Matthew 7:7-12 Who Can Live The Christian Life

If you enjoy hiking, tramping, exploring in the wilderness, or mountaineering, you might understand the concept of a false summit. A false summit is when you reach a peak while climbing a mountain, believing it to be the top, only to realise that the true summit was hidden from your view and there is still a little way to go. As we near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus concludes the main portion of his sermon, we encounter such a point, a conclusion that in some ways is a false summit.

One giveaway of this is Jesus' mention of "the Law and the Prophets" in verse twelve and the so-called Golden Rule, which together bookend Matthew 5:17, where the Lord also referenced the Law and the Prophets. While the Lord in this present section ties off themes that have come before, he will ultimately finish the Sermon on the Mount with three concluding calls, beginning in verse thirteen: "Enter through the narrow gate," which we will consider next week. We might say that Jesus has been extensively teaching his disciples about the ethics of the kingdom; now, he brings this section to a close and will then finish with a call to enter the kingdom.

So, a good question for us is, how does our passage this morning tie together the preceding context?

Simply put, one of the themes the Lord has developed is that the believer lives under the eye of God, who sees and knows all things. There can be no room in the Christian life for superficial religiosity, because no one can fool God; no one can pull the wool over God's eyes.

Instead, we are called to live as those who are poor in spirit, as the Lord has taught. Those who mourn, the gentle, those who long for righteousness, who are merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, persecuted for the sake of righteousness, and insulted by others for Jesus' name, we are the salt of the earth and kingdom light in the world, and in the darkness. None of these things are superficial; surface-level religion like that of the Pharisees means nothing before a God who sees all and knows every fibre of our being.

As we have gone along, Jesus has tightened the ratchet of his teaching. Adultery became not merely the physical act but also the lust of the heart, marking the first of Jesus' six expositions of the law’s command. And any honest believer who reads Matthew 6:1 ought to feel as if the air has been knocked out of their chest: "Beware of practising your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven." Or Matthew 6:15 has a similar effect: "But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions." As we saw last week in Matthew 7:1: "Do not judge so that you will not be judged."

We see here not only the theme of living under the eye of God but are also faced with the real question: who then can live under the eye of God, having considered all these things in the Sermon on the Mount?

Who can live this kind of life set before the follower of Jesus Christ? Surely, it cannot be me! We would rightly cry out with the psalmist in Psalm 130:3: "If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who would stand?"

I believe this question of "who can live the Christian life" sets the context for us this morning. On our own, even as believers, we cannot live up to the standard presented before us. So, what do we do now?

Acknowledge Your Inability

Here is the first of six headings: we must each acknowledge our inability to live the Christian life by our own efforts. We need God's help.

I believe that the kind of prayer life Jesus is calling for here is not simply an isolated thought. While these verses could be preached on separately regarding prayer, and there would be profit in that, I think it is best understood contextually. Jesus is drawing any disciple who is overwhelmed by their lack of spiritual resources to live the Christian life, inviting them to seek those resources from God.

Believers are to come to God asking, seeking, knocking, that from heaven they might be supplied with every spiritual help to ignite their soul for God. As I have said in many messages, Scripture never presents us with a golden ladder to heaven by which, if we climb, we save our souls. And it is the same with our ongoing life: we need heaven's resources to live the Christian life. Any religion that presents salvation as a work dependent on man is man-made; it is a Tower of Babel constructed to forge his own path to God.

No; the biblical teaching is that God comes to man with salvation. Adam was the only man like us who might have been confirmed in a state of righteousness had he obeyed God, but Adam sinned, and we sinned in him. Our only hope was then left to the second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, to merit righteousness on our behalf.

It is impossible for anyone to read through the Sermon on the Mount and think that they are doing well in these things. Instead, we ought to see that we are crushed by a thousand blows; we are blind, deaf beggars without a cane, stumbling in darkness.

We have nothing to commend ourselves to God. What are we then to do?

