"Four Kingdom Cautions" by John D. Martin

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Strength to Strength again this morning. It's always a blessing to gather here with many of you, and some of the best discussions happen about 10:00 till 6:00 here on this call. So if you ever want to get on early, feel free to do that, especially when Patrick Matthew's on here with us. So it's always a great time.

So it's a blessing to be gathered here. My name is Bryant Martin. I'm from State College, Pennsylvania, part of the Fathers of Jesus Congregation here, and I get the privilege of moderating this morning. The purpose of Strength to Strength is to advance Jesus' kingdom, and part of that is looking at topics that are stimulating and nurturing candid conversations. So we're looking forward to that here again this morning. Brother John Dee is joining us. And Brother John, this might be maybe your sixth time sharing on Strength to Strength or more than that. I'm not sure.

And so we're very thankful for your participation here on this call. So thank you for that. Also, Brother John gives us input and advice on Strength to Strength. That's a blessing as well. So this morning, the topic that Brother John is going to be sharing is called Kingdom Cautions, I believe.

Is that right, Brother John? I don't have the website. Yeah, Four Kingdom Cautions. Yes, Four Kingdom Cautions. And I'm anticipating that talk. So before we get started, let's bow our heads for prayer. Father, thank you for your many blessings this morning. Thank you for your mercies that are new to us this morning.

Thank you for health and strength. And most of all, we thank you that we can know that we are your children. Thank you for your Son, Jesus, for this new covenant, for this opportunity that we have to be your ambassadors here, participating in your work in the world of seeing people brought into a reconcile with you, brought into a relationship with you, experiencing peace and joy on earth, heaven on earth. Father, we thank you, Lord. And Father, I pray that as we hear this talk this morning by Brother John, that we could again understand more fully what you're calling us to be like as your representatives here on this planet.

So Father, guide and direct our conversation. Bless Brother John in a special way. Bless John too for his willingness to teach and to help us as younger generations to think seriously about you and your kingdom. So guide and direct this call, Lord. And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. All right, Brother John, it's all yours. Well, good morning. We're going back this morning to the Sermon on the Mount. So if you have your Bibles, you can turn to Matthew 5:6 and 7. We're going to be looking at chapter 7.

I really am intrigued by chapter 7 because the first two chapters, 5 and 6, are so idealistic that many people have written them off or said it must be referring to some future kingdom. There's no way we can live these chapters. They're too idealistic.

And the thing I always marvel about is that Jesus realized that, and he gave us a whole chapter of realism. So in the Sermon on the Mount, we have two idealistic chapters, and then we have a very realistic chapter because Jesus understood the difficulty of putting this all to practice, and he understood that many people would attempt to put those two chapters to practice and would actually create a nightmare rather than a heaven on earth. There literally have been hundreds of communes attempted, especially back during the hippie generation, people attempted to live together in full intentional community. And all of those have failed. I don't think any one of them has ever succeeded.

Only the Hutterites are continuing with that ideal in a real way. And so we need to look at chapter 7 because Jesus there really tells us what we're going to have to come to terms with if we're going to experience any reality from those first two chapters.

Now, I live here about 27 miles from Gettysburg Battlefield, which is probably the most significant battle, in fact, the largest battle fought here during the Civil War. There were 165,000 soldiers there. One-third of them were casualties. And the realism of Gettysburg was that if the Southern Army had been destroyed before they left Gettysburg, that would have been the end of the Civil War.

However, that did not happen, and the Civil War went on for another two miserable years with a tremendous loss of life. So why didn't that happen? Well, that's because General Meade, who was the general in charge of the Northern Army, refused to obey Lincoln because Lincoln realized the importance of this battle. And he telegraphed at the end of it repeatedly to General Meade that he was to destroy the Southern Army and make sure they did not escape. General Meade disobeyed every one of those orders and allowed the army to escape. And if you talk to older people, or at least when I was younger, who remembered stories from their grandparents, there are stories of wagonloads of these wounded soldiers coming down through Chambersburg with blood dripping out of the wagons of people screaming and moaning, injured people.

