Blessed are the Merciful | Rev. Josh Landen

Welcome to the podcast of Christ Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee.

Join us as we dive into this week's sermon that challenges our hearts and minds to grow closer to Christ.

We pray that your heart is inspired and transformed by God's Word.

When we read the gospel, we we remain standing in honor and reverence for the gospel of our Lord.

So today's reading comes from the book of Matthew, chapter five, as we continue our series on the Beatitudes.

Here now the word of the Lord Matthew five one.

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down.

His disciples came to him and he began to teach them.

He said, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied, and blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

This is the word of God for the people of God, and we say thanks be to God.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, thank you for your mercy.

God, thank you that we get to gather and worship you.

I pray, Lord, that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight.

You're our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

You may be seated.

Good morning.

My name is Josh Landon.

I get the honor and privilege of serving as executive pastor here.

And it's good to see you guys.

You never know on Labor Day Weekend what the crowd's going to look like, but I'm glad that y'all are here and you're making this a priority for your week.

This is not just a holiday weekend, but it's also, well, maybe this is a holiday to you.

This is the first week of college football.

Yes.

Who was at a game yesterday?

Anyone in person?

In-person attendance?

Okay, we got a few over here.

Okay, who watched a game yesterday?

As a few more of you.

Yeah, I saw a few of them.

My uh my Georgia Bulldogs quickly disposed of Tennessee State.

They by the second quarter, they had in the second string, and then they you know went to the third string, went to the fourth string, and still scored like 60 60 points there on Tennessee State.

He who shall not be named.

Thank you for that thumbs up over there.

Last night in the in the primetime game, I think he put half a hundred or so on on Clemson.

And those are those are some pretty high scores.

You get a lot of those with these Cupgate games at the beginning of the year, uh, but not as high as this one right here.

This is one from 106 years ago.

I don't know if you guys have heard about this game.

This is Georgia Tech versus Cumberland.

There's an interesting backstory there, but Georgia Tech scored 222 points.

They even had a running clock in the second half.

Their coach was John Heisman.

He had an axe to grind, some personal grievances here against Cumberland College, now Cumberland University, which I think is over in Lebanon, Tennessee.

And it was really, really amazingly so many points were scored.

But when I came to Memphis, I was told that this is not as much a football town as it is a basketball town.

So I want to show you a basketball picture if you'll indulge me here just a little bit.

This is the 1991 Katusa County Ringold, Georgia championship team.

Those are two coaches, Stuart and Lamar Sr.

There.

Uh back row, we have Amos Brad, Jason, and Lavar.

All four of them played college basketball.

On the bottom row, you have Jason, David, Brian, and then there's the hero of our story there on the bottom right.

This team was like the 27 Yankees or the 72 Dolphins.

We destroyed everybody.

We we went 16-0, I think, ultimately, something like that.

The closest game was 10 points difference.

Uh, there was one game that we won 85 to 6 the first time we played that team.

85 to 6.

Uh, and our coach uh at the end of the game said, You guys could have scored 100, and I'm disappointed that you didn't.

The second time we played them, it was 86 to 5, and he was still there was more yet to be done.

In those days, there was not a mercy rule, I guess, and we showed no mercy.

Uh, we did like the actual like physical limits of the number of points that were possible to be scored when you're playing eight-minute quarters with 11-year-olds.

The guy on the bottom right, he was not great.

He was out there for moral support often.

Uh, we'd get up by 15 or 20, he'd come in, crack a few jokes, be terrified of getting fouled, and have to shoot a free throw in front of everybody.

But he was there and he realized that you don't get points for wise cracks or for astute observations that they want to they want to see the ball, the ball go into the basket.

But there was no mercy rule there.

We were unstoppable and unbeatable, and we were relentless.

We didn't show mercy.

Mercy doesn't come natural naturally to any of us, really, because it requires us necessarily to remove ourselves from the center of our attention and the center of our action and put something else there.

Ideally, it's Christ.

It may also be others, but it's not us.

When Pastor Paul began this series, he said that the teachings and the Beatitudes are revolutionary, that they go against the ways of the world.

It's not how we operate, and it's not how the world operates.

We can go ahead and go to the blank slide.

We don't have to stick on the uh the basketball one there.

That's okay.

Our sinful nature keeps us from being merciful.

To be merciful is to live in such a way that puts others first.

And what is best in any particular situation is the way that Christ would respond and not the way that we would want to respond ourselves.

And that's how he wants us to live, as if as he is living, as he lived.

