The Lord’s Wisdom for Relationships | Matthew 7:1-12
Brian Hedges | May 17, 2026
Let’s turn to God’s word together. We’re going to be in Matthew 7:1-12 as we consider this morning the Lord’s wisdom for relationships. It’s a part of our ongoing study in the Sermon on the Mount, this series we’ve called “Heirs of the Kingdom.”
Life, as you and I all know, is all about relationships. Almost every joy in your life is tied to relationships. They may be family relationships—think of marriage and children—think of friendships that you have, relationships within the church, relationships in the workplace, and so on. All of our greatest joys are tied somehow to our relationships either with God or with others; but while relationships bring great joy, they also bring a great deal of frustration and heartache and pain into our lives.
Relationships are messy, aren’t they? And the reason relationships are messy is because people are complicated, and that means that the relationships in our lives are also complicated. We want to love people, but sometimes people are hard to love. People can be pretty foolish and difficult. We want to speak truth, but we don’t want to be harsh in the way we do that. We want to show grace to others, but we need wisdom and discernment to know how to do that. We want to help others, but we also struggle with our own sins and our blind spots.
All of those dynamics make relationships messy and difficult, and so one of the greatest needs in our lives is for the practical wisdom of how to relate to others, as well as God and ourselves, as the Lord would have us.
That’s really what this passage is about this morning in Matthew 7:1-12. At first glance, you might read through these verses and think that these are kind of disconnected thoughts that have all been thrown together, but the thread that runs through these twelve verses is the thread of relationships, as Jesus talks about our relationship to our own selves, our relationships to others, and our relationship to God the Father.
We are now entering into really the final leg of the Sermon, turning this corner into Matthew 7. And really, these twelve verses kind of bring the body of the sermon proper to its conclusion, and then verses 13 through the end of the chapter are really Jesus just pressing home in conclusion everything that he has said in this passage. So we’re close to the end of the series.
We have about three weeks left after this morning, and this morning we consider this wonderful passage, Matthew 7:1-12. Let’s read the passage. The Lord Jesus is speaking, and he says,
“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ’Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.
“Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
This is God’s Word.
Now, before we dig into these verses, I want you to see how these verses fit into the whole Sermon on the Mount, kind of the structure of the Sermon on the Mount. If you think of the Sermon on the Mount like a mountain, like a triangle—you can see this in the diagram—we’re kind of coming down the slope on the right side, and we’re coming to the end as Jesus talks about relationships.
But this really follows everything that Jesus said before, beginning with the Beatitudes, as he talks about the character that is so needed and desired in citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Then Jesus says that he came not to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them. And here in Matthew 7:12, we have another reference to the law and the prophets, kind of bracketing everything that goes between in the Sermon.
Jesus goes on to talk about the greater righteousness that characterizes those in the kingdom of heaven and the expression of that greater righteousness in terms of our ethics. He talks about obedience to the Torah in areas such as anger and sexual purity, marriage, adultery, oaths, retaliation, and so on. He talks about this greater righteousness in terms of our personal piety, our religious practices, giving and prayer and fasting. Really, the apex of the prayer of the Sermon is the Lord’s Prayer.
Then he talks about this greater righteousness in terms of our relationships in the world, relationship to the world’s wealth, at the end of chapter 6, which was the last couple of messages in this series, and then now in relationships with people in the world here in chapter 7.
Then, as I’ve already mentioned, the rest of the chapter is going to be Jesus pressing home the two ways of living, the two roads that people can travel, the two different kinds of people that are in the world, pressing all of that home in words leading up to the description of final judgment.
It’s a sobering end to the message, to this Sermon on the Mount, but today we’re focused on relationships, Jesus’ wisdom regarding relationships.
I think we can summarize the wisdom that we have in these twelve verses by looking at the relationships we each have with the self, with others, and with God. And we can summarize Jesus’ teaching in this way: In regards to self, Jesus calls us to repentant self-awareness; in relationship to others, he calls us to discerning love; and in relationship to God, our Father, he calls us to persistent prayer.
So let’s work through each one of those in turn.
1. Self: Jesus Calls Us to Repentant Self-Awareness
First of all, in relationship to ourselves, Jesus calls us to repentant self-awareness, and you see this in the first five verses. The passage begins with a warning (verses 1-2): “Judge not that you be not judged, for with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.”
