Merciful

Introduction:

Over the past several weeks we have been in a series called “Following Closer.” We are taking a close look at the Beatitudes in Matthew 5. This is the beginning of Jesus teaching about the kingdom of heaven. The essential point that carries throughout this teaching is that - God has called believers to help bring heaven to earth..... By studying this passage we hope to have greater clarity around kingdom principles which will be transformative and aid us in our calling. Here at Grace we know this is our reality and embrace it as we seek to Know Christ and Make Him known..... Yet, we get distracted. So, we aim to remove distraction, to look with clarity, seeking to discover Kingdom Values. In this search, we want to allow Him to make us an embodiment of those principles. The beatitudes are not a list of action steps but rather, an avenue for us to better pursue God and His purposes.

Matthew 5:1-7 “1 Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: 3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. 6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. 7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

So far, we have considered what it means to be poor in spirit, to mourn our sin, to be meek as we take an honest look in the mirror and as a result of our position, we cant help but hunger and thirst for righteousness. We have learned that to reflect on each of these is a humbling experience. Why, because if we spend honest reflection around something like being poor in spirit. Wrestling with its biblical meaning. Then using that lens to evaluate ourselves - there is no more hiding. The masks we wear, the images we present to others, our wrongful desires, sinful thoughts, and actions all come to mind. We quickly realize as we stand before God that we are utterly lost and totally wicked. Over the past several weeks, many of us have felt challenged and undone in our reflection.

My question for you is this “How are you reacting to these Beatitudes?”

As we continue to study the beatitudes, you will find that those who willingly search their hearts and minds will be humbled. Being humbled is a gift from God, it tears down every distraction and wall of our heart. We invite the Spirit in to mold and shape us, recognizing there is no other way to become more like Christ. We can’t manufacture our growth, but we can learn to surrender, to open up and let God in to do the work.

Today our focus is on Matthew 5:7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”

Laura and I moved here in January of 2019. We needed groceries, so we loaded the kids up in the truck and left for the store. As we came down the south bluff road, I had no idea what the speed limit was and in all honesty, wasn’t paying attention to my speed at all. We rounded the bottom corner and there was a officer there. He followed us out to the highway and pulled us over. He came up to the window and asked me how fast I was going, I told him I wasn't sure. He informed me that I was well over the speed limit. He asked for my license and registration. I had already reached for my wallet and realized that I left it at home. So, I explained I couldn’t give it to him. He asked for the vehicle registration and we didn’t have it because we just switched everything over to Michigan and we left the registration on the counter at home. So he looks at the license plate and the vin number and heads back to his car. I am thinking I am about to get a very large ticket. A few minutes later, he comes back to my door and asks me to get out of the vehicle. I noticed as we walked towards his squad car that another officer was starting to question Laura at her window. I also noticed that there are now three squad cars and four officers; My officer started explaining to me that the truck is showing up as a Minnesota vehicle, yet has a Michigan license plate. Not only that, neither Laura or I have proof of identity. It was evident that he was trying to determine if we were driving a stolen vehicle. Quite aware of how serious this situation just became, I was convinced I would be spending the night in jail. After explaining our move and pleading with them to come up to the house so I can show registration and proof of identity we had a slight pause. I assume, that they were checking to see if Laura and I had our stories straight. One of the officers asks, “what do you for a living?” An embarrassed smile broke across my face and I said, “I am the new youth pastor at Grace Church.” One of the officers immediately put it all together as he had already heard about me and new I was coming from Minnesota. It was as if suddenly everything made sense and a large weight was lifted. They let me get back in the truck, I saw two squad cars drive away. At this point, I was still expecting a ticket for speeding, no license and no registration. The officer who pulled me over, walked up to the window and gave me a formal warning.

Mercy! I cant tell you how relieved I was in these moments. Mercy feels so good! It alleviates the misery, whatever tension we are feeling is gone and we find ourselves at peace. The beauty of mercy is that the more significant our shortcoming or wrong, the more relief we feel. Mercy is a beautiful gift from one person to another and it is of great value in the kingdom of Heaven.

This is a posture of the heart that freely gives relief, even to the people who have wounded us the deepest. God has a merciful heart, it is part of His nature. Thus, in being shaped into the image of Christ we are also called to embrace mercy. First, we are to receive it from God - allow Him to have His way with us and teach what real mercy looks like. Then, the invitation to bless others. If we want to understand the significance of mercy, we must consider God’s heart.

God’s Merciful Heart

God’s Mercy is best seen when we consider our reality. Scripture is clear that we are wicked, inept, ungodly, sinful in nature. Look at

Ephesians 2:1-3 “1 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

When we look at this passage it is evident that we are dead to rights. There is no defending ourselves, no excuses, or reason we can give for our loving this world instead of God. We have committed the highest form of treason against the highest being. We deserve the worst form of punishment.