So Jesus is teaching us a better and a higher way.

So let's recap where we are here.

We're on the fifth beatitude.

The first four beatitudes tell us first who we should be and then what we should do.

Who we should be is made possible when we receive the Holy Spirit, and be given power to live a Christian life and obey Christ's commands.

So these four that we've gotten to thus far are blessed are the poor in spirit, to know that we have a spiritual bankruptcy within ourselves, and blessed are those who mourn to grieve over that pitiful condition, and blessed are the meek where we submit ourselves to God's will in all things, and then we're able to hunger and thirst for righteousness, a godly way of living.

And what that looks like, Jesus tells us first, is being merciful, merciful to the poor and to the needy, merciful to the offender, because we ourselves know ourselves to be poor and needy, and we have caused offense.

Mercy is part of God's character, it's who He is in concert with His grace and with His loving kindness.

The Psalmist puts it this way He says, But you, O Lord, are a God of compassion and mercy, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness.

So look down and have mercy on me.

Give your strength to your servant, save me the Son of your servant.

We cry out for mercy based on God's unfailing love, and he gives it to us by his grace.

Grace is when he gives us something that we don't deserve, and mercy is when he doesn't give us what we do deserve.

DA Carson put it like this he said, Mercy is a loving response prompted by the misery and helplessness of the one on whom the love is to be showered.

If grace answers to the undeserving, mercy answers to the miserable.

We were undeserving of our relationship with God, and we were miserable in our sins, and God has found a way to rectify all that.

To give help to the wretched, to the miserable.

God saw that in us and does for us what we can't do for ourselves.

Another writer Richard Linsky says this, he says mercy always deals with what we see of pain and misery and distress, these results of sin.

And grace always deals with the sin and guilt itself.

The one extends relief, the other pardon.

The one mercy cures, heals, helps, and the other grace cleanses and reinstates.

Mercy is giving attention to those who have need among us.

It is synonymous with compassion, but it's not just compassion.

Compassion is a feeling, but mercy is more.

This is who God Himself is.

When God reveals Himself to Moses on the mountain in Exodus thirty four, here's how God describes Himself.

He passed in front of Moses and said, The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and steadfastness, in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.

This is God's description of himself, and this is who God wants us to be.

When you get to the prophets, and the prophets are calling for people to leave their wickedness, to come back to God, God is telling them, I want to see mercy in your life.

Hosea says this in chapter six.

For I desire mercy, God says, not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.

I'm not wanting you to go through the rituals without a changed heart.

I'm not wanting you to just go through the motions, attend worship, have burnt offering sacrifices without actually showing mercy to your neighbor.

Mercy is compassion and action.

It flows out of God's loving kindness.

It's not remembering sins out of mercy, out of steadfast love.

Now notice here, when we accept mercy, we are accepting the arrangement.

We are accepting the structure of the relationship because somebody has to be in a position to give it, and somebody has to be in a position to receive it.

We can only receive mercy from God when God gives it to us, but then we can extend it to others.

And so when we accept his mercy, we're accepting this arrangement.

In the New Testament, it looks like this.

We see mercy in the person of Jesus Himself.

When the disciples are plucking grain on the Sabbath, the Pharisees complain and they say they shouldn't be doing that.

That's doing work.

And Jesus says, You don't understand what it means that I deserve, I expect to see, I want to see mercy and not sacrifice.

You wouldn't have condemned them if you had done that, if you knew that.

When Jesus feeds the four thousand and feeds the five thousand, it says he looked out on the crowds on the field and he had compassion on them, and then did the miracles to give them the food.

And then when the blind beggars in Matthew 20, they're outside the town walls at Jericho, and they see Jesus or they hear Jesus, as it were, approaching, and they shout out, Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us.

Jesus says, Well, what do you want me to do?

And they say, We want to see.

And Jesus had compassion on them and touched their eyes, and immediately they received their sight, and they followed him.

See, there were those there were people in that day and time who were very much willing to puff themselves up and to give their tithe and say, Look at me, but they weren't willing to be merciful towards others.

They wouldn't change their hearts.

So when we want to see what mercy looks like, let's look to Christ.

It is compassion in action, not just thoughts and prayers and not just sympathy.

In Proverbs 14, Solomon says this It's a sin to despise one's neighbor.

But blessed is the one who is kind to the needy.

It must be active.

There's a story about a believer in 1830s London.

He happened upon a friend whose horse had been killed in the street accidentally.

