God’s Generosity Matthew 7:7-11 Introduction You are here this morning for a reason. It is not an accident. You did not float in here on the winds of chance. God has something for you this morning. And although this is true every Sunday morning, every time we meet together to worship and open up God’s word, there is something about today’s message that makes it (if possible) even more true. Let’s read the text together and I’ll explain. Turn with me to Matt 7:7-11. <Read the text> The Central Trouble with Our Lives Now on first blush you might think that this is a passage about prayer. Ask God for things and he’ll hear you. But it is so...much…more than that! This is a passage rooting the Christian faith in a relationship with a heavenly father through his son, Jesus. This is a passage about the fatherhood of God. It’s a passage about what it means for us to be the children of God. And it is powerful! It is so powerful. Once you see that God is your heavenly father, everything in your life changes. Nothing’s the same. The great, great preacher of the last century, Martyn Lloyd-Jones sees this subject as so important, so critical to the Christian life, that he says this: “If you should ask me to state in one phrase what I regard as the greatest defect in most Christian lives I would say that it is our failure to know God as our Father as we should know him. That is our trouble, not difficulties about particular blessings. The central trouble still is that we do not know, as we ought to, that God is our Father.” “The central trouble,” he says, “is that we do not know, as we ought to, that God is our Father.” That is the central trouble. The greatest defect in most Christian lives. And I couldn’t agree more. But whether or not Lloyd-Jones believes it, or I believe it is irrelevant. It is completely irrelevant. The fundamental thing is that this (God as our heavenly father) is the thing that Jesus and John and Paul keep directing us back to. They continually point us to the profound significance of this one fact: if you are a Christian, you are a child of a heavenly father. And the greater a grasp you have on the significance of this fact, the greater you can experience all God has and is for you in the Christian faith. Your identity as God’s beloved child changes absolutely everything.  So I have prayed, nearly to tears, that you would grasp it this morning, that you would get it even for the first time today – and by that I don’t mean that you would become a Christian today (though I’m not excluding that) – but what I mean is that because this is such a defect in most Christian’s lives, I want to see you – you who are bona fide Christians leaving our time together in a new way. I want you to taste something of what it means for you to be a child of a heavenly (not earthly) father. Winding Down the Sermon on the Mount But we can’t start there. We’ve got to start with where Jesus starts in our passage – or rather, where Jesus ends. And we’ve got to start where Jesus ends because this text – Matt 7:7-11 – is not a stand-alone passage. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It represents Jesus winding down his most famous sermon: the Sermon on the Mount. Right before he concludes his message, which begins in v 13. Jesus winds his sermon down. Read the passage again with me. <Read the text> This is the end of the sermon. He’s winding it down – not introducing a new subject! I mean, if there’s one thing they teach you in preaching school is that you don’t introduce a new subject as you’re winding down! That’s called winding up! Jesus is ending his sermon here before he moves to his concluding (and sobering exhortations of vv 13 through the end). So if we’re going to understand vv 7-11, we’ve got to understand where we’ve been so far. And to this point, Jesus has essentially given us two things: the character of the Christian faith and the conduct of the Christian faith. The character of the Christian faith is the Beatitudes cf. Matt 5:3-12. <Read the text> The person who has believed the gospel of God’s grace is a person who is poor in spirit…etc. The Beatitudes are a thermometer of the gospel. They take your gospel temperature. They show you the extent and degree to which you are understanding and believing that your relationship with God is a sheer gift. Your resume didn’t get it. Your achievements didn’t get it for you. Nothing you have done has allowed you to be a partaker of the blessedness of the kingdom of God. And what Jesus is saying is that people who get that in spite of their weakness and frailty and shame and sin and foolishness God offers to rescue you anyway – people who are growing in their understanding of the sheer grace of the gospel are people like this. And now that we have become and are becoming new people - not nice people, but new people – now that we have become this way, Jesus moves to explain to us how we are supposed to live. It’s like this: Francis Chan “shut up” butterfly illustration. Now live like this. “Here is the conduct I expect from the people that I have changed and am changing by my grace.” Now I’m not going to read Matt 5:13 to 7:6 with you; I don’t need to. A few verses will work just fine cf. 5:20, 48. <Read the text> This is the standard that Jesus holds up to us. Christians are given an ethic – we are supposed to live a certain way. And I think I agree with Tim Keller when he says that what makes the Christian ethic so compelling is not simply that it is so high, but that it is so right. It rings true. Properly understood it resonates with us. You look at the ethics of this message and you say, “Yes! Yes!” Your heart and your soul say, “Yes! This is how life should be lived. If my neighbors lived like this, if everyone lived like this in their friendships, their marriages, their workplaces, with their money. If I could live a life without fear and anxiety. If I could be a person who was discerning and helpful and willing to say the hard thing without being judgmental. This is so right.” A Counterbalance to the Heavy Imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount And yet, although I agree completely with Tim Keller, I don’t think he’d disagree with me if I were to say, that as right as it is, it is equally high. Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. This is high. Now what are you supposed to do with this? If you have been a Christian even for 15 minutes – and I mean a real Christian, not somebody trying on the Christian faith like a pair of shoes – if you’ve been a Christian for even 15 minutes, and have tried to apply, to obey what Jesus commands in this sermon, you will find yourself coming up short. “Lust = adultery”? “Coldness, indifference, and hatred = murder”? And Jesus doesn’t stop. He’s unrelenting: How we should live in the world, how we should approach marriage, how we should speak with others, how we should respond when people wrong us, how we should treat our enemies, how (and that) we should give to the poor and pray and fast, how we should deal with money, how we should handle stress, how we confront other people, and, of course, it all gets summed up in v 12. <Read the text> In all, Jesus gives 66 imperatives alone! 66 imperatives! 66. And when you couple that kind of volume with what Jesus is actually teaching, with the content of his teaching, you are left with a recipe – I think – with a recipe for failure and disappointment and difficulty. If you don’t remember you are a child of the father, and look at the Christian life apart from that, you will only be discouraged. Christianity is not “ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you-but-what-you-can-do-for-your-country” message. It’s not a message about us taking the world on our shoulders. It’s an “ask your father and he will hear you” faith. It’s an ask and seek and knock proposition. Read it! <Read the text> Embarrass yourself asking. Shamelessly seek your father. Be like a little kid. Knock on his door in the middle of the night for wa-wa or a diaper change or because your blankey fell down and you need to be re-tucked in. Your father wants to hear from you. Your father loves helping you. He loves it! All of what Jesus calls us to do rests on the foundation that we do it (and can only do it) as we depend, like beggars starving for food, on our heavenly father. If all you do is look at the demands that Jesus sets before us, without seeing how much you mean to your father, you will say, “There’s no way I can do this!” And then you’ll see what a failure you are and your temptation will be either to give up entirely, become bitter and angry, or else one of those people that C S Lewis talks about in Mere Christianity: In the end, you will either give up trying to be good, or else become one of those people who, as they say, 'live for others' but always in a discontented grumbling way - always wondering why the others do not notice it more and always making a martyr of yourself. And once you have become that you will be a far greater pest to anyone who has to live with you than you would have been if you had remained frankly selfish. In other words, you’ll turn Christianity into moralism – you’ll turn the Christian faith into a system of ethics, divorced from a relationship with a living, loving heavenly father. This passage reminds us that Christianity is not a matter of religion; it’s a matter of relationship. Now I know that the “it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship” language is a little bit tired and sloganeerish and probably somewhat out of date, but explained in a way that’s faithful to the teaching of the Bible, it can be a very helpful way of understanding the nature of Christianity. Religion says, “Do these things in order to be acceptable to God. And so you go about doing them. And you go about doing them, not only to be acceptable to God, but you go about doing them in order to put God at your command, to keep God at your disposal. And you go about doing them in order to feel superior to other people, to the people who don’t do them or won’t acknowledge them or who appear to fail more often than you do. Instead, Jesus says, “This is what a person’s life looks like when they become part of the family, when they are adopted as children of the heavenly father.” God makes you a certain person so that you can live a certain kind of life. He doesn’t require you to be a certain kind of person so that you can achieve it on your own. Your identity is not your resume! Your identity is your family! It’s as if here in these five verses, Jesus is saying, “The standard I’ve called you to requires resources you can’t provide! You need to ask someone who is able and willing and rich enough to meet your need…because it’s huge. So ask your heavenly father, and don’t stop till he gives you what you need to live this way! And I promise you that you’ll never be disappointed: 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!” Jesus expects us to live this way, but our father wants to and is eager to and longs to help and encourage and empower us to do it all the way. In a way, this text is kind of like a passage that reminds us that we are butterflies. Jesus is not telling caterpillars