Ephesians 2:4 “But God,

We were dead… but God

We were trespassing.... but God

We were following Satan's ways.... But God!

We chose our own desires… But God!

We were wickedly sinful.... but God!

But God what? “being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us,” But God is rich in mercy. It is natural to Him. It flows out of Him to all of us who are so desperately lost. “But God” may be the greatest announcement of mercy the world has ever known. He has more mercy to give than we are able to receive and the reason is because it is a part of His very nature. If we continue to sin, which we will, He will continue to extend mercy - as long as we seek forgiveness.

It is out of His compassionate love for us, His tenderness toward the needy, that He offers mercy. By God’s mercy, we find forgiveness in place of judgement - freedom in place of punishment - life in place of death - Blessing in place of scorn.

Just as God’s mercy is part of His very nature, He wants to work in your life, not just so you can receive and give mercy, but to shape the very core of your being. God desire is not to see you practice mercy - He wants your heart to be shaped by it.

Receiving His Mercy

This leaves us with a an important question:

Do I struggle to receive mercy?” And if I have struggled to receive mercy, “Why???? Why do I struggle to receive God’s mercy?”

If you struggle to fully receive God’s mercy, it is not because God is keeping it from you. He is not trying to somehow entice you with it or get you to earn it. His desire is for you to receive it in the full. No lingering guilt or shame. No baggage that you have to carry around on your shoulders.

Secondly, for those of you who are in this place, you recognize that you need mercy, there may be varying levels of feeling like you have received it but you are still carrying baggage - let me say this to you.

You can’t earn it. You don’t deserve it. “But God” - He wants to lift the burden off you shoulders. He wants you to live in freedom from guilt and shame. It is good to come before God broken and shattered because He meets us in that place. But we are not asked to stay there, He doesn't ask you to somehow earn your way out. Those are lies from Satan who wants you to believe in works based theology. Satan wants you to believe you have to carry the burden of your sin and be good enough to be freed from it. “But God” - is the great healer who can restore you in an instant. So maybe what you need to do today is to just sit down, reflect on what you have done, ask God to forgive you for every sin that you list. As more come to mind, ask for more forgiveness in those areas. Ask God to help you let go of this weight. Ask Him to bring healing into your life.

God is standing at the door freely offering peace and freedom. It comes from His abundant mercy, which is able to cover every sinful and wayward thought and desire. If you struggle to receive God’s mercy it is because you have put limitations on God. Ask God to see Him more fully and to remove the limitations. When it happens, consider just staying in that place, standing in awe of how great is our God.

I know what it is like to feel unforgivable. I have walked through years of my life carrying weight that He asked me to surrender. But I wasn’t ready to give it to Him because I thought I deserved it. I thought that if I continued to carry it, somehow it would help me. But that is a lie from the pit of hell. Carrying that weight around doesn’t help you. Instead, it leads you to one of two places. Either you break down, believing that nobody could love you including God. Or, in your wearied state, you lash out at the people around you.

We all have skeletons in our closet. We all are wretched and sinful. When we stand before God - nobody has an advantage over the other - we are all guilty. But the beauty of the gospel is that all of it can be healed. Everything can be made right. What you will find in surrendering that weight, is that you are better positioned to reveal the person of God in your life to the people around you. Carrying the weight is a distraction that keeps us from being the people that God has restored to Himself.

When I was growing up, my grandparents started taking interest in taking quality pictures. Capturing beautiful moments in time to put on display. If you ask my grandma, she might tell you about the times thy got up early to catch the sunrise, or travelled across the U.P. to find a waterfall during peak fall season. This last week I took a picture of a sunrise as it came up over the Stonington Peninsula. I took several pictures over - turning the camera, focusing on different lights and elements in the sky. This is my favorite of the pictures. When I look at this picture, I can’t help but think Lamentations 3:22-23 “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

Offering Mercy

We serve a God who is full of mercy, compassion and love. We will never find the end of their depths. Just as God compassionately shares His mercy with us, He calls us to share mercy with others.

Matthew 5:7 “7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”

In bringing the kingdom of God to earth we are called to be “merciful.” To be merciful means more than to demonstrate mercy. Merciful implies that we learn to be filled with mercy. It is when we no longer think of it as an action but recognize it as a description of our character.

To be merciful is not to ignore wrongdoing. It is not to exaggerate an employee’s poor performance to better than actuality. Mercy intersects with truth. If truth is distorted than it is not mercy that is being demonstrated.

Being merciful can be thought of as inward sympathy that leads to outward action. The outward action alleviates the pain or tension that is being felt by the other person. It never includes a wrongful compromise and always includes the well being of others.