There were a crowd of onlookers who were expressing their words of sympathy until this friend stepped forward and said to the loudest one among them, I am sorry, five pounds worth.

How much are you sorry?

And then he passed the hat.

Mercy demands action.

One writer said it like this it's getting down on your hands and knees and doing what you can to restore dignity to someone whose life has been broken by sin, whether his own or that of someone else.

How much mercy we can show is a result of how much mercy we know.

It's compassion and action.

And it's also forgiveness.

It is forgiving.

One who forgives and pardons another who is in the wrong.

At the end of the book of Genesis, there's a story about Joseph, one of the one of the twelve brothers.

And Joseph had been sold into slavery by his brothers earlier, years before.

They were going to kill him, honestly.

And they realized, well, he's going to be dead to us either way, either physically or relationally.

They were going to kill him because of their jealousy.

So he's going to be dead to us either way.

We might as well sell him and get a little bit of money in our pockets, and we'll never see him again, one way or the other.

So they sell him into slavery.

He rises, you're familiar with the story.

He rises to be the viceroy in Egypt, second in command.

There's a famine in the land.

God had blessed him to know to store up grain to get through this famine.

And so the other brothers come to him seeking this grain.

He knows who they are, but they don't know who he is because he now has a beard and he's speaking Egyptian through an interpreter to them.

And the story goes back and forth for several chapters.

He sends them on some errands.

Go get your brother, go get your father, let me see them.

He sets them up a few times to be able to have to come back, to keep coming back to him.

And ultimately the story reaches this conclusion where Joseph has this option.

He can stick it to his brothers.

He is the second most powerful man in the world.

He can throw them in the pits.

He can have them beheaded.

He could do anything he wants to them.

But he shows them mercy.

In Genesis 50, he says this don't be afraid.

Am I in the place of God?

You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.

The merciful person remembers his sin and God's mercy to him.

He understands others and he forgives them.

He is forgiving others as a sign of gratitude for his own forgiveness that he has received from God.

Because we will never forgive someone as much as God has forgiven us.

That's what it says in Ephesians 4.

Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just in just as in Christ God forgave you.

God has forgiven us, and now he calls us to forgive others.

I want to show you a picture here.

This is the end of the Civil War.

This is Lincoln's second inauguration, so this would have been in 1865 in the spring.

The war was pretty much over.

They hadn't met at Appomattox yet, but the South lay in ruins burned much of it down to the ground, had no ability to continue to wage war.

And Lincoln had a choice here.

He had just been reelected president.

He could either be merciful and forgiving, or he could, as many people and as most people wanted him to do, he could really go after the South, confiscate the remainder of their wealth, execute any and all people who took up arms against the state, punish, punish, punish.

He says that is not the better, higher way.

The penalty has already been paid by what they've had to go through, and so in his address he says this, with malice towards none, charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.

Let's strive on to finish the work we're in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and for his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

He decided that he was going to help those to forgive those, even whose sins and the situation they were in was because of their own fault.

It was their own decisions that led to that.

That's a hard way to live.

There were people on the north whose husbands and fathers and brothers and sons were killed for this, and they were going to want blood.

They're going to want their pound of flesh.

He says no.

It's better to reconcile, it's better to forgive and move on.

Reconstruction was hard enough as it is.

It was going to be much harder the other way and much less charitable.

But we have a temptation to be like those other people too, to call for blood.

To say somebody's hurt me and you don't know how bad it hurt, and you don't know what that was like.

And so I'm going to avenge myself.

I'm going to put myself in God's place, and I'm going to make sure that punishment is handed out.

And I'm going to level the fit the score.

I'm going to go down to their level, as it were, and make sure that I am avenged and that what I want to happen happens.

You can't see it here.

It's hard, it's hard to see.

You can find it online, but in this picture, there's also another person who's famous.

He's an actor named John Wilkes Booth.

He's right over Lincoln's left shoulder.

He's on that terrace, looking down below him, looking down at Lincoln below.

And of course, a month later or so he's going to take matters into his own hands.

He's going to disagree with Lincoln and his approach here and what has happened, and he's going to assassinate him.

We can be tempted also to be like that.

To to deny Christ, to deny what he clearly tells us, to not live merciful lives and to go out and and make sure that we take care of ourselves, that we that we avenge ourselves, our family.

But Christ gives us some warnings there.

About living unmercifully and uncharitably with others and about not forgiving.

You see, when we do that, it we reveal our heart situation.

If that's our spirit towards others, we have deceived ourselves in that we're believers.

