26 Life-Changing Lessons From Matthew 20: Applying Matthew 20 to Your Daily Life

It is possible to be genuinely glad for another believer and privately bothered at the same time. Perhaps someone came to Christ years after you did, or joined the church last spring, and God has just handed them the thing you have been asking him for since long before they believed. You are happy for them. You are also something else, and you would rather nobody knew it.

Matthew 20 walks into that room and sits down. The lessons from Matthew 20 do not scold you for the feeling. They explain where it comes from, name it honestly, and then take it apart.

The chapter also puts one open question in front of two very different people. What each one asks for shows what they actually believe the kingdom of God is. Your answer would do the same.

Brief Summary of Matthew 20

Jesus tells a parable about a landowner who hires workers all through the day and pays every one of them the same wage at evening, which infuriates the men who started at dawn. He then takes the twelve aside and tells them for the third time that he is going to Jerusalem to be mocked, scourged, crucified, and raised.

The mother of James and John immediately asks for the two best seats in his kingdom, the other ten disciples are furious, and Jesus answers them all by redefining greatness as service. Leaving Jericho, he stops for two blind beggars and gives them their sight.

Underneath every scene sits one issue: what a person thinks they have coming to them.

Lesson 1: God Keeps Going Back for the People Nobody Else Wanted (Matthew 20:6-7)

Matthew 20:6-7: “Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard.” (KJV)

The householder in the parable does not send a servant to do his hiring. He goes himself, and he goes back again and again, at dawn, at nine, at noon, at three, and finally at five in the afternoon, when there is one working hour left in the day.

Read the reason the last men give for standing there. They are not lazy. Nobody hired them. In that world men gathered in the marketplace every morning hoping an employer would pick them, and these men had been passed over by every employer who came. They had stood there all day watching other men get chosen.

And the owner’s word to them is “Go ye also.” Also. The same word he used at sunrise, now spoken to the men nobody wanted. God has a habit of returning to the place where the overlooked are still standing, and he does not go there reluctantly.

Read also: Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard Meaning

Lesson 2: Those Who Bargain With God Murmur; Those Who Trust Him Rejoice (Matthew 20:2, 4)

Matthew 20:2, 4: “And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard… Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you.” (KJV)

Would you rather have a contract with God, or his word?

The first men in the parable took a contract. They agreed a figure, shook on it, and went into the vineyard holding a number. Every group hired after them went in holding nothing at all except his promise to do what was right. One group trusted a sum. The other group trusted a man.

By evening the men with the agreed figure are the ones complaining, and the men who had only his character are the ones going home astonished. The wage itself was honoured to the penny, so the trouble lies elsewhere.

It lies in what happens to a heart that relates to God by arrangement. Serve him on terms you have privately set, and every blessing gets measured against your terms, until one day you feel short-changed by a God who has cheated no one.

Where have you started keeping an account with God, expecting a return you believe you have earned?

Lesson 3: God Gives You What You Need, Not What You Clocked (Matthew 20:9)

Matthew 20:9: “And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny.” (KJV)

A penny here is a denarius, the standard day’s pay for a labourer, and it was subsistence money. It fed a family for a day and no more. That is why God’s own law insisted a hired man be paid before sundown: “At his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it” (Deuteronomy 24:15).

Hold those two facts together and the eleventh-hour man’s wage stops looking like a windfall. He did not receive a bonus. He received supper for his children. Pay him one twelfth of a penny for his one hour of work and you have treated him fairly and sent his family to bed hungry.

The owner has his eye on need rather than on a timesheet. He gives the way a father gives, and that is a far more unsettling thing than mere fairness, because it means the size of your portion was never a verdict on the size of your service.

Lesson 4: Grace Is Handed Out in Public, and It Exposes What Is in You (Matthew 20:8)

Matthew 20:8: “Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first.” (KJV)

Why did the owner pay them in that order?

He had no need to. He could have paid the dawn crew first, sent them home content with the wage they agreed, and handed the latecomers their penny after everyone else had gone. There would have been no murmuring and no ugly scene at the end of a good day. Instead he arranged it so that the men who worked twelve hours stood and watched a man who worked one hour receive the same coin.

That was deliberate. Grace in this parable is not merely given; it is given where the deserving can see it. And the moment they saw it, something came out of them that had been sitting inside them all day long.

