Blessed are the Merciful: Sermon on the Mount Part 4

Today on the "To Win the Many" podcast, we are back in the "Sermon of the Mount." We pick up with verse 7, "Bless to the merciful, for they will be shown mercy." We have been building this idea of the kingdom citizen. The kingdom of God is the area over which God rules and reigns, specifically and personally, we're talking about God's rule and reign in our lives. When we put our faith in Jesus, we become citizens of the kingdom of God, and we are to live as citizens under God's authority. Now, when we come to this particular passage here, this particular verse, "Bless to the merciful," the focus here is on character before conduct. The conduct flows out of the character, but we must look at the character, meaning the inner disposition. We want to focus on the inner disposition before focusing on the outward display because sometimes if we get that off, if we get it out of order, what ends up happening is we have these legalistic tendencies, meaning, well, I'm not this kind of person, but I'm fainting and acting as though I am, even though I'm not really. Bless to the merciful is all about the inner disposition that flows into the outward display. So these are not moral checklists, necessarily. They're character traits, and these character traits are consistent of all followers of Jesus. So we're not just checking a box here. We're making sure and asking the Holy Spirit to evaluate our lives and to give us feedback to help us understand if we are truly merciful or we're not. And I want to talk about here in a few minutes what being merciful is not, because I think sometimes we get this wrong, it's sort of like humility. There are some guys that are walking around with a false sense of humility. They think they're humble, maybe some people think they're humble, but it's false humility, it's not genuine humility. So we need to be careful with these dispositions like being merciful, that we're not faults of fying through an outward display, what is not present in our inner disposition. So these are characteristics of those who enjoy God's rule. It's not about God's rules, but it's about His rule. And His rule leads us to the blessed and the fulfilled life. Noah Jones said Christians aren't only to act a certain way, but to be a certain type. So the type of believer that we're talking about here or the type of person is a merciful person. So what does it mean to be merciful? I love what Coral says and I highly recommend his book there on Matthew and the Sermon of the Mount. He says those who relate to others with a forgiving and compassionate spirit, those people are merciful. So relating to others with a forgiving and compassionate spirit means that you are merciful. And by the way, you know this. This is counter-cultural, which is pretty much the entirety of the Sermon of the Mount. It is very counter-cultural. Now it's one thing to act with forgiveness and compassion. It is supernatural to possess a spirit, an inner disposition that is forgiving and compassionate. Meaning we can act towards somebody, we can fake it, we can grin and bear it and act like we're compassionate. But it is a supernatural disposition. It is not natural. It takes the work of the Holy Spirit in our life to possess and to walk in a forgiving and compassionate spirit. We can all cite examples where we've been a little merciful at times, but we've not liked it. We've all had to be nice. We've had to play nice with someone when we didn't really want to. And inside we were burning alive. Compassionate means acting to fulfill someone's need. And sometimes, sadly, we do this for selfish reasons. It's when we give money to someone who's in need, but we're not very compassionate. We're just trying to get them to move on. It could be a panhandler, it could be someone when you stop at the red light and you just want them to stop staring at you in your window. And so you'll toss them a dollar or you'll toss them what you have. That does not mean that you are necessarily compassionate. Just because you did one act doesn't mean that you have an inner disposition of compassion. And then we talk about forgiveness. Forgiving is when we're not bringing up the things that they've done against us. And sometimes, we don't do that for selfish reasons. If I might use an example here, sometimes when we gather for holidays, be it Thanksgiving or Christmas, we know that there are areas of tension. We know that there are issues that we might have with our family members. We haven't forgiven each other. We just don't bring it up because we want to make it through the holidays. We think going in, oh, it's only a day or it's only two days or maybe it's only a week. I'm just going to grin and bear it. I'm just going to make it through. That does not mean that you have forgiven that person. And it doesn't mean that you have a forgiving spirit. Sometimes this is true when we have a friend who has a friend and we don't like our friend's friend for whatever reason. Maybe that friend wronged us or maybe we just have something against them. And we will we will tolerate our friend's friend because of our friend. We'll tolerate them. So we'll just go along to get along. That does not mean that we have a forgiving spirit. We love to quote Proverbs 25 verses 21 and 22. If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. For you will heap burning coals on his head and the Lord will reward you. Now we need to remember that heaping burning coals is not the incentive. That's not that's not what we're going for. It is the effect in the