And we're denying ourselves the same mercy that we are denying other people.

In Matthew 25, Jesus says this.

And he says, Whenever you have visited the sick and the poor, whenever you've clothed the naked, you've gone to see somebody in prison, you've given you've given water and food to people, you've done that to me.

And if you haven't, then you haven't.

It just says, They will also answer, Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, or a stranger, or needing clothes, or sick, or in prison, and when did we not help you?

He'll reply, Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.

When we refuse to be merciful to others who bear God's same image that we bear, Christ tells us it's as if we're being unmerciful to him directly.

When we refuse to help someone whose need that we see, it's as if we're doing it to Christ Himself.

In Matthew 6, this is later on in the Sermon on the Mount, he says, For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you.

But if you don't forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive you your sins.

Are we willing to extend the forgiveness to others that God has shown to us in Christ?

If the answer to that is no, then we have to examine our hearts and see if Christ is really in us.

Because what we're saying is that someone's offense against us is greater than God's than my offense against God.

And I'm going to require more out of that person than God requires out of me.

Friends, that's a dangerous place to put yourself in.

Because our sinfulness is much greater offense to God.

And there are some things that have been horribly done to all of us.

Each of us in here can probably say relational, physical, financial, spiritual, any any manner of harm I'm sure it can be represented by us in this room.

But Christ has offered us forgiveness and we're not to deny it to others.

So what this means for us is that this these beatitudes, this mercifulness showing mercy, it reveals a Christian.

Character.

So we're called to let the scriptures read us.

Are we merciful?

Because a true Christian doesn't object to being humbled.

A true Christian doesn't object to allowing Christ to operate through him because that's exactly what's supposed to happen.

No longer us living, but Christ living in us.

He's in control.

We're not trying to be more Christian.

We're not striving through our own effort.

We're handing over it to him and letting him work and live through us.

The Christian life is not just a surface coating or veneer or a paint job.

It's deep within us.

When we're born again, when we have the rebirth, when we have a new nature, when we are a new creature.

And so these beatitudes tell us that as we live our lives, we are declaring exactly what we are.

These acts of mercy are the proof of our mercy, just like obedience to Christ is the proof of our faith.

Jesus' brother James writes in chapter two of his epistle.

He says, What good is it, brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds?

Can such faith save them?

Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food.

If one of you says to them, Well go in peace, keep warm and well fed, but you don't do anything about their physical needs, what good is that?

In the same way, faith by itself, if not accompanied by action, is dead.

Friends, to be merciful is to show mercy.

To be Christian is to live like a Christian.

The inward and the outward have to match in our lives, where our heart is exchanged for Christ's own, where we decrease and he increases.

You see, God's goal is to make you more like himself.

And we see that perfect image of God in the person of Jesus Christ, and that it comes to us through the church.

God shows mercy to man because while we were yet sinners, he sent Christ to die for us, and that proves his love towards us.

God shows mercy in the person of Jesus.

Do you remember when Jesus was hanging on the cross?

Actively dying?

Actively being murdered?

He says, Lord, forgive them.

They don't know what they're doing.

And we see this in the early church.

It's recorded in Acts and in other places of history.

Stephen the first martyr is being stoned for preaching a sermon about Christ, Jesus being the Messiah.

As the stones are coming down on him, as his body is taking these blows from these rocks, he has this vision of heaven opening up.

He says, Lord, forgive them for what they're doing.

That's what it means to be a Christian, to be so merciful in our spirit that we can live as Christ lived, that we can meet that same example because it is He who is living through us.

If we can't forgive, if we can't be merciful, then we don't belong to Christ.

But if we can, it is because we've been supernaturally gifted to do that through the Holy Spirit.

Those who are truly God's children, those who are objects of his mercy, will themselves be merciful and receive mercy in the end.

Living mercifully is the evidence that we know mercy.

So here's some tests.

First, towards people in need.

If we don't have mercy towards them in physical or economic need, then we're not true believers.

We don't become believers by being merciful, but we're not believers if we don't, if that makes sense.

Look at the story of the Good Samaritan.

There are people who abided by the law, the priest and the Levite, but they passed along the way when they saw the man who'd been beaten by robbers.

They refused to intervene and help that man.

So Jesus' question, when he tells this story about the Good Samaritan, remember this is a parable?

The original question was, What must I do to inherit eternal life?

And so Jesus tells that man, well, which one of these was the neighbor?

And the man can't even say the name Samaritan because that's anathema to them.