And so this injured army retreated to the south. So Lincoln was told by his associates that he should court-martial Meade for disobeying him. He should give him a dishonorable discharge. And Lincoln refused to do that. And he said something like this. He said, "I was not at Gettysburg. If I had been there during those three horrible days in July, the first, second, and third, I maybe would not have had the heart to destroy a wounded army either." He said, "I wasn't there to hear the screams and moans of dying people. I just was not. There's no way that I can court-martial this man because I don't know what I would have done in his place."

Now, I tell this story because Lincoln, even though he was commanding an army and something we would not do, there was another side to Lincoln, and that was the man had a huge heart for people. There are many stories of people who came to him pleading for mercy and help, and they could always depend on Lincoln.

We call that magnanimity, a magnanimous heart, which is a big heart. And Jesus knew that we would have to be that kind of people if this was ever going to succeed. And so he gives us four warnings here, which we want to talk about this morning.

He knew that he had talked about a new kind of person, free from anger, free from lust, free from dishonesty, free from revenge, free from violence. And those are pretty high ideals. He also realized he had projected an ideal society where the tyranny of property was broken, where there was vital faith without hypocrisy.

He realized that what he was talking about was an idealistic colony of heaven on earth, which we talk about when we talk about the kingdom. He realized that. He realized that he was projecting something very, very ideal for a very, very messed up society here in this world. And so a lot of people, like I said, have said, "Is this real?" And they've seen many communities fail, and they've concluded that it isn't. And of course, we as Mennonites know the failure of our idealism because we always set out to start a new community with high ideals, and everybody's happy, and they love each other so much that they could eat each other. And if they're not careful, they really end up doing that.

In fact, Jesus said that if you're not careful, you will bite and devour each other. And that's what happens if we don't look at these Kingdom Cautions. So Jesus tackles the practical problems to be overcome because he saw there would be a mixture of weak and strong. There would be a mixture of true and false. There would be a mixture of faithful and unfaithful in our attempts to establish these ideal communities. And so he gives us four Kingdom Cautions. So we want to look at these. The first one is how we relate to each other. And the second one is going to be how we relate to people outside the brotherhood. The third one is going to be how do we have the wisdom to do either of those.

And the fourth one is going to be what do we do about situations that are not covered in the Sermon on the Mount. So let's look at the first one. It says, and I read, "Judge not that ye be not judged, for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye meet, it shall be measured to you.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, 'Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye,' and behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then thou shalt see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." So the first point that I want to make that Jesus is dealing with here is in relation to each other. The warning here is that when we correct a brother, we have to do it with absolute compassion.

This is a beautiful ideal here. And the problem usually that comes up and the reason they fail is because of inner relationship problems between brothers. And so Jesus understood that. So the first thing he says here is, "Don't judge." Now, that does not mean we're not supposed to discriminate between right and wrong. That does not mean we're not supposed to identify people who are false because at the end of the chapter, he talks about identifying false prophets, and he spells out in detail how we're supposed to do that. So he's not talking about a person who's not discriminating in his ability to evaluate. He's not talking about that at all. In fact, the word that he's using here is actually this word, condemn.

Is that backwards? How are you seeing it?

Are you seeing it? I'm sorry, brother. Yeah, yeah, that is correct. We can see that, condemn. Well, it looks backwards to me. Okay. Yeah, no, it does. Do you see the last four letters of that word? And do you see where you could change one letter and have a word that we all understand very well, damn? That's what this is what this means. In fact, it's the same word that is used in John 3:17 when it says, "God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world." This is the same word that's being used here. And so what do we mean? Well, condemn has the idea of putting people down, putting people down because we have this very twisted concept that if we put other people down, that'll put us up.

And so when we go to talk to a brother, the thing that is the most dangerous is going to be whether or not we are going to consider our brother, as we are told in Philippians, to be better than ourselves. He has a fault, to be sure.

