"Merry Are the Merciful" Matthew 5:7 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Pastor Philip deCoursi was here ministering to us a few weeks ago, and he told me a story about a woman who celebrated her 50th wedding anniversary.

And there was a function for her to celebrate her 50 years of marriage, and a lot of the younger wives in the church came to kind of honor her and learn from her.

And somebody asked her what the secret to a happy, long marriage is.

And she said that when she was engaged, she determined to write down a list of 10 faults that are in her husband.

To put them on the list, and then whenever her husband commits any of those faults or any of those mistakes, to know that they're on the list, and she is determined to never be angry or bitter or disappointed in anything that is on that list.

So whenever he does those things, she would think to herself, oh, it's a good thing that's on the list.

So Philip says, a bunch of the younger women then take out their notebooks to uh write down.

And one of them asks her, So what are the ten things on your list then?

After 50 years, certainly you have it memorized.

And she said, You know the strangest thing?

I never actually did write the list.

Whenever he did something wrong, I just said, Wow, it's a good thing that's on the list.

That's a pretty good picture of what Jesus is describing here in Matthew chapter 5 in the fifth of our Beatitudes.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

You can look down at verse 7.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Jesus' declaration here is pretty straightforward.

Happy are those who are merciful.

Happy are those who are benevolent, kind, generous, giving and forgiving of other people.

That's what Jesus declares here.

Now, this is a bit of an upside-down statement.

Like all of the Beatitudes so far, and I hope you've noticed that.

The first one was blessed are the poor.

Now, Jesus could have said, Happy are those who are rich if they are rich in godliness.

That would be kind of the same implication.

But rich is a positive term, and Jesus is using negative terms.

So happy are the poor, he says.

That highlights and underlines the just upside-down nature of these beatitudes.

Or, you know, happy are those who mourn.

In and of itself, that is a contradiction.

Happy are the mourning?

Jesus could have said, happy are those who are filled with the Spirit, who comforts you in your mourning.

But filled would be a positive term, and he's using, of course, the negative terms.

Or happy are the meek.

I mean, that's completely upside down.

That's the word for surrender, remember?

And he could have said, happy are those who conquer this world.

Or like John says, happy are the overcomers.

But again, overcomer.

Even though it's a biblical analogy, a biblical word picture, that's true, but that's positive.

And Jesus is going low.

Happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Why not happier are those who are filled spiritually?

Happy are those who are rich in God's word.

But no, he goes with hunger.

He's going down.

And that's true here, of course, with this one.

Happy are the merciful.

Merciful in world cultures through world history, merciful is not a good word.

It's not a good concept.

In our Western world, we have, I think, romanticized the concept of mercy.

It's ingrained in our cultural DNA, but I want you to understand that's unique in world history.

You know, the Western world has this idea of the benevolent dictator or a king, and you can beg the king for mercy, and a good king might show you mercy.

But that is, I think, owing to the Christian ethic that has kind of permeated our cultural ethos here.

That's not true, generally speaking, in world history.

It certainly was not true of the Romans or the Jews.

The Romans and the Jews did not prize mercy.

In the Roman mind, a leader that showed mercy was unfit to be a leader.

If Rome were to conquer a place, they would go to war against a place, annex a place, that place could surrender immediately, in which case they would all receive Roman citizenship.

If they surrendered, they received citizenship.

But if they fought and they lost, they were either put to death or exiled or enslaved.

Most slaves in the Roman Empire became slaves when their place fought against Rome and they lost.

It would be absurd for a Roman Caesar or emperor or even senator to stand up and say, oh no, we should show them mercy.

Totally foreign to the Roman worldview.

The Jewish worldview is largely the same.

Although the Old Testament is filled with images of mercy in the Jewish mindset, showing mercy to somebody on an individual level almost undercuts what God is doing in their life.

There's ways in which the Jewish worldview is very much like almost modern-day Hinduism, where there's a concept of reincarnation, and if someone's suffering, they're suffering likely to purge them of evil that had been had happened before, that they had done before.

So if you show someone mercy who's suffering, you're almost robbing them of the sanctifying power of their suffering.

The Jews very much had that mindset.

And so when Jesus walks in and says, Blessed are the merciful, he's taking a word that in their world displays weakness, that in their world displays really impotence.

That you don't have the power to do what is right.

And I say it's looked upon in a positive way in our Western culture.

I don't know how much longer that's going to be true.

Do you?

