Be blessed. Be poor in spirit, always live in need of God’s grace.
• Be grieved by the things that grieve the heart of God.
• Be humble and submit to God’s sovereign rule in your life.
• Hunger and thirst for the things of God. Only such a craving will be filled.
Without a returning to God and His concerns, the emptiness and boredom in your life will never go away. You can’t find fulfilment apart from Him.
• We have this spiritual hunger and thirst the moment we become a Christian.
• We need to whack that appetite up and keep that spiritual urge going.
• Stay close to God, worship Him constantly, stick with the church and keep up the fellowship with one another.
Matt 5:7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.”
• We are called to be merciful. This is important.
• Jesus says in Luke 6:36: “Therefore be merciful, just as your Father is also merciful.” God is merciful.
• Jesus prayed for those who crucified Him: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34). Jesus is merciful.
• So this is what we must be. Not just a “good to have” trait.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE MERCIFUL?
• Like being meek, being merciful is not usually admired by the world.
• The world loves justice. Someone who is merciful is likely to be accused of not facing up to reality, or of being easily taken advantage of.
To be merciful is not to be tolerant of sin and evil. God isn’t and God is merciful.
• God is righteous, holy, just AND merciful at the same time.
• To be merciful is to give others a second chance.
• To MAKE ROOM for repentance; GIVE TIME for justice to take its course, and not taking things into our own hands.
Often when someone made a mistake and hurt us, we are tempted to think of that person only in terms of what they did – the ‘wrongs’, the ‘mistakes’.
• We reduce the person to those flaws – for life sometimes!
• To be merciful is to hope that there is more to the person than their mistake or sin—that their mistake does not tell us all of who they are.
The reason we want to look beyond the mistake is because we want others to look beyond our own sin.
• We do not want people to remember us only for our flaws or wrongs.
• We hope that our sin will not be the last word on who we are.
• When we ourselves long for mercy, for another chance, we realize that we are not that different from anyone else.
• We are alike - broken, hurting, and in need of the hope that this is not the end.
So to show mercy is not to let the person off the hook. It goes beyond that.
• It is not pretending something didn’t happen, or allowing the person to go on sinning just as before.
• Mercy is providing room for the person not to be trapped by the past or their sinful nature, but to be able now to move forward, to grow and mature, to become more of the person they were created to be.
• Mercy is not saying, YES to the sin, but to the sinner.
• So it isn’t giving in or giving up but, rather hoping for transformation.
But where does such a hope come from?
• It is obviously not based on the person or ourselves.
• We are counting on something or SOMEONE bigger to bring about a new change.
• To be merciful, I am counting on God to provide the possibility of real change in the person’s life.
• My mercy counts on God’s Spirit to be at work to bring about repentance and new life in the one towards whom I am being merciful.
We want to be merciful because God has not given up on the person, so neither should we.
• We believe He is able and willing to give the person a new life and identity.
• The woman caught in adultery ought to die but Jesus gave her a chance – go and sin no more – and she became a lover of God, a beautiful child of God.
Actually it is the same desire we have for ourselves.
• We want people to give us a chance to make things right, to amend for what we have done wrong.
• We hope that God will continue His work in our lives, and help us grow to be more like Christ.
John Wesley visited General Ogelthorpe when he was governor of the colony of Georgia. The General mentioned an incident involving a man who had angered him and remarked, “I shall never forgive him!”
Wesley responded, “Then I hope sir, that you never sin!”
We show mercy because we need mercy.
People who are not merciful are often driven by a sense of justice.
• But very often this sense of justice is flawed.
• Jerry Bridges says in The Practice of Godliness: “We want to see ‘justice’ done, but the justice we envision satisfies our own interests. We must realize that justice has been done. God is the only rightful administrator of justice in all of creation and His justice has been satisfied. In order to forgive our brother, we must be satisfied with God’s justice and forgo the satisfaction of our own.”
• Leave room for God’s wrath.
• The One with perfect justice is not in a hurry to mete out punishment or judgement, why are we more anxious than He is?
There was a preacher in the US whose wife was in the hospital and dying of cancer. The elders of his church came to the hospital to see them. The preacher thought they were coming to pray for his wife, but instead, they came to fire him.
