...was most appropriate as we come to the
table of our Lord, as it would be
appropriate at any other time.
We look therefore at Matthew chapter 5 verse
7.
Blessed, said Jesus, are the merciful, for they
will be shown mercy, or they will obtain
mercy.
Now in these beatitudes spoken by our Lord
to the disciples and to potential disciples that
surrounded him on the hillside about two thousand
years ago, we have the divine blueprint for
happiness or blessedness, happiness of the true order.
I indicated at the beginning that I don't
really like that word happiness in this context
because it is based upon the verb or
the word hap, and its corresponding verb, and
it suggests that blessedness might depend on what
happens to us on our circumstances.
Well it doesn't.
Our Lord assures us in these beatitudes that
blessedness is fundamentally a matter of character, of
being what God requires us to be in
the first place, and then of doing what
God has called upon us to do.
And it is in thus becoming what he
desires us, and in doing what he wills
for us, that is where we find the
blessedness of God himself here upon earth.
Heaven comes down into our hearts and occupies
our spirits only insofar as we grow in
the knowledge of God and in obedience to
him.
Now we've already noticed how our Lord's teaching
cuts right across what were then contemporary concepts
of happiness or of blessedness as well as
of the means of procuring the same.
He really turns the tables upside down when
he insists that blessedness is something very special
that men had no idea about, apart from
the revelation given in himself and in the
prophets and the apostles who succeeded him.
Neither did men know how to discover true
blessedness.
Now it will be seen that the progressive
development of thought and experience outlined in the
Beatitudes seem at this point to take a
new turn.
You have only to look at the words
before you and you'll see how we're really
coming as it were around a bend, if
we may so speak, in the development of
thought here.
Up until now the person envisaged by our
Lord has been altogether concerned about his condition
of soul before God.
The experience of the person involved thus far
could in some senses be compared with that
of a man who is charged in a
court of law.
He's so conscious of himself or of herself
as the case may be.
Everything turns in upon me.
I am being charged.
I have to give an answer.
I am the focus of attention.
That's really what we have in the in
the opening verses.
God is turning the searchlight upon us and
in the awareness of that we have to
plead that we are poor in spirit.
And as the searchlight continues upon us we
begin to mourn and to weep.
And that makes us meek.
And arising out of the sense of meekness
coming into our souls by the Holy Spirit
then we begin to hunger and to thirst
after righteousness.
And now you notice we take this other
turn.
When a man has been made meek by
the grace of God and has begun to
hunger and thirst after righteousness he now begins
to look out upon other people.
Sooner or later it has to come.
Christian experience begins by concentrating upon God and
God's relationship to me and my relationship to
God.
What I am in the sight of God.
God and myself.
But sooner or later the Lord will lift
up my eyes and say to me now
you gotta look around.
And if you're right with me you have
to be right with others.
You have to be right with my people.
And you have a duty to perform to
all men and women of every nation, every
clime, everywhere.
You have to be very careful how you
act towards men and women around you.
You have to learn to be merciful.
And that's where we're at this morning.
There is something in the grace of God,
something akin to electricity.
The grace of God is loath to get
in where it cannot get out again.
Electric current does not easily come in unless
it can pass through.
And the grace of God is like that.
Coming into a man he will pass through
a man.
And you and I cannot possess the fullness
of the blessing of God unless we are
channels of blessing, conductors of the divine power
and of the divine light and energy into
a needy world.
Now as briefly as we can this morning
I want us to look at mercy first
of all in the Old Testament then in
the New.
Then we're going to look at the manner
in which he who discovers mercy in his
own heart will be shown mercy by God.
Mercy as envisaged in the Old Testament, very
briefly, one of the things that we have
tended to forget, almost completely to forget, is
the infinite difference made in the world by
the revelation of God in the Old Testament
and in the New.
We have allowed liberals of various kinds to
bluff us and to blind us to the
fact that one of the significant features of
the Old Testament is the mercy of God.
Of course God is judge.
Of course God is sovereign everywhere whether it
be in the Old Testament or the New.
