Matthew 7:13-14
Life is about choice. Every day we are called on to make a multitude of choices. In these two verses, Jesus was calling His disciples to choose. What were they to choose? If you look at Deuteronomy 30:19 and Jeremiah 21:8 (which verse 14 is referenced to) they were to choose life. In Joshua 24:15 it is about choosing whom you will serve. They all amount to the same thing. We have a choice in life. We can choose two ways to go. We can choose to serve Jesus or we can choose to serve our own desires.
There is the broad way that leads to death that many take. It is pleasant and wide and there is much scope to indulge your every whim. You can do what you like and never feel you have to account for anything, unless the law catches up with you! Then there is the narrow way. There is pressure and difficulty and the way is hard and long, but at the end of the way there is life.
If you think of life, the elite athletes with their gold medals worked long and hard to achieve that reward. The successful people of this world had many years of hardship and poverty to reach the pinnacle of their success. The good things in life are never easy to acquire and there are no short cuts to acquisition. It may be possible to think they are easy to come by, but those things which are easy are usually brief and dissatisfying. The way to true life in Jesus is a hard way and involves long hours of dedicated service, but the reward at the end is the most precious gift anyone can receive.
As Jesus’ disciples we are called to choose the narrow way. It will not be easy. We will need to persevere in the face of many temptations and difficulties. We will be called upon to make a myriad of choices about how to respond to difficult situations, to horrible people, to temptation. We will often fall off the path and have to scramble our way back on to it. It will often be dark and the only light will be Jesus as the lamp to our feet. We will tentatively step forward, not able to see the path ahead through the darkness, just knowing that our feet are on solid ground. At the end of this path, however, is our reward, eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. And when we reach there, we will rest, at peace in His loving arms and know that it was worth it.

Matthew 7:12
According to the NIV Study Bible notes “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is referred to as the Golden Rule. They note that in rabbinic Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism the golden rule is found in the negative form where you do not do the evil to others they would want to do to you. It was also found in Greek and Roman ethical teaching in various forms. In this verse, Jesus states this in the positive form and attributed this to the meaning of the Law and the Prophets which He came to fulfil.
Matthew Henry has a lot to say about this verse and the following two verses. He emphasises Jesus’ message that righteousness towards men is an essential branch of true religion and that religion towards God is an essential branch of universal righteousness. In this way He is saying that righteousness towards men involves treating them the way you would like to be treated. That is easier said than done. I know I often struggle with the desire to retaliate against someone and it is a struggle to respond to others in God’s way, using appropriate assertiveness but not behaving in an unrighteous way.
Matthew Henry continues that it is important to resist the temptation to retaliate to others like for like. He extends this to include not judging or censuring others and then links this honesty to the way we should approach God in prayer. He states that if we are not honest about our feelings before God then He cannot hear our prayers. This reminds me of the book “What happens when women pray” by Evelyn Christenson. In the book she related her journey of setting up a prayer group with two of her prayer partners. Progress towards the establishment of this group was agonisingly slow as the three women spent months handing attitudes and resentments over to God. The message here was that it was important to be right before God in order to pray effectively. This is not saying you should put off praying because you may have things you haven’t dealt with yet. What it is saying is that you must be honest before God.
What does being honest look like? For me, it looks like praying and realising I am feeling hurt, angry, resentful, and so on, about another person or God, admitting this to God and asking for His help in dealing with it. After all, the Holy Spirit has prompted me about this matter because it is important for me to bring it to God to deal with it.
Jesus backs up the reason for His proclamation with the statement that “this sums up the Law and the Prophets”. This is the second great commandment on which hang all the law and the prophets. You can read about the Great Commandment and its partner in Matthew 22:37-40.
The great commandment and its partner are “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbour as yourself”.
So Jesus is telling those who would be His disciples that we should seek to not retaliate against others, but instead to treat them as we would like to be treated. In the same way, we must be honest in our prayers and seek to hand over to God resentments and hurts that we feel, as well as being honest about our own sins. In this way we can be true disciples of Jesus and we can grow in our relationship with God through prayer.

Matthew 7:7-11
In this section Jesus is teaching that the disciple must Pray. In order to be a disciple of Jesus, you must ask God so that He can give to you, seek Jesus with a view to Him increasing and you decreasing (John 3:30) and seek to spend time with God because when you do that, He will open to door for you. Just as you wish to spend time with a friend and you go to that friend’s house, knock on the door, they open it and you go in and spend time with them. In the same way, through prayer, you must seek God and a deeper relationship with Jesus.
Just in case the doctrine you have been taught is that God is a harsh God who delights in denying people happiness and rarely gives anything, Jesus expands on his words. He asks the people which of them would respond to their child’s request for food by giving the child a stone? What would you do? If you are like most other people, you would say that you would give the child food. Likewise if the child asks for a fish, would you give it a dangerous snake? No. So, Jesus continues, if you, an evil sinner know how to give your children good things, then wouldn’t God, who is perfect and has no evil in Him, give good things to His children? Romans 8:28 tells us that God works for the good of those who love Him, and have been called according to His purpose, in all things. This means that the things that happen to us are for our good, even when they don’t appear to be that way. I don’t know the answer for the suffering in the world and why sometimes horrible things happen to us, but I stand on the promise of Romans 8:28 that God works for my good.
Here in this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is saying this. God loves us because we love Jesus. Because we love Jesus, we are God’s children. God desires to give us good things, but like a loving parent, He knows that some things we desire are not good for us. God wants us to spend time with Him. Like a loving parent, He desires to have quality time with us, which means we need to spend time in prayer with Him. He also desires us to love His firstborn, Jesus, our Saviour. So God also desires we spend time with Jesus in Prayer. As we spend time with Jesus, we hand over our wilfulness and our desire to have things our own way. We submit to Jesus and to God’s will for our lives. Then Jesus will grow larger in our lives and we will grow smaller. Then we will be well on our path of discipleship.