God still works this way. He blesses openly, in front of people who have been serving longer, and what surfaces in the watchers was already there before the blessing landed. The blessing did not create the bitterness. It found it.

Lesson 5: You Can Receive Exactly What God Promised and Still Feel Cheated (Matthew 20:10-13)

Matthew 20:10-13: “they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny… But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny?” (KJV)

You can hold everything you asked God for in your hand and still feel robbed. The first workers prove it. They are gripping a full day’s wage, the exact sum they bargained for that morning, paid on time and in full according to the law, and they are complaining.

Matthew’s word is “supposed.” They supposed they would receive more. The owner never said it and never hinted at it. They watched somebody else’s generosity, did some arithmetic in their heads, and built an expectation God had never given them. Then they grieved over the gap between what he promised and what they invented.

A good deal of the disappointment carried into prayer works exactly like this. A believer serves faithfully, watches how God has moved for someone else, and concludes that a certain outcome is now owed. When it does not come it feels like betrayal, while in truth God has kept every word he ever spoke.

Then look at how the owner answers him. He calls him “Friend,” and tells him the truth without flinching. God is tender toward the believer struggling with this, and he is honest, and he will not pretend you were wronged when you were not.

What have you been holding against God that he never actually promised you?

Lesson 6: Your Real Complaint Is Not That You Got Too Little (Matthew 20:12)

Matthew 20:12: “These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day.” (KJV)

Listen to the charge they actually bring. The words are not “you underpaid us.” The words are “thou hast made them equal unto us.”

Their grievance is equality itself. They are untroubled by the contents of their own hand and greatly troubled by the contents of someone else’s. Underneath the language of justice stands a man who wanted the distance between himself and a lesser man preserved, and who discovered that God had closed it.

That is what makes the parable so uncomfortable and so useful. Envy almost never announces itself as envy. It arrives dressed as a fair point, with a reasonable tone of voice and a list of hours worked, and the tell is nearly always the same. The complaint turns out to be about what somebody else has rather than about what you lack.

Put your next grievance against God to that test before you take it any further.

Lesson 7: Envy Turns God’s Goodness Into Your Grievance (Matthew 20:15)

Matthew 20:15: “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” (KJV)

An evil eye, in the Bible’s own language, describes a grudging and envious heart. Moses uses the phrase of a man who will not lend to his poor brother, “and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought” (Deuteronomy 15:9). Jesus used the same picture himself in the Sermon on the Mount, so his hearers knew exactly what he meant by it.

The owner’s question is therefore a diagnosis, and it lands with terrible precision. He has already settled the question of whether the man was wronged. Now he names what has actually happened: your eye has turned evil, and here is the thing that turned it. My goodness.

That is the strange power of envy. It takes the kindness of God, the very thing that ought to make a believer glad, and converts it into a private injury. The better God is to someone else, the worse you feel. And while it is happening it does not feel like sin at all. It feels like a point of order.

Where has the goodness of God toward another Christian become a wound in you?

Lesson 8: God’s Kindness to Someone Else Costs You Nothing (Matthew 20:15)

Matthew 20:15: “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?” (KJV)

Your wage was never touched. That is the first thing to see in the owner’s question, and it dismantles the whole complaint. Every penny paid to the latecomers came out of his own purse. Not one coin was lifted from the men who worked all day. Their pay was complete, exactly as agreed, entirely unaffected by his kindness to anyone else.

Grace is not a fixed pot that empties as other people are blessed. What God gives to a newer believer, a younger minister, or a family down the road is not subtracted from what he has promised you. Their answered prayer did not spend your answer. Their open door did not close yours.

Paul told the Galatians to prove their own work and find their rejoicing in that, rather than in comparison with another (Galatians 6:4), and this parable shows why the instruction matters so much. The ledger you have been keeping on other Christians is measuring nothing real. It records their portions and yours side by side, as though the two were connected, when God has never once run his household that way.

Lesson 9: Long Service Is Not Proof That You Belong to Him (Matthew 20:16)

Matthew 20:16: “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.” (KJV)

Jesus ends the parable with a sentence it did not strictly need. The story was already complete. He adds this line anyway, and he adds it in the hearing of the men who murmured.

Many are called. Few are chosen. The men who had been in the vineyard since sunrise, who bore the burden and heat of the day, who could point to twelve solid hours of work, are the very ones standing there with a grudge against their master’s goodness. Length of service settled nothing at all about the state of their hearts.

