Description
What does Jesus mean, exactly, in Matthew 7:8? Does he mean we can have whatever we want?
Matthew 7:8
For everyone who … (visit YouTube for more)
Transcript
So it’s a dangerous verse to meditate on today. Matthew 7 verse 8, Jesus is speaking and he says, " For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened."
This verse has been abused so much throughout the centuries. People have taken it to mean that whatever we ask God for, we’d get.
And I remember something that Tim Keller used to say, it was something like this: God gives us everything that we’d give ourselves if we knew everything that God knows.
Jesus’s point here, when he goes on to say, "If your son asks for bread, would you give him a stone?" his point is that God is a good God. And if we are asking him for good things, we can expect good things from him. But God’s definition of good, not ours.
This isn’t a verse that says, we can absolutely have anything we want at any time. But this is a verse that reminds us that God is a good God. He wants to show us what we want to learn of Him.
He who seeks, finds. If we knock on doors that God is telling us to knock on, they will be opened. But maybe not on the first knock, or the second. Maybe it’s the 99th knock.
He wants us to be mature. He wants us to serve Him obediently. He wants us to learn good spiritual discipline. Because He is a good Father, and He wants us to grow.
It’s a challenging verse, isn’t it? It’s a verse that we could read naively, not holding it in tension with other verses in the Bible. But we do need to dwell on this and ask, what does this mean, God? What are you saying to us through this verse? Perhaps you’ll do that now, when this video ends. The verse is in the description, so you can spend some time with God, meditating on this further. May God bless you as you do.