There is no significant difference between the sovereignty
and the justice of God in the Old
Testament and in the New.
You read the book of Revelation as some
of us are doing in these days and
you will find that God is just and
terrible in holiness and majesty and sovereignty there
as he is in other places in the
Old Testament.
God is just everywhere at all times because
it is part of his nature.
But into the Old Testament and into the
world of the Old Testament there came this
amazing revelation of the mercy of God, that
our God was a merciful God.
I don't really think that we as professing
Christians have taken this with sufficient seriousness.
The world and Western civilization in particular has
been very much influenced by the Judeo-Christian
religion that we take so much for granted.
It's amazing how much we take for granted
that we've lost the sense of the glory
of God and especially of his mercy.
We have rebelled against God and we have
wandered far from his ways.
We have shown contempt for his laws.
Nevertheless you and I are living in a
day when we are still drawing upon a
capital, a spiritual capital, that gives an amazing
flavor to life which men and women did
not have before the revelation of God in
the Old Testament and in the New.
And we need to remember that we see
sometimes ungodly people, people who do not name
the name of God and do not love
him, doing things which are almost Christian-like.
Where did they get the impetus?
As I understand my Bible, I believe that
that impetus comes ultimately from the revelation of
God especially in his mercy and of the
manifestation of his common grace, if not his
saving grace.
So that you will find today many people
who call themselves humanists, who call themselves this
that or the other, doing ostensibly Christian deeds.
And they do it because they're still drawing
upon a capital of spiritual power and spiritual
influence.
Haven't you noticed sometimes if you have an
electric fire on in the room, you switch
it off, there's a glow there long after
you've switched it off.
Have you noticed it?
I often think that is a parable.
There are myriads of men and women who
only had the fire of God burning in
their homes 50, 60 years ago.
But there's still a glow, there's still an
influence, there is still something that is coming
down the years.
It is not saving, but it is an
influence.
And we in our Western society are still
drawing upon the capital of our fathers.
Now I want to go just to remind
you, not to go back to the Old
Testament particularly, but nevertheless we're moving into that
era.
Let me just remind you of the kind
of world into which Jesus came.
Do you know for example that in Plato's
Republic only the children of the best unions
were allowed to live?
Did you know that?
Now we're talking with some about some of
the great minds of pre-Christian days.
Aristotle likewise insisted that deformed children should be
abandoned immediately and not reared, don't waste time
on them.
Seneca attributes the then contemporary habit of destroying
sickly children to sound reason.
That was the world into which Christ came,
that was the Old Testament world.
Moreover if a child was thus treated, how
much worse was a slave treated?
Now there were exceptions in Israel where there
is where there is a revelation of the
God of mercy as well as of judgment.
But outside of Israel the plight of the
slave was but the plight of a thing.
You could do as you pleased with your
own slave.
He had no rights, she had no rights,
she was just a thing or he was
just a thing.
Something of that same merciless approach to life
has prevailed even to modern days when the
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the
revelation of God in the Bible is not
accepted.
I remember reading in one of the commentaries
a reference to a very famous English surgeon
in his day, Sir Henry Holland, who was
serving in a certain country where eye complaints
were very prevalent and people were losing their
sight due to the climatic conditions.
And on one occasion when he was home
in Britain, he opened his heart and he
said that the most horrifying, the most terrifying
aspect of contemporary paganism to him was this.
That when he after much heart-searching had
to break the news to a patient in
his hospital that he was going to lose
his sight, in nine cases out of ten
all those around him would have a jolly
good laugh.
They'd enjoy it.
There was a sadism that crept through the
souls of men and said Sir Henry Holland,
I only find one thing to make a
difference, and that is the grace of the
Lord.
And when modern man turns away from the
God of grace, well you know as well
as I do what happens.
We have our Dachau, we have our Buchenwald
and fascist and communist tyrannies all over the
world and we don't need to go quite
as far as that.
We have people bashing babies near at hand.
We've all the cruelties coming back again of
the ancient world.