Scripture is not handing anxious believers a fresh reason to doubt, and it never treats faithful years as worthless. This warning is aimed at the person who has begun to trade on his record.

When your assurance comes to rest on how long you have been at it, on your attendance, your giving, your years in the pew, then this verse is speaking to you and it means to unsettle you. The only safe ground under any of us is Christ himself, and a heart that resents his mercy toward others has stopped standing there.

Is your confidence before God resting on his goodness, or on your record of service?

Lesson 10: The Eleventh Hour Is Real Grace, and a Terrible Thing to Gamble On (Matthew 20:6-7)

Matthew 20:6-7: “And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle… Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.” (KJV)

Maybe you feel you have come late. Years spent elsewhere, a faith picked up long after it might have been, a sense that the useful part of your life was already spent before you gave any of it to God. This parable answers that fear, and the answer is a full day’s wage placed in the hand of a man who worked one hour.

Nobody who comes to Christ has come too late. The thief on the cross had one afternoon and heard, “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). That is genuine grace, and Scripture holds it out without a hint of embarrassment.

Now read the verse again and notice what it never shows. There is no man here deciding to stroll in at five o’clock. These men were hired the moment they were asked, and they went at once. Nobody in this parable waits out the day on purpose and cashes in at the end, and Scripture nowhere promises any of us an eleventh hour of our own choosing.

Grace at the eleventh hour is a door God opens. Receive it as the mercy it is, and never treat it as a plan.

Read also: What Is Cheap Grace

Lesson 11: Jesus Walked Toward the Cross With His Eyes Open (Matthew 20:18-19)

Matthew 20:18-19: “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, And shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him: and the third day he shall rise again.” (KJV)

This is the third time Jesus has told them (compare Matthew 16:21), and it is the fullest telling yet. He names the betrayal, the sham verdict, the handover to Rome, the mocking, the whip, the cross, and the third day.

Nobody is dragging him anywhere. He says “we go up to Jerusalem,” and he is the one leading the way there. Matthew even notes that he took the twelve aside to tell them, which means he carried this knowledge through every crowd and every conversation on that road while looking perfectly composed.

He knows the shape of every hour in front of him, down to the spitting and the scourging, and he keeps walking toward all of it. Whatever else the cross was, it was a road he saw in full and chose.

That is the love the rest of this chapter stands on, and it is the reason the demands he makes later in it are not cruel. When he tells his men that greatness means becoming a servant, he is not issuing an order from a comfortable distance. He asks no one to go anywhere he has not already gone first, and further.

Lesson 12: He Said “Cross” and They Heard “Crown” (Matthew 20:19-21)

Matthew 20:19-21: “and to crucify him: and the third day he shall rise again. Then came to him the mother of Zebedee’s children with her sons… Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.” (KJV)

Set those two sentences side by side and the effect is almost unbearable. Jesus has just described his own execution, naming the whip and the nails. The very next thing Matthew records is a request for the two best seats in the throne room.

These were not wicked people. They were listening closely enough to catch the word “kingdom” and to move on it quickly, and they were devoted enough to be walking the road with him at all. What they did was filter. Everything that cost him something slid past them, and the part that promised something to them stuck.

A person can sit under the words of Christ with real attention, week after week, and still hear only the portion that serves him. The promises are memorised and the cost is somehow never quite absorbed.

Which parts of Jesus’ words have you been filtering out?

Lesson 13: You Can Worship Christ and Still Be Working an Angle (Matthew 20:20)

Matthew 20:20: “Then came to him the mother of Zebedee’s children with her sons, worshipping him, and desiring a certain thing of him.” (KJV)

You can bow before Christ, mean every word of it, and be angling for something while you are down there. Matthew puts both things in one verse, and he does it without a flicker of embarrassment. She was worshipping him. She was also after something.

Her worship was not a performance, and that is precisely what makes the verse so searching. If she had been a hypocrite there would be nothing here to trouble us; we would simply file her with the Pharisees and move on. She was a genuine follower with a genuine agenda, and the two sat together in her comfortably enough that she seems never to have noticed the seam.

So the question this raises is not whether you love Christ. Take it that you do. The question is what you are hoping to get out of him while you are on your knees, and whether you would still be there, still worshipping, if the answer to that hope turned out to be no.

