Flourishing: Blessed Are The Merciful

I wonder if you know or still remember these two letters.

LG.

Do you still remember those words?

LG.

Life's good.

You see, for decades that drove on brand has captured our attention, isn't it?

With a brilliant three-word slogan, life is good.

And I must admit that it is a masterful piece of marketing, isn't it?

Because it taps into a deep universal, inescapable human ache, human desire.

My desire.

See every single person in this auditorium, whether you are a committed follower of Jesus Christ, or whether you are a skeptic exploring the faith, or someone who's in between like Kazer Chiefs.

All of us, all of us, you see, all of us are on a frantic, lifelong quest to figure out what exactly those two letters know.

Life is good.

See, we want to know what it looks like to truly flourish in Johazardous Bake.

And the problem is this Johazardous spec has a very specific, aggressive, and highly polished definition of LG.

The city tells us that life is good when you are constantly moving upwards.

Life is good when you have financial independence, a secure suburban perimeter such that you don't see your neighbor, personal comfort, social recognition, and enough corporate or relational leverage to ensure that nobody, nobody can ever take advantage of you.

See, under Cyril Ramaposa's economy, success is key, isn't it?

And the ultimate goal is self-assertion.

Under Cyril's economy, life is good when you have a full tank.

We maximize our rights.

We curate our public images for Instagram and other social media platforms.

And we treat vulnerability as a fatal liability, for we don't want to be perceived as weak and at the end of receiving mercy.

We always want to be seen as strong, as capable, as people who are succeeding.

Yet Jesus stands on a mountainside, he looks at his followers in the midst of the crowds, and he completely hijacks our cultural definition of what LG means.

He pronounces the ancient word which is blessed, which we have said over these last couple of weeks really means truly flourishing.

He says, Blessed are you, in a context really where people don't know, at least in practice, what it means to be blessed.

See, over the last few weeks we have heard him announce that life is good for those who are poor in spirit.

Life is good for those who are broken moaners, for those who are meek, who refuse to self-accept, and those who are starving for righteousness as if they don't possess it yet.

And now we arrive in Matthew 5.7.

Jesus shifts his focus and he delivers a radical countercultural bombshare that directly opposes this defensive, self-made, self-protective spirit of Johazard respect.

And he says to everyone who's listening to his word, he says, Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

What does this mean?

I think to our modern hearers, this sounds like a beautiful, universal piece of harmless moral advice, isn't it?

We treat it like a general, a generic proverb, a helpful lifestyle for a society at large, or one of those chapties did you know messages.

But if we read it that way, we completely miss out, really, on what Jesus is saying and doing here.

You see, the Sermon on the Mount is not a general collection of helpful moral precepts for the public square.

In fact, if you look closely in verses 1 and 2, Jesus isn't preaching to the crowds at large, but he's speaking directly to his disciples.

You see, the sermon on the mount is not a pattern for secular society, so to speak, but rather Jesus is speaking to his disciple.

And therefore, this sermon here is a radical document that explicitly deals with the character, the duties, the attitudes, the dangers of being Jesus' disciple, of being a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is entirely concerned with discipleship, with men and women who are living in total obedience and devotion to God Himself.

And it is because of this that Jesus makes this claim over your life and over my life.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

And because it is about discipleship under God's gracious rule, the absolute center of these words that we are hearing this morning are about Jesus Himself.

He's not just an ancient philosopher passing down good ideas, he's the Messiah making a radical thing over your life.

When Jesus stands and redefines what a good life looks like, he isn't giving you and I a checklist to make Jehazzard's back, perhaps a slightly more politer place to live in.

But rather, he's laying down the radical demands of the kingdom.

He's forcing you and I to ask really good questions.

What does it mean to be blessed?

What does it mean to be blessed as a merciful person?

He isn't offering passive advice here, but he's revealing the essential, non-negotiable heartbeat of a disciple who has surrendered their will to God.

You see, Jesus looks at a world obsessed with power, obsessed with preservation and getting even, and he announces this truth.

The true flourishing, a good life, it is not found in guarding our worldly security, but it is found through risking it, through radical generosity.

Jesus looks at his disciples and he says to them, a good life is not found in guarding your possessions and your life, but it is really found in risking it through generosity.

When we surrender our love, our leverage, when we stop trying to protect ourselves and start living out the upside-down logic of the kingdom, then really, truly, life will be good.

Life's good because we are no longer bound up by the fear of scarcity.

Instead, we are liberated to give out mercy, to extend mercy.

And so for us to really understand the weight of this demand, we have to go back for history uh classes.

Remember the history classes that you burned?

This morning we are going back for some history mercy.

