Transcription
So if you are new to the Bible, you're going to want to turn to the middle and turn right. Matthew is the first book in the New Testament. The New Testament starts with the life of Jesus. And then everything that happened from the life of Jesus on the Old Testament is the story of Israel and how God worked in the nation of Israel and primed the world for the Messiah to come through the nation of Israel. So the Bible is about Jesus. The Old Testament talks about what happens before Jesus. The New Testament talks about Jesus and what he's done for the world. So we as a church are going through one of the books in the New Testament called Matthew, and Matthew is just recounting and telling the story of Jesus and Jesus's teaching. So we're in this famous section called the Sermon on the Mount.
Have you ever heard of the Sermon on the Mount? Show of hands? A few of you, yes. Okay. So Jesus, this is a teaching that Jesus gave to a crowd sitting by the Sea of Galilee. So he's about 30 years old and he's been teaching in these Jewish sites called synagogues all around this region of Galilee. That's a big body of water. There's these little towns along around this big giant lake and Jesus has been teaching from town to town and he's been healing people. So he's becoming popular and people want to know where's this guy get his power from? And he's teaching with authority. So there comes a point where Jesus teaches from a hillside this message. So we are over two thirds of the way through this because it starts in chapter five. We're in chapter seven. It goes, and one of the things that we've seen is that Jesus is describing the society, what he calls the kingdom that he's bringing to account, that he's bringing into the world. So we've talked about these parallel kingdoms, the idea of how we live in America and we kind of have our culture and there's a lot of things that make up our culture that we have subcultures within the American Western culture, but we generally have just kind of like western society or western culture. Well, Jesus comes in and he says, I'm bringing to bear, I'm bringing onto the scene the kingdom of Heaven. And he's the king of that kingdom, but he has a kingdom, doesn't just have a king, but it also has a value system.
It has an ethic of what's right and what's wrong. And so Jesus has been teaching all about his kingdom throughout the Sermon on the Mount. So we're in chapter seven last week. We looked at this whole idea of judging and we looked at that famous verse that says, judge, not lest you be judged. And we kind of walked through that text. Now we're getting into this section about prayer, which is a section just about talking to God. We talked about prayer already one time, but this is going to kind of cover some new parts about prayer, super practical. So all of us, at any point in the day, the amazing thing about prayer is that you can talk to God anywhere. You could be in prison, you could be locked up and you could be stuck in traffic and you could talk to God. You could be waiting in the grocery store at Walmart in those long lines that they have, and you could talk to God, right?
Yeah. And so Jesus is like He is a great teacher, all about prayer. And the great thing about the last book that we studied together as a church was Hebrews, is that Jesus' full-time job is to help you and I be spiritually connected to God the Father. That's his full-time job. So Jesus is deeply invested, right? What's your full-time job? Maybe you're a student. Maybe you're looking for a full-time job. Maybe you work for the government or maybe you, whatever it is, whatever your full-time, Jesus has a full-time job, but he never clocks out his full-time. Job is to help you and I be close to the Father. He's even tells us, look, there's a throne. It's a throne of God's grace that God sits on. And he says, I want you to boldly approach that throne. I want you to come into the presence of God and just be able to talk to God, not like a shy little mouse, but with boldness.
Like you can talk to your heavenly Father about anything that's on your heart, if you're upset, if you're angry, if you're confused, all that is with inbounds because of who Jesus is, what he's done. Okay? We're going to get to that in just a second. I'm going to explain a little bit. I'm going to use my iPad and draw up here the three circles so that you can kind of understand how this all works together. But let's, first, let's look at this text. Now imagine that you are a parent, okay? Imagine that you're a parent and you have little Susie or little Jimmy comes to you and says, could I have some bread? Or he says, could I have a tuna fish sandwich right now, any kind of parent, you don't really have to be a special kind of parent to feed your kid, right?