A great example of this would be the Good Samaritan. Jesus begins the story with a Jewish traveler who is jumped by robbers. The robbers not only steal from him but beat him up to the point where he is no longer able to continue his journey. Both a priest and a levite were travelling by, saw him and did nothing to help him. But a Samaritan man came by, helped him get to the next town and paid for him to stay and eat at a local inn until he was well.

The priest and the levite may have felt compassion, they may have been concerned about the man but they never took action. It was the Samaritan man, who not only helped him travel, bandage wounds, but paid for him to eat and have a place to sleep. Mercy is then the action of compassion. After this parable, Jesus explains that this man showed mercy and we should go and do the same.

Another example would be the parable of the unmerciful servant.

This leads us to another important question, “Am I merciful?”

How do I respond:

When my children struggle to listen?

When my co-worker causes me extra work?

When strife enters my marriage?

When I am deeply hurt and wounded by another person?

When a friend betrays me?

The way we answer these questions can tells us a great deal about our own walk with the Lord.

John Stott

“Nothing moves us to forgive like the wondering knowledge that we have ourselves been forgiven. Nothing proves more clearly that we have been forgiven than our own readiness to forgive. To forgive and to be forgiven, to show mercy and to receive mercy: these belong indissolubly together.”

The human Conception of God - listen carefully here

You cannot know the depths of mercy unless you have received it. You cannot receive it from God unless you reflect on the many ways that you have entertained sin.

At every fault, sin, and shortcoming God has blessed me with His mercy. Therefore, because I know true love, true compassion, true mercy - I can give blessings of mercy. Because I am forgiven I can forgive. Because I have known mercy, I can offer mercy.

But lets not kid ourselves here. we might be tempted to think that we just need to practice mercy more. No. That isn’t the answer. If you want to be merciful, you have to go back over these beatitudes and reflect.

Listen to Martin Lloyd Jones speak to this:

I am poor in spirit; I realize that i have no righteousness; I realize that face-to-face with God and His righteousness I am utterly helpless; I can do nothing. Not only that. I mourn because of the sin that is within me; I have come to see, as the result of the operation of the Holy Spirit, the blackness of my own heart..... I am meek, which means that now that i have experienced this true view of myself, nobody else can hurt me, nobody else can insult me, nobody can ever say anything too bad about me. I have seen myself, and my greatest enemy does not know the worst about me. I have seen myself as something truly hateful, and it is because of this that I have hungered and thirsted after righteousness. I have longed for it. I have seen that I cannot create or produce it, and that nobody else can. I have seen my desperate position in the sight of God. I have hungered and thirsted for that righteousness which will put me right with God, that will reconcile me to God, and give me a new nature and life. and I have seen it in Christ. I have been filled; I have received it all as a free gift.”

If we have wrestled through each beatitude in this type of honest reflection coming to understand ourselves rightly before God, how can we be unmerciful? What moral high ground do I have to stand on when I know that I am just as guilty as anyone else? And whatever hard things happen to me, are said about me, are done to me - I know that I deserve far worse. Who am I to pound my chest and say “I don’t deserve that?”

Romans 3:23 “23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” The only difference is that some have found forgiveness and others have not. We should not hate and despise those who do wrong, we should pity them - that their eyes have not been opened. That they are so lost and yet they think they know what they are doing.

We are all broken. We are all in need of mercy.

As believers, we need honest reflection at every level at every level. We need to come back to the beatitudes time and time again, to check our spirit. Through this, we can’t help but recognize the depths of God’s love and the greatness of His mercy. Through this our character is shaped more into the image of God; experiencing deeper compassion, tender hearts, as we extend mercy from the core of our character.

We are called to practice extending mercy. But our action step of mercy is not the goal. It is the inner transformation of the heart and mind that draws us ever closer to our Lord.

Abrahamic Covenant - “blessed to be a blessing.”

We know that we are all bias when we read scripture. More than that, we are all bias in our understanding of God. We have a natural way of projecting God to be someone we can understand. In our understanding of God, He sometimes looks a lot like we do. More than that our projections of God always leave God with limitations. So now, we must consider that our struggle to receive mercy and forgiveness may be directly linked to the lack of mercy and forgiveness that we offer.

If we are bias in our understanding of God and we imagine him to be a better version of ourselves it would make sense that we struggle to receive mercy and grace. Because we have limited God, by an evaluation of who I am. Thus, as I am limited in my ability to have mercy and to forgive, so God must be limited. Therefore, I have to stop and ask, “Have I exhausted His mercy?”

As you can see, there is great consequence in taming God to be someone we can understand. God is beyond us, His mercy has no limits and we can never exhaust it.