The Ones He Never Knew

There is a sentence in the Gospels that should stop anybody who writes a book about doing good.

“Many will say to me in that day, L-rd, L-rd, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”

MATTHEW 7:22-23

Read the résumé they hand Him. Prophecy. Deliverance. Wonderful works. All of it in His name, which means they were not doing it under some other banner. This is not a crowd of pagans wandering into the wrong line. These people were in ministry.

And whatever you believe happened when they cast out devils, something happened. Nobody keeps a list like that if nothing ever worked.

They have works. Good ones. Public ones. Powerful ones. And the verdict is depart from me.

If doing good were the mechanism, that verse could not exist. So either the verse is a problem for this book or the verse is the most important thing in it. I think it’s the second one, and here’s why.

Look at the two words He uses. “I never knew you.”

The Greek is EGNON, from GINOSKO. It is not the word for knowing a fact. It’s the word for knowing a person. And the reason that matters is that Jesus picked up the same verb one other time, on the last night, in the prayer He prayed out loud where the disciples could hear it.

“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true G-d, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”

JOHN 17:3

Know. Same verb, and the tenses are the whole story. In John 17 it’s the ongoing kind, a knowing that keeps happening. In Matthew 7 it’s flat and finished. Not once, not ever.

Jesus defines eternal life as knowing Him, and then tells a crowd holding a stack of ministry credentials that the one thing they never did was that.

So Matthew 7:23 isn’t G-d being hard to please. It’s G-d being consistent. He said life is knowing Me. They brought Him everything but that.

Now put a second scene beside it, because Matthew does, twenty chapters later.

The sheep and the goats. The King separates them, and He tells the ones on His right what they did. You fed Me. You gave Me a drink. You took Me in. You clothed Me. You came to Me in prison.

And they argue with Him.

“Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, L-rd, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?”

MATTHEW 25:37-39

When did we ever do that.

Hold the two scenes side by side, because the contrast is not subtle.

The first crowd knows exactly what they did and can itemize it. The second crowd cannot remember doing anything. The first crowd is sent away. The second crowd is welcomed home.

Group one had a ledger. Group two had a life.

That tells you something about how the good works in a life that’s actually connected to Him. It stops being an event you log. You feed somebody on a Tuesday and by Friday you have genuinely forgotten, not because it didn’t matter but because it wasn’t rare. You don’t keep receipts for breathing.

Here’s the honest part. The people who can list it for you are usually the people it’s least native to.

So what is the actual variable between those two groups?

It is not the works. Both groups have them. Nobody in either scene shows up empty-handed, and that alone kills the reading where Matthew 7 is a warning against doing too much.

It is not awareness. One group is fully aware and rejected. The other is unaware and received.

The variable is whose they were.

The first crowd used His name. The second crowd belonged to Him. You can borrow a name. You cannot borrow a father.

Which means I have to say the thing this whole book depends on, and say it plainly enough that nobody can miss it later.

Do Good, Everywhere, Always is not a way to get to G-d. It is what people who already belong to G-d do with their hands. It’s the walk of sons, not the application of strangers. Take the Person out of it and you don’t have DGEA. You have decency with a Bible verse stapled to it, and Matthew 7 says exactly where that road ends.

I have watched this in the mirror, so I’m not preaching down at anybody. There have been stretches where the works were real, the results were real, people were genuinely helped, and my actual relationship with Him was a subject I taught rather than a thing I had. Ministry will let you get away with that longer than any other line of work. Nobody audits it. The calendar stays full. And the whole time you’re building a résumé for a Man who is going to tell you He wanted you, not it.

Now let me guard the other ditch, because there’s one on both sides of this road.

Some of you just read Matthew 7 and got scared of doing good. That’s the wrong lesson and it’s the one people most often walk away with. Jesus never tells that crowd their works were the problem. He doesn’t say you should have prophesied less. The problem was never the doing. The problem was that the doing was the entire relationship.

And look at verse 21, which sits right above the whole thing. “Not every one that saith unto me, L-rd, L-rd, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”

He that doeth. Even in the verse that warns you about works, the verb is still there. Jesus never once tells anybody to stop doing. He tells them whose will they’re supposed to be doing, and He tells them the difference will not be visible on a stage.

So the order stands, and it’s the same order we found in Acts 10:38 in the last chapter. Anointed, then went. Known, then doing. Grace first, in Noah’s case, then character, then obedience. Scripture keeps building it in the same sequence and we keep trying to start at the end because the end is the part people can see.

Bread goes in the water because a son throws it. Not so somebody will decide he’s a son.

One more thing before the act, because it’s the piece that makes this chapter livable instead of terrifying.

The sheep in Matthew 25 were not anxious. Nothing in that scene suggests they spent their lives checking their standing. They were just going along feeding people, and they were so unaware of accumulating anything that they questioned the King’s own account of it. That is what security looks like from the outside. Not certainty about your score. No interest in the score at all, because the relationship was never scored.

That’s what I want for you, and what I want to keep for myself.

The next chapter is where I show you something I did not expect to find. Doing good was already filed somewhere in scripture, under a heading none of us would have put it under, and the moment you see the heading you’ll understand why this isn’t a side ethic bolted onto your faith.