Sermon Tone Analysis

In his book No Wonder They Call Him Savior, Max Lucado tells the story of a Brazilian peasant girl, Christina, who desperately wanted to leave her simple home, see the world and live the better life she dreamed she would find in the city.

One morning, she slipped away.

Her mother was heartbroken when she found that Christina was gone.

Knowing that the girl had no money to support herself in Rio de Janeiro and knowing the kinds of things that a stubborn, prideful and hungry young girl would have to do in such a situation, she packed her own bag and headed to the bus station.

Along the way, the mother stopped at a drug store and used the photo booth there to take all the photos of herself that she could afford.

She then boarded the bus with a her purse stuffed full of little black and white photos, each of which had a short message printed on the back.

After arriving in Rio, Christina’s mother stopped at every bar, nightclub, hotel and dive that was known for catering to street walkers and their clientele.

At each place, she would leave her photo taped to a bathroom mirror or doorway or bulletin board or phone booth.

Soon she ran out of photos and money, and she returned home, tears filling her eyes as the bus made its way to her small village.

A few weeks later, Christina — broken, tired and afraid — was headed down the stairs of yet another hotel, thinking once again of the home she had left behind and of all the ways that it now seemed so far away, when she noticed a photo stuck to the mirror in the lobby.

The face in that photo was so familiar and so much missed, and she was sobbing as she reached for it.

Through her tears, she gazed at the loving face of her mother, and then she turned the picture over and saw the message on the back.

“Whatever you have done, whatever you have become, it doesn’t matter.

Please come home.”

And so she did.

What a picture of grace.

You’ll recognize that this story sounds a lot like the story of the prodigal son, which Jesus told in part as a picture of the grace that God shows repentant sinners as He welcomes them into His family.

In fact, as Christian apologist J. Gresham Machen noted, “The very center and core of the whole Bible is the doctrine of the grace of God.” [Mark Olivero, “God’s Grace,” in Lexham Survey of Theology, ed.

Mark Ward et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018).]

1 Mark Olivero, “God’s Grace,” in Lexham Survey of Theology, ed.

Mark Ward et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018).

Today, as we continue our series on the attributes of God, I want us to look back into the history of Israel to a time when David, the man after God’s own heart, lavished unearned and undeserved grace on a man whom he might have had killed if he had followed the traditions of his time.

Turn with me to 2 Samuel, Chapter 9, and let’s look at the story of Mephibosheth.

While you’re turning there, I’ll give you the background.

Saul, the evil king whom the people had chosen, had died in battle, along with his sons, and David had been made king over all of Israel.

He had then led the nation in battle against the Philistines, the Moabites, the Arameans, the Amelikites and the Edomites, and God had brought peace to the land.

Now, with his nation finally at peace, David’s mind went back to his friend Jonathan, Saul’s son, whom David had loved greatly and who had been killed along with his father.

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David wanted to honor a descendant of his dear friend with the “kindness of God.”

The Hebrew word here is hesed, and it can be translated in various ways, including “loyal love,” which comes very close to the sense of what was in David’s heart at this time.

We will learn in a moment that this man Ziba mentions is named Mephibosheth.

He first appears in the history of Israel as a five-year-old boy whose nurse took him up and fled when the news reached them that Saul and Jonathan had been killed in the battle at Jezreel.

You see, Mephibosheth would have been in line for the rule of Israel with the death of his grandfather, the king, and of his father.

But God had already decreed that David was king, and in the tradition of this time and place, Mephibosheth might have been in mortal danger.

Most kings of the time would have sought to put to death any males of the dead king’s line in order to ensure that there would be no challenge to the throne.

So when the nurse was fleeing with the young boy, worried for his life, Mephibosheth fell and was badly hurt, so badly hurt that he was left lame from the accident.

So now, years later, with Mephibosheth grown to a man, David has found him.

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The name of this town, Lo-debar, is significant.

It means “land of nothing.”

So Mephibosheth, crippled and lame and an unlikely challenge to the throne, was basically a nobody.