I mean, it's easy to think of, you know, like 50 years ago, maybe there was this idea of a benevolent leader who was kind and showed mercy to people.

But even that's going away, isn't it?

I mean, now the cry in our culture is for, you know, justice, culture warriors who take no prisoners, who won't offer forgiveness, you know, one political side is something wrong, the other side will wait until we're in power and we'll get you back, kind of attitude.

I mean, that permeates our American culture now.

I think there's still in our the recesses of our consciousness this idea that mercy is probably good, but man, we just don't want our political leaders to demonstrate it at all.

But Jesus walks in and says, if you want to be happy, you should be merciful.

You should be merciful.

It's so foreign to our culture, as I as I mentioned.

The Stoics, you see them in the New Testament, they were a group of philosophers that were uh against this idea that God had any kind of um compassion or any kind of uh love in him.

For the Stoics, compassion was a sign of weakness in God.

And uh, I think it's important to understand why that was for you to get the biblical picture of mercy.

For the Stoics, compassion meant that you didn't have the power to stop suffering.

And they use an example.

I'm gonna change the example and make it more American.

They didn't have a bicycle in their analogy, but I'm gonna use the bicycle.

Imagine you're walking down your road and you see a little kid on a bicycle, and the kid gets hit by a car and falls and breaks his arm.

And his arm's you're not a doctor, but his arm is broken, right?

You hear the snap and it's all disfigured.

His arm is broken, and you saw it happen, you would have compassion on that child.

You would have you want to drive him to the hospital, you'd want to get the arm fixed, you'd have compassion.

You might even say, I wish there was something more I could do.

That's compassion, and it's good to feel that way.

The Stoics took that and said, That's why compassion has no place in God.

Because if God sees something bad happen and has compassion on it, that means God did not have the power to stop it.

If God had the power to fix things, he wouldn't need compassion.

That was their argument.

I want you to appreciate that argument a little bit before we get to how compassion is described in the Bible.

Understand what they're saying.

They're saying that by God demonstrating compassion, it's God declaring that he's unable to solve what is wrong in the world.

In contrast with the Stoic view of compassion or mercy, is the Christian view of it.

And so I'm going to walk us through a biblical understanding of mercy this morning.

Mary or the merciful, uh, which is an outline I'm stealing from Jesus here in verse 7.

Happy are the merciful.

First, let's look at mercy defined.

Mercy is an English word, of course, uh, and mercy in English usually means not giving somebody something they deserve.

It's usually pitted against grace.

Grace is, you know, grace is giving something to somebody that they don't deserve.

Mercy is holding something they do deserve back.

The classic analogy of this for children, you know, a child wants seconds on dessert.

They don't deserve seconds on dessert, but you might give it to them anyway.

That's an act of grace.

Or on the other hand, the child might do something wrong and be deserving of a punishment.

You might withhold that punishment from them.

That's an act of grace.

I mean, that's an act of mercy.

Do you see the distinction?

Mercy is the withholding, grace is the giving.

Both are positive and favorable towards the person receiving them.

Amen.

Biblically, there's not that clear-cut distinction between the two.

For example, in the Old Testament, there's no one word for mercy in the Old Testament.

In the Old Testament, there's just a whole umbrella of words that sometimes gets translated into English as mercy, because they all have components of it.

In the Old Testament, you have words translated for mercy that mean grace.

You have words translated for mercy that mean compassion, that mean uh attraction is one.

It's a word used for Jacob has, you know, Rachel and Leah, and Rachel might find favor before Jacob.

That word for favor or attraction before Jacob, that's sometimes translated mercy in other parts of the Bible.

Uh you might find the word hissed, which is covenant love.

That's sometimes sometimes translated mercy.

That God enters a covenant love relationship with his people.

He establishes a covenant with them and engages with them through that covenant.

That word hissed is sometimes translated mercy.

Mercy is so rich in the Old Testament, there's not one word for it.

It means a lot of things.

The first use of mercy in the Old Testament is with Lot.

Lot, if you remember, was a resident of Sodom and Gomorrah, and God was going to destroy it, but the angels came to rescue Lot first.

And as Lot was being led out of the city, Lot turns to the angels and thanks them.

He tells them, Thank you for showing me this mercy in saving my life.

Lot understood he was being rescued because of his mercy.

This is, if you're familiar with the story, mercy that comes to Lot through a covenant.

Why was God rescuing Lot?

Because God made a covenant with Abram to bless him.