But he's not a brother that is beneath us. He's not a brother to be demeaned. He's a brother to be handled very, very carefully. And so Jesus is saying, "Before you go talk to that brother, you be careful that you don't have this problem, which is basically self-righteousness.

My brother has a fault, so I'm better than he is." That's the attitude we have to really, really work with, all right? Because there's always this subtle temptation to raise ourself on other people's faults. And that's what's behind gossip. It's what's behind all these things that we tend to do in relationship to the faults in our brotherhood. And this takes some real discipline.

Now, condemning is wrong for three reasons. Number one, I already told you, it's the opposite of what Jesus did. He did not come to condemn the world, and he could have. He could have come here with a superior attitude, with everybody with an attitude that everybody else is just terribly wrong. But he saw the good in people. I mean, here's a prostitute, and everybody else is putting her down. And Jesus deals with her problem without doing that.

Here's Peter, who, after he had been called, apparently went back to fishing. Did Jesus meet up with Peter and just lay into him for his going back on his commitment? No. He meets Peter on the shore with his fishing boat, and he says, "Let's launch out into the deep." And so they launch out, and he says, "Now put down the net." And you know what happened? So what Jesus did is, here's Peter. He went back to fishing, and Jesus said, "Look, Peter, I'm going to get back and visit his fishing with you." And then, of course, they have this tremendous catch of fish, and Peter sees his sin, and he says, "Depart from me. I'm a sinful man."

That's how Jesus dealt with it. He took Peter's wrong action and actually got involved with him to show him his need. He did not put Peter down. In fact, at the end of that whole thing, he said, "You're going to catch men.

You have a great ministry ahead of you, Peter." That's how Jesus dealt with people who had faults. And this is a difficult thing to do because this self-righteous attitude—I'm talking about myself. I deal with it all the time because when I see a fault in a brother, I immediately think that he is less intelligent, is less perceptive, has less commitment, you name it. That's my first tendency when I see a fault in a brother. And Jesus said, "Don't you go talk to him until you have taken that mote, that beam of self-righteousness out of your eye." So the first reason why we're not supposed to do it is because Jesus didn't do it. He gave us example after example of how he dealt with people who really were pretty blatant sinners without putting them down.

In fact, he dealt with them in a way that when it was all said and done, they had hope, and they felt encouraged by the way Jesus dealt with them. The second reason why it is wrong is because we tend, in this kind of situation, if we have self-righteousness, to project our faults on other people.

Romans 2:1 says, "Who are you, brother? Who are you that condemns other people?" Same word. "You also do the same things." And if we're really honest, sometimes the reason we're so sensitive to the faults in other people is because we have the same problem. I mean, here we have—I guess I can say this because it was public information—a number of decades ago, we had Jimmy Baker, who was caught in immorality.

And Jimmy Swaggart goes on the TV and just absolutely flays the man alive, just condemns him and condemns him and condemns him.

About a year later, we find out that Jimmy Swaggart was doing the same thing, only worse. See what's happening here? If you can put another TV evangelist down, that maybe makes you feel better about your own problem. In fact, I was in a barbershop after it was all over, and they replayed Jimmy Swaggart's confession. The man that was the barber was an atheist.

And he pointed to the screen, and he just ridiculed Jimmy Swaggart. He said, "Now, isn't he a beautiful evangelist? Isn't that beautiful?" I mean, he just, of course, very, very cynical. So that's what happens. People who are dishonest tend to be really sensitive to other people if they tell untruths. People who are immoral tend to be very sensitive to other people's immorality. In fact, when I see a person who has a really critical spirit, there was a man in our community that for years, if there was the slightest hint of immorality, he was on it, gossiping, just put that person down all over the community.

And I often wondered—I never found out—but I often wondered what was going on in his life morally. Why was he so sensitive to that one issue? So we sort of give ourselves away. If we have a judgmental spirit about something that we always use it, and everybody knows that this is the one thing we always sniff out, we're probably giving ourselves away that in that area, we probably have a problem of our own. So the first reason we shouldn't do it is Jesus didn't do it. Number two, it projects our faults on other people. And number three, it misses the whole point.