Over against that the God of the Old
Testament is a God of mercy.
Not only mercy, he's a God of justice
too.
And he, don't forget, as the creator of
life and the sustainer of life has the
right to terminate life.
He's the only one.
But he was a God of mercy.
I was fascinated to be reminded this last
week of the three main words that are
used in the Old Testament to describe the
mercy of God.
The most familiar word describes what Professor Norman
Snaith refers to in these words.
The steady persistent refusal of Almighty God to
wash his hands of his wayward people.
Israel sins against God and against the covenant
and God goes after her and he sends
his prophets and he sends this person and
that person and he goes out of his
way to come after this rebellious people and
he will not let her go as mercy.
When he has every reason to apart from
the reason of his own heart and his
own grace.
The second word stresses the gracious favor of
a superior to an inferior.
All undeserved.
God the creator, God the Lord condescends to
have mercy upon a worm like me.
That's mercy.
And the third to me is the most
startling of all.
The Hebrew verb racham comes from a root
which is related to racham which is the
word for the mother's womb, a woman's womb.
God has womb love, womb compassion.
A feeling that a mother has for a
child and only a mother.
This is what the Old Testament teaches us.
This is what the Old Testament tells us.
God was planning all the way through the
Old Testament to send the only begotten of
his bosom to save an ugly sinning world.
Why God?
Oh, I have womb love for my creature
still.
As Karl Barth puts it, our personal God
of the Bible is a God with a
heart.
Indeed he is.
Thus it is that God is a God
of mercy.
Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens,
and thy faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds.
Says the psalmist, I will trust in the
mercy of the Lord forever.
Yes, blessed be God.
He's trustworthy.
Now when we move into the New Testament,
what difference does it make?
Well, according to the New Testament, the elements
of persistent heartfelt compassion continues.
God is always loyal to his covenant purposes.
He never gives up.
When God has begun a good work in
your soul, he continues it.
Here Francis Thompson was quite right when he
spoke about the hound of heaven.
Daring language, there's no question about that, but
he knew what he was about.
When God is on your heels to save
you, he will seek you, he will come
into the wilderness, he will go to all
kinds of lengths to bring you to himself.
And anybody who has a grain of that
mercy in him will do the same, in
some measure.
Not that the merciful person is morally free
and easy and doesn't care to argue the
toss with people, doesn't care to show people
that they're wrong.
No, no, no, no.
He will have a conscience, all right, if
he is a man of God or if
she is a woman of God, he will
have a conscience, she will have a conscience.
But at the same time, there will be
this compassion in the soul.
The very life of God, the God of
the Old Testament and of the New, the
very life of God in the soul of
man will mean that sooner or later there
must emerge in me something akin to his
mercy.
In the New Testament, there is great stress
upon the fact that mercy is an attitude
before it is an action.
Sometimes we can't do anything for people to
alleviate them, but we should be merciful even
when we cannot.
Now, this feeling of concern for people is
not adequate, of course, where we can do
more.
We should always be aiming to do that
which is required of us, but the attitude
is important.
You see, the New Testament is not simply
concerned with our doing the right things, but
doing the right things in the wrong way,
in the right way.
I have an illustration of that.
I read in P.T. Trevelyan's book, The
Life of John Bright, he relates an incident
from the father, the history of the father
of John Bright, going back now many years
when they traveled in their buggies with their
horses, and John Bright's father met an accident
on the road.
He had a lovely horse drawing his buggy,
and the horse was killed.
The horse was killed, and a group of
people met, and there they commiserated with this
poor man that he'd lost his buggy, lost
his horse, and one man came around and
he said, well, I, he says, am sorry
and sympathetic five pounds.
This is English money, not the dollar.
How much are you sorry?
He said to the others, you see, it's
so easy to say I'm sorry for you,
to have an attitude which I can put
into words and use the right cadences and
show that, yes, oh, I'm terribly sorry, but
how much does it cost?
I'm sorry five pounds.
Five pounds was a lot in those days.
How sorry are you?
And they were standing there, the whole crowd
of them, that didn't offer anything.
