Prayer and The Golden Rule – Matthew 7:7-12
In Matthew 7:7-12, Jesus invites his apprentices to ask anything of God. Christ’s disciples can foster a life of prayer that goes to God with everything and then extends that goodness to all through the golden rule.
The Sermon on the Mount
The Sermon on the Mount is not an isolated speech.
The whole sermon is Christ describing what life in the kingdom and allegiance to him looks like.
Obedience to the Sermon on the Mount is a practice in imagination.
Doubt is a consistent human experience.
The thorny tension as you look at Jesus’ descriptions of the Kingdom of God is that there are bad things happening constantly.
On The Kingdom of God
“Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand”– Matthew 4:17
The moment these words are first uttered is fraught with political, cultural, and economic tension.
Jesus defines the Kingdom of God as “your kingdom come, your will be done” (Matthew 6:10) The Kingdom of God is the space in which God’s will is done.
23 And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people. 24 So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, those having seizures, and paralytics, and he healed them. 25 And great crowds followed him from Galilee and the Decapolis, and from Jerusalem and Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.– Matthew 4:23–25.
A theme that emerges through the New Testament is that of Inaugurated eschatology or the “already, not yet”. It is this idea that the Kingdom of God has begun in Jesus, but will not be fully established until a later date.
Jesus is offering us the invitation to live in the reality of the Kingdom– to experience the goodness of the Kingdom and to express that to all people.
“Ask, and it will be given to you…”
The essential foundation of Jesus’ life and ministry is that “God is a loving father.”
“But, for most of us, the problem is not that we are too eager to ask for the wrong things. The problem is that we are not eager enough to ask for the right things.” – NT Wright
“[Prayer is] talking to God about the things we are working on together. It is a collaboration with God to accomplish the good purposes of His kingdom.” – Dallas Willard
Our lives with God are deeply intertwined with our lives with others– these are not separate relationships.
The Wooden Rule (Lex Talionis) – “Do unto others what they do to you.”
The Silver Rule – "do not do unto others what you do not wish done unto you.”
Golden Rule – “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” (v.12)
To practice the golden rule requires that I abandon my privilege, distance, and safety in order to be empathetic and in proximate relationships.
For Jesus the sum of the Law and the Prophets is to become a person of love, reflecting the love our God gives us.
“a lawyer asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” – Matthew 22:34–40 (ESV)
The baffling nature of the Gospel is that Jesus invites us into a Kingdom in which we, with God, push back evil with good.
