The Blessed Merciful

Read Matthew 5:7-8

Matthew 5:7–8 NIV

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Let’s Pray.

I want to start off this morning by saying thank you. A very specific thank you, not to the congregation – although I love you all and I’m glad you’re here this morning. Not a thank you to Alyssa – although I am so grateful that she is here with us helping lead worship this morning as well. This thank you is specifically to Ethan, to Joseph, and to Dani. Thank you to these two boys who went through confirmation this year and thank you to Dani who walked with them on their journey too, this morning. Thank you for your commitment to your faith all year long but mostly thank you for your witness this morning in front of this church and the world. I don’t know if y’all know this, and maybe you do already, but confirmation is a beautiful thing in the life of the church. It is a beautiful thing in the life of the believer, knowing that you have committed yourself to something and somebody who has committed all they have to you, but the church needs to see more witnesses like this. More moments where we stand up and own our faith publicly. Where we can remember that moment in our own lives when Jesus claimed us as his and we gave in and said, “Yes”. We need these moments because they root us in what it means to be a Christian and because they take us back to the roots of what it means to walk in faith, and we need that reminder. We need to be reminded because most of us, shoot, all of us, have been doing wrong. Now, that’s not to shame anybody, but we all need to be able to admit that we get our Christianity wrong more often than we’d like to admit and sometimes we just need that reminder. That moment when we see another believer take those first steps in the walk of their faith and we are reminded when we learned the basics of our own faith. Some of those basics – most of those “basics” are contained in the Blessed statements we’ve been studying over the past three weeks, and we continue to do so today.

Because the reality is, just as we’ve been talking about it, that these things seem pretty basic at the outset, but they humble us mightily when we realize that we have a really hard time just grappling with these basics and more often than not we need to get back to the beginning.

And this is a lesson for y’all. You’re starting your journey this morning and what we have been stressing to you over the past 9 months of Confirmation – yes, y’all have been hanging out with me for 9 whole months now! – is that confirmation isn’t just the start of your journey, it is the start of your ministry. As we live our faith out in the public eye, as we profess it before our family, our friends, and our church, we are reminded that our calling is to go much further than this. Jesus tells us that it must go out to the ends of the earth. But I don’t want us to start out thinking about the ends of the earth. First, let’s start with this room right here and see where it goes from there.

But as you start this journey, I’m reminded of when the Apostles began their own ministries. They were an extension of Jesus – as we are all extensions of Jesus when we put our faith in him – and they took that seriously. They watched what they said and what they did. They were curious to understand him better, to follow him more closely, to see the world the way that he saw the world, and they were even willing to die for his ministry just as he himself died.

But when they started, they thought, as we all think, like humans and not like Jesus. We’re all guilty of this and as humans who have experienced Jesus and experienced this wonderful justification in him that cleanses us, they fell into the same thing that we do. They saw themselves as righteous. We see this throughout the gospels and Paul speaks about it as well, but when we grow closer to God – to his righteousness – we begin to feel more righteous ourselves because we are allowing His righteousness to come through us by the Spirit. But the humanity in us doesn’t really know what to do with our righteousness so we abuse it. We abuse it because we take that next step, and we begin to look for justice.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, justice is a good thing. But what I’ve learned from really digging into the Minor Prophets, and what God has been laying on my heart for the past few weeks as I’ve been studying the Beatitudes, is that we don’t really know what justice is, and it’s not our own fault by any means. The issue is that no matter how broadly we try to look at justice, our view is still too narrow and too skewed to truly be just. It is justice according to our idea of justice. I believe that this is why the Bible is so careful with how it uses justice and who it attributes justice to. We are called to live just lives – lives that have been justified in Jesus Christ and transformed so that we might live by love of others rather than service of self – but the only person that the Bible affirms as being able to dole out justice is God because He is the only one who is truly just and truly righteous. He is the only one capable of holding an eternal and total justice for all of His creation.

Yet we, yes, every single one of us here is concerned with justice. We are concerned that our version of “right” our version of “just” be accepted as the true version of righteous and just. That’s why we are so quick to argue. To fight. To hate. To write off. To become angry with or to belittle. We do it because we feel justified in doing it.

So just as Jesus challenged those listening to him while he preached, just as Jesus challenged my own heart, and challenged all of us last week when it came to our pride, he said “Blessed are the meek.” So that we might better understand our hidden pride. Now, Jesus tells us, “Blessed are the merciful.” So that we might reveal our obsession with justice.

But when Jesus started them on their journey, he didn’t tell them to go forth and determine who was sinful and who was not. He didn’t even tell them to proclaim sin. He told them to go and proclaim the kingdom of heaven, and so that they might hear this message and believe it, he also gave them the ability to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleans the lepers, and drive out demons. He sent them out to proclaim the gospel and so that people would believe the gospel he sent them with the ability to show them mercy.

In Hosea 6:6, God proclaims to his people “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” And Jesus would quote that same scripture in Matthew 9:13, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

We have to get back to the basics y’all. We are so caught up in sacrifice that we’ve forgotten how to give mercy. And I realized this about myself this week: I pray for patience, gentleness, love, kindness, and acceptance all the time… but I realized that I don’t know that I’ve ever prayed for a merciful heart.

And here is the really funny thing, I’ve prayed for the next one. I’ve prayed to be given a pure heart, but I don’t know if you can have one without the other. A heart that knows and believes its pure but doesn’t have mercy is a heart that is prone to pride and, again, justice. If we want to see and to know and merciful and wonderful God, to have heart that draws near to a loving and merciful God, then we have to be willing to be merciful.

And mercy isn’t nearly as rare an occasion as we think it is. Mercy means that you have the ability and the right to dole out punishment, but you choose kindness, pity, and restoration instead. Isn’t it a small mercy when we choose to help somebody instead of helping ourselves? Isn’t it a small mercy when we choose to let something go and love somebody instead? Isn’t it mercy when you give up your seat for somebody else? When we listen to a broken heart? When we hold the hand of somebody in need?

We have opportunities to be merciful every single day, and the truth of the gospel is that we can tell people about it and share Facebook posts and recommend great hymns and worship music all we want to, but until we accompany that message – that wonderful message that the kingdom of God is near. That the King of the kingdom, Jesus Christ, has come down and given his own life as payment so that we might all be included in this wonderful kingdom – we can proclaim that all we want to and some might listen, but it was the signs and miracles – the mercies that demonstrate just a small part of God’s incredible, atoning mercy that gathered the crowds and caused them to believe what they were hearing. If we want people to know Jesus, we have to be willing to show them Jesus and we have to become a merciful people, and Blessed people living in proximity to and by the rules of the Upside-Down Kingdom.

Ultimately, we need to be reminded that we should absolutely offer mercy to anybody we come into contact with and not just those that we deem worthy of our mercy. We’re merciful to those that we feel have earned the right of our mercy but offer it more sparingly to the stranger and we give it to the enemy only rarely. We need to remember that we were enemies of God living in open rebellion, and He gave us His mercy for nothing. Freely we received this mercy from God, through Jesus Christ, and by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We received relationship and even above and beyond mercy – the grace of God – for absolutely nothing. Now it’s our turn. It’s our turn to freely give. To be the merciful people, purely aligning our hearts in love with the love of God, acting as ministers and apostles sent forth to proclaim the good news that we have received and professed to, and offering the wonderful mercy of the Upside-Down Kingdom wherever we go.

Ethan, Joseph, Dani, and everybody else gathered here – I pray that he makes your ministry fruitful, merciful, and blessed.

Let’s pray.