I have no idea what that preacher did that was so bad, but those elders demonstrated no mercy at all.
We have to make room within ourselves to be merciful.
• You have to make an effort to be merciful.
• This is what we see God has done. It costs Him a great price to extend mercy, to give us forgiveness, to be patient with us.
• You need to be willing to be merciful. It does not come naturally to us.
HOW TO BE MERCIFUL – we are going to look at 2 parables
The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) and the Unmerciful Servant
The Good Samaritan shows us…
(1) The merciful person DEMONSTRATES mercy
“Go and DO LIKEWISE”. Do acts of kindness and love.
He saw a poor man on the side of the road, beaten and robbed.
• He stops, goes across to where he is lying, and look at him.
• The others – the priest and Levite – saw the same man but went on.
• They may have felt compassion and pity but they have not done anything about it.
• The one, who is merciful, stops by the man, dresses the wounds, takes the man with him, and makes provision for him to recover.
That a merciful person!
• It goes beyond just a feeling of sympathy. Mercy is an act of love.
• Jesus asked the question: “So which of these three to you think was a neighbour to him who fell among the thieves.” The lawyer: “He who showed mercy on him.”
• Then Jesus said, “Go and DO likewise.” It’s a DOING thing.
That’s the Father’s heart for us today. Have we been merciful?
• Jesus tells the Pharisees (Matt. 23:23) "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.”
• Micah 6:8 “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
• Let us SHOW mercy, because this is what the Lord delights in.
(2) The merciful person FORGIVES
In His parable of the Unmerciful Servant (Matt 18:21-35) Jesus equates mercy with forgiveness.
• A man who owes the king a big sum of money is forgiven and set free.
• He, in turn, went out and caught hold of a fellow servant who owes him a very small amount of money.
• The man fell on his knees and begged, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.” (18:29) but he locked him up in prison.
• The Master heard about it and called him. He said, “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” (Matt 18:21-35).
The Lord is saying, “Should you have mercy on your fellowmen just as I had on you?”
• Mercy is not given to those who deserve it. It is given to those we feel are not worthy to receive it. That’s mercy.
• The unmerciful servant, by not forgiving his fellow servant, shows that he has not understood forgiveness, and has not truly experienced mercy.
• One who will not forgive cannot receive forgiveness. Mercy flows through the same channel, whether being given or received.
• That’s why Jesus says the merciful will be shown mercy. In order words, only the merciful will understand and experience true mercy.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones: “If I am not merciful, there is only one explanation: I have never understood the grace and the mercy of God.” (p.105 in Studies in the Sermon on the Mount)
Philip Yancey wrote about Joseph struggling through the process of forgiving. He observed that the story of Joseph forgiving his brothers is filled with loops and twists. One minute he’s throwing them in jail. The next minute he’s so overcome with emotion that he has to leave the room. He plays tricks on them when he hides the money and silver cup.
All the time, according to Yancey, Joseph is struggling to forgive these men who sold him into slavery and he’s finally successful. When we are deeply hurt in a marriage struggle, we will likely respond in a manner similar to Joseph’s.
You cannot command your feelings; but you can command your will and your will should be that of a desire to forgive.
Conclusion:
• If there is a gauge that can measure ‘mercy’, how do you measure up?
• Will you be considered merciful? Or one who is driven by a desire to get even?
• Be merciful. It is one of those acts that only we can do for ourselves.
One pastor even defines mercy as the key indicator of a Christian’s spiritual maturity:
"You can’t judge the spirituality of a Christian on the basis of his prayers, since praying is often done for its effect on the listeners. Nor can you measure a person’s spiritual status by the loudness of his "AMENs" and "hallelujahs." The generosity of one’s giving is not an infallible test for it may be done for personal recognition or to ease one’s conscience. Faithful attendance at worship, support for Christian education, and observance of Sunday are not reliable either for they may all be done because of family, community, or peer pressures.
"A sure test of the depth of our relationship with God is found in our willingness to show compassion and to forgive those who hurt us."
… By Rev Adrian Dieleman, Trinity Christian Reformed Church.
