

Do I show love to this person or to that person?

I gotta choose.

Do I go left or right?

Which way do I go, Lord?

Who do I interact with right now?

I need your wisdom, Lord.

Open one door, close the other.

I'm asking for help.

Boom, that's asking.

You ask, you'll get it.

You ask for wisdom from God about how to navigate the situation, he will give you wisdom.

But what if he gives you something for which you did not ask?

You're asking for help to be at peace with this person over here, and the Lord gives you a salad with the dressing on the side.

I wanted this.

I wanted this promotion at work.

I wanted my mortgage paid off.

I wanted that job over there, I wanted reassigned to the Pentagon and not to Alaska.

I had very specific prayer requests in mind.

And instead I got these other things.

I didn't get peace, I didn't get that promotion, I didn't get whatever.

And this is back to where I started.

How you view the gift giver colors how you view the gift.

Do you then believe that what he gave in answer to your prayer request is actually for your good and for his glory?

Even though it's not what you ordered.

The bottom line here to all this is confidence.

At the end of verse 11, your heavenly Father will give good things to those who ask him.

If he gives you salad, guess what, my friends?

Salad is good for you.

That's the promise.

We're not left to the abstract with these kind of promises because Jesus lived this out perfectly.

We have the communion table in front of this as an example for us.

Jesus, who preached this sermon, did exactly what he preached.

He loved his enemies.

He treated others as he would have wanted to be treated.

He didn't have a log in his own eye, of course, he was sinless.

He helped confront specks in people's eyes.

More than that, you want to know what it looks like to not give to dogs what is holy?

Look at what Jesus.

After this sermon, by Matthew 12, he's cutting off the Pharisees.

But Matthew 12, he's no longer teaching them.

He's speaking in parables, so they don't understand, they can't see, they can't hear.

He's telling them the kingdom has been hidden from you.

And in Matthew 21, it's taken from you and given to somebody else.

You guys are whitewashed tombs, you're a pack of dogs, a brood of vipers.

I mean, he goes off on them.

He's no longer sharing the gospel with them, he's withholding it from them because he's not going to cast what is holy before dogs.

So Jesus lives out exactly what he teaches here.

And where does that get him?

They murder him.

They turn against him and kill him.

But he was sinless, and in his death he bears the penalty for our sin.

So what does he give us in exchange?

He takes our sin from us and he gives us his body.

He gives us his blood.

He gives us atonement, demonstrated through the wine, he gives us his death, substitutionary death, our sin to him, his death for ours, demonstrated in the bread.

And then he gives us these tokens, these bread and wine, these symbols, so to speak, that point us back to what he did on the cross.

So the greatest gift we could imagine, the secret to horizontal living here is the vertical giving, and the greatest thing he gives us is himself.

So no one can ever say, Lord, I prayed and you didn't give to me.

No, if you knock, he opens and he invites you into fellowship with himself through his death and his blood and his resurrection.

You seek him through the word that you now have eyes to see through the Holy Spirit, and you find him.

You ask him for help, and he gives you himself.

God, we are thankful.

For the example of Jesus Christ, who opens the door of heaven when we knock, when we come to him in faith, he's eager to receive us.

We're so thankful for the world we live in.

We know it has fallen because of sin, which makes it difficult, and there's conflict.

And yet, Lord, you are sovereign over all of it.

You provide for us all that we need to navigate the trials of life as well as you would have us to do.

You didn't call us to solve every problem, to fix every relationship.

You called us to ask, to seek, and to knock.

And so we are content with whatever doors you open, we are content with whatever wisdom you give.

We're content with the grace that we need for today.

Thank you for answering our requests, not maybe necessarily like we asked, but you answer them with what is best for us.

And this communion that's in front of us now really is the example of that.

We can never critique what you serve us when you have served us yourself.

We're so thankful for the body and blood of Christ.

It's in his name we pray.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to iBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.