Now, these actually may be the most famous, often-quoted words in the Sermon on the Mount, “Judge not that you be not judged.” And we need to just take a moment to understand what Jesus means and what he doesn’t mean here.
Jesus in this passage is not forbidding all judgment whatsoever, okay? We need to know that. We need to understand that.
This was the view of Leo Tolstoy, who tried to live out the Sermon on the Mount, and he took such a radical view of this that he believed that Jesus and the teaching of Christianity even forbade the legal system and the use of law courts and anyone who would ever pronounce judgment on anyone else. Now that’s ridiculous, of course. If you read the rest of Scripture, we know that God cares about justice, and he has instituted even human government, the human institution of government with the law courts and everything else, in order to ensure that there’s some measure of justice in the world.
The more popular view today is that Jesus here is teaching something like tolerance at all costs, and it would go something like this: Jesus means that no one in any circumstance should ever call out someone else’s beliefs or behavior as wrong. And if you ever say that someone believes something that is wrong or is doing something that is wrong, then you are a judgmental person. “Judge not that you be not judged.” There’s never a case then for calling out wrong behavior or saying that someone is a sinner or that their beliefs are wrong, because Jesus calls for love and tolerance, full stop. Anything short of that is judgmental.
This can’t be what Jesus means in this passage, because in the verses that will follow, Jesus calls for something like moral discernment. We’ll see that in verse 6. In the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus himself pronounces judgment on those who are not in the straight and the narrow way. He says that there are two kinds of people in the world. He says, “Beware of false prophets,” and the way you will know whether someone is true or false is by the fruit that they bear in their lives.
Jesus in other passages calls people, actually, to exercise judgment. In John 7:24 he says, “Do not judge by appearance, but judge with right judgment.”
Even in Matthew chapter 18, Jesus tells his disciples how to handle a situation where someone has sinned against them, and he says, “If that’s the case, go to your brother between you and him alone,” and you tell them your grievance, you tell them the sin, and if they don’t respond, you take someone else with you, and if they still don’t respond, you bring it to the whole assembly, you bring it to the church. That’s where we get the basic pattern for exercising discipline in the church.
So whatever Jesus means here, he doesn’t mean that any kind of judgment, any kind of assessment of the behavior or the beliefs of another person, is forbidden in all cases.
So, what does Jesus teach here? He teaches that we should not judge in harsh and hypocritical ways. I think that’s what he’s forbidding here: harsh and hypocritical judgment. This all really turns on the meaning of that word “judge,” which in the Greek can have a pretty broad semantic range. It can mean anything from discerning or assessing someone’s behavior to the idea of pronouncing condemnation in a harsh and critical way. I think it’s that which Jesus is forbidding here.
It’s what we might think of as a critical spirit, a judgmental attitude that is hypocritical and harsh in its very nature. J.C. Ryle put it this way, I think very clearly:
“What our Lord means to condemn is a censorious and fault-finding spirit, a readiness to blame others for trifling offenses or matters of indifference, a habit of passing rash and hasty judgments, a disposition to magnify the errors and infirmities of our neighbors and make the worst of them. This is what our Lord forbids. It was common among the Pharisees. It has always been common from their day down to the present time. We must watch against it.”
Jesus is warning against that.
But what I really want you to notice here is what Jesus says next in verses 3-5, as he really turns the magnifying glass onto our own hearts. And you see this in verses 3-5. It’s why I’m saying that Jesus calls us here to repentant self-awareness.
Jesus says, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ’Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite! First take the log out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
Jesus uses a very vivid illustration here, probably a humorous illustration to its original audience. You can imagine Jesus the carpenter maybe even holding up a speck of sawdust in one hand and saying, “How can you say, ’Let me take this speck of sawdust out of your brother’s eye?’” And then he holds up a plank, holds it up to his eye and says, “You’ve got a two by four sticking out of your eye!” Everybody would have understood what Jesus meant. Here is someone who is always critical, always fault-finding, picking out the little things in someone else’s life, when there’s this huge, glaring sin in their own lives that they have not dealt with. And Jesus is calling us to deal with that.