Take for just as an opposite example. Here's a parent, a sadistic parent who this poor boy has asked his dad for some bread and he's feeding him some stones, or this parent who's decided instead of giving his child a fish, he's giving him a snake to eat. No parent would do that, right? That would be horrible. I've worked with a lot of parents where the bar's really low and we've got some parenting issues in this city, but pretty much most of the parents I run into at least are trying to get their kids some food.
Well, Jesus is going to borrow from that image of what's just common sense to explain your heavenly Father. But here's the thing, here's the thing. Some of you, in your own experience of talking with God, you may feel like that's how God is, that you've asked for things and instead you're getting back snakes and rocks, and Jesus is coming into your world and into my world and he's saying, listen, I want you. It's really important for you to understand who God is when you come and pray, when you come to talk to him. So let's read over this text together and then we're going to try to understand it better. See what Jesus is talking about. So Jesus is this. He says, ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you'll find knock and the door will be open to you. For everyone who asks, receives, and the one who seeks finds and the one who knocks the door will be opened.
Who among you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, we'll give him a snake. If you then who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give good things to those who ask him? Therefore, whatever you want others to do for you, do also the same for them. For this is the law and the prophets. Let's pray for a second and let's ask God to help us understand this text. God, we pray and ask your son, Jesus taught this to his followers. It's recorded for us, and now we're reading it and we ask that your spirit help us to understand these things and apply them in our lives, and we ask this in Jesus' name, amen.
When we look at a text like this, there's a number of different objections that people come up with. The first objection may be this objection around unanswered prayer. You may say, I've asked for things in prayer and I haven't received them. Why didn't God answer my prayer? People may feel like their experience contradicts this promise of receiving what they've asked for. Other times, people struggle with this idea of understanding God's will. What should I ask for? And then other times people are wrestling with the idea of timing. I've been seeking and knocking for a long time. People will say, and yet there is no answer. God will not respond. The issue of divine timing versus our expectations can be a significant hurdle for our faith. And then the nature of good gifts, that's another objection that people have. What exactly are the good things that God gives?
So let's look at this because this is part of Jesus's teaching, part of teaching on prayer. If we were going to break this text down, verses seven and eight is this command to ask to seek and to knock. And then there is an explanation around it of here's who that person who does this, here's who they will be. And then in verses nine through 11, we have this earthly illustration that makes the point all that much more clear. And then verse 12 is this famous what we call the golden rule. Let's look at verses seven and eight. Ask, seek and knock. So Jesus, look what he says. He says, ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find knock and the door will be open to you. So Jesus is teaching. Imagine Jesus is up on a hillside and he's teaching his disciples to ask and to seek and to knock, and do you see what he promises?
What does he say will be for the one who asks? What are they going to have? It will be given to them. If you seek, what are you going to find? You're going to find, right? You're going to find and if you knock, what do you get? The door will be open. This is one of those where I've said to you, sometimes I feel like Jesus is a bit or God himself is overextended in his promises because all of a sudden you go like, wait a second, can I ask for anything? What if I want the Lamborghini that is that included in this picture? Can I ask for a mansion? And so it's like, what is Jesus doing here? Well, first of all, we've got to remember the context. Who's He teaching? It says in Matthew five, one and two that it's his followers that he's teaching.
So there is probably the crowds that are listening to this, but Jesus is specifically teaching people who have committed their life to him, so they're in a relationship with Jesus. There is a loyalty and commitment and really a surrender. You know what the word surrender means? When one nation is at war with another and they decide to surrender, they give up their stake in the fight and they throw up the white flag and they say, I surrender. That's kind of the relationship that a follower of Jesus needs to have where you say, I surrender to you God that you would win in my life. I'm giving my life over to you. Jesus is teaching those kind of people to pray and he's saying to those people, I want you to be the ones that are asking and the ones that are seeking and the ones that are knocking. One of the things I think that's surprising to me, and tell me if this is surprising to you, you go through this teaching by Jesus and the spirituality that Jesus is teaching is very proactive.
