The Bible Study Podcast, episode 422. Today, the Bible Study podcast concludes the study on Matthew 7 and on the Sermon on the Mount.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. We're going to finish the study today,

finally, of the Sermon on the Mount. We may, in fact, get into Chapter 8. We'll just have to see

how it goes. And Chapter 7 is where we find ourselves, and you may remember that last week we

talked about the wide and the narrow gates and the true and the false

prophets. And we talked about how even though Jesus said just the week before, ask, seek, and knock,

and the door will be open. And what you seek, you'll find, what you ask where you'll be given,

and the door will be open. But even all of that, there's still a wide and narrow door.

There's still a path that everybody is heading on, a path that is heading away from

God. And we also talked about true and false prophets, that you can claim to be a sheep, but still be a

wolf underneath, and that we should be known by our fruit. Before that, we talked about judging

others, and that we shouldn't. That's really the bottom line there is that we have no right or responsibility to be judging others. And that's not something we're called to do. We talked about worry and how we shouldn't, that it doesn't do any good. You can't get any taller by worrying about it. You can't live a single hour longer by worrying about it. In fact,

I'm pretty sure that you can live shorter by worrying about it. We talked about storing up your

treasures in heaven where they are safe, where thieves don't come in and steal them, that we should

value the things of God and not the stuff. We talked about fasting. We talked about prayer, we talked about giving to the needy,

we talked about murder, divorce, adultery, oaths, revenge, an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth,

loving our enemies. And finally Jesus concludes here in the sermon on the Mount, the end of

chapter 7, with the wise and the foolish builders. And I think that there's a

reason why this is the last part of the recorded sermon on the Mount. And I don't know whether Matthew

was trying to write down the whole thing or not. But this is the part that he concludes with is the

wise and the foolish builders, therefore everyone who hears

these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a man who built his house on the rock.

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