He was nobody from the land of nothing.

Remember that as we see what David does for him.

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You have to imagine that Mephibosheth must have been frightened when he was summoned to see the king.

He surely knew of the deadly tradition that might have threatened his life.

So his trembling was more than just a sign of respect; it was likely a result of very real fear.

But David had a surprise for him.

David would show him mercy by not killing him.

But the loyal love that David had for Jonathan compelled him to do something even more remarkable.

He restored Mephibosheth’s inheritance and he treated Mephibosheth as if he were family.

This is grace in action.

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Imagine a man lame in both feet coming to the king’s table.

He would not have been able even to get himself seated on the floor without help.

He was utterly without anything to offer David.

He had done nothing to deserve the favor that David had shown him, and he could do nothing to earn it.

This is grace in action, and it is but a glimpse of the grace that God shows we dead dogs whom He has adopted into His family through Jesus Christ.

So perhaps you now have an idea of what grace means and how it differs from mercy.

But I want to dig a little deeper into the concepts today; by the time we are finished, I hope you will have a sense of awe at the extent of God’s grace and mercy.

First, let’s look at His mercy.

One of the main Hebrew words that we translate as “mercy” has the sense of an emotional response that can result in removing the object of mercy from impending difficulty.

It is this sense that is in play when God withholds judgment for sin.

God spoke of this kind of mercy through the prophet Ezekiel.

Even in the Old Testament, the punishment for sin was death.

“The person who sins will die,” God says elsewhere in this book.

In fact, if we didn’t know it any other way, we know that there is still sin in the world, because there is still death.

And we know through the Apostle Paul that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

We are all under sentence of death because of sin, both the original sin of Adam and Eve and the sins that each of us commits.

But in His mercy, God gave the people of Israel the sacrificial system of the Mosaic Law.

The people could avoid the punishment for their sins by bringing a sacrifice in faith to the altar.

Now, there’s an element of grace working here, too, and we see it most clearly at the cross on Calvary, where Jesus became the once-for-all sacrifice, offering those who follow Him in faith the opportunity for forgiveness from their sins and a place as sons and daughters of God.

Just like Mephibosheth, we bring nothing to the table.

We are lame in both feet, unable even to sit there without help.

But we are in an even more precarious position than Mephibosheth was.

We come into the presence of the King as those who deserve eternal punishment for our rebellion against this King.

But in His boundless grace, our King offered Himself as payment for the price of our rebellion.

He died so that we might live.

And so we transition this discussion from mercy to grace.

If mercy is not getting what we deserve, then grace is getting what we do not deserve, being adopted into the family of God and given a seat at the feast in Heaven.

Understand this: We deserve neither mercy or grace.

We deserve justice.

And justice for a people who have rebelled against the King, who have sinned against the God who made them in His image — justice for us would mean death, eternal separation from God, eternal damnation in Hell.

R.C. Sproul puts it this way: “Mercy and grace are actions God takes freely.

God is never required to be merciful or gracious.

The moment we think that God owes us grace or mercy, we are no longer thinking about grace or mercy.

Our minds tend to trip there so that we confuse mercy and grace with justice.

Justice may be owed, but mercy and grace are always voluntary.”

[R.

C. Sproul, What Can We Know about God?, First edition., vol.

27, The Crucial Questions Series (Orlando, FL: Reformation Trust: A Division of Ligonier Ministries, 2017), 45.]

I think we tend to have a narrow view of grace.

We need to understand that it is God’s grace that superintends the very clockwork activity of our planet’s orbit around the sun.

1 R.

C. Sproul, What Can We Know about God?, First edition., vol.

27, The Crucial Questions Series (Orlando, FL: Reformation Trust: A Division of Ligonier Ministries, 2017), 45.

This is called “common grace,” and God gives common grace to us all, whether we are believers or not, whether we repent of our sins or not.

God created the world.

It is His to do with as He pleases.

He is not required to do anything to keep it running or to keep us healthy or even alive.