God Of The Impossible

Mattew 7:7 – 29 – God of the Impossible

This is a whole chunk of Matthew’s Gospel and forms the end of the Sermon-on-the-Mount, which started back at the beginning of chapter 5. We normally study these sections individually and could preach a whole sermon on each of them, but today we are going to take an overview and consider what they mean in the context of the whole of the sermon Jesus is preaching.

It’s a big, set-piece sermon, that He probably taught many times, in various different ways, in many different places, giving more emphasis to one or more points as the setting and situation demanded. So whenever Jesus stops in a town to preach, the Sermon-on-the-Mount is probably the core of what he’s teaching.

Matthew chapter 7 is the conclusion of the sermon, that started gently enough in chapter 5, with ‘The blessings’. However, there is nothing gentle about the ending of His sermon. As the Sermon-on-the-Mount progresses Jesus makes more and more demands on His listeners. He has not come to abolish the Law-of-Moses, He tells His listeners, quite the contrary: He holds his followers to a much higher standard than the Law-of-Moses, higher even, than the meticulous rule-keeping of the Pharisees. Jesus demands total purity, of heart, mind, and spirit – an impossible standard for anyone to reach.

We might conclude Jesus is exaggerating, in order to show how important these commands of His are. But I can assure you He is not. He is absolutely serious about the levels of perfection He demands from his followers – from us.

As the end of the sermon approaches, Jesus forces us to reconsider what he has already said, from different angles, and with ever-increasing degrees of urgency and seriousness. We are continually cycled back to the beginning of the sermon, to reconsider what we have already heard.

Jesus tells us to Ask, Seek, and Knock. The illustration, about fish, snakes, and bread, he gives us after this command, makes it absolutely clear that God loves to answer, loves to reveal Himself, and loves to open the gates of heaven. But we need to be both earnest and persistent.

What do we ask for, what do we seek? We seek to be like those who He has already said are blessed. We seek to be comforted, to be filled, to be shown mercy. On what door to we knock? We knock on the door to the Kingdom of Heaven.

Jesus says the whole Law and The Prophets (in other words, the whole of the Old Testament) are summed up by the phrase – “Treat others the way you would like them to treat you.” This is often called the Golden Rule. However, Jesus makes it clear that this is not the end point, but the starting point. The golden rule only sums up the Law and The Prophets.

Jesus has already demanded that we do better. That we be more pure, holy, and righteous than the Law and The Prophets, if we wish to gain access to the Kingdom of Heaven. So this cannot be the whole story, there must be more.

Then Jesus tells us to enter through the narrow gate, which is small and difficult to find, instead of the wide gate, which is broad and easy to find, but does not leads to the Kingdom-of-God.

How then, despite being good people, are we to find this gate, if it is so small and difficult? Again we are thrown back to the beginning of the sermon. We know what we must do to find the narrow way, we must be like the people who are blessed. The difficulty, is how do we become people like that?

The clues start to add up as the sermon comes to a conclusion. Jesus goes on to let us figure out for ourselves, what good teachers and good disciples look like, by first telling us what bad ones look like:

You can tell a bad prophet or teacher of the word, by looking at the fruits of their work and their lives. What does bad fruit look like? Well Jesus has just preached a whole sermon on what goods fruit looks like, so turn back to the start of chapter 5 and work your way through, substituting all the good stuff for its opposite:

A bad prophet or teacher of the word is someone who is,

• Self-satisfied and full of themselves,

• Self-sufficient, self-reliant, full of self-confidence, with no need of God

• Forceful, arrogant and seeks only their own ends

• Who hungers for fame, fortune, power, and celebrity status

That is just the first four of the Beatitudes turned into opposites, but I’m sure you get the idea. So here is your homework, when you get home, work your way through the whole sermon on the mount, turning all the positives into negatives.