If you remember, God was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and it was Abram that pled with God, that prayed to God, that negotiated as much as you can negotiate with God.

Abraham did, and the result of that was Lot was saved.

And so God showed mercy to Lot through his covenant with Abram, and that's the first use of mercy in the Bible.

That Abram, Lot was rescued from his judgment.

Rescued.

And if you're familiar with Lot, you know he wasn't rescued for anything good that he had done.

You know, Lot was not living necessarily a virtuous life, he was living a compromised life.

But through God's covenant with Abram, God's word came to Lot, and Lot believed the word of God.

He was spared judgment by God's mercy, and Lot's faith was credited to him as righteousness.

It was not based on anything Lot did.

Lot was not righteous because he fled.

Lot fled because he received God's mercy and put his faith in Yahweh, and that was credited to him as righteousness.

It's so foundational for mercy in the Old Testament.

Mercy comes to people through a covenant, and God withholds judgment on them because of their faith in that covenant.

This leads to the most famous example of mercy in the Old Testament.

When you think of a verse that uses mercy, it's probably this one.

It's Exodus 33, verse 19, where Moses wants to see God, and God tells Moses, I'm going to hide you in a cleft, and I will pass by, and he says, I will make all of my goodness pass before you, Moses.

Exodus 33:19

I will proclaim to you that my name is Yahweh, and therefore I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy.

That's God's covenant love.

God can show grace to whomever he wants, and he can have mercy on whomever he wants because of his Hasid, his covenant love with his people.

And if you remember, Moses did not sign up for this covenant.

Do you remember when God invited Moses into a relationship?

Moses wrote, you know, not here, wrong address, return to sender, and put it back in the mail.

That's why it's so fitting that when God finally gets Moses in the rock and reveals himself to Moses, he tells Moses, listen, you can't decline this, Moses.

I will have mercy on whomever I want to have mercy.

But mercy is not merely God's covenant.

Mercy really speaks to the affection, the warmth that is inside of the heart of God that draws him towards the people that he will be in covenant with.

Mercy speaks of this, the benevolence, the kindness, love is a good word for it, that is inside of God, that desires a relationship with people.

In God's heart, he wants to be in a relationship with people.

That's why he made us.

It's not about anything deficient in God.

It's not that God was lonely, so he made you.

It was that God is benevolent, he's kind, he's generous, and he wants to be in a relationship with people to whom he can show mercy.

And this gets back to the Stoic objection about mercy.

The Stoic says if God was merciful, he wouldn't need to be merciful.

If God was sovereign, he wouldn't have to show mercy to people.

Like, why doesn't God just stop the kid from getting in the car accident?

Or, you know, if an example of mercy, mercy is raising the dead, why doesn't God just keep the dead person from dying?

And the answer to that is because God's character is revealed to the objects of his mercy by displaying mercy.

If this world is all there is, then mercy doesn't make sense.

You know, if you're gonna die, then it makes, and that's the end of the story, then it doesn't make sense to say it's good for you to go through hardships now so you experience God's mercy.

If death is all there is, if death is all there is, it'd be better if God spared you suffering in this world and just showed you his goodness in this world.

However, there's a second life coming.

There's a second life coming.

You're gonna die and you'll be resurrected and you will reign with God forever, and you will learn about him forever and ever and ever.

And so in this world, you're preparing for that world, and so in this world there is suffering and hardship and loss, so that you experience the grace of God, so you see the mercy of God, that God is merciful by nature, and you're growing in your knowledge of God that is better preparing you for the next life.

That's why God displays mercy in this world, so that you learn about Him.

His mercy reveals His character.

Isaiah 54, verse 10.

Isaiah 54:10

The mountains may depart, the hills can be erased, but my covenant love will not depart from you, and my covenant of peace will not be removed from you, says Yahweh, who has mercy on you.

Think of that verse, Isaiah 54, 10.

God says, I would sooner remove the mountains from the earth.

I'll erase all the hills from the planet, but I will not remove my mercy from you who have my covenant.

If you're in a covenant relationship with God, you receive his mercy, it is more sure and more confident than the earth itself.

Because God made the earth, and he made the earth to display his mercy towards you.

In light of the covenant that God makes with us, his mercy reveals God's heart to us, but it does more than that.

If you think of Isaiah 54, I made you, I'm in a covenant love with you, and I will show you my mercy that will lead to your salvation.

Mercy leads to salvation.