You see, in the ancient Greco-Roman world, mercy was considered not a virtue.

The Stoic philosophers actually viewed mercy as a character flaw, a psychological defect of weak-minded people who could not really maintain strict judgment and pass out cold justice.

They argued, in fact, that if you showed mercy to someone who has failed, you are allowing your emotional pity to cloud your intellectual judgment.

And I put it to you that today, in Johazard aspect, we often treat mercy like that, as a passive, soft, sentimental emotion.

We think being merciful just means being a nice person, feeling a little bit sorry for someone, or letting things start because well, you don't want conflict.

But in the vocabulary of Jesus, mercy is a position of strength.

Mercy is a position of strength, and it always has a robust practical character into it.

You see, in the gospel of Matthew, still, mercy is never just a feeling, but it is a feeling coupled with action.

Mercy is a feeling, but also action.

We see this clearly in Matthew 9.27.

If you read your, if you have your Bible, please open it up and look at Matthew 9.27.

May I please get a glass of water.

Matthew 9.27.

If I was at the new one, I was going to say, food that Tembi blanket.

Assuming that Tempi is sitting in the audience.

Matthew 9.27.

When two blind men are following Jesus, they are crying out there loudly, have mercy on us, son of David.

What do you think they're really asking for there?

You see, when they are asking Jesus to have mercy on them, they're not asking Jesus to feel some wave of sympathy for them.

But really what they are asking for is for him to do something about their situation.

They were asking for an intervention that would alter their physical reality.

Mercy is pity plus action.

Mercy is pity plus action.

It is a heart that is so moved by suffering, the guilt, the helplessness, the misery of another that it actively steps into, it steps out of its own comfort zone to bring relief, restoration, and forgiveness into the other.

Mercy is God's active love, stepping out of heaven into human helplessness, with holding the judgment we deserve to buy us back, to forgive us, and to fully restore us as his people.

So I ask you this morning, have you received mercy?

Have you experienced what we are talking about this morning?

Have you met with this God who is merciful?

Do you see the wonder here?

We first receive mercy, and the wonder is that God invites us to extend that which we have received.

Two ideas would have come into their mind.

And the one idea is that of chesed, that's a Hebrew word.

And the second word is rekamin.

Chesed is this a covenant loyalty, chesed is this relentless pursuing love of God that refuses to let go of his people even when they break their promises, even when they run away and fail him completely.

As you would have seen in the book of Hosea.

God has chesed to his people, he has that covenant loyalty, love to them.

It describes that protective, deep-felt emotion and response of a woman who is pregnant and who doesn't want anything to happen to their baby.

It is that love that moves with intensity.

It is compassion that aches when the other person hurts.

And so when these guys are hearing Jesus' saying, God be merciful or blessed are the merciful, they are combining those two ideas together.

When Jesus commands his disciples to be merciful, he's telling them that their daily character must match the very self-revelation of Yahweh from Exodus chapter 34, verse 6.

Exodus 34:6

Remember that verse?

The Lord, the Lord, a merciful God and a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in step first love.

Mercy and love combined in happiness.

Jesus is telling his disciples.

This is a dangerous calling for Jesus' disciples.

It is dangerous and terrifying for it goes against the current, isn't it?

The high-performance religious and corporate cultures we have built in a city today.

You see, to help his disciples understand this danger, Jesus repeatedly exposes the religious idiot of his phares by pointing back to the Old Testament prophets.

Jesus deploys a single prophetic verse from the Old Testament.

I don't know if you still remember it.

It is in Hosea 6, verse 6.

Hosea 6:6

Do you still remember that verse?

So he utters that verse to break down the culture that's so easily entails, and he says, I desire mercy and not sacrifice.

I, the Lord, desire mercy and not sacrifice.

To understand what Jesus or why he's doing this here, we again need to go back for a second period of history lessons that again bound.

See, I'm assuming that you you hated history here, but forgave my assumption.

But let's go back to that history lesson concerning Hosea.

You see, in 8th century BC, Israel, the temple courts were buzzing with activity.

The smoked animals filled the temple.

It was like they were having briars every weekend.

The people were bringing their bent offerings precisely according to their liturgical calendar.

Outwardly, the religion looked like it is successful.

Outward, they looked like they were prospering, at least spiritually.

They were devout Christians.

But God looked past the smoke.

He looked straight into their hearts and essentially said, I am sick by your worship.

It sickens me.

Why?

Because while they were offering sacrifices at the altar, they were oppressing the poor in the streets.

They were exploiting their workers.

They were withholding justice for the poor, the widow, and the orphan.

Their daily lives were entirely devoured of chess.

Devoid of that covenant, loyalty, steadfast love, that basic human kindness that should move you from your gut.