Lesson 14: Before God Calls Your Ambition Sinful, He Calls It Ignorant (Matthew 20:22)

Matthew 20:22: “Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” (KJV)

Jesus opens with a diagnosis of ignorance. “Ye know not what ye ask.”

They had asked for the seats at his right hand and his left in his glory. What they could not see was that the throne they were reaching for stands on the far side of a cross, and the cup he was about to drink was no coronation cup. He had spelled out the details minutes earlier. It had simply not landed.

There is real mercy in an answer like that. God does not always meet a wrong prayer with anger. Often he meets it with the truth about what has actually been requested, because a great many of our prayers are not rebellion at all. They are requests made by people who have no idea what they are asking for, and who would be undone if they received it.

If God has said no to something you wanted badly, it is worth considering that he may have understood the request rather better than you did.

Lesson 15: Christ Honoured the Promise They Did Not Understand (Matthew 20:23)

Matthew 20:23: “Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with.” (KJV)

Was “we are able” a lie?

It was reckless, certainly. Within days both brothers would run from him in a garden, and Jesus could have said so on the spot. He does something else instead. He takes their rash promise and confirms it: you will drink this cup.

And they did. Scripture records both endings. Herod “killed James the brother of John with the sword” (Acts 12:2). John was later on Patmos “for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ” (Revelation 1:9). One brother received the blade, the other the island. Two men who asked for thrones were handed a cup, and by the grace of God they drank it.

Christ is not cynical about the sincerity of weak people. He heard the ignorance in “we are able,” and he heard something real in it too, and it was the real thing he answered. He does not despise the shaky promises of disciples who mean them, even when he can see exactly how far they still have to fall.

Lesson 16: There Are Things Even Jesus Will Not Hand You (Matthew 20:23)

Matthew 20:23: “but to sit on my right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of my Father.” (KJV)

The Son of God names something he will not do. He will not distribute positions. Those seats belong to the Father to give, prepared for whom he has prepared them, and no amount of asking through the right channels will move them an inch.

Some things are withheld for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your praying. They are simply not on offer. That truth cuts the ground from under a whole way of relating to God, in which the right approach, the right person praying, or sheer persistence is thought to unlock anything at all.

There is enormous relief buried in this. A believer who accepts that the kingdom is not a place where position can be secured by asking has stopped playing a game he was never going to win, and is finally free to ask God for the things he actually delights to give.

Lesson 17: Your Indignation at Someone Else’s Ambition May Be Your Own (Matthew 20:24)

Matthew 20:24: “And when the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two brethren.” (KJV)

Why exactly were the other ten so angry?

Concern for the honour of Christ would be the flattering answer, and the text gives no hint of it. They were furious because two men had reached openly for a thing all twelve of them wanted privately, and had come close to getting there first. The ten were not more humble than James and John. They were slower, and they were caught out.

Moral outrage makes a wonderful hiding place for the very sin it denounces. It feels like righteousness from the inside. It sounds like righteousness from the outside. And it can be nothing more than ambition that lost the race, complaining loudly about the man who ran.

Notice too that Jesus does not take the ten aside and congratulate them for their principled stand. He gathers all twelve together and gives the same correction to the whole room, which tells you what he thought was really going on in it. Ten men and two men had precisely the same disease, and only the two had been honest enough to say it out loud.

The next time another believer’s self-promotion makes you angry out of all proportion to the offence, ask what your anger is actually protecting.

Lesson 18: One Rebuke Will Not Cure the Hunger for Rank (Matthew 20:24)

Matthew 20:24: “And when the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two brethren.” (KJV)

These same men had already asked Jesus, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” back in Matthew 18:1, and he had answered by setting a child in the middle of them. Here they are again, two chapters later.

And Luke tells us that on the night before Jesus died, at the very table where he gave them the bread and the cup, “there was also a strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest” (Luke 22:24).

Three times. The same twelve men. The last time in the upper room, hours from Gethsemane, with everything he had ever said and done standing in front of them.

There is something here a sincere believer needs badly. When a sin you thought you had dealt with rises up in you again, that recurrence is not proof you were never his. The men closest to Jesus, taught by him directly and corrected to their faces, went back to the same hunger for rank again and again while he was still walking beside them.

He never once left them over it. He kept teaching, and in time the teaching went in, and these are the men who later poured their lives out serving the church.

