Have you ever noticed how many things in life only work when all three parts are in their proper place? To make the simplest of yeast breads you need yeast, water, and flour. You leave any one of those ingredients out and you won’t get a bread that binds, bakes, or rises. For a fire to burn, it needs oxygen, heat, and fuel. Without those you will not get the fire that is needed for warmth and cooking. Marriage is one of these things as well. Marriage is not a man made idea, but rather it is one of two God made institutes (the other being the church), and He is very clear what marriage requires. For a Biblical marriage, you must have one man, one woman, and God at the head in order to make the marriage work. This idea of having all three parts present to make something work is seen in our next beatitude as well. Understanding there are three things required will also help us understand the scope of what Jesus is speaking of.
Matthew 5:7
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
In the first handful of beatitudes we have seen our utter and absolute reliance upon God. As Jesus continues in this sermon we are going to see how that reliance upon God is supposed to be lived out in our everyday lives. Jesus tells us here that in order to get mercy you must give mercy. This can be a very simple beatitude to understand when it’s understood in its proper perspective. It is much harder to actually live it out in our lives. The type of mercy that Jesus is speaking about could be best described as “compassion in action”. It’s this showing of mercy in our lives that is often very difficult for us. It’s not hard to feel compassion for someone who is in need or in trouble. However, when it comes to actually doing something about it, many times we find that part much more difficult. To help us understand what it takes to truly live out mercy the way Jesus is commanding us to, I want to look at three parables that Jesus used in His ministry. Each will represent one of the three parts that are all required to live out the kind of mercy that God’s approval rests upon and Jesus speaks of here.
Mercy Received - The Prodigal Son - Luke 15:18-24
I will go home to my father and say, “Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son. Please take me on as a hired servant.”’ “So he returned home to his father. And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him coming. Filled with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him. His son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son.’ “But his father said to the servants, ‘Quick! Bring the finest robe in the house and put it on him. Get a ring for his finger and sandals for his feet. And kill the calf we have been fattening. We must celebrate with a feast, for this son of mine was dead and has now returned to life. He was lost, but now he is found.’ So the party began.
We need to start this morning by looking at the truth contained in the end of this beatitude so we do not get the wrong idea about what Jesus is saying here. Jesus is not saying that the mercy that we receive from God comes from anything we have done or any mercy that we have shown. Instead what He is communicating is the reverse. Because you have received mercy from God by His grace alone, you can now go and give the mercy of God, with a promise of the totality of God’s mercy to be experienced in the future. Therefore, in order to carry out this beatitude, we are going to have to be a recipient of God’s mercy to begin with. This mercy that is received is beautifully shown and demonstrated in the parable of the Prodigal son. While the main purpose of this parable was to communicate the problem with the attitude of the other son, there is also a beauty I want to focus on in the interaction between the wayward son and his father that we too must experience. This parable begins with a son who wanted all of his inheritance while his father was still alive. The father obliged and the son headed off to the city to do whatever his heart wanted. It would be appropriate to say, he took this new found freedom and went wild. He quickly squandered all he had on everything he ever wanted. As soon as the money ran out, so did everything else — the pleasure, the friends, all of it was gone. Then a famine came upon the land, and the son found himself slopping hogs to survive. He knew that he would perish shortly if something didn’t happen. That’s where our text begins. The son realizes the wretched state that his actions had put him in and his desperate need for someone to pull him out of that place because he couldn't. He turned to his father, hoping for just some scraps from his table. As he approached his father in faith, while he was still a ways off, the father came running for him with mercy in hand. The mercy the father showed was unearned, it was unexpected, and it was overflowing into the life of the son who turned to him in faith. We could say that the prodigal's father is defined by mercy and this is just how God defines Himself in Scripture. When we look back in Exodus 34:6-7a we see God answering a prayer of Moses. A prayer that consisted of the phrase, “God, show me Your glory!”. As God is just letting Moses see His glory after He passes, God speaks. Of all the things God could have said listening to how He chose to define Himself in that moment, “The Lord passed in front of Moses, calling out, “Yahweh! The Lord! The God of compassion and mercy! I am slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. I lavish unfailing love to a thousand generations. I forgive iniquity, rebellion, and sin. But I do not excuse the guilty.” He is a God of mercy and forgiveness and that is what we so desperately need. We are just like this son, stuck in a situation of our own making, sinners who can do nothing about it ourselves. God just doesn’t forget, justice still has to be done and that’s why Jesus came, to pay the price we could never pay. As Peter put it in 1 Peter 1:3 - “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” Jesus looks past all our faults and our sins, because He paid the price for them and comes running with mercy to us when we place our faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Do you remember when Jesus and His mercy came running for you, past all your failures and right to your ultimate need for Him? We should never get over the day that the mercy of God met us in our sin and saved us from it all! Therefore, those of you who have never taken this first step, let me briefly communicate its importance in your life right now. This