Matthew 7

http://www.esvbible.org/Matthew+7/

Jesus tells us to stop judging others. When we judge people, we will be judged by the same standards that we use to judge. The part about the sawdust means that if we notice the small things that our brothers and sisters in Christ do wrong then we are hypocrites because we all have screwed up majorly. We can't tell someone that we are going to help them fix their small problem with God when we have a huge, glaring problem. Instead, we need to work on ourselves so that the Lord can lead us in helping others.

Don't let what is valuable and holy go to invaluable places. This is the same sort of thing that Paul talks about false prophets, you can use the truth and twist it for your own evil cause, but when you do this evil deed, you trample it and then those in Heaven will trample you.

Jesus says that we who believe and have faith in Him need only to ask for what we want or are looking for, and the Lord will provide. If you knock on His door, He will open it for you. Jesus uses parents as examples. He says that if a child asks the parent for bread, the parent wouldn't give him a stone. Or the child asks for a fish, the parent wouldn't give a snake. If we as humans, who are inherently sinful and evil can give good gifts to our children when they ask, the Father in Heaven will give us so much more when we ask Him.

The golden rule from Jesus Himself. Always do to others what you would have them do to you. I don't think much needs to be said about that lesson because we have all, raised by Christian parents or not, heard that lesson since a very young age, and it in and of itself is quite self explanatory.

Entering into Heaven means going through a narrow gate because the gate to Hell is wide. Many people will enter through the wide gate because there are masses of unsaved people. There needs to be a wide gate to fit them all in. Few enter through the narrow gate because it may cause trouble for us from people, but the reward is from our Heavenly Father. Only few people find the narrow gate, so look our for it.

Jesus warns us to beware of false prophets. Again, Paul doesn't make this stuff up, it all comes from the gospel. False prophets can be hard to spot because they come on looking and acting like they truly are doing the will of God, but they are simply masking their evil. The tree metaphor is really popular. Good people whose lives are honestly rooted on the firm foundation of Jesus Christ do not produce rotten acts and misled people because God's Spirit leads them in their conversations with others. You will know the false prophets by how they act and teach. Not everyone who stands before Jesus' trone will be allowed into Heaven. Many will claim that they spoke in His name and cured illnesses by His power, but Jesus will tell them that He never knew them in their lives because they never turned toward Him, and He will send them away.

Jesus tells thew crowd that they must build their rocks on a firm foundation, like the wise man who built His life on the stone. When winds came and floods rose, the house stood firm. Jesus is the rock, and our lives are the house. We must build our lives with Christ as the center and focus so that we can stand strong in whatever life throws at us all the way until after death when we stand before Him and can show Him without words how we stood with Him as our foundation. The foolish man built His house on sand, and when the storm and floods came, disaster happened. In the same way, if we focus our lives on anything but Christ, disaster will follow. We will face crises on our own and never truly know how to handle them. And after death, Christ will see that He doesn't know the foolish men, and He will cast them away.