I mean, Isaiah is writing to the Israelites.

These people are wicked, man.

They're wicked.

They were in a covenant relationship with God, and they're getting all the curses of the covenant.

The ten tribes of the north, Ephraim, they were worshiping idols.

They were worshiping the rain god.

They deserved judgment.

And instead of destroying them, God sends them prophet after prophet after prophet.

He sends his word to them, he pleads to them to repent from their sin and to return to a relationship with Him.

That's God's mercy.

God's justice would have been eliminating them.

God's mercy is coming to them and saying, Come to me.

Come back to me.

Doesn't my heart yearn for you?

So come back to me.

So if you're living your life right now and you feel distant from God, you feel like you're not in a right relationship with God.

Do you understand that God's heart is not what is cold towards you?

It's the deficiency is not in God's heart.

God's heart is warm towards you and desires a relationship with you, and so he shows you mercy by not giving you the judgment you deserve.

Instead, he gives you warnings about the judgment that will one day come unless you repent.

So his mercy draws you to repentance.

That's why God's mercy is compared to a father who looks at wayward, rebellious people and wants them to come home.

I said earlier that it's the word for attraction or favor sometimes.

Rachel found favor in Jacob's eyes.

That word sometimes is translated mercy.

And you think, why is that?

Well, another very well known example of mercy in the Old Testament is Hosea.

Hosea was commanded to marry an adulterous woman.

He did does marry her, she runs away into sexual immorality, and Hosea goes and buys her back for a picture of God's mercy towards his people.

That's that image there.

Even though you are in your sin, God is still drawn towards you in your loneless.

He's drawn towards you in your sin.

He comes to you at that point, and his mercy tells you that he wants you to return to him.

That's God's mercy.

That's what God displays.

Jeremiah says this, is Israel my darling son?

Israel, remember the ten tribes of the north that are living a debauched life.

And God says, Aren't they my darling son?

That's the ESV's word.

As often as I speak against them, I remember them still.

Because God keeps sending them prophets that condemn them and condemn them and urge them to repent.

And God says, I may keep speaking against them, but my heart yearns for them.

I will surely, Jeremiah 31, verse 20, I will surely have mercy on them.

Jeremiah 31:20

That's the picture in Jeremiah 31.

God's heart is towards those who are in a covenant with him, even though they are living in sin.

God's heart burns with love towards them.

And because of his mercy, he calls them to come back to him.

Mercy gives you confidence.

David, Psalm 6, Yahweh, have mercy on me.

Give me refuge.

Don't rebuke me in your anger.

Be gracious to me, he says, or be merciful to me.

Deliver me.

David can pray that because David is in a right relationship with God.

David knows his own sin and knows he deserves judgment, but cries out for God's mercy instead.

Now that's the Old Testament.

All those words: attraction, grace, covenant, love, mercy, favor.

The New Testament, mercy is so much simpler.

Because in the New Testament, it's embodied in the person of Jesus Christ.

He is that divine mercy in one person.

This is Luke 1.

Luke 1 says that Jesus is going to be born as a human being, as a man, to display God's mercy to the nations.

In the Old Testament, mercy came through God's covenant, which was for Israel.

Jesus comes, Luke 1 says, to display the mercy of God to all the worlds.

To all the worlds.

To expand that covenant, so to speak.

And you see this marking so much of what Jesus does.

The huddled masses are around him at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount or at the end of Mark 9, for example, and it says Jesus looked at the crowd and he had compassion or mercy on them.

That word there, spelangta is the Greek word.

It's it's something in the guts.

You know, for for the for Americans, the heart is the seat of the affections.

For the Hebrew, the gut is the seat of the affections.

You you feel affections in your stomach.

Some of you are thinking, Amen.

That's why Shakespeare, by the way, had to write in English and not Hebrew.

It's just so much better to talk about the heart than it is the guts.

But the Hebrew Valentines, they were shaped like a small intestine.

And Jesus says he feels that in his gut, when he looks at the people who are lost, he's filled with mercy towards them.

So what does he do?

He teaches them.

That's the Old Testament right there.

God has mercy and love towards his people, so he sends them prophets.

Jesus sees the people gathered around him.

He doesn't need to send somebody else.

Jesus is that somebody else.

And so he teaches them.

Mark 5, the demoniac comes up to Jesus and is healed and says, Can I come with you now?

And Jesus says, No, go back to your family and tell them how the Lord had mercy on you.

Jesus comes across a funeral.

