“With all other teachers the world has ever known, the important thing is the teaching; but here is a case in which the Teacher is more important even than what he taught.”
— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount
Jesus, The Rock (Matthew 7:24-27)
“In applying [the Sermon on the Mount] to ourselves, we need to consider that the Bible is a dangerous book to read, and that the Church is a dangerous society to join. For in reading the Bible, we hear the words of Christ, and in joining the church, we say, we believe in Christ. As a result, we belong to the company described by Jesus as both hearing his teaching and calling him Lord. Our membership therefore lays upon us the serious responsibility of ensuring that what we know and what we say is translated into what we do.”
— John Stott
Finding the Narrow Gate (Matthew 7:15-23)
“You say, you find it hard to believe it [is] compatible with the divine purity to embrace or employ such a monster as yourself. [In thinking this, you] express not only a low opinion of yourself, which is right, but too low an opinion of the person, work, and promises of the Redeemer; which is certainly wrong. ... Satan transforms himself into an angel of light. He sometimes off ers to teach us humility; but though I wish to be humble, I desire not to learn in his school. His premises perhaps are true, that we are vile, wretched creatures—but he then draws abominable conclusions from them; and would teach us, that, therefore, we ought to question either the power, or the willingness, or the faithfulness of Christ.”
— John Newton, “Letter XI, to the Rev. Mr S”
“[I]t is as if an error slipped into an author’s writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error. ... and now this error wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No, I refuse to be erased; I will stand as a witness against you, a witness that you are a second-rate author.”
— Søren Kierkegaard
Jesus, The Narrow Gate (Matthew 7:13-14)
“The way is unutterably hard, and at every moment we are in danger of straying from it. If we regard this way as one we follow in obedience to an external command, if we are afraid of ourselves all the time, it is indeed an impossible way. But if we behold Jesus Christ going on before step by step, we shall not go astray. ... For he is himself the way, the narrow way, and the strait gate. He, and he alone, is our journey’s end. When we know that, we are able to proceed along the narrow way through the strait gate of the cross, and on to eternal life, and the very narrowness of the road will increase our certainty. The way which the Son of God trod on earth, and the way which we too must tread as citizens of two worlds on the razor edge between this world and the kingdom of heaven, could hardly be a broad way. The narrow way is bound to be right.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12)
“The Golden Rule is a ‘call to creativity.’ Far from being a wooden rule to look back and ‘do to others what others have done to you,’ which would be counsel to reciprocate proportionally, it is counsel to look forward and to anticipate what others would like done and so be initiatory. And Jesus’ command to act in this creative way applies not only to disciples’ relations with other disciples, but with all human beings, as the use of the word ‘people’ rather than ‘brothers’ or even ‘neighbors’ indicates.”
— Bruner, Matthew, A Commentary
Ask, Seek, Knock (Matthew 7:7-11)
“In your gift we find our rest. There are you our joy. Our rest is our peace. … A body by its weight tends to move towards its proper place. The weight’s movement is not necessarily downward, but to its appropriate position: fire tends to move upwards, a stone downwards. … Things which are not in their intended position are restless. Once they are in their ordered position, they are at rest. My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me. By your gift we are set on fire and carried upwards.”
—Augustine of Hippo
God's Grace is Sufficient (Matthew 6:25-34)
“‘Be not anxious for the morrow’: either that is cruel mockery for the poor and wretched, the very people Jesus is talking to who, humanly speaking, really will starve if they do not make provision to-day… or it is the unique proclamation of the gospel of the glorious liberty of the children of God, who have a Father in heaven, a Father who has given his beloved Son. How shall not God with him also freely give us all things?”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
The Eye and the Heart (Matthew 6:19-24)
“1. Draw me from created good,
From self, the world, and sin
To the fountain of Thy blood,
And make me pure within
Chorus: If Thou hast drawn a thousand times
(Oh draw me Lord again)
Around me cast the Spirit’s bands
(Oh draw me Lord again)”
— Benjamin Beddome
Fasting to Feast with Our Father (Matthew 6:16-18)
“In spite of errors and abuses, Christians in the past had sound intuitions about the centrality of fasting in the Christian life. In the early Church, fasting was not an isolated practice reserved for a day or a season. It was a clue to all Christian living, a perspective on the whole of discipleship. To be a Christian meant to participate in a great feast. It meant also to observe a great fast.”
—Peter J. Leithart
Our Father (Matthew 6:9-15)
“The simple, possessive pronoun, ‘your’ on Sinai, and now the simple possessive pronoun ‘our’ on the New Testament mountain, join the people of God to God. God was not introduced to Israel, coldly and formally as ‘Yahweh, the God,’ but warmly as ‘Yahweh, your God.’ And now in the same spirit, God is given to us not only as the Father, but as ‘Our Father.’ The ‘our’ means we belong and are at home. It is a possessive pronoun, meaning that God the Father owns us yet gives himself to us so that he is ours and we are his. In the simple word ‘our’ is the joy of the whole gospel. We will never be able to calculate the honor that has been done us by being allowed to say, ‘Our Father.’’’
—F.D. Bruner, Matthew, A Commentary