to fly and pollinate flowers; he’s telling butterflies to do it! A completely different proposition. Remember Who You Are Or in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, he’s not telling orphans or slaves or illegitimate children to do it, he’s telling children of the heavenly father to live this way and to rely on that father to give you as his very child what he needs in order to live this way. At bottom, Jesus’ command is: remember who you are: you are children of the heavenly father. Therefore I invite you, even as I command you to ask and seek and knock and you’ll have what you need to live according to the Sermon on the Mount. Are you beginning to see why I say it’s so important for you to understand your standing as a child of the heavenly father? Jesus emphasizes it here, but not only here. It’s a note he strikes throughout the sermon – over and over and over again cf. 5:48; 6:1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 14, 15, 18, 26, 32. It is only by knowing how much you mean to him that you will ask him to gift you with the power to live the Christian life. Knowing who you are changes everything. Paul Tripp illustration, “My father is a doctor.” If you are a Christian this morning, you are his child, and because you are his child everything changes. And this has to do with the nature of our adoption into his family: it is all of grace! Listen to this helpful definition from the contemporary theologian, Sinclair Ferguson: “Adoption is not a change in nature, but a change in status. If we fail to see this truth, we will reject the power of our adoption….Adoption is a declaration God makes about us. It is irreversible, dependent entirely upon His gracious choice, in which he says, ‘You are my son, today I have brought you into my family.’” What this means is that when God brought you into his family he brought you into his family “as is,” just as you are – as bratty and filthy and cranky and petty and self-willed and disrespectful and disobedient as you are – he, while you were in the throes of a temper-tantrum said, “I’ll take that one. “And not only will I take you, but I’ll take that one and give it every privilege and joy and all the spiritual riches I can lavish on you. I will gorge you on grace – now and forever!” Adoption by Propitiation Now, how can God do this? How is it that orphans and slaves like us can have our status permanently changed? Answer: through the death of Jesus Christ. I feel like I can’t really talk about becoming a part of God’s family without talking about what makes it possible. Answer: propitiation. See 1 John 4:10. This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. This means that all hostility, all ill-will, all wrath, all unfriendliness has been removed by God himself. This is what makes Christianity’s vision of propitiation different from pagan versions of propitiation. The gods of the Pantheon call on us to placate them and in some way to try to make them more favorable toward us. We never know when they may feel like a jilted lover – like were not spending enough time thinking about them, or spending too much time thinking about someone else. So we try to give them a big gift to make them happy. And we hope against hope that it’s big enough, while they hold out for the biggest gift imaginable – what they really want is a human sacrifice. They want your life. They want to keep you insecure and always questioning their love so that you’ll give more and more of yourself to them till they’ve consumed your entire life. Not so with God! God sent his son to be the propitiation. In other words, he placated himself! He took the initiative to remove what kept us from him and to restore friendly relations. Therefore God now has no reservations about you. He loves you fully and completely. There is no barrier between you and God. You are his and he is yours and Jesus’ death proves it! Now this is as good a time as any to say that until Jesus is your propitiation, God’s wrath is on you and will be on you forever. Until Jesus is your propitiation, you are not his child. Oh, there is a sense that because God made all of us that we are his children. But this is not what Paul is talking about when he talks about adoption. And this is not what John is talking about when he talks about being born again, being born anew into God’s family. If you want to taste the privileges of knowing God as a heavenly father, then you need to you trust in the Lord alone to rescue you, Jesus is your propitiation. And with this propitiation, you have been given the privilege of adoption and birth into God’s family. You are his kids. He is not reluctantly your daddy! He is enthusiastically your father – he’s the one who made it possible. He’s the one who sent his son to make you a son (or daughter). This is the heart of the gospel: propitiation. God’s disposition of wrath toward you (anger, hostility, holy rage over your sin) is turned to a disposition of favor (love, congeniality, enthusiastic acceptance) by God’s own choice and initiative. He’s the one who made it possible. He did it all for you. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and gave his son to be the propitiation for our sins. And this, Jesus says, the fact that you are children of the heavenly father is the single most important thing that you need to understand if you are going to make any headway in living out the Sermon on the Mount. God loves you. You are his child. And nothing can ever take that away from you. Therefore, be confident. He knows how to give good gifts to you. Be bold. He will never reject you. Be persistent. He loves to be the one who meets your greatest need. The Prodigal’s Suspicion And yet, we are so suspicious of this. We question God’s love for us all the time. Sinclair Ferguson calls it “the prodigal’s suspicion.” Listen:  Although [the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15] is probably the best known and loved of all Christ’s parables, the lesson it teaches us...is often overlooked. Jesus was underlining the fact that....the reality of the love of God for us is often the last thing in the world to dawn on us. As we fix our eyes upon ourselves, our past failures, our present guilt, it seems impossible that the Father should love us. Many Christians go through much of their life with the prodigal’s suspicion....Lurking in their hearts there often remains this sneaking suspicion: “I am not worthy to be God’s son, but perhaps I can struggle through as one of his hired servants.” It’s the prodigal’s suspicion. We just can’t believe that God would love someone like me. What’s with that? The evidence is in. Look again at what Jesus says here – v 11. <Read the text> If we being evil know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more our heavenly father. This is just, as Calvin says, God being himself. He is a loving father. And yet, this suspicion lurks in our hearts. We question the father’s love. What’s with that? Why do you think that is? Why do we suffer from “the prodigal’s suspicion”? Well, let me say that the answer to the question isn’t as benign as you might think. The Sinister Source of Our Suspicion Some people say that they have a hard time seeing God as a loving father because they have had terrible relationships with their earthly fathers (or step-fathers and other father figures). They say, “Since I had a terrible relationship with my father, I just don’t get God as father. And it really hurts me in my relationship with God. I just don’t get it.” Now I hope that you can see through this line of reasoning. I cannot minimize the harm that earthly fathers can do to their children if they mistreat or abuse or neglect their kids. The sociological and psychological literature gives us ample proof of that. But my point is that your mistreatment by your father – as horrible as it may have been – your mistreatment doesn’t make seeing God as your father impossible. In fact, without some idea in your head of ideal fatherhood, you couldn’t even make the statement that your childhood was horrible. You need some standard for true fatherhood in order to say that the one you experienced was lame. More than that, I’ve met more than one person who has had an atrocious childhood, who instead finds the doctrine of the fatherhood of God to be the most comforting, most thrilling things in the world – precisely because it represents what they longed for but didn’t receive from their earthly fathers. So to say that the reason you’re suspicious of the father’s love is owing to your past experience of a poor relationship with your earthly father, doesn’t go deep enough. There’s got to be something more. And there is. Fundamentally, the reason why we struggle to believe that God could love us so freely and so fully is that we want to believe that we had something to do with our status before God. We want to believe that we contributed something, that we brought some assent into the relationship. Now that may sound strange, but…if you think about it for a moment, maybe it will make more sense. Reread the text with me. <Read the text> Ask, seek, knock – seek the Lord to give you what you need to live out the implications of the Sermon on the Mount. And Jesus says, you can be confident in the asking because – v 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 what is good to those who ask Him!” God is not cruel. He’s not going to trick you any more than your earthly father would trick you – vv 9-10: “Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he?” I mean, really, how many fathers would take their daughters to Toys-R-Us and say look at that and look at that and isn’t that great only to say, “You see all this?” “Yes, Daddy.” “You’ll have none of it!” So here you have this father you can be confident to approach – he knows how to give good gifts to us. Now, what can make us question whether or not our father is for us is often how bad we’ve been – our past, our sins, our weaknesses, whatever. We say to ourselves, “I have been too disobedient. I am too bad a person for God to hear. It’s too late for me. Why would my father give anything good to a person like me?” Now listen to this carefully. “Since I’ve been so bad, I should expect nothing from my father.” What does this imply? It implies that if I had been obedient enough (whatever that means), my father should give me what is good. And therefore it reflects a works-righteousness approach to the Christian faith. In other words, if my blemished record makes me question God’s love for me, then I must also be operating from the assumption that my own record is what secures God’s love; otherwise, I wouldn’t question God’s love when I’m bad…I would know that it’s by grace alone that I am the object of the love of a heavenly father.  