Lesson 19: The World Presses Down; the Kingdom Kneels Down (Matthew 20:25-26)

Matthew 20:25-26: “Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you.” (KJV)

Jesus describes worldly greatness with complete accuracy and not a trace of admiration. Authority flowing downhill. Weight pressing on people. Position measured by how many are beneath you and how much they must absorb from you.

Then comes the sentence that ends the discussion: “But it shall not be so among you.” He lays it down as a flat prohibition on every one of his people, and he leaves no room for a higher and lower class of disciple who might be excused from it.

It binds the home, the workplace, and above all the church, where the world’s model of leadership has long found it easy to change clothes and walk in wearing a title. Authority itself is not the trouble; Christ hands his people plenty of it. The question is which direction it flows.

Take honest measure of whatever authority you have been given, and ask whether the people under it are being carried or being pressed.

Read also: Parable of the Pharisee and Publican Meaning

Lesson 20: Jesus Does Not Kill Your Ambition, He Redirects It (Matthew 20:26-27)

Matthew 20:26-27: “whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.” (KJV)

What does Jesus do with a man who wants to be great?

He does not say, “Stop wanting it.” He never tells them the desire itself is wicked and must be starved out of them. He says: so you want to be great. Here is the road. Serve.

That is a startlingly generous thing to do with a sinful impulse. He takes the drive that has been tearing his twelve men apart all afternoon and, rather than crushing it, turns it around and points it downward. The wanting was never the problem. The direction was. A man may burn to be great in the kingdom of God and be entirely right to burn, provided he has understood that the way up runs through a towel and a basin.

Which means the ambition you have been feeling guilty about may not need to be killed at all. It may need to be aimed somewhere it has never once been pointed.

Where would that drive go if you turned it toward the people you have been trying to impress?

Lesson 21: The Cross Is Your Ransom (Matthew 20:28)

Matthew 20:28: “Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (KJV)

Everything Jesus has just said about serving rests on this verse, and this verse holds something no disciple can copy.

A ransom is a price paid to set a captive free. Jesus says he came to give his life as that price, in the place of many, and the whole weight of the Old Testament’s promised Servant stands behind the phrase: “he bare the sin of many” (Isaiah 53:12). The word is commercial and it is deliberate. Something was owed, and he paid it.

So imitate his humility, because he commands it in the same breath. Only never let his death shrink down into a demonstration of it. A cross that is merely an example can show you how a good man dies and leave you exactly where it found you, still in your sins. He came to pay.

That is why a Christian serves, and it is also why a Christian can afford to serve freely. The debt is settled. There is nothing left to earn.

Read also: Parable of the Unprofitable Servants Meaning

Lesson 22: Two Blind Men Saw More Than the Crowd That Could See (Matthew 20:30)

Matthew 20:30: “And, behold, two blind men sitting by the way side, when they heard that Jesus passed by, cried out, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou Son of David.” (KJV)

They could not see him. All they had was the sound of a crowd going past and somebody telling them whose crowd it was. Everything these men knew about Jesus had reached them by hearing.

Out of that hearing they got his name exactly right. “Son of David” is a Messianic title, a confession that this man on the Jericho road is the promised King of Israel. Two beggars who had never laid eyes on him said it out loud, on the same road where twelve men with perfect eyesight had spent the afternoon arguing about seating arrangements.

Physical sight and spiritual sight are two different things, and nearness to the things of God is not the same as understanding them. God is entirely capable of giving a clearer view of his Son to a person who has nothing than to a person who has been close to the gospel for years.

Lesson 23: When the Crowd Tells You to Be Quiet, Cry Louder (Matthew 20:31)

Matthew 20:31: “And the multitude rebuked them, because they should hold their peace: but they cried the more, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou Son of David.” (KJV)

You may have watched this happen, or felt it from the receiving end. Consider who does the silencing in this verse. The Pharisees are nowhere in sight and Rome is nowhere in sight. The people walking with Jesus are the ones telling these men to be quiet, because two beggars shouting for mercy were spoiling the atmosphere of a great procession.

It is a sobering thing that the crowd around Jesus can become the obstacle between a desperate person and Jesus himself. Churches can do it. Christians can do it without ever intending to, when someone’s need arrives loud and inconvenient and does not suit the tone of the room.

The two men refused to lower their voices. They cried the more. They had one chance at the only person in the world who could help them, and they were not about to trade it for the crowd’s approval. Their desperation turned out to be better manners than the crowd’s decorum, because it was the desperation that Jesus stopped for.