He’s saying, “First take the log out of your own eye—” that’s repentance “—and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
So Jesus here is calling for something that today we would call self-awareness. The old Puritans used a different word; they called it watchfulness. Watchfulness. Watching over the heart, keeping your heart with all vigilance, for out of the heart flow the issues of life, as Proverbs 4 says.
This is the consistent teaching of Scripture, that it’s only when we watch our own hearts, only when we are growing in self-awareness and humility and repentance of sin, only when we watch ourselves that we are able then with the right attitude, with the right disposition, to help others.
Listen to what Paul says in Galatians 6:1. He says, “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.”
I think Jesus is teaching basically the same thing here. There’s a place for helping our brothers and our sisters in Christ, but it always must follow a watchfulness in our own hearts.
You know, Charles Haddon Spurgeon preached a famous series of messages—lectures really—that he gave to his students at the pastor’s college. And the very first of those lectures is called “The Minister’s Self-Watch.” I’ve read that many times, and every time I read it I’m freshly convicted. Here’s something Spurgeon said; it was originally for pastors, but I think this applies to all of us. He said,
“We must search ourselves very anxiously and very thoroughly lest by any means, after having preached to others, we ourselves should be castaways. To lose the personality of repentance and faith is a loss indeed.”
“No man,” says John Owen, “preaches his sermon well to others if he doth not first preach it to his own heart.” No one preaches a sermon well to others who doesn’t first preach it to his own heart. That’s what Jesus is saying. Take the log out of your own eye, and then you’ll see clearly to help your brother.
Now, let’s apply this for a minute before we move on. What does this call to repentant self-awareness and watchfulness mean for our own lives and our relationship with ourselves? Let me just ask you some questions. I want you to reflect on these questions for a moment as we sit under the word of God.
Are you a person who frequently points out the sins of others while tolerating unrepentant sin in your own life?
Are you a critical person?
Do you have a critical and a harsh and a judgmental spirit?
Would your spouse or your kids or your colleagues think of you as someone who’s always pointing out their faults, always pointing out the negative, never giving them the benefit of a doubt?
Ask yourself this question: What do people experience when you enter a room? Does it heighten the tension? Does it make people uncomfortable or nervous, or are people relaxed in your presence?
How do you show up?
When was the last time the Holy Spirit dealt with your heart in your daily time with the Lord in the word and prayer, and God showed you something that you needed to deal with in your heart, a sin you needed to repent of, an area of character that needed to change?
As followers of the Lord Jesus, we should all be growing in humble self-awareness. We should increasingly see our own faults and failures, not so that we will constantly berate ourselves and live with a guilt complex, but so that we will practice daily repentance and live with humble self-awareness, and therefore be kind and gentle and loving and discerning in our relationships with others. Jesus calls us to this. Watch your hearts. Take the log out of your own eye before you presume to criticize someone else.
Relationship to the self, a call to repentant self-awareness.
2. Others: Jesus Calls Us to Discerning Love
Secondly, notice here that Jesus in relationship to others calls us to discerning love. In fact, Jesus has already spoken about our relationship with others in those first two verses when he says, “Judge not that you be not judged.” But he continues now in verse 6 and then again in verse 12, and what we see in these two verses are two aspects of Jesus’ relational wisdom that must be combined if we are to have relational wisdom in the world today.
The first thing we need is discernment in our interactions. Look at verse 6. “Do not give dogs what is holy and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.”
What does Jesus mean by that? Well, both dogs and pigs were unclean animals for the Jewish mind, and both of those terms were terms of derision for people who were outside. They were outside the community of faith.
In fact, you see an example of this in Matthew 15, when a Canaanite woman comes to Jesus and asks him to heal her demon-possessed daughter. And Jesus says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And she implores him for mercy, and then Jesus says, “It’s not right to take the bread of the children and to give it to dogs.” It’s almost shocking when you read this. It looks like Jesus is insulting this woman. She has great faith and she says, “Yes, but the dogs eat the crumbs from the children’s table.” And he says, “Great is your faith,” and he heals her daughter.
But it’s a reference to her as a Gentile. That’s what he’s doing. He’s referring to her as a Gentile.