And this, I say, is what makes the questioning of God’s love for us so sinister – it is a species of unbelief. The prodigal’s suspicion, like any suspicion by definition is a form of disbelief. It’s not utter disbelief, but it’s a leaning toward unbelief, a suspension of belief in something – and what this does is to essentially say to the Lord that what he did to make me his child – sending Jesus to be the propitiation for my sins was not enough and therefore I need to throw in something of my own to sweeten the pot. This is nothing but works-righteousness. Looking to our own record to be acceptable to God. Sinclair Ferguson finishes that paragraph I quoted just a moment ago like this: “At the root of such thinking [prodigal suspicion] is an inability to believe that salvation is entirely of God’s grace and love. We contribute nothing to it; we can do nothing to earn it in any way. We are often slow to realize the implications of that.” “Outgrowing” the Gospel Now you might be sitting there thinking, “I’m not like this. I’m never suspicious. In fact, I’ve been coming to Redeemer for like a year now (or two years or seven), and I feel like I’m outgrowing what you’re teaching. Gospel, gospel, gospel, gospel, gospel – isn’t there something more to the Christian life than the gospel?! No, there isn’t cf. Col 1:6. <Read the text> So there isn’t something more to the Christian life than the gospel. If the gospel seems elementary to you in the sense that you feel like you’ve completed that lesson and now you’re ready to move on to the deep stuff, you don’t understand the Christian faith. You don’t get it. You just don’t get it. Now I’m not saying this to belittle you or shame your or anything like that at all…whatsoever! Instead, I’m saying it because if the gospel is as central as Paul (and Jesus and the rest of the Bible) says it is. If the gospel is what bears fruit in our lives from the moment we hear it till the day we go to be with Jesus, then you need to see how important it is. You need to see that you never graduate from it! Ever! That’s why I preach the gospel of God’s grace in Jesus to you every single week. But I don’t want you to misunderstand what I’m saying. Every week I preach the gospel, yes, but not in the sense that I preach a so-called “salvation message” every week or that I tag all my messages with the gospel at the end, calling all you non-Christians who are here to become believers in Jesus. I’m not doing this at all! Instead, I am preaching the gospel to Christians! Primarily, in fact, to Christians! I am showing you how everything the Bible teaches – whether we’re in the Old Testament book of Jonah or the Sermon on the Mount – everything the Bible teaches is rooted in and flows from the gospel of God’s grace. That’s what I’m showing you. That’s my job! More than that, I want you to see how every failure in your life, every sin, every lack of fruitfulness, every failure to live a beautiful life is rooted in unbelief – in a failure to keep repenting and keep believing the gospel of God’s grace. In other words, I want you to see how much you still don’t get it. I still don’t get it. You Revert to Slavery And when it comes to this issue of the fatherhood of God, our adoption by the gospel, our regeneration through the gospel – when it comes to being children of God, I’m saying that no matter how many years you have been a Christian, now matter how many ancient, dead languages you can read it in, no matter how many messages you’ve heard – you fail to believe that you have a heavenly father who knows what you need before you ask him and who loves to give you what is good. Let me prove it. In Galatians 4 and Romans 8, for example, the Apostle Paul contrasts sonship with slavery. He says that the Christian life is a life of sonship and the non-Christian life is a life of slavery. In Gal 4:7, he says, that if you’re a Christian “you are no longer a slave, but a son.” And in Rom 8:15 he says, “You have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’” Now here’s the thing – and it’s CRITICAL. Just because our status has changed doesn’t mean we can’t fall back into our slavish ways. In other words, it is possible for sons (and daughters) of God to lose their sonship sensitivity. We can forget we are the children of God and act like slaves, or like orphans (to borrow another metaphor). This is why Paul trumpets this warning in Gal 5:1: “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.” That is, it’s possible even for Christians to subject ourselves to a yoke of slavery. To operate from a belief that we are not sons, but slaves. Fear and Faith, Slaves and Sons Now then, how does a slave act? What is the chief characteristic of a slave from Paul’s perspective? Well, you heard it in the verse I quoted from Romans 8 – Rom 8:15: “You have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’” Did you hear that? “You have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again.” It’s fear. Fear. Fear is the modus operandi of the slave. And this slave-like fear manifests itself primarily in the slave’s motive for obedience.  Why does a slave obey? A slave obeys because he doesn’t want to be punished or sold or worse. But this isn’t the only fear he has. He doesn’t just fear for his life, he fears for his livelihood. First century slavery, though it had some things in common with 19th century American slavery, wasn’t quite the same. Many “slaves” were more like what a wealthy family would call today “servants.” And these servants, though they lived with their family, were well-taken care of materially and monetarily, and with enough money could even buy their freedom from their masters/employers. My point here is that fear of losing a job could also have motivated their obedience. As a slave I do a good job because I want my master to give me something I value. So I do it to please him. The slave is motivated by fear. What I want you to see is that whatever the slave’s fear – in the final analysis, it comes down to performance, it