S.O.T.M. Ask, Seek, Knock [Matthew 7:7-11]

Turn to Matthew 7:7-11 and stand for the reading of the word of God

I cannot imagine a better, more cheering or a more comforting statement with which to face all the uncertainties and hazards of our life in this world of time than that contained in verses 7–11. It is one of those great comprehensive and gracious promises which are to be found only in the Bible. There is nothing that can be more encouraging as we face life with all its uncertainties and possibilities, our ‘future all unknown’.

This is a common biblical message from beginning to end, this is the promise that comes to us: ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ In order that we might be quite certain about it, our Lord repeats it, and puts it in an even stronger form, for He says: ‘Every one that asks receives; and he that seeks finds; and to him that knocks it shall be opened.’ There is no doubt about it, it is certain; it is an absolute promise. What is more, it is a promise made by the Son of God Himself, speaking with all the fullness and authority of His Father.

The Bible teaches us everywhere that that is the one thing that matters in life. The biblical view of life, in contra-distinction to the worldly view, is that life is a journey, a journey full of , problems, difficulties and uncertainties. That being the case, it emphasizes that what really matters in life is not so much the various things that come to meet us, and with which we have to deal, as our readiness to meet them.

The whole of the biblical teaching with regard to life is in a sense summed up in that one man Abraham, of whom we are told, ‘he went out, not knowing where he was going’. But he was nevertheless perfectly happy, at peace and at rest. He was not afraid. Why? As an old Puritan said: ‘Abraham went out, not knowing where he went; but he did know with whom he went.’ That is the thing that matters, he knew that he went out on that journey with Another. He was not alone, there was One with him who had told him that He would never leave him, nor forsake him; and though he was uncertain as to the events that were coming to meet him, and the problems which would arise, he was perfectly happy because he knew his Travelling Companion.

The same could be said of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself who, under the shadow of the cross, and knowing that even His most trusted disciples were suddenly going to leave Him and forsake Him in their fear and concern about saving their own lives, nevertheless was able to say this: ‘The hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me’ (John 16:32).

According to the Bible, that is the one thing that matters. Our Lord does not promise to change life for us; He does not promise to remove difficulties and trials and problems and tribulations; He does not say that He is going to cut out all the thorns and leave the roses. No; He faces life realistically, and tells us that these are things and problems which are bound to come. But He assures us that we can so know Him that, whatever does happen, we need never be frightened, we need never be alarmed. He puts all that in this great and comprehensive promise: ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ That is just one of the biblical ways of repeating this message which runs through the Scriptures from beginning to end.

If we are to get the full benefit from such wonderful and gracious words from our Lord, we need to look a little more closely at them. With a statement like this, which can easily be misunderstood, we must remember some basics when it comes to interpreting scripture.

One, the bible conveys truth to us and wants us to consider this truth. i.e. we must know what it means and we must apply it in detail to our lives. If the truth of God’s word does not change you you are not applying it to your life.

Two, we must remember the canon of interpretation which warns us about the danger of extracting a text from its context. We must avoid the terrible danger of twisting the Scriptures to our own destruction through not taking them in their setting, or failing to observe particularly what they say, or failing to note their qualifications as well as their promises. This is particularly important with a statement such as this.

There are people who say, ‘Scripture says, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you”. Very well,’ they go on; ‘does not that say explicitly, and does it not mean of necessity, that whatever I want or desire, God is going to give to me?’ And because they think that it does, and because they think that that is the scriptural teaching, they ignore all the other teaching and just go to God with their requests.

And when their requests are not granted, they become down in the depths of depression and despair. Their case is even worse than it was before. They say, ‘God does not seem to be fulfilling His promise’, and they are even worse than before. We have to avoid that. Scripture is not something that works how we want it to. Actually the scriptures pay a great compliment to us by regarding us as intelligent people, and it presents truth to our minds by the Holy Spirit. It asks us to take it as it is, and as a whole, in all its promises. That is why, you notice, we are not looking at verses 7 and 8 only. We are considering verses 7–11 because we must take this statement as a whole or we could go seriously astray in considering its various parts.