So many commentators have read this verse and have thought that it meant something like this. Jesus is saying, “Don’t disclose the gospel of the kingdom to the Gentiles prior to the death and resurrection of Jesus.” Don’t give what is holy to dogs; don’t cast your pearls before the pigs, before swine.
Another interpretation—this was adopted by the early church; you find this in the Didache, the teaching of the twelve, a very early document that closely follows the New Testament—the early church believed that this meant that you should not teach the secrets, the mysteries of the faith to unbelievers, and especially they had in mind the Lord’s table. That’s why they were so careful to guard the table so that an unbeliever would never come to the Lord’s table and partake in those sacred mysteries.
Now both of those interpretations may be legitimate applications of what Jesus is saying, but I think the broader principle that Jesus is calling for is discernment in our relationships with others. We need to know who we’re speaking to in order to know how to speak to them.
This is classic Hebrew wisdom. Let me give you an example from the book of Proverbs. Proverbs 26:4-5 has two verses—these two verses!—that go right hand in hand, and they almost look contradictory, but they’re calling for wisdom. Verse 4 says, “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.” Verse 5 says, “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”
So which is it? Do you answer a fool according to his folly or not? And the answer is, it depends. It depends. It requires wisdom, doesn’t it? It requires discernment in the relationship. You have to know the person you are speaking to in order to know their degree of receptiveness to truth. There are times when it’s foolish to speak truth, because someone has no capacity to receive it. It’s foolish to get involved in debate and, you know, ongoing discussion where there’s no end in sight and just kind of useless debate. I mean, Paul warns Timothy and Titus about this kind of thing in the pastoral letters. We’ve all experienced those kind of conversations.
Let me give you just a simple illustration from my world right now. A few months ago, our family got a new dog. We got a beagle. This is Milo. He is just as happy and just as hyper as that picture would make you think he is. You know, when we got him, Milo was about—I don’t know—eight pounds, maybe; six, eight pounds; something like that. He was about eight weeks old. Now he’s closer to six months old; he’s probably about twenty-five pounds, and what we have is an adolescent beagle who is just going crazy.
Now, the things we’ve trained him on he does really well. But there are some things we haven’t quite got the training down, and we’re trying to break some bad habits and figure this out. And with training a dog, you have to know what the right command is. If you just express frustration or you give commands they have no capacity to understand, it doesn’t do any good.
So here would be an example. I mean, Milo likes to climb on people, he likes to jump on people. And my daughter Abby, I overheard her saying, half in humor, half in frustration—it was a couple of months ago—Milo was on her and, you know, he’s still kind of nipping and biting and stuff. And Abby says, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another.”
On one hand, I’m glad my daughter’s quoting Scripture. But the beagle has no capacity to respond to that command. And wisdom requires doing something else if we want to get him to quit jumping on people.
Well, Jesus is saying, “Don’t cast what is holy to the dogs.” There are people who have about as much capacity to understand the commands of Scripture as a beagle has to understand these commands.
Paul even tells us that the natural person does not understand or welcome or receive the things of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him because they are spiritually discerned and he cannot understand them.
So what Jesus is calling for here is a kind of wisdom—relational wisdom, discernment.
Let me just give you an example of how this might work. Think about your experiences in sharing the gospel with other people. All of us are called to do this. We want to share our faith; we want to do evangelism. And there are times when the Lord gives an open door and there are times when the door is clearly not open.
I remember the very first time I shared the gospel with someone. I had prayed that morning in my prayer time. I prayed that morning, “Lord, would you give me an opportunity today to talk to someone about Jesus?” And it was about forty-five minutes into a conversation at work that afternoon, I was talking to a guy named Daryl, and I realized God had just answered that prayer, and this was an open door to talk to him about the Lord. And I did. He was receptive and open to it.
There have been other times when I’ve initiated a conversation with someone and in ten seconds shut down, when I’ve tried to even invite someone to church—shut down. Literally, one time I had the door slammed in my face. I was out walking the neighborhood trying to invite people to church. Door slammed in my face.
In situations like that, the worst thing you can do is persist and go on and keep trying to talk to someone. They’re not open. They’re not ready. The Spirit hasn’t opened their hearts yet. You don’t have an open door, and it requires wisdom to know whether you keep trying to talk to someone or not. Sometimes you step back and pray.