Someone he doesn't know.

And the woman is weeping.

Her son died.

She's apparently a widow.

And Jesus stops the funeral and raises the dude back to life.

Talitha, the woman who, the little girl who had died.

Jesus goes to that house, interrupts that funeral, raises her back to life.

Lazarus, Jesus goes to that funeral late, raises him back to life.

Now the skeptic says if God was really merciful, why doesn't he keep those people from dying to begin with?

But the answer to that question is that you see God's mercy so much more powerfully and in an incarnate way when Jesus comes and demonstrates it so that you see God's mercy.

You see that God is merciful.

Is it worth it to have death in the world and not learn about the mercy of God?

The answer has to be yes if there's a resurrection.

Again, the skeptic says, Oh, but that woman cried before her son came back to life.

You know?

The Talitha was having a funeral.

That was expensive.

There were professional mourners there.

Somebody paid for that.

And Jesus brings her back to life.

Lazarus' funeral.

Mary and Martha were there.

There was a lot of cooking that probably went into it by at least one of those two.

And Jesus raises them back to life.

That's just not a good use of resources.

But it's worth it because from that you see the mercy of our God.

But that mercy is not ubiquitous.

That mercy is not for everyone.

That mercy is for particular people that come to him through covenant.

Those particular people.

And when they come to him, they receive mercy.

For those outside of the covenant, they do not receive mercy.

Do you remember the guy in Luke 16 who's praying from hell?

And he doesn't even have access to God.

He's praying to Abraham and he prays for Abraham.

Please drop a drop of water on my tongue, which is burning with the fires of hell, and show some mercy to me.

And Abraham tells him, You don't get any mercy now.

You're outside of the covenant.

You have no mercy.

You have no mercy.

One more note about mercy.

Mercy is always costly.

Mercy's not free.

Something doesn't cost you anything.

It's not a display of your mercy.

Do you remember David when he was going to buy the land to build the temple for God and somebody donated the land?

And David said, No, I no, unless it costs me something, it's not an act of worship for me.

Well, the same principle applies for mercy.

Hosea had to sell all he had to buy his wife back.

That's mercy.

That's mercy.

Moses left everything behind to experience the mercy of God.

God's a merciful God.

What does it cost him?

It costs him his son.

That Jesus comes and gives up his life on the cross.

That's the cost of God's mercy.

When you take all that together, the Bible's picture of mercy, it gives a repentant person hope and confident assurance based upon God's covenant relationship with his people of divine favor.

That's what mercy does.

It gives you confident assurance of divine favor based upon God's covenant love.

It's the heart of God revealed through his covenant that gives you assurance of your salvation, not just your salvation, but that you will receive the riches of Christ.

This is why Ephesians 2, I'll put on the screen, can say this.

God being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, we were dead in our sins and trespasses.

God, through his riches of mercy, cleanses you with the blood of Christ and brings you into right relationship with him.

And it is not based on merit.

You can't work for this.

Abraham did not have to do anything to be in a right relationship with God other than place his faith in Yahweh.

Ditto with Lot.

Lot received the mercy of God.

That mercy revealed itself through Lot's faith in God's promise.

Lot is called righteous because of that, based on nothing that he did.

Hosea bides his wife back from slavery based on nothing she did.

In fact, contrary to everything she did, based solely on his covenant love that was manifest in his mercy towards her.

And so this all is just background for Ephesians 2.

That God sets his love on you, he names you, he knows you, he loves you.

Even though you are a sinner, even though you run from his love, he displays his love to you through the mercies of Jesus Christ, which he does because he is rich in them.

It won't be exhausted.

We sang earlier there is a fountain filled with love.

Probably my favorite biblical metaphor.

God is a fountain.

It's an infinite supply.

It wells up inside of him.

The fountain is filled with love.

It is filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins.

It will never be extinguished.

His mercies never run out.

His grace never turns off the spigot.

The blood always comes out.

It always cleanses those who come to him through faith.

Because God is a gracious God.

That's mercy defined.

Secondly, mercy defended.

Defended.

Here, Jesus takes that concept, which for the Stoics and for the skeptics is a sign of weakness.

Jesus takes it and associates it with happiness.

He makes it a positive attribute.

In fact, he says it's the road to joy.

You want to be a happy person, be a merciful person.

Now, a couple observations on that connection there.

First of all, notice that the gospel is all about internal, not external.

You see this with just where Jesus starts.