So he just says, the one who showed mercy.

And Jesus' response, go and do likewise.

We cannot turn a blind eye to people in need.

And in the Good Samaritan that was a physical need, but it but it may be other needs as well.

First John 3, the apostle writes, if anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity, how is the love of God in that person?

You see, true belief isn't divorced from action.

Attitude and action go hand in hand.

That's a test for mercy.

What about a test for forgiveness towards those who offend?

If we refuse to exercise mercy by forgiving others, we have no claim to Christ, because God's grace makes us merciful.

Forgiveness demonstrates that we have been forgiven, and if we refuse, then we don't understand what Christ has done for us.

There's a parable later on about the wicked servant.

This wicked servant owes the king ten thousand bags of gold, an enormous sum, many, many lifetimes of earnings.

And the king threatens him and he says, Please forgive this.

Don't throw me, don't throw my family in prison.

Forgive this debt.

I can only pay it back by your mercy and your goodness.

There was no other way to do it.

So the king forgives it.

But the wicked servant goes to somebody else who owes him just a few pieces of silver.

And he refuses, he grabs him by the neck, it says, he refuses to forgive that guy.

He did not realize, he did not understand what forgiveness really was.

He was willing to accept the good parts, the part that helped him.

But he wasn't willing to accept the part that required him to be gracious and forgiving to others.

We have to be willing to forgive.

That's what we pray in the Lord's Prayer.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

I recognize that this can be a hard teaching.

This is hard to do on our own.

This isn't how we naturally operate.

This is how the world works.

And if we're not careful, this is how the church can sometimes work too.

We either insulate ourselves from the pain and suffering that we see in the world, or we we kind of scoff, we kind of laugh when somebody gets their comeuppance and what they feel like is coming to them.

But when we show mercy, we continually find ways to rediscover mercy.

God's merciful to us, we show it to others, we realize again and anew and afresh how He's merciful to us even more.

And then we let that flow through us to other people.

You see, we don't earn mercy or forgiveness, lest anyone should boast.

But we don't receive it unless we repent, and we can't claim to have repented if we are unmerciful towards others.

Nothing moves us to forgive like the sense of wonder that we've ourselves been forgiven.

Nothing proves that we've been forgiven more than our readiness to forgive.

And nothing shows that we know God's mercy more than giving mercy to someone else.

To forgive and be forgiven, to be merciful and receive mercy, those belong together, and that starts with our posture before God.

That's why this follows those first four beatitudes, poor in spirit, mourning, meek, hungering and thirsting for righteousness.

When we do that, we're acknowledging that we are sinners and we are in need of a savior, and we're able to interact with other people in such a way that we recognize that they are in the same position as we are.

When we are merciful, we are exhibiting Christ's own life as difficult as it might be.

There's a picture here that I want to show you.

You guys have probably heard of this lady before, many of you at least.

Her name is Corey Tinboom.

She is Dutch.

And Cori Tinboom is a Christian believer, and in the 1930s and 40s, she started hiding Jews in her house.

She wrote a book later on called The Hiding Place.

This is how you accessed it, right here.

And she was betrayed by somebody, and the Nazis found out that she was hiding Jews.

And so they they arrested her and put her in a prison, a concentration camp.

She made her way out of that concentration camp.

This is her visiting that later on.

And she began teaching and preaching God's word.

And she gives us she has a story.

I'm going to read it very, very briefly.

She has a story about running into someone who worked at that concentration camp and how difficult it was for her.

She says this was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former SS man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbrook.

He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time.

This is ten years later.

And suddenly it was all there again, the room full of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, and Betsy's pain blanched face.

Betsy is her sister.

He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing.

How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein, he said.

To think that, as you say, he washed my sins away.

His hand was thrust out to shake mine, and I, who had just preached so often to the people in Blumental the need to forgive, I kept my hand at my side.

Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them.

Jesus had died for this man.

Was I going to ask for more?

Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me forgive him.

I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand, I could not.

I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity.

And so again I breathed a silent prayer.

Jesus, I cannot forgive him.

Give me your forgiveness.

And then as I took his hand the most incredible thing happened.

From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for the stranger that almost overwhelmed me.

She was someone who had watched others perish in a concentration camp.

She was someone who had been persecuted for protecting innocent people.

She was someone who herself had lived through the horrors of that concentration camp and went on to preach about forgiveness.

And when the opportunity presented itself, when the rubber met the road, it was very difficult for her.

That's a natural response.