other person. The effect of putting someone in their place though should not incentivize us to do what God is calling us to do. The incentive should be us doing what pleases the Lord. So blessed of the merciful meaning the emphasis is on our inner spiritual life. We have been supernaturally changed and we see this connection there in the blessing portion blessed of the merciful for they will be shown mercy. It result is it a result in or as a result of when we show mercy, it's not us earning mercy. I think sometimes we're getting this backwards. When we show mercy, it's not us earning mercy. It actually demonstrates that we have been given mercy. So by the fact that I am merciful to someone, I can only be merciful to someone because God has been merciful to me. I can forgive because God has forgiven me. So my mercy is not resulting in the mercy of God towards me. My mercy is a result of God's mercy towards me. We see that in the positioning of the verb, we'll be shown mercy. It's a divine passive. We have been given mercy. We are given mercy by God and his mercies are new every morning. So we are merciful because we recognize that God has shown us mercy and we're living out of God's mercy. We are forgiven of our sins, we've repented of our sins and we have received mercy. And again, he is showering us with mercy. John starts it this way. This is not because we can merit mercy by mercy or forgiveness by forgiveness, but because we cannot receive the mercy and forgiveness of God unless we repent and we cannot claim to have repented of our sins if we are unmerciful towards the sins of others. Lloyd John said, "If I am not merciful, there is only one explanation. I have never understood the grace and the mercy of God. I'm outside Christ. I am yet in my sins and I am unforgiven." So repentance is displayed through our showing of what we have received from God. If you want to know the mark of a believer or a mark of a believer in Jesus Christ, it's that we can extend mercy and the reason we can extend mercy and the reason we can extend compassion and the reason we can extend forgiveness is because we have been showered with mercy. We have been showered with compassion. We have been showered with forgiveness from God. It is the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18. The one who was forgiven little, the one who was forgiven a lot, and then you have the one who didn't act like he had been shown mercy. And how do we know that he didn't really grasp the mercy that he had been shown? It's because he did not extend mercy. And that reminds us, by the way, punishment awaits those who haven't received mercy. God's mercy and grace, because they haven't been inwardly transformed. They don't have that inner disposition. And Jesus continually criticizes those who present themselves as though they are on the side of God. However, their actions reveal that they haven't been transformed by God inwardly. Fearing God's punishment, however, is not the reason we extend mercy. We extend mercy because we have received God's mercy instead of His punishment. God has been merciful to us, so we are merciful to others. There are a lot of people who claim to be followers of Jesus. They claim to be Christians. We need to recognize brothers and sisters. If we have been shown mercy, we will extend mercy to others. Now, I want to take just a moment to talk about what being merciful is not. And we alluded to this earlier with family members and friends. It doesn't mean that we're just easygoing. It doesn't mean that we just don't care. Easygoing and not caring is not synonymous with being merciful. That just means you don't care about probably what you should care about. It's not niceness going along to get along. I just want to fit in. I don't want to cause any ripples or any waves. That's not what it means to be merciful. It doesn't mean just to be passive and to be tolerant in the Western sense, which we take is, well, I don't want to offend anybody or I don't want to take a stand. That's not what it means to be merciful because I would simply ask, is God easygoing and not caring? Is God just nice? Meaning God just goes along to get along? Is God tolerant in the Western sense of not being offensive and not taking a stand? Would we say that God doesn't take a stand? Of course not. Those are not the characteristics of God. We know that God cares deeply about sin and about offenses. We know that God doesn't just go along to get along. We know that God takes very clear and definitive stance and we know that God is merciful because we know that He takes definitive stance and even when we push against and we rebel against the standards that God has placed on our lives, He still moves towards us with mercy. He is the ultimate example of mercy. He's not uncaring. He's not unwilling to take a stand. He is merciful. So for us, for us, what do we do with this? I would say that the previous Beatitudes, so when you think about being poor and spirited, mourning appropriately, being weak, hungering and thirst for righteousness, I would say these flow into being merciful. These other Beatitudes change forever our view of others because of the way we now view ourselves. We recognize as the Beatitudes have reminded us. We recognize we are spiritually bankrupt and we mourn over our sinfulness and we are humble before God because God has extended His love and forgiveness and compassion for us. So now we can be rightly related to Him and the fact that He has done that and He showered us with His love only drives us to hunger and thirst for more of God. And now we