This is his first recorded sermon in Matthew's gospel, and it's all about the heart, not about the hands.

Very different than the other religions of the world, just very fundamentally different than what any other religion in the world where they would start.

Other religions in the world start with what you do.

So mercy is a concept that's in Catholicism, it's in Islam, it's in Christianity, it's in Judaism, but it is very different.

Islam, it's a pillar.

Give to the poor.

In Catholicism, it's a it's a sacrament, basically penance.

Jesus doesn't go to what you do with your hands.

He goes inside.

He goes inside.

You know, my grass is out of control this week because it was raining so much and I couldn't mow it.

That's my excuse.

It was too wet to mow.

I'm sticking to that excuse.

You can look out the window and you see the grass out of control.

My wife might say, Oh, the grass is out of control in the backyard, it needs to be mowed.

And I would say, I have such an easy solution for that.

Close the window blinds.

You won't see it anymore.

Problem solved.

That is the external approach to sanctification.

You want to be merciful, give to the poor.

You want to be merciful, make penance, give to the church, dilute your assets.

It's all focused on the outside.

Jesus does not do that.

That's the close the blinds approach to sanctification.

Who cares what's in your heart?

Just start giving money away.

I'm telling you, that's most of the world's understanding of mercy, that it's seen in what you do.

Jesus does not go to what you do.

He'll get there later on in Matthew, but for now he's not there.

He starts by raising the blinds and going through the window.

Jesus gets in your heart and does heart surgery.

He talks about what's important to him is that you're poor in spirit, inside the heart.

That you're mourning, internal reality.

That you're meek, surrendering inside you, that you're hungry and thirsting for righteousness inside you, that you're merciful inside you.

He's all about the heart.

There's nothing here about what you're doing on the outside.

He wants the inside right first.

Martin Lloyd Jones writes the Christian gospel places all its primary emphasis upon being, not doing.

It puts greater weight on our attitudes than our actions.

That's so well said.

The Christian has to have a certain type of character, and that character is produced by the inward actions, the inward surrender of the heart.

One more comment on this.

A lot of people, I think, in under mercy defended here, a lot of people, I think, misunderstand this beatitude because they think it teaches works righteousness.

If you read it in isolation, blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

It seems to say, if you are merciful, then you merit mercy.

Do you follow that?

Blessed are the merciful, because then you receive mercy.

Therefore, if you are merciful, you receive mercy.

But that is not how it's functioning.

It's not in isolation.

It's functioning in the flow of the Beatitudes, which you really need to appreciate to understand this one.

The Beatitudes begin with you being poor in spirit.

You're aware that there is nothing good inside of you, including mercy, by the way.

You don't have it at the beginning of the Beatitudes.

It's not there.

You look for mercy and you can't find it, you don't got it, you're spiritually bankrupt.

Mercy is an explanation of spiritual riches, by the way.

It comes from a heart filled with riches.

You cannot be merciful if the first beatitude is still true of you.

If you're poor in spirit, you ain't got no mercy.

That's where we start.

You're broken and you don't have anything spiritually worthwhile that's your own.

But not everybody who's broken is saved, which leads to the second beatitude.

Do you mourn over your sin?

Do you weep over your standing before God?

That's the second beatitude.

But not everybody who is poor weeps, and not everybody who weeps is saved.

Lots of false tears in the world.

Which leads to the third beatitude.

Those who are meek, those who are surrender.

That's the word for that this is conversion.

Your conversion takes place in the third beatitude.

You've given up trusting yourself, you surrender your life to the Lord, you surrender living for yourself, and you fall at the feet of the Lord, and you give yourself to Him and you say, Lord, I belong to you.

I'm yours now.

That's surrender, that's salvation, that's desperation.

The fourth beatitude, you start to look up.

Now you're hungering and thirsting for righteousness.

You want what you don't have.

You know Christ is righteous, you're not converted, so you love Jesus and you love righteousness now.

Before you converted, you didn't long for righteousness.

You tried to make your own.

But this person knows he doesn't have any, has surrendered to the Lord, has been washed with the blood of Christ, and now desires to be more like Jesus.

He's hungering and thirsting for righteousness, so his eyes go up to Jesus.

Now the first positive action of that person is going to be mercy.

He's going to display mercy.

So here's where the Beatitudes start to move you upwards towards Christ.

The first one's brought you down.

This one, the last one, you're hungry and looking at Jesus, and now you have positive momentum towards him.