It's pushing into this spiritual realm beyond this position of just kind of like Buddhism. Buddhism is very much be water and just kind of flow, right? Is that right? You have a background in this is my Buddhist expert down here. He studied Buddhism quite a bit, right? And it's very much like passive. Whereas here Jesus is saying, no, I want you to be askers. I want you to be seekers. I want you to be knockers. And then he's attaching. And still this blows my mind every time I see it. I mean I've seen this for I am 42 and I've seen this for a long time, and yet it blows my mind that he says it will be. It's not. It might be it will be.
You will find the door will be opened to you. Now, I am naturally skeptical and so I come to God and I read these things and I think of purchasing a car and all the 15 pages of fine print of like, I'm sure God, when you wrote this, there's some page in the Bible with all the fine print where it's like I'm missing something where that kind of explains away how this can't mean what it says and our human tendency, why do we want to expect that? Because we want to protect ourselves, right? When we read this, rather than just taking it for what it says, we want to look for the fine print in the exceptions to the rule so that it doesn't mean this grand like ask, seek and knock, but Jesus doesn't just say this here. He says this many times to his disciples.
If you take all of the times, Jesus teaches about prayer in Matthew. And then another book about Jesus is the book of Mark and then Luke and John, those are four different books that are telling the story of Jesus and his teachings. All of those books give these kind of promises and they should push us as followers to be actively asking, seeking and knocking with full expectations that God's going to work. So he says, I want you to ask. I want you to seek and I want you to knock. And then if this wasn't enough, he has another part of the teaching and he says, for everyone, everyone who asks, receives and the one who seeks finds and the one who knocks the door will be opened. This is a substantiation where he is just coming along and he's saying, why am I telling you to do this? I'm telling you this because the one, everyone who is an asker is also a one who receives, and the one who's a seeker is one who finds and one who's a door knocker is the one who has the door opened to them.
So Jesus presenting his kingdom a saying, come and live in my kingdom with me. Come be a follower of me. Come let me wash away your sin. Come let me just adopt you into my family. Let me just give you fresh vision and give you eyes to see how I designed you. Let me love you and bring you into this new kingdom. This is who I want you to be living in my kingdom, asking, seeking and knocking. You got to have a tender heart. You can't be the skeptic. You got to just go with God and let him reveal what this means. Okay, so you come back at me and you're like, but I've prayed and God didn't answer that prayer. I asked for this and it didn't happen, and how does this reconcile with the lived experience? I don't fully know. I know that in James, James says that you don't have certain things in your life because you don't ask, and then there's other times where you're asking for stuff, but you're asking for it so that you're asking for it.
He says, this is James for if you want to look it up, he says you're asking for it in the wrong way because you just want to use it, right? You want to use it for in a selfish way. So there are reasons why God maybe says no, but Jesus here he is not dealing with that In this text here, he really wants you and I to be asking, seeking and knocking. Then he's going to illustrate it. He's going to illustrate it by saying this. Who among you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Right? Who's going to do that? Or if he asks for a fish, we'll give him a snake. The clue. Here's the idea, the clue to understanding our struggle with prayer. It doesn't lie in the method, but it lies in the relationship. Jesus is bringing forward this idea of this. He's your father. You are a daughter or a son in this kingdom, and God is going to deal with you according to his kindness.
If
We go back here in verse 11, he says, if you then who are evil? Now, when you hear that, does that kind of rub you the wrong way that you're evil here? Jesus is saying if you being evil and then he's going to make his point. But doesn't that hurt a little bit? Here's what Jesus is saying. You're not perfect. You don't line up with God's standard of holiness. The Bible teaches that none of us are that all of us have sinned. We've all fallen short of God's perfect standard. Now, are there people who are more evil and more wicked like a Hitler than others? Yeah, there are, but Jesus is saying, look, you generally are just selfish. You're generally bent towards sin and yet, and your parents were, and yet they fed you. He says, if you are evil and you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give good things to those who ask him?
