Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has been teaching his disciples the principles for kingdom living. He began with the beatitudes, which describes the characteristics of someone who is truly born again, and they’re progression toward godliness. They come to the Lord poor in spirit, recognizing that they have nothing that makes them worthy of the Lord even casting a glance their way, but they know they desperately need God. So, broken and bankrupt they mourn over their sinfulness and the sinfulness of others.
In gentleness and recognizing their unworthiness, they turn to the Lord and hunger and thirst after His righteousness. Not their righteousness, because they have none, but His, because He will give His righteousness freely to all who truly seek Him. Since they have received His mercy, they are merciful toward others, and in purity of heart, they become peacemakers who not only seek peace among men, but more importantly, they guide others toward the same peace with God that they have.
Then Jesus gave us the key to understanding His Sermon by telling us that unless our righteousness exceeded the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees, then we would never see the kingdom of God. In other words, the scribes and pharisees sought after a righteousness that was based upon the works of the flesh, while the citizens of the kingdom would seek God’s righteousness through faith in Christ, not merely performing the outward letter of the law, but living according to the spirit of the law.
In chapter 6 we saw that the pharisees made a show of their religion in order to be seen by others. They would pray, give their tithes and offerings, and fast in such a way that everyone would know what they were doing. They would receive their reward from men, but the citizens of the kingdom would practice their good deeds and almsgiving in secret, seeking only to please God, not man.
And then last week, we learned that kingdom citizens can help others take the speck of sawdust out of their eyes, by first getting the huge log out of our own eyes so that we can see better to help them. Our judgment of others should never be harsh, or in a manner that condemns, but it should come from a place that only wants the best for our brother, recognizing how the Lord has dealt with us so that we can deal with others in the same way. Our sins were great and many and His mercy and grace freed us from our sin and gave us liberty in Christ. This is how we are to deal with others who are struggling—we give to them in the same manner that Christ gave to us.
Friends, everything that Jesus has taught us so far in the Sermon on the Mount has led us to where we are today. God’s standards for living are impossible for us to achieve on our own. For example, how can we love those who hate us so much that their only desire to kill us? How can we be perfect like our heavenly Father is perfect? How can we keep growing in our kingdom character?
Well, according to the Lord, if we want to develop and maintain the kingdom’s standards, then we must ask, seek, and knock…or in other words…
I. We Pray for It.
Mat 7:7-8 "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. (8) For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.
Now, this isn’t the end of the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, but He is winding it down and this is the end of His teachings about the righteousness of the kingdom. But you can’t take what He’s saying here out of context, which many people tend to do. They’ll go to this section and pull it out and turn it into a stand-alone topic or a blank check, so to speak. That if they ask for anything in faith, they’ll receive it. They’ll say that we can pray for health, wealth, and our best life now, and He’ll give it to us.
But is that what He’s talking about here? Remember, He’s still on the Mount preaching His sermon, and up to this point He’s been preaching on the kingdom characteristics His followers should be demonstrating in their lives. Our righteousness has to exceed the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees, doesn’t it? Well, how do we do that? How do we attain the high mark He has set before us?
Well, we do that through prayer! If we want to attain to our high calling in Christ, then we will follow His example and pray! Throughout the gospels, we find Jesus seeking solitude so that He can spend time with His Father in prayer. He has given a lot of time speaking on prayer, and He even gave a model prayer for us to follow. And the simple fact that He returns to prayer over and over should give us an understanding of how important prayer is in the kingdom.
It has been said that prayer is oxygen to the Christian, so, like Paul tells us, we should 1Th 5:17 pray without ceasing. In a similar way that we naturally inhale and exhale our breath without stopping, in like manner we should pray. Then John tells us that if we want to be heard, we must pray according to God’s will. 1Jn 5:14 Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.
When we pray according to the Lord’s will, we can be sure that He will hear us, but in order for us to know how to pray according to God’s will, it would help for us to know what His will is, wouldn’t it? So, to know God’s will, we need to study God’s word! His promise is that if we pray according to His will, we will receive what we ask, seek, and knock for.
And according to the context of this whole sermon, what kingdom citizens will be asking, seeking, and knocking for the most is righteousness. Not the things of this world. Not health, wealth, and prosperity, but God’s righteousness because we will hunger and thirst after it. And what did He say about those who hunger and thirst after righteousness? Didn’t He say that they were “blessed” and that they would be “filled”?
So, to develop and maintain kingdom characteristics, number 1, we pray for it. But number 2…
II. We Pray Persistently for It.
Once again, verses 7 & 8 tells us Mat 7:7-8 "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. (8) For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.
Now, I’m sure you may have heard this before, but in the original language, when Jesus said to ask, seek, and knock, the Greek words He used mean more that just ask, seek, and knock; they mean to continue that action, to keep on asking, to keep on seeking, and to keep on knocking.