also recognize the need in others. We mourn for their sins and we hunger for their rescue and we run to them with the same kind of mercy that God has extended to us. I'll go back to John's thought. He said, "For to be meek is to acknowledge to others that we are sinners. To be merciful is to have compassion on others for they are sinners too." We are moved by others' needs with a disposition of love and compassion and we move towards them with actions of love, compassion and mercy. Mercy is the desire, mercy is the action where we want to help someone, we want to relieve them of difficulty or a bad situation. And Jesus doesn't specify in this Beatitude to whom we are to show mercy. He says we should have the inner disposition of being merciful, okay, towards whom. And we show it to whomever needs it. We show it to whomever needs it. Jesus is so counter-cultural in this sense. He advocates for mercy to be shown to enemies, to enemies. So the person's level of deserving mercy doesn't determine our level of giving mercy. The person's level of needing mercy does not determine our level of mercy. You can go to the Good Samaritan and Luke chapter 10 as an example. So obviously we would look to Jesus. But when you look at Luke 10, you have the question from the religious guy and he says, "Well, who is my neighbor?" And Jesus essentially is presenting this parable to him and he's calling him to be neighborly. This guy is saying, "Who's my neighbor?" Jesus is saying, "You need to be neighborly to all, particularly all who need it." So for us, we need to ask ourselves if we are merciful people, do we think mercifully? Do we act mercifully? Is there someone that we know who is in need of mercy or compassion or forgiveness? What are we doing in our actions on a daily basis that demonstrate that we have a heart of mercy? So when we consider those in need, if we're struggling to discern because all of us will run into people that they have needs, they're extending their hand to us, they're asking for money or they're extending their hand for us in ministry and they're asking for us to be merciful to them and to minister to them. And sometimes we have to play this game, so to speak, of discerning. Do they really have a legitimate need? Well, we should begin the evaluation, not with them, but with us. We should begin the evaluation and we should begin the testing of whether or not we're going to give them whatever they're asking for. Again, not with them, but with us. We need to begin by evaluating our own heart. Are we moved with mercy? Are we moved with compassion? If we are not, the problem is not with them and their need, the problem is with us. Are we just trying to get rid of them? We could follow that up with, okay, whatever they're asking for. Can I actually provide for that need, okay? If I can provide that need, am I willing to provide that need? You see, at that point, we're not even to the point of saying I'm going to give them or provide that need or not, we're dealing with ourselves. Am I just trying to get rid of them? Am I able to provide that need if I am able to provide am I willing? And then we can move to, all right, should I help them in their need? For us, we also need to consider, if we're being faithful disciples of Jesus, as we show mercy, are we being faithful stewards of God's resources? But one challenge that I would give to all of us, it's a challenge that I wrestled with as a young guy in ministry, but I realize, man, if I'm to err, if I'm to make an error, let me err on the side of mercy. If I'm to err, let me err on the side of mercy, whatever that looks like. So what about if there's someone who's wronged us and they need forgiveness? I think this will probably make it a bit more personal for all of us. Is there someone who has wronged us that we need to forgive? I would remind all of us, and I use the right pronoun in that, all of us, the person who needs our forgiveness, their level of deserving does not determine our level of mercy. Their level of need does not determine. It does not determine necessarily how we act. It is our inner disposition. We move towards them with all of the mercy and all the forgiveness that we can offer. So in actuality, their level of need, meaning if they need us to forgive in order to be in a right relationship, we must match that level of need when it comes to forgiveness and compassion. But we need to remember, we are most merciful when we approach it according to Matthew who has seen, addressed the wrong, so that we might forgive biblically. Forgiveness, there's a lot baked into that. And I don't, I wouldn't say that this is the place to fully wrestle with and grapple with what it means to forgive. I would simply remind all of us that if there's someone that we need to forgive and they are asking us to be made right with them, then we need to extend mercy and forgiveness to them. We need to make sure that we are the kind of people who are merciful. Because as we do that, we are reminded, bless the merciful for we will be shown mercy. But also we're reminded of the be attitudes. This is the blessed life. This is the fulfilled life. As Proverbs 14, 21 says, "The one who despises his neighbor sins, but whoever shows kindness to the poor will be happy." We'll be happy. So, as we show mercy, as we extend compassion, as we extend forgiveness, we continually walk in light of the mercy that God has so richly lavished on us. And we find ourselves living this blessed, fulfilled life. We are overflowing with what God has given to us, and we overflow into the lives of others. [Music]