You want to live mercifully.

So being merciful doesn't earn you mercy.

You have received mercy back when you surrendered to the Lord, and you're now using what you've been given.

And the Lord will keep meeting your needs over and over and over again.

I thought of a uh, let me put this on the screen so you see kind of my flow here.

Salvation changes your character, which leads to your actions.

That's what Jesus is teaching here.

You're gonna see more actions as the Beatitudes go on.

You know, pure in heart, the next, which we'll look at next week, Lord willing, is again speaking of the inner heart attitude, but then you're peacemakers, now you're starting to engage with the world around you.

And it ends with persecuted.

It's all about the actions at the end, but it gets there through the heart.

It gets there through the heart.

But you don't earn mercy by being merciful.

You are merciful because you've received mercy.

I thought of an example to help explain that distinction.

Sometimes I'm people visit Emmanuel Bible Church, they found us on the website, they're tourists in town, and they came here on Sunday morning and they asked me in the hallway, okay, we want to go see DC next.

We want to go see the museums and the monuments.

How do we get there?

And I'll tell them, I'll usually send them on EDSL and get on 395 at Edsel, and which used to be a lot easier, but now they change those on ramps at Edsel.

You know what I'm talking about?

Man, I will another 10 years, and I'll still be getting on the wrong direction there.

Some habits die slow.

So you get on, you want 395 north, and you know you're going the right way as you crest the hill and you see the Washington Monument.

You see the Washington Monument, you're going the right way to DC.

Now it would be strange to say seeing the Washington Monument is what causes you to go to DC.

No, it's evidence that you're on the right road.

However, if you get on 395 and you see, I don't know, the Marine Corps Museum on your left.

Okay, you're you're in Quantico.

You're going the wrong way.

The Marine Corps Museum is lovely to go see, by the way.

In rainy days, it's a great museum to go to.

However, if you see it, you're not going to end up in DC.

The wrong way.

Now, it doesn't mean that going by the Marine Corps Museum is what causes you to be outside of DC.

It's the evidence that you're on the wrong road.

So take this back to the Beatitudes here.

If you are a merciful person, being merciful is not what causes you to receive mercy.

It is the sign on the road that says you're going in the right direction.

It's the monument that says you are on a happy road.

But if you look around and you see no mercy, then you're going the wrong way.

You've got to go back to the start here.

You took a wrong turn somewhere.

Go back to the start.

Have you been broken over your sin?

Have you mourned your lack of spiritual standing before God?

Have you surrendered to God?

Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness?

Go back to one of those forks in the road.

Because the scripture teaches that when you are forgiven, when you are truly repentant, you will live out this kind of mercy.

Caesar, Nero, was the emperor during Paul's lifetime.

He was strong and powerful and not merciful, and went to his grave hated by all.

Paul was bankrupt and poor, and went to his grave loved by all who knew him.

Paul was merciful.

Nero was not.

This is why Peter can write, once you were not a people, but now you are God's people.

Once you had not received mercy, now you have received mercy.

Therefore, go to war against sins in your body.

Go to war against sins of the flesh.

Don't live like the Gentiles.

You want happiness?

Receive the mercy of Christ and then live it out.

Then live it out.

Thirdly, mercy demanded.

We saw mercy defined, mercy defended.

Thirdly, mercy demanded.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

There's a corollary to this, or the opposite side of this coin.

If you withhold mercy, then mercy has been withheld from you.

That's driving down the road and seeing the wrong museum.

You're going the wrong way.

This is why J.C.

Rao wrote, there are a few characteristics so strongly commanded in the New Testament as mercy.

And few whose neglect so clearly shuts a man out of the kingdom of God.

When people withhold mercy from others, they demonstrate they haven't received it.

And the most well-known illustration of this is Matthew 18.

Matthew 18 is the wealthy landowner, and one of his employees owes him 10,000 talents.

You remember this in the end of Matthew 18?

10,000 talents is a ridiculous, comical, hyperbolic amount of money.

You know, one talent would be, you know, months of wages.

10,000 talents would be like saying he owes him a gazillion trillion but million dollars.

You know?

It's just nonsense words.

It's so much money, it's ridiculous.

And the rich guy forgives the debt.

Says, don't worry about it.

Erasing the books.

Well, that guy then goes, you remember what he does?

Find somebody who owes him like five bucks, beats him up, and throws him in jail.

Well, the rich guy finds out about it and says, How dare you?