So, Christ is not only telling us to pray for kingdom character, but to pray for it persistently. To pray for it and to keep on praying for it. You know, it’s one thing to pray for a heart to share the gospel, or to pray to stop lusting, or to pray for healing, but it’s something else altogether to pray for those things constantly! Persistent prayer shows a desperate desire, so when we persistently pray for righteousness, our God will reward our fervor.
Look at what the Lord said in the parallel passage in Luke’s gospel. Luk 11:5-9 And He said to them, "Which of you shall have a friend, and go to him at midnight and say to him, 'Friend, lend me three loaves; (6) for a friend of mine has come to me on his journey, and I have nothing to set before him'; (7) and he will answer from within and say, 'Do not trouble me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give to you'? (8) I say to you, though he will not rise and give to him because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will rise and give him as many as he needs. (9) "So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
How many of you know this kind of persistence in prayer when it comes to major financial problems you might have faced in the past, or even right now? How many understand what it means to be persistent in prayer when someone you know and love is facing a battle with cancer, or a heart issue, or maybe a tumor that’s been discovered?
Persistence is needed because we are in a constant battle with sin and the evil one. We may stumble, and we may make mistakes, but we must never give up in prayer until God has healed, delivered, or told us to stop.
If we are going to grow in kingdom character, then we must pray with persistence like Jesus did in the wilderness, hungry, and teaching the devil a thing or two about the Bible. We need to pray like He did in the hours before going to the cross.
We need to pray to grow in kingdom character. We need to pray for it persistently, and we need to…
III. We Pray for it in Faith.
Mat 7:9-11 Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? (10) Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? (11) 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 good things to those who ask Him!
Now, I’ve read a lot of commentaries and I’ve heard many sermons that went into great detail about verses 9 & 10, and what the stone and the serpent meant, but you know, sometimes an illustration is just an illustration, and when the Lord follows up those 2 verses with His explanation of what He meant, then there’s really no need to get all fancy with our explanations.
If a child of ours is hungry and asking for something to eat, I doubt there are any loving fathers out there who would give them the opposite of what they asked for. If your kid is hungry, you get him some food. It’s as simple as that. So, if we being the sinful beings we are, would go out of our way to provide for our children, then how much more, would our heavenly Father who by the way, gave His only begotten Son for us—how much more would He give us what we need?
So, when we pray in faith for something we desperately seek after, the Father will hear and answer us. Jesus has already said that if we ask, seek, and knock we will receive what we’ve asked for, but check out what else the Bible says about prayer and faith.
Heb 11:6 But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
Jas 1:5-8 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him. (6) But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. (7) For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; (8) he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.
Luk 17:6 …"If you have faith as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be pulled up by the roots and be planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.
Friends, in order to receive God’s promises, including His promise of righteousness, we must pray with total confidence in God’s character. If God has promised something, then we must believe that He will do as He has promised, otherwise, He won’t answer because a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.
So, to grow in kingdom character we must pray, pray with persistence, and pray in faith. But the last thing I want to point out is that as we pray and seek God to grow us in our kingdom citizenship, we must also...
IV. We Imitate God’s Love.
Mat 7:12 Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
For years the basic musical instrument was the harpsichord. As a key is depressed and a string is plucked, a certain note would sound, but the note wasn’t really a pure sound and the mechanism to playing this thing was slow and limiting. Around the end of the 18th century, some unknown musician modified the harpsichord so that hammers struck the string instead of plucking them with a guitar pick. It was a minor change but a major improvement that would radically enhance the entire musical world.
This is the sort of revolutionary change that Jesus made with the golden rule. Up to this point, many others around the world expressed something very similar, but it was always in the negative. For example, the Jewish rabbi Hillel said, “What is hateful to yourself, do not to someone else.” Confucius taught, “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” Greek king Nicocles wrote, “Do not do to others the thing that makes you angry when you experience them at the hands of other people.” And then Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “What you avoid suffering yourself, do not afflict on others.”
Those negative expressions go only as far as sinful man can go, and they are essentially expressions of self-interest, not love. The motivation behind them is basically selfish. But when Jesus said, “whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them,” He turned the selfish negative into a positive, making it much harder to do. He turned what many others had spoken as a self defense measure into something that goes on the offensive. Instead of not doing something, we are to take bold action and do something. We are to do good to others!
You see, it’s one thing to not slander someone, but it’s another to always edify them and build them up. It’s one thing to not steal from our neighbor, but it’s another to give to them. The negative version tells us to not sin, but the positive version tells us to do good, to show love. And as Jesus said, love summarizes God’s commands in the law and the prophets and love also summarizes His Sermon on the Mount.
Eph 5:1-2 Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. (2) And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.
Eph 4:32 And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.
Friends, the standards of God’s kingdom are impossible to achieve through our own human effort. So, if you truly want to grow in kingdom character, then to put it simply, you must first believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, because when you believe in Him, He will save you and make you into a totally new person through the new birth.
Then you must earnestly and without ceasing ask, seek, and knock because Mat 7:8 …everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.