They used religious rituals as a smooth screen to hide their systematic lack of love.

They thought they could buy off God with public rituals while maintaining a cold, unyielding heart towards their neighbor.

And centuries later, Jesus looks at the Pharisees and diagnoses the exact same spiritual disease against them because they have exposed the heavy gravity of choosing sacrifice over mercy, and they need God's word to confront that culture of sacrifice.

Again, 10 to Matthew 9, and we look at verse 9 to 13.

You see, in Matthew 9, Jesus does something scandalous there.

He calls Matthew a corrupt, despite tax collector, who was actively extorting his people for Rome and Prophet to be his disciples.

Jesus calls him to be his disciple.

And then Jesus goes on to Matthew's house for a dinner party.

Clearly, Jesus also loved rice.

But the Pharisees, they see this and are deeply offended.

They pull Jesus or Jesus' disciples aside and they ask, Why does your teacher eat on the tax collectors and sinners?

You see, the Pharisees valued religious purity, social separation, and moral performance.

They loved sacrifice, the outward, clean, costly rituals that prove that they were the elite of the city.

They were holier than others and better than everyone else.

But Jesus hears this and turns to them.

He turns the tables around.

He says, it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.

But go and learn what this means.

What is this that you need to learn?

Look at the scriptures again.

I desire mercy and not sacrifice.

For I'm not come to call the righteous but sins.

Isn't it interesting that Jesus adds that phrase from Hosea 6, 6, I desire mercy and not sacrifice.

And I think in other gospel, that phrase is not there.

Jesus is doing something huge here.

He issues a direct stinging, rabbanic result insult into the elite scholars.

He tells them, Go and learn.

In other words, go back to school and take those classes that you banned.

Those classes of mercy, go back and learn again.

Go reopen the scrolls because despite all Your doctoral degrees in theology, you have completely missed the core structure of God's heart, and at his heart, at the core of his heart is love and mercy.

The Pharisees preferred to maintain your clearing, clearing self-righteous boundaries over rescuing the spiritual broken people.

And may I put it to you that we are also in danger of that as an empty sea church.

I'm sure you know why that means they would rather let a sinner rot in their guilt rather than compromise their own pristine curated reputations.

Church, this morning you must be incredibly assobled by these words, because the spirit of the Pharisees thrives through ferocious intensity in a high-performance culture of Jehazzar's.

You know exactly what this means as you curate your image in Jehozzar's.

We all look pretty and we look handsome.

As if we don't have thoughts.

As if we don't deserve a mercy.

Our secular beatitudes, they teach us to secure our identity through performance, power, self-expression.

But Jesus calls us to a countercultural vulnerability that varies people over performance.

Jesus calls us to a countercultural vulnerability that varies people over performance.

Do you see how we have built our own modern secular versions of the temple sacrifice systems?

We are a city built on altar of performance.

We bring our own costly sacrifices.

I was told, I was given a bottomless time to preach so there is some time.

We sacrifice our sleep, our mental health, our marriages, and our children on the altar of corporate execution.

Professional ambition, upward mobility.

We sit in our corporate boardrooms and we check even our banking app.

Someone is really opening their banking app now, they're checking their network while I'm reaching.

Those of you who are not here.

How polished we are.

Where is God?

The great danger of sacrifice, that culture of sacrifice is that it will sweep us under feet quicker than we can realize.

You see, because if you work eight hours a week, you have zero patience for the colleague who is frightening with anxiety and message like that.

Because you have kept your moral shape relatively clean, you look with disgust at the people whose marriage is perfectly collapsed or whose life is a messy.

When someone in a corporate sphere or social settle slips are means a costly mistake or wrongs another person, our immediate cultural instinct is strict, swift retribution.

We demand sacrifice, we cancel them in one life.

And here that is this thing called cancel culture.

It's as if we're keeping people at arms length, as if we still live in conflict.

We gossip about them and break our rules.

We exploit their weakness to make ourselves look more competent.

We cast them out of our lives completely to protect our own comfort.

We operate on a strict baseline of retribution.

You cross it, you pay.

Sacrifice lets you keep your hands clean as it were.

Mercy forces you to get your hands dirty.

Sacrifice lets you stay on your own throne room of judgment.

Mercy forces you down into the trenches of other people's brokenness and deal with it.

Jesus looks at our high-achieving, defensive, scorekeeping lifestyle, and he issues a warning.

A life built on sacrifice without mercy is empty.

It is a decaying spiritual shell.

I, the Lord, desire mercy and not sacrifice.

And this brings us, therefore, to the profound and challenging promise attached to this fifth beatitude.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Notice the specific phrasing here.