Jesus is calling for that kind of discernment in our relationships, and it applies not just to evangelism, but to all kinds of things. You know what it is to try to talk to a family member about an issue and to do it with the wrong timing, when they’re not open, when the relationship is not in a place where they’re ready to hear. And you bring that up at the wrong time, in the wrong situation, you say it in the wrong way, the wrong words, and things just blow up. We need wisdom, and Jesus is calling for that kind of wisdom in our lives. So, the wisdom of discernment in our interactions.
There’s the same kind of wisdom, and it’s love as our motivation. This is verse 12. Jesus says, “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets.”
This is Jesus’ famous golden rule. “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” And he says this is fulfilling the law and the prophets. Again, it bookends Matthew 5:17-20, and I think it is a summary, really, of everything that Jesus teaches. All of Jesus’ ethics boils down to this: loving others, doing to others as we would have them do unto us. This is how we fulfill this greater righteousness of the kingdom. In other passages of Scripture, both Jesus and the apostles simply call this love. They say love is the fulfilling of the law. Look at Matthew 22:40, Galatians 5:14, Romans 13:8.
So, I think you put these together and Jesus is calling for discerning love. It’s not simply speaking the truth without love, and it’s not simply being nice while ignoring truth; it is, instead, a deep, wholehearted commitment to pursuing the well-being of others with love in our hearts for them and discernment to know when and how to speak the truth to them, having first dealt with our own hearts, taking the logs out of our own eye, before we try to take the speck out of someone else’s life. It is discerning love.
This is exactly what Paul tells us to pray for, what he prayed for, in a wonderful passage in Philippians 1. Look at this prayer. Paul said,
“It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and the praise of God.”
Repentant self-awareness: relationship to self. Discerning love: relationship to others. That’s a high call, isn’t it? Who is sufficient for these things? How can we live that kind of life? Well, only if you have a certain kind of relationship with God your Father.
3. God: Jesus Calls Us to Persistent Prayer
So point number three, briefly, verses 7-11, Jesus calls us to persistent prayer. Look at verses 7-8: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” This is a call to persistence: ask, seek, knock. There’s escalating intensity in those words. All of the verbs are in the present tense, so it’s really, “Go on asking, go on seeking, go on knocking.” Persistent prayer.
In the parallel passage in Luke 11, Jesus gives this story about the friend at midnight. I won’t take time to read all of this, but the friend at midnight keeps knocking on the door of the friend so that he can get some food to feed a guest. And the friend at midnight is kind of annoyed at it, but because of the persistence, the importunity of this person—his impudence, as Jesus says—because of his impudence he gives it to him. And Jesus says you should pray like that. You should pray like that, with persistence. You don’t give up. Don’t give up! “Men should always pray and not lose heart,” Luke 18:1. That’s the lesson here, persistence in prayer.
So much of our relational dysfunction in our lives boils down to this, an inadequate relationship with God himself. We’re not pursuing God. We’re trying to do all of this on our own, and therefore we fail to watch our own hearts well. We live without self-awareness and we’re constantly running into problems in our relationships with others because our relationship with God himself is not characterized by this kind of persistent asking, seeking, knocking, dependence on the Lord.
It’s persistence, but it’s persistence in prayer to the Father, verses 9-11.
“Which one of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone, or if he asks for fish will give him a serpent? If you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him?”
Jesus here argues from the lesser to the greater. If we who are fallen, sinful parents still have the disposition to give good things to our children to meet their basic needs, how much more will our heavenly Father hear us when we call to him?
Now, in the context of this prayer, Jesus of course is not saying that the Father is like a genie in the bottle: present your three wishes and God will just give it to you. That’s not the idea at all. God is not a Santa Claus in the sky who fulfills our wish list. Instead, what Jesus here is calling us to do is seek the Father for the very things that he is calling us to in the Sermon on the Mount.
If you want transformation, if you want Christ-like character, if you want to live with this greater righteousness that characterizes the citizens of the kingdom, if you want to embody the virtues of the Beatitudes, if you want to be salt and light, if you want to deal with anger and lust in your heart and in your life, if you want to live before the Father in prayer and giving and fasting and all of the disciplines that God calls us to, and if you want to embody this kind of relational wisdom in your lives; ask, seek, knock. “If anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask of God who gives generously,” as James 1:5 says. So Jesus is calling us to pray to the Father for those things we need in order to obey him and yes, that includes the basic necessities of life. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Ask the Father and he will give you the things that you need, but it’s as you seek first the kingdom of God. Our great confidence in prayer, of course, is that we come to the Father.