comes down to works. If I do enough. If I do enough of the right things. If I don’t botch too many projects. If I do a good job. The master will give me what I want and protect me from what I don’t want. A son, on the other hand, as the analogy goes, is motivated by love. He’s not afraid that he’ll be sold or punished or killed or disinherited. He knows his father loves him. He knows that there is nothing he can do to lose his status in the family; therefore, he obeys his father out of love. The hymn-writer, William Cooper had it right when he said, To see the law by Christ fulfilled And hear his pard'ning voice Transforms a slave into a child And duty into choice. So slaves are motivated to obey from fear – fear of punishment, fear of rejection, fear of recrimination, fear of not getting something they value. Sons are motivated to obey from love: all punishment (not discipline, but punishment), all rejection, all recrimination are removed. And the inheritance, because I am a son, is mine – it’s only a matter of time. My father has effectively already given it to me. So the son obeys from love. What this means for us is that whenever we are motivated to obey the Lord (our father) from fear, we have forgotten that we are not slaves any more – we are sons. The moment we are motivated by fear is the moment we have forgotten the gospel. So let me ask you some questions:  Do you ever obey God from fear of punishment? Do you ever say no to that lustful behavior because you are fearful that God will get you back in some way? Do you ever serve someone in your neighborhood because you want God to keep your kids safe in your home while you and your wife take a long weekend? Are you driven to perform for God – to “serve,” taking on too many tasks, saying yes to too many things because you don’t want God to disapprove of you? Then you’re acting like a slave. And if you’re acting like a slave then you don’t understand the gospel. The gospel makes you say, “I do this or don’t do that because I’m so happy to belong to this family, God’s family. He will never reject me, so why wouldn’t I want to obey? Or why would I want to disobey a loving father like that? Do you gossip? Do you blame-shift? Do you boast? Do you find yourself angry at other races or classes of people? Oftentimes, these are hiding strategies. They are ways of getting attention off ourselves and our sins. Why? Because we’re afraid. We’re insecure in our relationship to God. We don’t believe that our status has changed. So we have to protect ourselves from our status or reputation being marred by our own failings and sins. This is slave behavior! A child isn’t afraid to take good, long, hard looks at himself because his weaknesses only give him an opportunity to boast about his daddy! “Do you want to know how great my daddy is – he accepts people like ME! I don’t have to put up a front any more. I can be open and transparent. That’s the life of a son, a person who’s in touch with the gospel! Can I give you one more example? Another list of questions? How do you handle life’s curve-balls? When adversity comes, do you see it as paybacks from God for your many failures? Are you always looking over your shoulder for the next terrible thing to happen, half-expecting it? Then you’re acting like a slave. A slave’s whole life is predicated on performance – therefore, bad things must be because I’ve done something to deserve them. A child doesn’t act like this. As unpleasant and tragic as life’s difficulties can be. The child sees them simply as discipline – discipline in the good sense, formative discipline. This is my father at work in my life, instructing me, training me, preparing me for future lessons. This is my father loving me. Life is not about my performance. I have a father who will marshal all his omnipotence to do me good. This difficultly can’t be him rejecting me! He loves me so much that he made this slave his beloved child.  Conclusion So don’t you see? Don’t you see? You need to hear the gospel of grace every week. Jesus gets this. His grace is presupposed in the Sermon on the Mount. It is addressed in the Sermon on the Mount. And it is revisited again and again and again in the Sermon on the Mount. Don’t miss it. Don’t say, “I don’t need this because I’m already a Christian.” Here in Matthew 7:7-11, as Jesus moves to conclude the greatest sermon ever preached, he hits us hard with a reminder of what the Christian life is all about. It’s not a system of behavior. It’s not a list of dos and don’ts. It’s not about doing all the right things so that the gods (or God) will accept me and won’t let anything bad happen to me. It’s about God doing something in Jesus Christ. A magnificent, hardly imaginable thing. It’s about him taking self-absorbed, self-righteous, self-dependent, self-willed, self-centered little brats and making us his beloved children – permanently. We did nothing to earn the status of being God’s children, and therefore we can do nothing to lose that status. We are his and he is ours. Therefore, when we see all the demands of the Sermon on the Mount, as high as they are, Jesus doesn’t want us simply to see our inability to live up to the standard he’s setting – he wants to tell us something glorious. That despite our lack of resources to live the way he calls us to live, there is one, a heavenly father, who loves us and will give us everything we need to serve him in his world. And when we fail, we can know that our failure cannot for one second change how he feels about us. This is the gospel. And it changes everything. I pray that today it changes you. Amen.