Do you see how he lays out the logic here? He's moving you from just this earthly layer. He's taking you from where you are at and your relationship with your parents and maybe the way that you parent your kids. He's saying, look, if you provide for your kids, how much greater is your heavenly Father that he wants to give you the good things? Your Father in heaven will give you good things to those who ask him. This is the kind of logic that the New Testament use all throughout. If this is your normal experience with parenting, how much more so is God a good heavenly Father?
Listen, the teaching here from Jesus is simple. Assimilating it into your experience is difficult because you and I have gone through things in our life that are painful and it is easy for us to associate those things with God saying, God, if you are a good heavenly Father, why would you let that happen to me? Why would you let me get sick? Why would you let that person treat me in this way? Why would you let me make that mistake over here? And it is easy to stack up these things in our minds and say, well, if God's good, why would he allow this to happen? Well, the Bible addresses that. The book of Job is the most important philosophical treaties on this. You look through the book of Job and one of the things that you see is that God allows people who are generally good to be tempted by Satan and to go through difficult things.
It's a horrible account, this thing that God allows job to go through. And yet at the end of the story Job, in his conversation with God, job has held onto his faith through a very difficult trial, and God answers job's questions in a sense, or basically responds back to all of the angst that Job feels. And God just says, look, I'm bigger than all of this stuff, and rewards Job for his integrity having gone through his trial and blesses him like 10 times more. But it's a process where the goodness of God is in question through his life. Jesus is teaching, Hey, listen, the world that you live in is broken, but my people, I'm calling my people to be asking, seeking and knocking. What has Jesus been doing? Why does Jesus have this huge crowd that's listening to him on a mountain side because he's been teaching and he's been healing, he's been taking people who are injured and sick and suffering, and he has been doing these miraculously good things and he's anticipating the breaking out of his kingdom just completely overruling the darkness in the world.
And then he says, I'm here. Jesus comes on the scene to basically rescue broken, hurting, sinful humans from evil and bring them into his kingdom. What I want to do is I want to spend a minute just kind of drawing out for you what this looks like. So I'm going to take over the screen, Hayden with my iPad, and I'm not sure if we'll be able to get it back for the last song, so if you just be ready to move forward. But what I want to do is I want to draw for you the three circles. So let me find a blank page here. And if somebody asks you comes to you and they just ask you, how do I have a relationship with Jesus? This is one of the easiest ways to explain it, and I want to explain to you, how does prayer fit into this?
Because sometimes the Bible, if you just have a Bible, it looks gigantic and kind of confusing, and you're like, what's going on here? What is all of this stuff? So this is what this diagram is called, the three circles, and I'm going to put up here in this left hand circle a heart, and this circle represents what you long for when you wake up in the morning or when I was driving into the city, there's this just beautiful sunrise and there's this sense of, yeah, that is just beautiful when you're loved by somebody else and you have that sense of being accepted and welcomed in, there's a sense of, yeah, this is what life is about. This is what's good.
The reason there's a heart there is because being loved is so central to who we are as humans, and we're going to call this God's design. When you look at the Bible, especially the first two chapters of the Bible, what you see is that God created the world and it was really good. It was like everything that you long for, of being loved and being in good, healthy relationships, and there's no more pain and death. That's how God designed the world. But at the same time, our lived experience is not over here in God's design. Instead, we live in this world where there's brokenness and brokenness would include pain, it would include sickness, death, what else? What else would broken relationships hurt?
Scars, hate. Yeah, all of that is very real, right? This is where we want to live. This is what we know. This is what we feel like we were designed for, was this world of love, of acceptance, of purpose. And yet, for so many of us, our experience has been this experience of deep pain. The Bible says that while we were created to live according to God's design, the first humans and every human since them have actually ran away from God's design in rebellion away from God. Here's a guy, he's running as fast as he can, little stick man, and this is called, this is what the Bible calls sin. It's just basically running away from God's design in disobedience, not living how God designed us, but instead living over there. And our experience is just, everything's broken. Now, nobody wants to live a broken life. Nobody wants to hang out over there with hate and death. And so the human experience is how do I get back to God's design? And one of the things that we see is that people are trying really hard. People will run hard by, maybe it's through romance, romance or maybe it's through drugs trying to run away from their pain, alcohol. Maybe it's work, maybe it's religion.