It’s not difficult to show that this statement, far from being a universal promise that God is pledged to do for us anything that we may ask of Him, is actually something very much bigger than that. I thank God—let me put it like this bluntly—I thank God that He is not prepared to do anything that I may by chance ask Him, and I say that as the result of my own past experience. In the past I, like all others, have often asked God for things, and have asked God to do things, which at that time I wanted very much and which I believed were the very best things for me. But now, standing at this particular juncture in my life and looking back, I say that I am profoundly grateful to God that He did not grant me certain things for which I asked, and that He shut certain doors in my face. At the time I did not understand, but I know now, and am grateful to God for it. So I thank God that this is not a universal promise, and that God is not going to grant me my every desire and request. God has a much better way for us, as we shall now see.

The right way to look at this promise is to remember the theme running right through the chapter. The theme is that of judgment, and we are reminded that in this life we are always living under the judgment of God. Whether we like it or not, the eye of God is upon us, and this life is a kind of preparatory school for what awaits us after this life.

So everything we do in this world is of tremendous significance, and we cannot afford to take anything for granted. That is the theme, and our Lord applies it immediately. He starts with the question of judging other people. We must be careful about that because we ourselves are under judgment. But, why then does our Lord utter this promise of verses 7–11 at this point? Surely the answer is this. In verses 1–6 He has shown us the danger of condemning other people as if we were the judges, and of harboring bitterness and hatred in our hearts.

He has also told us to see to it that we remove the plank out of our own eye before trying to extract the speck out of our brother’s eye. The effect of all that upon us is to reveal us to ourselves and to show us our terrible need of grace. He has held us face to face with the tremendously high standard by which we shall be judged, for what judgment you judge you shall be judge.

Immediately we realize that, we are humbled and begin to ask, ‘Who is sufficient for these things? How can I possibly live up to such a standard?’ Not only that; we realize also our need of cleansing, we realize how unworthy and sinful we are. And the result of all this is that we feel utterly hopeless and helpless. We say, ‘How can we live the Sermon on the Mount? How can anybody come up to such a standard? We need help and grace. Where can we get it?’

Here is the answer: ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ That is the connection, and we should thank God for it, because standing face to face with this glorious gospel we must all feel undone and unworthy. Those foolish people who think of Christianity only in terms of a little morality which they themselves can produce have never really seen it. The standard by which we are confronted is that found in the Sermon on the Mount, and by it we are all crushed to the ground and made to realize our utter helplessness and our desperate need of grace. Here is the answer; the supply for our need is available, just ask and our Lord repeats it for the sake of emphasis.

So then the question is, with such a promise in view, why are we what we are in light of such a promise? If we have everything we need for life and godliness available to us…then why do we not exemplify the sermon on the mount more perfectly? If such benefits are offered to us in Christ why are we not rejoicing in them? These are great questions and our Lord addresses them in this section and answers them for us, our Lord shows us why we have not received, why we have not found, and why the door has not been opened as it should. He realizes what we are, sinful people, and He encourages us to fall on the precious promises. How do we fall on the precious promises of God?…first,

There are some conditions we must observe in order to rejoice in the great benefits offered in Christ

If we want to go through life triumphantly, with peace and joy in our hearts, ready to face whatever may come to meet us, and to be more than conquerors in spite of everything, there are certain things we have to realize. The first is, we must realize our need. It is strange, but some people seem to think that all that is necessary is that the promises of God should be held before us. That’s great, however, the central trouble with the whole of mankind is that we do not realize our need.

There are many who preach about the Lord Jesus Christ to no effect and we can see why. They have no doctrine of sin, they never convict or convince people of sin. They will hold Christ before men and say that that is enough. But they fail to address the effect of sin upon man, and until a man sees his desperate need for Christ because of his sin he will never fly to Christ. The natural man hates to be regarded as a sinner, and we do not like to feel our need.