The whole point is to win the brother, not to put him down, not to put him out, not to condemn him. That's not the point at all. The point is we go there with a heart that we want this brother back. We love him. He's an indispensable part of our brotherhood. He has something to contribute. And we don't want to lose him. We want to see the fault corrected.

So what do we do? Well, Jesus says, "First, cast the beam out of your own eye. Don't you go talk to that brother until you're absolutely sure that you have nothing in your heart but to restore, that you have no attitude whatsoever of putting him down. And you're going to study before you go to him how you can say what you have to say in the kindest, most winsome way.

And you're going to be careful that if there's going to be any hurt, it's going to be the words that you say, not the way you said them." And I'm preaching to myself this morning. I mean, those who know me know I'm a strong personality. I'm very opinionated. I'm very categorical in the way I think. And I can be the opposite of what I'm describing. And so this is a real discipline that we have to go through before we go talk to a brother. We have to think carefully what we're going to say and how we're going to say it so that it does the least amount of hurt to the person that we're talking to.

So he says, "Quit beholding the beam. Quit staring at it." That's what it means. In other words, what you tend to do is you look at this one thing in the person's life, and it obliterates everything else about him, and you just stare at it and stare at it.

The condemning person keeps staring at the fault. The redemptive person is thinking hard how he can remove that fault. He's not magnifying the fault in his own thinking. So what Jesus is saying here is, "Secure your own repentance." All of us, I think I can say without any qualification, all of us, when we see a fault in a brother, have to do some real repenting because immediately we're going to have this self-righteous problem. And so we have to repent of that before we're ready to do anything about it.

It's just amazing how this works. We all think we are so smart. I like to tell the story of the man who wrote a book on child training, and he did it before he had any children, or at least his children were small. And the first title to the book was, "10 Sure-Fire Ways to Raise Spiritual Giants." And I mean, it was all in there, just a little bit like my talks before I was married on child training. If you want to hear how to train children, get one of my talks before I was married. Well, anyway, he wrote this book, and it was all in there. And 10 years later, he had children about 8, 10 years old.

The book was out of print. He revised it. The second title was, "10 Principles of Child Training." So you see what was happening. 10 years later, the book was out of print. Now his children have all married and left home. And he revises the book, and he puts it back in print. The last title was, "A Few Child Training Suggestions You Might Find Helpful."

So I'm just showing our tendency to really think we know, and we need to take the high ground in our relationship with other people. Someone has said, "When others are set in their ways, they're obstinate." When you're set in your ways, it's firmness. When your neighbor doesn't like your friend, he's prejudice. When you don't like his friend, you're a good judge of human nature.

When he is mild-mannered, you call him weak. When you're mild-mannered, it's graciousness. When someone dresses especially well, that person is extravagant. When you do, it's good taste. When he says what he thinks, he's spiteful. And when you do, you're being frank. So that's what we tend to do with ourselves.

So first of all, focus on your own repentance. It's easy to act concerned. We give these prayer requests, and often they're just simply a way to gossip in a sanctified way. So we're to examine our own faults. He chooses the eye. When an eye surgeon is about to do a surgery, he scrubs his hands to make sure he introduces no pathogen and causes more problems than what he remedies. And so Jesus is saying, "Scrub your heart. Do a good scrub and make sure that you know before you go that your only purpose is to reclaim the brother. It's not in any way to introduce any put-down or hurt into the situation." And then once you've done that, go and gently correct your brother.

Our brothers are precious. I have brothers in our congregation that I disagree with. And some of them are pretty serious disagreements. But I have tried really hard to appreciate them for the strengths that they have and to relate to them accordingly. And I haven't done it perfectly, but that's been my purpose. And that should always be our purpose. I mean, you may need that brother later. You may have a problem of some sort that only he could meet. And if he's gone, you won't have anybody to meet the need that you have. I mean, our brothers are precious to us, and we should view them that way. Here are a few cautions. There are some things that are very contagious: hatred, greed, jealousy, hurts.