Keep crying out, whatever the room thinks of the noise.

Lesson 24: Jesus Stopped on His Way to the Cross for Two Beggars (Matthew 20:32)

Matthew 20:32: “And Jesus stood still, and called them, and said, What will ye that I shall do unto you?” (KJV)

He is days away from Calvary. He has just described to his closest friends the mockery and the scourging waiting for him at the end of this road. There is a great multitude around him and a city ahead of him.

And he stops.

The whole procession halts because two men the crowd wanted silenced would not stop shouting. He does not send a disciple to deal with them. He calls them himself, asks them what they want, and then, Matthew tells us, he had compassion and touched their eyes. He touched them. Blind beggars sitting in the dust of the roadside, and the hands that would be nailed down within the week reached out and made contact.

Christ was never too far into his own suffering to attend to yours. The Saviour walking toward the darkest hour in the history of the world had time to stand still for two men nobody else could be bothered with.

Lesson 25: What You Ask For Reveals What You Think the Kingdom Is (Matthew 20:21, 32-33)

Matthew 20:21, 32-33: “And he said unto her, What wilt thou?… And Jesus stood still, and called them, and said, What will ye that I shall do unto you? They say unto him, Lord, that our eyes may be opened.” (KJV)

What would you say if Jesus of Nazareth turned round on the road, looked straight at you, and asked what you wanted?

He asks it twice in this chapter, and it is very nearly the same question both times. To the mother of James and John: “What wilt thou?” To two blind beggars: “What will ye that I shall do unto you?” The same Lord, the same road, the same open hand held out.

One answer is a bid for status. Put my sons at the top, above the other ten. The reply is, “Ye know not what ye ask.” The other answer is a few words of pure need. Lord, that our eyes may be opened. And they received exactly what they asked for.

The question was identical, so the difference lies entirely in what each one believed Jesus was for. One person saw a ladder. The others saw mercy, because they knew they had nothing, no standing, and no case to make. The kingdom of God opens to people who come like that, and it stays shut to the ones still climbing.

So what would you ask him for? Answer that honestly and you will know what you believe about him.

Lesson 26: New Eyes Follow Him Down the Hard Road (Matthew 20:34)

Matthew 20:34: “So Jesus had compassion on them, and touched their eyes: and immediately their eyes received sight, and they followed him.” (KJV)

The first thing these men do with brand new eyes is walk to Jerusalem behind the man who gave them. They had every reason to run in the opposite direction. They could see. There were faces to look at, families to find, a whole world they had only ever heard described.

Instead they fell in behind him on the road he had just announced would end in a cross. Nobody compelled them. Matthew simply records that they followed him.

Real sight tends to end up here. When Christ opens a person’s eyes, the first thing they see is him, and what they want afterward is to be where he is going, even when they have been told plainly what it will cost to go there. Sight did not carry these two men away from the cross. It carried them straight toward it.

Follow him down the road he is actually on, and not merely the one you had hoped he would take.

Key Themes in Matthew 20

• The generosity of God: he gives according to his own goodness, and no one is cheated by it.
• Envy and comparison: another believer’s blessing can expose a heart that was never at rest in God’s kindness.
• The reversal of greatness: the way up in the kingdom runs downward, through service.
• The cost Christ chose: he walked to the cross knowing every detail of it, and paid a ransom no one else could pay.
• Mercy for those who know their need: the ones who came with nothing went away with everything.

Frequently Asked Questions About Matthew 20

Related Articles to Read Next

• Parable of the Prodigal Son Meaning
• What Does Grace Mean in the Bible
• Is Grace a License to Sin
• Book of Matthew Summary by Chapter 1 28
• Lessons from the Life of Jesus Christ

Conclusion: Lessons from Matthew 20

The feeling you walked in with is common, and Matthew 20 does not despise you for it. It simply refuses to leave you there. A man can work all day for God, hold a full wage in his hand, and still go home poor, because he spent the whole day measuring his life against somebody else’s portion.

The way out runs through the one who told the story. He walked to Jerusalem with his eyes open, took the lowest place, and paid a ransom for people who had nothing to bring him. A believer who has truly seen that finds it hard to stay bitter about God’s kindness to somebody else.

So let him ask you what he asked on the Jericho road. What do you want him to do for you? Answer with your need rather than your record, and you will find him standing still for you too.