But she got a supernatural intervention by allowing Christ and his love and his forgiveness to go through her, to forgive this person who had harmed her, harmed her sister personally, and harmed so many others.

Forgiveness is possible.

If you are a Christian, you can forgive.

By God's grace you can forgive whatever wrongs have happened to you, domestically, interpersonally, financially, because Christ has forgiven us.

He is the one that we keep our eyes on.

The writer of Hebrews says, For this reason he had to be made like them, Christ like us, human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.

All of this is possible because of what Christ has done and who Christ is.

God saw our state, he saw our suffering, and in spite of the law breaking, in spite of our transgressions, he offered mercy that moved him to action.

And so there's no contradiction there between justice and mercy and mercy and truth.

They're all met together in Christ.

So keep Christ before you.

Let him work through you to give you mercy, which comes from God.

Friends, to the world, this is going to look like weakness.

This is going to look like foolishness.

Somebody harms you, you harm them back twofold to teach them a lesson so they don't do it again.

Somebody takes something from you, you take something from them.

Somebody disparages you, you disparage, you say even worse things about them.

That's what the world tells us to do.

Christ tells us to live differently.

Remember, when we emulate that world, we are emulating a world who took a perfect man who was perfectly innocent and crucified him.

If we are merciful, we will have mercy in this way.

We will see our relationship to God.

We will see our great need for mercy.

We will cry out for it.

He will give it to us by his grace, and then he'll allow us to share it with others.

Friends, let me tell you, it is a it is a load to carry bitterness and anger and resentment.

It's heavy.

This inability or unwillingness, maybe, to forgive.

I can I can sympathize with you.

There are situations in my own past and yours where I feel like I have been harmed tremendously, in life-altering ways.

But we don't gain anything by hanging on to it.

We release it, we give it to God, we let him sort it out.

We take the same forgiveness that he has offered to us, and we give it to others.

So what I want you to do with that this week, in your prayer journal, if you don't have a prayer journal, take a sticky note.

I want you to write down the name, the situation of where you need to offer forgiveness.

It can just be a first name, it can be a last name, it can be March of 1993, and God knows what it is.

Pray over that vocally with your mouth.

Lord, I forgive such and such.

Lord, I forgive so and so.

Let that go through your spirit, and Christ will give you the grace to make it so, to lay down that burden.

Give it over to Him, forgive, be merciful.

Secondarily, find ways to show God's mercy in real and tangible ways to people that are in need.

And there are people in need within a half a mile of where you're sitting right now.

There are people in need in your own neighborhood.

This church, Nathan talked about it last week, and there are some signups out here.

We are sponsoring a serve day.

This has not all been leading up to a pitch for this, but this is what we want our people to do and to be.

It's people who are merciful, who love the poor and the oppressed and the marginalized, who take what God has given and gifted them with and shares it with others.

Find a way to be in service in the name of Jesus Christ to others.

I want to challenge you today on your Sunday school group text, on your group email, whoever, whoever are the admins for that kind of stuff, send out an email and say, What is our Sunday school class doing for the 19th?

Organize your life in such a way that that's the kind of thing that is not difficult to ask you to do on a Saturday morning.

Be an example with your kids.

Be an example for others.

Let us be a church that loves people enough to be merciful to them.

There are dozens of different opportunities all day on Saturday the 19th.

If you already have plans that day, good news.

There are missions teams that are already working with those particular groups that you can just plug right into.

It doesn't have to be the 19th if that doesn't work for you.

Find a way to show God's love and mercy to others.

The gospel this morning is that God's mercy has been shown to us and sends us into the world to show mercy to other people.

So ask yourself, how am I showing mercy to people?

How am I doing mercy?

Whom shall I forgive?

Who am I letting stand between my spirit and God's grace and forgive that person?

Blessed are the merciful, Christ says, for they shall obtain mercy.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you for your great mercy to us.

Thank you, Lord, for giving us your Son Jesus Christ.

Thank you for his perfect example.

Lord, change our spirits.

Lord, help us to forgive others who have harmed and wronged us.

Help us, Lord, to be examples of your love to them.

Help us, Lord, to show mercy to people who need it, to show them your great love, people that are in need to share what we have with them out of the abundance of your grace.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the podcast for Christ Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee.

We pray that today's message has inspired and encouraged you in your walk with Christ.

To stay connected with our church community, visit us online at ChristchurchMemphis.org.

We hope to see you this upcoming Sunday for worship as we seek to glorify God and make disciples of Jesus Christ among all peoples.