And there are people walking around that are always talking about those things. And those people are very dangerous people. Be careful in your relationships with them. We have a lady in our congregation. I never saw anybody quite like her. She will absolutely not listen to any gossip. If you go to her with a story that you shouldn't be telling, she'll stand there in silence and maybe even make a few very kind comments that let you know she really does not want to hear that.

She's really been a challenge to me. I have never heard her gossip. I've never tried to talk to her in a way that I didn't feel rebuked if I was saying something inappropriate about somebody else. And so this is a real discipline. This is a real skill to develop. Fight against gossip. Somebody has said, "Gossip is that which goes in both ears and comes out the mouth greatly enlarged." And so we should fight against it. And another thing that I would say is we should study to compliment people. I mean, we're so quick to criticize, but we're not very quick to compliment. I mean, we're afraid we're going to make them proud, of course.

You probably won't. I remember a teacher that I taught with who went to EMC in its early years and had Mrs. M.T. Brackbill. He was the person famous for astronomy, built the planetarium or the observatory there at EMC. Well, his wife, I think she taught English. And he was in her class. And he said, "She was an amazing teacher." He said, "She never missed an opportunity to compliment a student on a good answer, a good paper, whatever." He said, "She just gave out compliments like candy. She just was constantly complimenting people and also was a very good teacher." And he said, "What was interesting," he said, "if she happened to be absent and there was a substitute teacher," he said, "we actually behaved better for the substitute teacher than we did for her because we didn't want her to come back and hear that we had caused a problem.

We had that much respect for her that we didn't want to hear any criticism get to her about what we had done." So let's learn to compliment people. Let's learn to build them up. Let's be careful with our criticism. And yes, scrub ourselves of self-righteousness, the tendency to put ourselves up by putting other people down. The second thing here is witness. That was correct with caution.

This one is witness with wisdom. So how do we handle this with people who are outside the kingdom of God? Well, the first thing we have to realize is there are three kinds of people out there. Number one are the simple people. Now, the Bible gives these three categories: the simple, the full, and the scorner. The simple person is the person who believes everything you say.

The story is told of the deacon. Somebody came to him and had some case and made a big issue out of something. And the deacon said, "Well, I think you're right." And shortly after that, another man came on the other side of the issue, and he made his case. And the deacon said, "You're right."

And his wife was listening to both of these, and she said, "Honey, they can't both be right." And he said, "Well, honey, I think you're right." So that's the simple person, okay? And those people, there's great hope for them because they're going to listen to you.

They're going to hear what you have to say, and they're going to think you're right. So you have a chance with them. The second person is the full. He already has heard the truth and has decided to reject it. And you need to be a little careful with them. There's some hope for him, not as much as for the simple person. And then there's the scorner. He not only has made up his mind to reject, he's out to destroy. He's out to destroy the truth. He's out to destroy everybody who's telling the story, the truth. And so the Bible gives almost no hope for that person. In fact, it tells you basically to avoid him.

He'll do you a lot of harm. And that's what Jesus is saying here. Vulgar, corrupted, reprobate people. Don't go with this message. We have to understand that almost nothing in this sermon makes any sense to those people out there. I mean, when you're talking to—I talked to a lot of people, young people on the telephone from the billboards. And if you even suggest that fornication is wrong, that is so stupid to them. They think that's the whole point of dating. That's what it's all about. What are you talking about? This makes no sense. It makes no sense not to accumulate wealth. What are you going to do in your old age?

Shouldn't you? In fact, I was talking to my brother the other day. I was talking a little bit about the way I handle my finances. And he said, "John, you have to look out for yourself. You have to do good things for yourself." See, that's how people out there think.

So that makes no sense. It makes no sense that if somebody does you wrong, you wouldn't try to hurt them in some way. That makes no sense. It makes no sense to always tell the truth because once in a while, there are situations where if you'd actually tell the truth, you're going to get yourself in hot water. So you need to sort of detour around the truth. So none of these things make sense to those people out there. In fact, if they try to apply them, they don't work.