People are ready to listen to sermons which present a caricature of Christ to them, but they do not like to be told that they are so helpless that Christ had to go to the cross and die before they could be saved. They think that that is insulting. We must be brought to realize our need. The first two essentials to salvation and to rejoicing in Christ are the consciousness of our need, and the consciousness of who supplies for our need…or the riches of grace that are in Christ. It is only those who realize these two things who ‘ask’ truly, And then he begins to realize the possibilities that are in Christ.

What our Lord emphasizes here at the is the importance of the realization of our need. He puts that by using these three terms—ask, seek, knock. When you consult the commentators you will find great discussions as to whether seeking is stronger than asking, and knocking stronger than seeking. They spend much of their time in dealing with such matters.

Some say that asking represents a faint desire, seeking a greater desire, and knocking something very powerful. Others say that the man who knocks is the man who is right outside and that the supreme thing is asking, not knocking. The unbeliever, they say, must knock at the door, and having entered in at the door he begins to seek, and at last face to face with his Lord and Master he can ask.

I think the main point our Lord is emphasizing is simply persistence in seeking after Christ. Our Lord is emphasizing we are to show persistence and perseverance in seeking Him. These three words emphasize the element of persistence. There are times when we take stock of our life when we pause for a moment and say: ‘Life is moving on; I am moving on. What progress am I making in this life and world?’

We begin to take stock of ourselves and say: ‘I am not living the Christian life as I should; I am not as diligent in my reading of the Bible and in prayer as I know I should be. I am going to change all this. I see there is a higher level to which I must attain, and I want to get there.’ We are honest; we are quite sincere; we fully intend to do it. And so often, during the first few days of a new year, we resolve to read the Bible regularly, to pray and to ask God for His blessing. But—and this is surely true of all of us—we soon begin to slacken and to forget.

At the very moment we thought of reading our bible or praying something comes in, quite ‘out of the blue’, as we say, something we never anticipated, and our whole scheme and program is upset. It’s not long and we find that we have entirely forgotten our excellent resolve and we lose focus on God. That is what our Lord is concerned about. If you and I are really to obtain these blessings which God has for us, we must go on asking for them. ‘Seeking’ simply means going on asking; ‘knocking’ is just the same thing. It is an intensification of the word ‘ask’. We go on, we persist in seeking God.

The importance of this element of persistence cannot be exaggerated enough. You find it not only in biblical teaching, but also in the lives of all the saints. The most fatal thing in the Christian life is to be content with passing desires. If we really want to be men and women of God, if we really want to know Him, and walk with Him, and experience those boundless blessings which He has to offer us, we must persist in asking Him for them day by day. We have to feel this hunger and thirst after righteousness, and then we shall be filled. And that does not mean that we are filled once and for ever. We go on hungering and thirsting. Like the apostle Paul, leaving the things which are behind, we ‘press toward the mark’. ‘Not as though I had already attained’, says Paul, ‘but I follow after’. That is it. This persistence, this constant desire, asking, seeking and knocking. This, we must agree, is the point at which most of us fail.

the next thing we need is...

The realization that God is our Father in Christ

Our Lord talks about that in verse 9 and He puts it like this: ‘Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?’ This, of course, is the central principle of all—the realization that God is our Father. That is what our Lord is concerned to emphasize in all He says here. He is using His familiar method of arguing from the lesser to the greater. If an earthly father does so much, how much more so God? This is one of our main troubles, is it not? That is a great defect in most Christian lives today I would say 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. Ah yes, we say; we do know that and believe it. But do we know it in our daily life and living? Is it something of which we are always conscious? If only we got hold of this, we could smile in the face of every possibility and eventuality that lies ahead of us.

How then does God become my Father? According to the Scriptures it is like this. Christ ‘came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power (i.e., authority) to become the sons of God’ (John 1:11, 12). You become a child of God only when you are born again, when you receive a new life and a new nature. The child partakes of the nature of the Father. God is holy, and you and I are not children of God until we have received a holy nature; and that means we must have a new nature.

