Today, I am reading and commenting on Matthew 7-9.

I really love to write about the contrast between Matthew 7:1 (Do not judge, or you too will be judged.) and Matthew 7:15-20 (Watch out for false prophets…Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.).  Often times, the first of these is misinterpreted, but the second helps us to understand that we need to dig a little deeper into the verses following Matthew 7:1 if we are going to understand it.  However, today I want to write about the connection I saw today between Matthew 7:7-12, Matthew 7:13-14, and Matthew 9:36-38. Perhaps I should have lumped those first two together and made this a comparison between just two passages, but I am going to stick with viewing it as three.  In the first passage Jesus tells us to ask, to seek, and to knock.  When we ask, He tells us that we will receive, and when we seek, He tells us that we will find, and when we knock, doors will open for us.  We, evil as we are, give good gifts to our children, so we know that God, being good, will give good gifts to those who ask Him.  I find the conclusion which Jesus reaches from this interesting: since God will give good gifts to those who ask of Him, to those who Jesus has just declared evil, we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us.  Not, the way so many misremember, do unto others AS they do unto us.  No, we should do as we would like them to do unto us.  And, that reminds me of another misinterpretation.  We should not do as we think would be best for them, but as we would like them to do to us.  From there Jesus tells us to enter the narrow gate.  And from the two misinterpretations I just identified we do indeed see that what Jesus tells us to do is the narrow gate.  Which brings me to the third of the segments from today’s passage which I want to bring into this theme.  So, what is it that we should be asking God to give us?  We should be asking Him to send workers to harvest the crops of those who are seeking something without knowing what that something is.  We should be asking God to send people, hopefully like us, to show the lost how much God loves them and wants to heal them.  We should be asking God to send us.  

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.