When I describe the kingdom of God, frequently, one of the callers will say, "I bet you voted for Bernie Sanders." Well, yes. Bernie Sanders wants an equitable society. He wants wealth to be shared. But he's going to do it with force.

And I tell those people that when people who have not had selfishness dealt with, this always turns into a nightmare. What it ends up with is a few elites making everybody else equally miserable while they pocket the cash. And so this ideal that Jesus has here with money, for instance, it has created a disaster.

In the last century, 100 million people perished under Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, who tried to force this equality of money on everybody. And so Jesus says, "Be careful. When you're out there giving this message, try to evaluate who you're talking to and be careful how you handle it. It's not going to make any sense to them. It only makes sense to people who have had the selfishness of their heart dealt with, have studied the life of Jesus, who've seen the reality of this message, and have the grace of God to apply it. That's the only way any of these things are going to work." So he says, "Be very careful when you try to handle these things out there."

I'll give you another example. On our wedding, after we were married on Saturday, we stayed in West Winchester, Virginia. And I said to my wife on Sunday morning, "We're going to get up and go somewhere to church here in this city." So we went, I guess, to the church that had the tallest steeple.

And I think we went at 9:30. We didn't realize most of those churches don't start till 10 o'clock. But the pastor was having an early Sunday Bible study with a very select group of people. And it so happened that Sunday morning, the message was they were studying the Ten Commandments. And that Sunday morning, they were studying "Thou shalt not kill."

And so the pastor started off saying, "Well, now, the majority view on this has been that under certain circumstances, Christians really can get involved in killing." And he gave the just war theory. He said, "Now, there's a very small minority of people who have always believed it's wrong to kill under any circumstances. I'm sure that view is not represented here this morning." So I listened for a while till I had a chance. And I said, "Well, actually," I raised my hand and said, "I actually represent the minority view that you're talking." "Oh," they said, "We want to hear that." And they got all excited. They wanted to hear about this minority view.

Well, I didn't talk very long till I sensed they were all disgusted and wanted to go on with their discussion. See, I probably didn't handle the subject very wisely. I'm not saying I wouldn't do that again, but I'd be much more careful how I talk about it. I was way too idealistic, and it made no sense to them. So that's what Jesus is saying. Be very careful when you give this message to the people out there. And yet, we're supposed to give the message.

So how? How do we give the message to these people out there? Well, let's go back to chapter 5. "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven." See, for us Christians, we can believe without seeing.

And then usually we see after we have obeyed, at least we see some of the wisdom. That bunch out there, they have to see it first. And so that's why I think it's so important for us to form these kingdom communities and show the world how you resolve these difficulties. In fact, did you ever notice in James chapter 4, where he talks about fighting among brethren? Right in the middle of that discussion, he says, "Don't you know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?" Did you ever hear a sermon on non-conformity that said that fighting is worldly?

It is. That's how the world solves its problems. And the world should be able to look at our communities and see something altogether different that we do not resolve our problems with fighting. That just does not happen in the Christian community.

So we need to be very careful how we give this message. Basically, the ideal way to give it is to wait until there's a phenomenon that the world does not understand: a death in the family, some tragedy that occurs. The Nicole Mines shooting is a good example. I had a friend who was in London during that time, and he said that that was front-page news in the London newspaper. People in England could not understand why these people chose just to forgive and let it go and actually bless the family of the perpetrator. So in fact, at Pentecost, you see the same thing. You have these people hearing in their own language, and then they say to Peter, "What is this?"

And then Peter preaches the sermon. So that's the ideal way to get the message out. Now, on the billboard calls, of course, they don't know me. They don't see me. They're not around to see how I live. So there's only one thing I can do to pique their interest, and that is the way I handle the disagreements. If somebody comes on and they're just antagonistic and ugly and mean with their comments, and I'm gentle and kind to them and let them speak and I'm reasonable, they often, at the end of the conversation, will say something like this: "When I picked up the phone, I was expecting to talk to an angry fundamentalist, and this has been altogether different from what I expected.