More accurately, it is not a matter of what we must do, but what God must do for us. Jesus said in John 8:36: "So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed."

We must be born again from above; the divine surgeon must not only operate on our hearts, which are dead in sin, but make us new. Jesus must stand at the tomb where our soul lies and command, as he did to Lazarus, "Come forth." Only by this means can a son of Adam be made right with God. John 5:21 says: "For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom he wishes."

You must recognise and confess your moral bankruptcy, crying out to God that he would save your soul. You must see Christ on that Roman cross, dying as your substitute, and say, "Father, this is the only way a wretch like me can be saved."

I fear that many people, especially those raised in churches, have little thought of their own need for Jesus at a personal level. That is what I fear: they never truly understand that when the Bible speaks of sinners, it means those born sitting in pews as much as those out in the world.

They let the message of the gospel pass over their heads Sunday after Sunday, believing that living as a Christian is the same as being a Christian. What is clear here is that first we must acknowledge that there is no good in us; we must be saved, and only then ask, how shall we live? The true Christian realises that even now, having become a believer, the life set before them remains all but impossible.

We might even feel slightly discouraged! But that is the secret. What is the Christian to do now?

Our Lord continues: you are to seek, you are to knock, you are to ask without ceasing, that you might grow, grow, and grow.

Appropriate True Spiritual Life From God

So, first, we must acknowledge our own innate bankruptcy and turn to God for salvation and help. Second, as our text teaches, we must learn to appropriate true spiritual life from God.

Read again verse seven: "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 he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened."

Here the Lord Jesus leaves the key under the mat for us to unlock spiritual growth in the Christian life. This is how we progress from one degree to another in holiness and Christlikeness, in mind, heart, and action. We do not, as modern secular psychology teaches, look inside ourselves to find the power to live the Christian life.

No; Jesus says we must appropriate it from God. That is why I repeat the necessity to daily seek to grow in grace, in the word, in prayer, and in all things related to the Christian life. These are verbs of persistence: asking, seeking, knocking—always.

One thing I have appreciated about the late Ian Lang, since arriving at this church, is that even in his eighties, I saw a hunger in him to grow. He desired to understand the Bible more deeply. I heard him pray for help to be more like Jesus, though he himself was not far from heaven.

It is very clear in the Christian life that while we may stand positionally in a state of saving grace, as believers we are still called to cooperatively grow in that grace, to become like Christ one degree at a time; it is active, not passive. I fear, however, that we are not persistent enough in this calling. Worse, at times we are altogether unconcerned with it. It is never meant to be that a Christian should cease growing in grace.

So let me apply this for us. Are you struggling in your Christian life to live with joy, a sense of joy in God, joy in Jesus Christ? If so, the Lord Jesus says plainly here that you need to go to him: seek, ask, and knock, that it might be given to you. You will not find it in yourself; it must be supplied to you. You must go to the well from which all true joy is sourced.

Are you a Christian who struggles with anxiety? As we all do. It is incumbent upon you to persistently go to your heavenly Father and present your petition, ask that he would supply and change you: change the way you think, change your heart, and change your perspective. Pray that he would show you just how sovereign he is, how powerful and unchangeable are his ways, that you might rest knowing he holds the future yet unseen.

Are you struggling daily with a sinful addiction, or battling in your mind for control of your thoughts? Jesus asks you this morning: are you daily at the throne of grace, pleading that God would make Christ the best and brightest object of adoration so that there is no room in your heart for any other idols?

Are you struggling with forgiveness, or with a judgmental spirit? Are you failing in your Bible reading, struggling in your prayer life? Friends, we must stop looking to ourselves for the supply of power to change our heart and mind and fight our spiritual battles; instead, we must appropriate the supplied heavenly grace by persistently coming to God. As James 4:2 says, "You have not because you do not ask." It is true: we do not ask God for these things, so we do not have them.

We do not want our faith to be like a car sitting in idle, neutral, going nowhere. We want a Christian life that shifts through the gears, one after the other, drawing power from God.