mercy received from God is not something to make you feel nice, or make you get excited. It is a matter of life and death. You are dead in your sins and there is no life that you can have outside of Jesus Christ. Listen to how the writer of Hebrews expresses the importance of Jesus as Lord and Savior of your life. Hebrews 10:28-29 “For anyone who refused to obey the law of Moses was put to death without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. Just think how much worse the punishment will be for those who have trampled on the Son of God, and have treated the blood of the covenant, which made us holy, as if it were common and unholy, and have insulted and disdained the Holy Spirit who brings God’s mercy to us.” It doesn’t matter who you are or whether you believe it or not, you are a sinner who will soon have to stand before a perfect and righteous God. You will have to answer for everything you have ever done, every thought you have ever thought, and every motive you had, even when you thought you were doing good. There is nothing you can say to God in that moment that will not warrant His perfect judgement carried out upon your guilty soul. That’s why you need Jesus now. Cry out to Jesus and be made new. Be forgiven, be shown mercy in a way you can never experience outside of Jesus Himself. Not only is this undeserved and overflowing mercy experienced in our lives immediately the moment we cry out to Jesus, there is also a mercy that we will not fully realize till we are done in this life and with Jesus forever. That’s the type of mercy that Jesus is speaking of here. It’s a mercy that has to be experienced by faith in Him now before you will be able to experience it then. However once you have experienced this by faith in Jesus, because it is overflowing, you can’t hold it back in your lives.
Mercy Demonstrated - The Good Samaritan - Luke 10:36–37
“Now which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the man who was attacked by bandits?” Jesus asked. The man replied, “The one who showed him mercy.” Then Jesus said, “Yes, now go and do the same.”
Just like we saw concerning our own sins, those in serious need (no matter what the needs are) are in need of mercy. This Jewish man in Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan is in desperate need of mercy. Not the same type of mercy we talked about earlier (even though everyone needs Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior), but this need is a physical one. We will run into people who are experiencing a need for this type of physical mercy all throughout our lives, and their physical needs will vary greatly. Those in need of mercy will meet the same three groups of people that this Jewish man met. I like how Adrian Rogers referred to these groups of people. He calls them the beater uppers, the passer uppers, and the picker uppers. They have an attitude of what’s yours is mine, what’s mine is mine, and what’s mine is yours. This Jewish man first ran into the beater uppers who literally beat him up, took all his things, and left him for dead. These people brought the man into a crisis in which he was in desperate need of mercy. Then two religious people came by — one was a priest and one a worker in the temple. These two should have been the exact ones that this man needed in that moment. Because of their positions both should have experienced and have known extensively about the mercy of God and should be the first to step up and show the man mercy. However Jesus tells us that these two were the passer uppers — they just walked on by. We aren’t told their motive behind this but we can speculate. Maybe they didn’t want to get dirty. They were on their way to the temple in Jerusalem after all and in order to serve God there, they couldn't stand the chance of being ceremonially unclean. Maybe they thought he got what he deserved — thinking they were better than him. Or maybe they just didn’t want to be associated with such people who found themselves in that kind of situation. Whatever their excuse, they just passed on by a man who was in desperate need of their help. Then you had a man who belonged to a group of people who would have been despised by this Jewish man — a Samaritan. In Matthew 5:7, when we look at the grammar of the beatitude Jesus gave, we see that mercy is mentioned in its adjective form. There is only one other time this form is used in Scripture and that is when, in Hebrews, we are told Jesus came down, bent low, and became our perfect High Priest. The idea of bending low is found in Jesus coming to earth, when He stepped down out of Glory to meet us where we are in our sins. It is also the picture we are given in the actions of the Samaritan. Not only did the Samaritan come over to the injured man and got down on his level, he took time to soothe his wounds, He became a picker upper by placing him upon his own donkey, and took him to an inn and paid for the man to be taken care of. Mercy cost Jesus His life. Mercy cost this Samaritan his comfort and money. When we show mercy as Jesus is calling us to, it will cost us something as well. Once Jesus was finished telling the parable, He asked those listening which of these people were most like a neighbor. The answer was “The one who showed mercy”. Jesus said yes — now go and do the same. Like we said last week, our true faith (what we really believe) will be what we live out beyond the doors of this church building. Nowhere is that more evident than in how we show mercy. Mercy crosses boundaries, mercy interrupts schedules, and mercy invests resources all the while always being led by the Gospel in word and deed. Mercy always calls us to move toward the hurting and not away from them. With this beatitude and parable, Jesus is reframing the mercy that is required of a follower of Him not to be just shown in an occasional gesture. It is a lifestyle shown continually in the life of a Christian. Yes, we must be careful because there are those who will take advantage of a Christian’s mercy. However, as a good steward some of the most merciful things we can do is to confront that sin in the lives of others and share the truth of God’s Word concerning that. Mercy can look like a multitude of things in the life of a believer because there is a multitude of hurts people can experience in this broken world. There will always be visible fruit from those acts of mercy. There is a type of mercy that we are called to give that might not have as much of a noticeable outward fruit, but definitely does concerning inward fruits in our own lives.