I disagree with you, but this was a good conversation. I really enjoyed it." Now, you can be sure that they're going to think about that message more than if I had taken a different approach. So we have to live in a way that people see something, and then they want to hear the message. And that's what Jesus said. "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father." And of course, then ask the questions. Well, so we have correct with caution, witness with wisdom. And how are we going to have all this wisdom to do all of this? Well, the next part is perceive with prayer. "Ask, and it shall be given unto you.

Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh receive it. And he that seeketh findeth. And to him that knocketh, it shall be opened unto him. Or 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? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?"

It took me a long time to realize that there are tremendous promises here. It says, "Everyone that asketh receive it. Everyone that knocks finds. And to everyone—" I'm sorry. "Everyone that seeks finds. And to everyone that knocks, it shall be opened."

And so Jesus called us to live in constant prayer. I mean, before I talk to almost all the billboard callers, when they call, I breathe a silent prayer before I say anything because that's the way we're going to have the answers. Now, the words here have an ETH to them. And there's an interesting thing about the King James Version that I appreciate. And that is not always, but many times when you have an ETH on a verb, it is that special Greek verb that means continuous action. So we're talking about continual prayer here. We're not talking about just one little prayer. We're talking about the person that has persisted in prayer. And Jesus, of course, told us that we are to persist in prayer.

And he gives examples of the widow and the unjust judge. He gives the example of the friend who comes knocking at night and just persists until you get out of your bed and go meet his need. And so I think if we can learn anything here, it's that God answers the prayers that we continually ask.

George Mueller, I think I've given this one here on one of my talks before. George Mueller, in his diary, talks about five men that he prayed for for 50 years. In his diary, he records that, I think, two or three of them were converted shortly before he died. And someone observed that shortly after he died, the rest of them were converted. All five of them were finally converted. But George Mueller prayed for them for 50 years.

And so we need to be in constant, persistent prayer if we want wisdom. The story is told of a young man who went to a philosopher, a Greek philosopher, and said, "I'd like to be wise. Would you tell me how to be wise?" "Yeah," he said, "I can do that." And they were standing on the seashore. So he said, "Come with me." So they started to wade out into the water till it got deeper and deeper and finally was up to here.

And then he took the young fellow's head and pushed it under the water and held it there. And the guy struggled and struggled. And he held it there for quite a while till the fellow was in pretty bad shape.

And then he let him up. And then the young fellow was really angry. He said, "Why did you do that to me?" "Well," he said, "when you were under the water, what did you think about? Did you think about how much money you had? Did you think about your vacation? Did you think about your hobbies? No. What did you think about? Air." Well, he said, "When you want wisdom as badly as you wanted air, you will become wise."

So Jesus is saying here that we need to be desperately seeking. We need to see wisdom as the most precious thing and be in constant search. Ask means we have a sense of need. Seek means we become active. We talk to people. We read the Bible. We pray.

We put some action behind our desire. And knocking has the idea, according to one of Jesus' parables, of persistence. And if we have that sense of need and we're constantly asking God, we will have the wisdom to know how to relate to our brethren and how to relate to those outside. We used to wonder if it was possible to pray without ceasing.

I have observed now it's possible to text without ceasing. So I suppose we could pray without ceasing if people can text without ceasing. So anyway, so perceive with prayer. So now we have correct with compassion, witness with wisdom, and perceive with prayer.

And the Bible assures us that God always gives us the best gifts, especially, in fact, in Luke chapter 11, when it talks about persistence, it says he always gives the Holy Spirit to them that ask. So I kind of think that all of our requests are answered by the Holy Spirit. And God always gives us that in our requests. He ministers to us through the Holy Spirit.

So perceive with prayer. And when it says, "It'll be opened unto you," what will be opened? Well, I think it will be—and all of you know my famous diagram—all the resources of heaven made available to us through Christ.