We Have An Ever-Present Audience

Thirdly, I want you to understand that this passage makes clear we have an ever-present audience.

Christ does not command you to go to your heavenly Father with earnestness only to be turned away. He promises to always be the attentive ear you need, an audience you can seek at any time. In our day of the Internet, we are hyper-connected. This week, something that happened in America was instantly beamed across the world. I saw a man in a video be shot on the other side of the world, and it was instantly on my device. We are so hyper-connected, and yet, ironically, perhaps less connected than ever before.

With Elon Musk's Starlink satellites circling the globe, there is virtually nowhere on the surface of the earth where you cannot access the world through the Internet.

Yet, perhaps it is worth considering just how connected the Bible teaches the believer is to God, and how we can experience ever-deepening intimacy with him. We do not need to go to a priest to confess our sins. We can do it wherever we are. You do not need to be at Woodlands Church to pray to God. You can do it at home, in the calving paddock, on the lambing beat, in the car, at the bedside of a dying saint, at the birth of a newborn, at the scene of a tragic loss, in a crowd of fifty thousand in a stadium, in a deep dark cave or in an ocean liner on a cruise. We have immediate access and an audience with God in prayer. He is ever-present, offering twenty-four-hour, free-of-charge access, no subscription required.

You do not have to clean yourself up first. You can be in the worst mood imaginable, filled with grief or anger, overwhelmed or confused, and he is still there. Even when you have openly and consciously sinned, God is waiting to hear his children come to him.

Jesus says in Revelation 3:20: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with me." Such is the intimacy and spiritual union Christians are meant to have with their God. We were made to know him and commune with him through the Spirit who lives within us.

Paul says in his sermon at Athens, Acts 17: "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us."

The Assurance That He Is the Perfect Father

Fourthly, we need to live with the assurance that he is the perfect Father. Read on in verse nine: "Or what man among you, who when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask him?"

Any honest Christian parent, of whom most of you are, knows that in some way, they have not parented as they ought and have made mistakes. Yet at the same time, no matter how strained things may be, no parent does not deeply love their children.

Here is Jesus' point: a loaf of bread would not be exchanged for a stone, nor a fish for a snake, even by failed and fallible human parents. Though Jesus here confirms the common depravity of man, saying "you, being evil" yet there is still love in our hearts for our children. But now, watch what Jesus does.

He uses a "how much more" argument. If we, being evil, can love our children and give them good gifts, how much more will a pure, holy, righteous heavenly Father, who is a Saviour and great Redeemer, do so for his people? Will he not so much more meet every need according to his will that the believer seeks? We are assured that there is no father like our heavenly Father. No one cares for or watches over your soul more than he does.

He Will Answer Every Prayer

The assurance that God cares also confirms my fifth point: he will answer every prayer. Jesus says, "How much more will your Father in heaven give what is good to those who ask him?"

Here Jesus teaches something that, for me at least, was life-altering in my study. This gives us a profound perspective on prayer: Jesus promises that every prayer is heard and answered.

Now, you might say, "But wait a minute; there are things I've been praying about for quite some time that have not turned out as I prayed." What about that?

This is where we become so carnally minded. Consider Jesus’ own illustration: the loaf and the stone, the fish and the snake. You see when we pray, we think we always know when bread is bread and when a stone is a stone.

What do I mean by that?

When we pray for something, we believe that the best possible outcome—the bread—is exactly what we have prayed for. We presume we are omniscient; we presume we know what is good for us and others. We forget that only God knows all things and knows what is best for us more than we do.

Let me give you a personal illustration.

I have observed that when I have been most sick in my life, my prayer life has greatly benefited from it. When I am most unwell, I become far more conscious of my mortality, and suddenly pray far more. The great irony is that while I am praying that God would heal my body, seeking the bread, might in fact be more like a stone to me. Because once healed, perhaps I will pray less!