This is an exclusive claim, a big claim made about God Himself.

When Jesus says they will be shown mercy, he uses a phrase that implies that it is God Himself who will personally show them mercy.

It is not just that the world will treat them better, but that the creator God of the universe will actively step in to take care of his people.

And God will show them mercy.

He falls on his knees and he begs the king for forgiveness.

The king, moved by mercy and love, has compassion on him and cancels his debt.

But the same servant walks out of that freedom, finds a fellow servant who owes him a pocket of change, a few hundred revenge.

He grasps that servant, he literally chokes him, he begins to choke him and demands, pay me the 500 yard.

And the fellow servant begs for mercy.

The other servant who has received forgiveness refuses, and in fact, he throws him into the debtor's prison.

Later on, the king finds out and he's furious, rightly so.

He calls him back and says, Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had mercy on you?

The king, in fact, revokes the cancellation and delivers the same servant to be tortured.

Jesus concludes that at that parable with these staggering words, this is how my heavenly father will treat each of us unless we forgive your brother or sister from your heart.

Now, let's be incredibly careful here and ask important question.

Is Jesus saying that we can end God's forgiveness by being nice to other people?

Is he saying that?

Is he saying that our horizontal mercy is the currency that buys our vertical salvation?

Is he saying that?

Absolutely not, isn't he?

As we have said it throughout this series, that beatitudes are not a layer of condition to end your way into the kingdom.

But they are grace-shaped description of what a kingdom citizen looks like.

You must first realize that you are entirely poor in spirit before God.

You must have mourned over your own death and brokenness of your hidden sin.

You must have surrendered your right to self-asset in true meekness.

You must have hungered for the righteousness of God.

And now in 5.7, you can only truly, duly extend mercy to an offender until, or at least before, you must have received it from God Himself.

You cannot give away what you have not experienced, at least in the kingdom framework.

This will be hard for you to do.

When you have stood at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ, you will realize that you were the bankrupt servant holding the unpayable debt to your king.

You and I deserve strict, unyielding cosmic judgment.

But Jesus Christ stood in our place.

He took the violent judgment we end upon ourselves so that we could be flooded by the respect and reckoning of God, by the mercy and love of God.

That's what we see at the cross.

Therefore, may I put it to you that a person who stubbornly refuses to show mercy to others is simply demonstrating that they have never actually received mercy, or at least they don't understand it yet.

They may claim it, but actually they don't.

A heart that is closed to forgiving others is a heart that remains locked tight against receiving the grace of Jesus Himself.

As I close, see Jesus' vision here of the good life changes everything about how we step into the city tomorrow, about how we step into the offices, our relationships at home, and the violent spirits of Chahazad respect.

It calls us to build a distinct Christianity, a countercultural Christianity.

Let's think about your office tomorrow.

What does it look like for you to embody mercy tomorrow?

See, embodying this text means that when a colleague or a subordinate drops the ball on a critical project, your first instinct isn't to protect your own skin or use their failure as a corporate leverage.

But rather it means stepping into the mess to help them bear the burden, extend professional grace, as it were, and choose parts that will restore over corporate execution.

In your relationships, it means you willingly, intentionally tear up the mental scorecards of how your spouse, your daughter, your kid, or your dad, or your mother, or your parents, your family, of your friends, or of how they failed you, tearing those mental scorecards down.

It means relinquishing your right to hold the grudge.

It means extending forgiveness even when the other person hasn't fully entered or asked for it.

God did that to you for you.

Why wouldn't you do it for other people?

In our city, it means we stop looking at the deep social economic fractures and the overwhelming brokenness of Johazardous with the spirit of cold, cynical, defensive judgment or frustration, especially as we head up to the elections.

Instead, it moves us to look at the vulnerability with a womb-like compassion that drives us to roll up our sleeves and practically meet physical and spiritual needs of the city.

But again, we need the Lord's help in this.

We must have experienced mercy from God Himself before we can do this.

It is a hard call and it is a call for those who are disciples.

And so let me pray first.

We confess that we are often like the Pharisees than we are like you.

We prefer clean sacrifices and our moral performance over mercy work.

We prefer sacrifice over mercy.

We prefer performance over fallibility.

We prefer strength over weakness.

We prefer high-polished careers than failure when you meet us.

And so we ask that you would melt our hard hearts together with your words.

Forgive us for our bitterness, forgive us for our yielding spirits.

Forgive us when we have not extended to mercy.

Forgive us for not doing what you have called us to do.

May we walk out of this place as true disciples, carrying your covenant loyalty, carrying out your woman like compassion into every office, every hole, and every corner of Johannesburg for the glory of your name and for our community.