God is able to make all grace abound toward you that you always, having all sufficiency in all things, may abound unto every good work. Or Ephesians chapter 1, verse 3, which says he's made available to us everything in the heavenly places. And so that happens through the people who want that and persist in prayer to receive those graces.

Now, the last question. So what do I do in situations that are not covered by the Sermon on the Mount? And there are many of them. We get into many situations that are not—there's nothing specific in the Sermon on the Mount. And the Sermon on the Mount is very interesting because it's half the length of the Constitution of the United States.

And here we have a Sermon on the Mount that's much smaller than the Constitution of the United States for a much larger kingdom. But we can learn something from the Constitution of the United States. It has a clause in there called the Commerce Clause, which is often called the Expansion Clause. And it says something like this: if there's something that is needed in interstate relationships that is not specified in the Constitution, the federal government has the authority to do that. And we call it the Expansion Clause. Well, the Sermon on the Mount has an Expansion Clause. And I would like to read it. "Therefore, all things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets."

So Jesus is saying, if you run into a situation where you don't know what to do and I haven't told you what to do, here's how you decide. And I always smile when I read this because if I had been choosing something to which people can appeal if they need to answer a situation like that, I would have thought of something in my nature that is good.

But Jesus chose the worst: selfishness. He says, "Now here's a chance for you to use your selfishness. Indulge it to the max and then go do it to the brethren. Whatever you would want people to do to you, think the most selfish thoughts you want to think and go do that to your brethren, and you will always be right."

You know who the best example in the scriptures is? Haman.

Haman was probably the most intensely selfish person we read about in the scriptures. And so the king came to him. You know the story. "What shall I do to the man who the king delights to honor?" And so Haman just unloaded all the selfish thoughts he had. Get the best robe, get the king's robe, put his crown on his head, put him on a horse, have somebody lead him through the city and say, "This is the man who the king delights to honor." And the king said, "Haman, that's a great idea. Go do that to Mordecai."

That's what Jesus says we're supposed to do. That if you don't know what to do in any situation in relationships to your brethren, relationships to somebody outside the brethren, do that. Indulge your selfishness and then go do that to him.

And like I said, I always smile when I read this because it is so ironic. But it was also very wise because everybody has a point of reference then. Everybody has this quality. It's not that Jesus is saying we're to appeal to something that some people don't have. Everybody is selfish. And everybody can indulge their selfishness. And everybody can know what is the right thing to do in a situation.

So these are the four things. Correct with caution your brethren. Witness with wisdom to the people outside. Perceive with prayer. And if you don't know what to do, indulge your selfishness and do it to the person that you're relating to. Let's not defeat our kingdom ideals by behaviors that defeat our message. I conclude with a story. There was a man, a German artist. His name was Hohemer.

And he was such a—he was a German artist. And he became so well-known that he finally moved to England. He moved to London, set up his office, and was an artist there, his studio. And then his father, who was a widower, he invited him to come live with him. So his father came and discovered that he had some real skill making pottery.

So he started to make pottery. So there was the son and the father in business together in London. But as the man got older, Hohemer noticed that at the end of the day, he would look at his pieces of pottery and he'd say, "My hands aren't as steady as they used to be. My pottery is not the quality it used to be." And he would leave the studio very, very discouraged.

So Hohemer would wait until he was upstairs in bed, sound asleep. And then he would take all his pieces of pottery that were still green, and he would put them on the wheel, and he would perfect them and set them aside.

And his father would come down in the morning, and he would look at them, and he would say, "Well, you know what? I think I still can do as well as I always did before." So that's what God is calling us to. He's calling us to have that attitude toward people. Do we have the kindness and the compassion to go to them to correct the fault and make it a beautiful example of what God can do in the lives of people, whether it's our brethren, whether it's someone outside the brethrenhood? That should be our purpose. And we need to scrub our hearts good and clean and pray with persistence so that we have the wisdom and the repentance of self-righteousness to relate to people in that way.