The Apostle Paul prayed that God would remove what Paul called the thorn in his flesh. We do not know exactly what it was, but it tormented him, and he prayed for its removal. God, however, knew better and said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness." See, Paul did not understand what was bread and what was stone either.

Consider Jesus' words in Matthew 17:20: "For truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you." I have pondered that text for a number of years, sometimes confused by it. What exactly is Jesus promising? Will a mountain really move when the believer prays? What does he mean?

Well, it is quite literal when we understand prayer: when prayer is prayed in accordance with God's will, the mountain will move because God willed it. He knows, better than we ever could, when bread is bread and when a stone is a stone; when what we ask for is good for us and when it is not, even if we do not understand. When prayer is prayed according to God's will, the mountain will move.

All manner of things will be accomplished for the believer who presses on and earnestly seeks the Lord's intervention, for his will is stirred to do the impossible for us. Since he knows bread from stone better than we do, we often misinterpret the results. But know this: Christian, you have an audience and the assurance that he cares and will answer. Psalm 34:15 says, "The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears are open to their cry." This means you can keep praying in faith.

You can also pray, "Lord, help me to pray in accordance with your will, since I know that is exactly what I need right now." This prayer is always answered.

Into Action

A sixth and final point: this spiritual life, this grace that we daily appropriate, must translate into action toward others. Verse twelve is placed here deliberately by Matthew. It may seem a little disjointed, you might think verse twelve should actually follow verse six, since it seems to conclude Jesus' teaching on judging others. As we saw last week, he taught: "Do not judge, lest you be judged," and so on.

You might expect verse twelve to follow immediately, wrapping up that section. Why, then, does Matthew place the Golden Rule where he does? I believe Matthew, as superintended by the Holy Spirit, knew exactly what he was doing. Before concluding the section on judging others, he left it a little open. Then, in verses seven to eleven, Jesus reminds us of God's undeserved dealings with us and how we need to appropriate grace from him for our Christian lives. Only once we have that knowledge are we prepared to hear the conclusion on judging others.

So, Jesus gives us the so-called Golden Rule: "In everything, therefore, treat people the way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets." Interestingly, this saying is not original to Jesus; he adapts it. It is found in older Jewish writings, and even in some secular religions and their philosophical writings. Of itself, it may seem a plain statement, but Jesus adds a unique twist not found in its other similar appearances.

In every other occurrence in human writings, the Golden Rule appears in the negative, such as: 'Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.' In that form, it is something that can be mastered; as long as you do not do something, you are fine. But when stated positively, as Jesus does, it becomes an infinite command, because it requires us to go out and actively treat people in a certain way. There is, therefore, no fulfilment of the Golden Rule; this is a lifelong principle of character to be embodied by the Christian.

This is the kind of character produced by those who appropriate God's grace for their own lives and then walk in it toward others. By saying 'this is the Law and the Prophets,' Jesus means that this is the thrust of the Old Testament regarding the governing of relationships. This is the essence of what God requires for our human relationships: treat others the way you want them to treat you.

It is a straightforward blueprint for how God would have us treat others. He tells us we simply need to ask ourselves how we would like to be treated. I will close with a quote by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who puts it this way: "He is really saying that if you are in trouble at all as to how you should deal with others and behave with respect to them, this is how you should act. You do not start with the other person; you start by asking yourself, 'What is it I like? What are the things that please me? What are the things that help and encourage me?'"

I believe that if we took Jesus' words here seriously in verse twelve concerning the Golden Rule, it would transform our relationships. Our tendency as Christians is to reduce it to how the secular writings present it: "Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you." That gives us a way out, an escape route, a way to avoid being active in loving others. But when the Lord Jesus puts it positively, we realise it is something we must go out and pursue: we must do to others what we would have them do to us. We are to love others as we wish to be loved, to speak to them as we wish they would speak to us. Do you see?

And I remind you again: this is all as those who have appropriated the grace of God for power to live the Christian life, a life that on our own is impossible, but made possible only when we take unto ourselves all that God has supplied, that we might live it.