There’s one other little twist in this that I want you to see before we close. In the parallel passage in Luke 11, it’s worded a little differently. There Jesus puts it like this: “If you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?”
Why does it say that? Because the Holy Spirit is the great new covenant gift of Christ to his people. Through his death and his resurrection on the cross, Jesus fulfilled the law covenant, he lived righteous and obedient in our place, he bore the penalty for our sins on the cross, he rose in triumph from the dead, he ascended to the Father’s right hand, and from the throne of heaven he poured out the Spirit on the church on the day of Pentecost. And now every single person who comes into the family of God receives the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father,” the Spirit who indwells our hearts, the Spirit who intercedes for us with groaning too deep for words, the Spirit who enables us to live the Christian life.
Listen, you can’t live the Christian life on your own! You can’t live out the Sermon on the Mount. You’ll be a failure every time…unless you have the Spirit of Christ living in you, fulfilling this word in you, conforming you to the image of Jesus Christ.
Our greatest need is the Holy Spirit, our need for the Spirit; and every Christian—every Christian—though we have received the Spirit as the church on the day of Pentecost, and though the Spirit indwells the heart of the believer in regeneration, every Christian has to grow in understanding and personal appropriation of the power of the Spirit for everyday life. We all have to do that, and we do that through persistent prayer, as you ask, as you seek, as you knock; as you bring your needs, your relational needs, your family needs, the needs of your life, the needs of your character, the needs of your heart—you bring them to the Father, and you pray, “Father, by your Holy Spirit, change me. By your Holy Spirit, fill me. By your Holy Spirit, give me wisdom. By your Holy Spirit, sanctify me. By your Holy Spirit, make me more like Jesus.”
So this is the call, brothers and sisters, in our relationships: repentant self-awareness in relationship to yourself, discerning love in your relationships with everyone else in the world, and persistent, prayerful, trusting dependence on your Father in heaven, seeking for the grace of the Holy Spirit in your relationship with God. We have this confidence that if we bring those needs to Him, He will surely give. As John Newton put it so well,
“Thou art coming to a king;
Large petitions with thee bring.
For his grace and power are such,
None can ever ask too much.”
Let’s pray.
God, our Father, we come before you now in these moments, as we have heard and received the Word of God, and we bring large petitions, large requests to you in this moment; that, Lord, you would so work in our hearts that we would be characterized by this wisdom in our relationships, that we would be more aware of the needs of our own hearts and lives, and that as you show us the logs in our eyes, we would repent, that we would turn from our sins, that we would become more like Jesus; that you would give us discernment and love in our relationships with others—with our family members, with our neighbors, with our friends, with fellow church members, with unbelievers in the world—and that we would know how to speak the right word at the right time, that we would know how to express the love of Christ, that we would discern open doors and closed doors, that we would truly live as salt and light in a way that brings glory to you and that loves our neighbors as ourselves. Especially we pray this morning that you would give us this heart to ask and seek and knock, to continually bring our hearts and our needs before you, our Father in heaven, through the work of your Son, Jesus Christ, who gives us boldness and access to the throne of grace so that we might receive grace and help through your Holy Spirit to change us, to transform us, and to make us more like Jesus.
Would you work that in our hearts now, this morning, as we bring our needs before you? Every one of us is faced with the messiness and the complexity of relationships in our lives. There are probably specific situations on our minds right now, so we bring them before you and we ask you, Lord, to equip us with everything we need in order to do your will, to work in our hearts that which is pleasing in your sight, to work in us to will and to work for your good pleasure.
As we come to the Lord’s table this morning, may the table be for us once again a means of grace as we taste and see the goodness of the gospel in remembering that Christ our Lord, the bread of life, was broken in his body on the cross and poured out his blood on the cross for our sakes. As we receive these elements, may we by faith feed on the gospel of Jesus Christ, and in doing so, may our hearts be strengthened with grace. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