People are running away trying to run away from their pain, but the further they make these efforts, the further they're getting away from God's design. The Bible teaches that this is the human experience, but God didn't make the world to be like this, to be stuck in this place. And so the Bible says that God sent his son Jesus. He sent him down into the world, his only begotten son, and Jesus died on the cross. And the reason Jesus died on the cross was because this sin is legal guilt. So there's an accumulation of guilt. This is the punishment, and this guilt needs to be taken away. It has to be dealt with. And God's like, look, I want you to live over here, but you can't fix it because look it, the more you try to fix it, the more you're running away from God.
So he sent Jesus into the world. Jesus died on the cross. The cross was a death. Jesus died the death that you and I should have died. But Jesus, when he died, because he was perfect, he was the substitute payment for our guilt. We have an accumulation of guilt. Jesus took on himself our guilt so that we could be reconciled back with God. So the only way to return back to God's design is through Jesus. Why do Christians talk so much about Jesus? It's because Jesus is the answer. Jesus is the answer to all of the sin and the death and the brokenness that we've brought into the world that we've brought on ourselves. And so the response to this is to do two things. One is to repent. That means that you're ready to turn away, you're ready to turn away from your guilt, and you're ready to believe in Jesus.
Those are the only things. Now you say, well, what about cleaning up my act? I have to get rid of my drugs, or don't I have to stop lying? Yeah, those things are good to do, but the only thing that's going to reconcile you back with God is if you are willing to repent and believe in Jesus and make him the king. Let's put a crown here. Let's put a crown on Jesus. Make Jesus the king in your life the reason, look, you and I can't fix it. We've tried to fix it. Chased relationships, drugs, alcohol, jobs, religion, all kinds of efforts to fix the problem. Once you believe in Jesus, he begins to take you and restore you back to God's design. Some of you have gotten there where you're like, you've gotten to that point and you decide, okay, I'm ready. I'm ready to repent and believe in Jesus.
Here's what I want you to know this morning. If all of this kind of passes you by and it's like, I don't know about this church thing and I don't know what's going on, but you know this, that your life is characterized by pain and death and suffering. Jesus is speaking to you through the Bible this morning and he's saying, listen, I've made a way for you to have a relationship with me, and I want you to talk to me. I want you to seek, I want you to ask. I want you to knock because I haven't left you here. I came into the world to restore you back to this place. And for those of us that have made that decision, we are on a journey where we have a bit of it now, where we're experiencing God's design a little bit. We get into this space here, and there's people, this hopefully is a place where you're loved and you're accepted and it's like, yeah, maybe you had a bad attitude this last week.
Maybe you got in trouble this last week. Maybe things were not good, but you're loved here. It's a little taste of the amazing future that we have because of what Jesus has done for us on the cross. The invitation is yours. Jesus comes along and he makes this invitation clear to his followers. He says, listen, I want you to be restored back to this place of love. If you'll just accept it in a minute, we're going to take a communion, communion for the church. This is, it's like a symbolic meal. It's a meal that we share together. Remembering what Jesus did here on the cross, how he died for us on the cross, and he was raised to give us new life. I want to invite you as you take the communion elements that if you have not yet had that conversation with God, where you say, I'm ready to turn from my sin and I'm ready to believe, then now's the time to do it.
This meal, this celebratory meal, it's a celebration because we're being restored. We're being restored back to God's design. We are being given new life. It's beautiful. So let me pray, and then we're going to sing a song, and as that music is playing, I'm going to encourage you to come and receive the elements. Lord, we thank you this morning for the fact that Jesus came into the world to die for our sin. Thank you for giving us new life. We're so thankful for just the life and the hope and the future that we have in you. We pray that you would teach us to pray. Teach us to pray in the way that Jesus, you taught your disciples to pray. We want to be those that ask, seek and knock, and we want to find and receive and see the door opened this week. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.