Being evil, and even conceived in sin (Psalm 51:5), we do not have one; but He will give it to us. Now that is what is offered to us. And there is no contact and communion with God, nor are we heirs to any of these promises of God, until we become His children. In other words, we must remember that we have sinned against God, that we deserve the wrath and punishment of God, but that He has dealt with our sin and guilt by sending His Son to die on the cross of Calvary for us.

And believing in Him, we receive a new life and nature and we become children of God. Then we can know that God is our Father; but not until then. He will also give us His Holy Spirit, ‘the Spirit of adoption, where we cry, Abba, Father’; and the moment we know this we can be certain that God as our Father adopts a specific attitude with respect to us. It means that, as my Father, He is interested in me, that He is concerned about me, that He is watching over me, that He has a plan and purpose with respect to me, that He desires to bless and to help me. Lay hold of that; take a firm grasp of that. Whatever may happen to you, God is your Father, and He is interested in you, and that is His attitude towards you.

But that does not exhaust the statement. There is a very interesting negative addition. Because God is your Father He will never give you anything that is evil. He will give you only that which is good. ‘What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?’ Multiply that by infinity and that is God’s attitude towards His child. In our folly we are apt to think that God is against us when something unpleasant happens to us. But God is our Father; and as our Father he will never give us anything that is evil. Never; it is impossible.

God never makes mistakes

He knows the difference between good and evil in a way that no-one else does. Take an earthly father; he does not give a stone for bread, but he sometimes makes a mistake. The earthly father at his best sometimes thinks at the moment that he is acting for the good of his child, but discovers later that it was bad. Your Father who is in heaven never makes such a mistake. He will never give you anything which will turn out to be harmful to you, but which at first seemed to be good. This is one of the most wonderful things we can ever realize. We are the children of a Father who not only loves us but looks upon us and keeps His eye upon us. He will never give us anything evil. But beyond all, He will never lead us astray, He will never make a mistake in what He gives us. He knows everything; His knowledge is absolute. If we but knew we were in the hands of such a Father, our outlook upon the future would be entirely transformed. If we would just,

Remember the increasingly good gifts He has for us

How much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?’ This is the theme of the whole Bible. What are the good things? Our Lord has given us the answer in the parallel passage in Luke 11. There, you remember, it reads like this: ‘If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?’ That is it. And in giving the Holy Spirit He gives us everything; every fitness we require, every grace, every gift. They are all given to us in Him.

Peter summing it up says, ‘his divine power has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness’ (2 Peter 1:3). You see now why we should thank God that asking, and seeking and knocking, do not just mean that if we ask for anything we like we shall get it. Of course not. What it means is this. Ask for any one of these things that is good for you, that is for salvation, your sanctification, supplication, anything that brings you nearer to God and conforms you more into the image of Christ is thoroughly good for you, and He will give it you.

He will not give you things that are bad for you. You may think what you want is good but He knows if they are bad. He does not make a mistake, and He will not give you such things. He will give you things that are good for you, and the promise literally is this, that if we seek these good things, the fullness of the Holy Spirit, the life of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, etc., all these virtues and glories that were seen shining so brightly in the earthly life of Christ, ask for them and He will give them to us. If we really want to be more like Him, and like all the saints, if we really ask for these things, we shall receive; if we seek them, we shall find them; if we knock, the door will be opened unto us and we shall enter into their possession. The promise is, that if we ask for the good things our heavenly Father will give them to us.

That is the way to face the future. Find out from the Scriptures what these good things are and seek them. The thing that matters supremely, the best thing for all of us, is to know God, ‘the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom (he) hath sent’; and if we seek that above everything else, if we ‘seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness’, then we have the word of the Son of God for it that all these other things shall be added unto us. God will give them to us with a bounty that we cannot even imagine. ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’