After what I forgave you, you're acting like that to other people?

That's what it's like for a Christian to withhold mercy from people.

How much have you been forgiven?

How much has God forgiven you?

Then how would you end by being bitter about other people?

It's so strange.

You know if somebody is rude to you, cut you off on the highway?

Like, I know that person.

I see that in many Bible church sticker.

How dare they drive like that in front of me?

Rubs in the fact that your sports team lost a church.

How dare they?

I'm not talking to that guy again.

Doesn't send you a Christmas card.

Also make it more practical.

You know, a couple months ago you share with somebody that your sister is dying of cancer.

And last month you tell the person, oh, she died, and the person says, I'm praying for you and your sister, and sorry to hear she died.

And this month, today, that person comes up to you and says, Oh, how's your sister doing, by the way?

And you think, how can you be like that?

You aren't praying for me.

And you get bitter at that person.

Has the Lord forgiven you of so much more than that kind of petty offense?

So much more?

And certainly you can overlook it when people offend you.

Can't you?

If you don't, you're not going to be a happy person.

You're gonna be the person with the list of all those who have wronged you in your wallet, biding your time.

Love keeps no record of wrongs.

Keeps no record of wrongs.

James 2, what a powerful example of this.

James 2 says, if you see your brother or sister in need, naked, crying out for help, and you close your heart to them.

And don't dilute that, by the way.

Some people say, oh, that's talking about the poor in the world.

It's not the poor in the world.

James 2 is very something, something very specific in mind.

Brother or sister, that's another Christian.

Somebody you know from church.

You recognize them, you're crossing the crosswalk crosswalk over to Phillip's school afterwards to get your car, and there's somebody from church.

They've sat next to you for the last four years of your life, and you see them looking homeless, huddled up naked is the word James uses, but you know, huddled up in rags and dirty clothes on the side of the road, crying that they don't have enough money for food, and you tell them, Oh, hey, I'd like to help, but I I got a sports game to get to.

It's absurd.

How can you say the grace of God dwells in you if you can't show mercy to somebody else?

Zechariah 7, verse 9, in light of receiving mercy, you show mercy to one another.

Zechariah 7:9

And James goes on to say, if you close your heart to a person like that, the mercy of God is not seen in you.

You should howl, you rich.

Wail for the judgment that is coming upon you for your lack of mercy.

But then James 2.13 says, you can always repent.

Come back to God and receive his mercy.

James 2.13, mercy triumphs over judgment.

You deserve God's judgment for your sin, and then God gives you mercy.

A picture of this, of course, is Jesus Christ, the most merciful person who ever lived.

He is mercy incarnate.

He preached about mercy.

Blind Bartimaeus comes up to him and says, Son of David, have mercy on me.

He prays that people receive mercy.

He shows mercy to the lepers in the mourning and the blind.

He rebuked the Pharisees.

Remember Matthew 23, he says, Oh, you whitewashed tombs, you withhold mercy from people.

That's what he told the Pharisees.

You strain at the small parts of the law, you neglect the weightier matters of the law, like showing mercy, you're straining out the gnats, and you're letting camels waltz on in.

Woe to you, he tells them.

Yet, despite being the most merciful person who ever lived, never withheld mercy from anybody, he's put to death after a sinless life.

Beaten, crucified, bloodstained, humiliated, raised up on the cross, exposed before the world, the ironic sign above him, the mocking crowds before him, the blasphemous people on his left and his right, all of that.

And what does he pray?

Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing.

Showing them mercy even then.

In light of that, Hebrews says you can draw near to the throne of the throne of grace.

Draw near to Christ, who's resurrected in heaven, pray to him now so that you may receive mercy and find help in your time of need.

If you're here today and you've never thrown yourself at the feet of Christ, if you see feel cold in your spiritual life, you feel distant from the Lord, receive his mercy.

He doesn't withhold it, he shares it.

He is the fountain that shares his, he doesn't run out.

It's not the credit card that maxes out.

There is mercy every day.

His mercies are renewed to you every day.

And even though you feel distant from him, you can turn from your sin and receive the forgiveness of Christ.

You can receive mercy that will transform your life from the inside out.

God, we're thankful that you offer mercy to all who would believe.

We're grateful for your mercy.

It is new every morning, it never runs out.

There's mercy enough to cover all of our sins.

We don't love like that.

Our mercy is limited, our love is finite, but yours is abundant and rich.

We give you thanks for it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to iBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.