Mercy Extended — The Unforgiving Debtor - Matthew 18:32-34
Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’ Then the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt.
The words of the king in Jesus’ final parable are harsh. They are violent and they show how serious Jesus’ call is for us to show mercy through forgiveness. In the life of a believer this point is non-negotiable. The debt that we owed God, because of our sin, was impossible for us to pay — just like this evil servant. This servant in this parable owed an amount that was over $20 million dollars in today’s money. He knew he could not pay and came to the king and the king in goodness and grace gave him the mercy that he did not deserve. This is exactly like us when we come to Jesus for forgiveness of our sins. It’s a debt we could not pay, but Jesus paid it for us. It’s not that the debt went away in either of these cases, it's just that the king and our King paid the price for us. In the parable, the one who was forgiven much, refused to forgive someone who owed him so little in comparison to what he was forgiven and had him thrown into prison. This parable is the warning to those who have been forgiven by Jesus, not to be like this unforgiving debtor. We live in a fallen world, and there is no doubt we are going to be hurt and many times the worst of those hurts come from people we thought were in our own camp. Remember David as a musician in Saul’s court? Saul should have been excited for David that God was blessing him. One day he would be king over what Saul was now. However, instead of happiness, anger and bitterness came up in Saul and he threw a spear at David trying to kill him. We are all going to be hurt in this world, but we cannot respond in kind. We are commanded in many places like Colossians 3:13 and Ephesians 4:32 to forgive others as we have been forgiven. It’s a command for us not to hold on to hate, not to hold on to bitterness and not to be like this evil debtor. Unforgiveness does no one any good and it only harms you. Not only can it cause many physical, mental, and emotional problems but it’s in direct disobedience to Christ and will cause harm in your daily walk with Him. It’s a sin you are holding on to. Understand that we can still struggle with forgiveness even after we have forgiven others. There are times that we might find that the same bitterness and anger come creeping back. Those are just artifacts of sin’s brokenness and a message from our enemy, Satan. It’s in these moments that we bring those old feelings back to Jesus and lay them at His feet. There have been many times in my life that I have been hurt in church, by people who I trusted and I would love to say they didn’t mean to, but they told me that they did. I forgave them, but there were times I still struggled. Every time I experience those old feelings from the hurt, I’d bring those to the cross and remember what God has forgiven me of and guess what. It took time, but each and every time these feelings came up, I brought them to Jesus and then as the years passed, these feelings stopped coming up. I realized I was more able to forgive like Jesus. Did they deserve my forgiveness? Did they ever ask for it? No, but my King, the One who had forgiven me of so many things, has said that mercy is a lifestyle that must be a part of mine. I walk one step at a time in obedience to His calling in all parts of my life, even those that are not pleasant all the time, like forgiveness. One quick side note, most of the time when we think of mercy given through forgiveness we think of someone else hurting us. However there are many times we can find that we are unwilling to forgive ourselves. This truth and call is just as true for forgiving yourself as it is for others.
Those are the three parts that you must have and exhibit to show mercy like Jesus calls us to. Jesus’ followers need all three to reflect the mercy of God into the lives of others around them. Because they have experienced the mercy of Jesus, they are now conduits of that same mercy into a hurting world. This is not just something we are called to do, but it’s who we are called to be. Just as Jesus is defined by mercy, so we are to be defined by mercy in our actions and in our forgiveness. I’ll be honest with you, mercy and compassion are difficult for me. Every time I have taken a spiritual giftedness test in my life, there will be some giftedness that will change spots depending on where God has called me. However, I always know what my lowest two will be, they will always be mercy and compassion. It would be easy to say, “Well I guess that’s how God made me” and ignore it. This beatitude is not a suggestion for those who call upon Him as Lord, it is the lifestyle they must have because of the mercy they have experienced. So no matter where we are, we are going to have to lay our struggles with mercy at the feet of Jesus for His glory and our good.