Brothers and sisters, this is the mercy of
God.
It's a compassion in the soul.
It's a care in the spirit, but it's
not a care that is confined to one
attitude.
It puts its hand in its pocket.
It will walk.
It will go.
It will run.
It will do.
It will act.
It's very, very close to grace.
It's interesting that in his epistles to Timothy
and Titus, particularly the apostle Paul, does not
only speak of God as our Lord Jesus
Christ in terms of their love and grace,
but also mercy.
He's the God of grace and mercy.
But what's the difference, you say?
Archbishop Trench has put it like this.
The grace of God, his free grace and
gift, is extended to men as they are
guilty.
Guilty.
His mercy is extended to them as they
are miserable.
You see, as God looks upon us this
morning, he distinguishes between two things.
One, some of us may be still guilty
before God.
We've never had our sins forgiven.
We are under judgment.
We are like the prisoners in the condemned
cell.
We've broken the law of God, and the
wages of sin is death, and we're awaiting
the sentence.
And one day it will come.
God looks upon a world under sentence, and
that's his grace.
He sends his Son into the midst, and
he sends men and women to proclaim what
the Son has done and what God offers
through his Son by the Holy Spirit.
That's the God of grace.
Thinking of men lost in sin.
Now, the mercy of God is, God is
looking not simply at their guilt, but along
with the guilt, the misery of men.
All the miseries of men.
They're sad.
They don't know what to do at the
beginning of a day, and they don't know
how to sleep as the night comes on.
All the burden is crushing, and God is
not only concerned with a sin that damns
us, but with the misery that pursues us,
and that's his mercy.
How does mercy emerge in the soul of
a man?
Well, this is what the Beatitudes will tell
us.
I think we understand how mercy is born
in the soul of man if we just
follow the movement of thought in the Beatitudes.
It can only be done as insofar as
God has dealings with us.
That's how our fathers used to speak of
it.
Is God having dealings with you these days?
Do you really meet God?
Does he come to meet you?
Does he talk to you?
Does he speak to you?
Does he check you?
Does he speak to you from his word?
Does he make this old book the platform
upon which he stands and speaks to you?
Is he dealing with you?
Mercy comes in due course.
It is born in the soul in due
course.
When I begin by seeing that I am
poor in spirit, bankrupt, lost, that I cannot
save myself, I cannot straighten the divine reckoning
books, I cannot straighten out the ledger, I
cannot put things right with God, it must
start there.
Then as I go on from there and
I am grief-stricken, not just because I've
been found out, not just because I know
that God knows all about me, no no,
but I am grief-stricken because of the
kind of person I've become by sin.
Because as a creature of God I've spoilt
my life and spoilt myself and I'm touching
other lives and I'm spoiling them.
And wherever I go I somehow disseminate, I
pass on something of the sin of my
soul and the influence of my evil life
and I weep.
And that makes me humble, that makes me
meek.
That's the progress of the beatitude.
And the meek man is the very humble
man.
You see, the meek man is the man
who has seen that he has no rights
before God, only the rights that God has
given him out of sheer grace.
He cannot plead merit before God or right
at all.
But he's condemned, he's a lawbreaker, he's guilty.
And therefore he doesn't expect God to make
him the center of God's thoughts and the
center of God's deeds.
Until a man comes here, you see, where
we generally live is somewhere here.
We feel that God's no good at all
unless he makes us, makes me as the
individual, the center of his thinking all the
time.
And unless God really causes his world, his
universe to revolve around me, there's no place
in my life for God.
That's the sinner thinks.
You judge God by his usefulness to man.
Ah, but when you've seen yourself to be
poor in spirit and you've begun to weep
for your sin and you become a meek
man or a meek woman, everything's changed.
Now the center of the universe is God
and I see that I was made for
him, whether it be in joy or in
sorrow, whether it be through suffering or not,
whether it be here or there, I was
made for God.
My life has only meaning insofar as it
serves my God and my creator.
This makes a man humble and meek.
And so he doesn't get angry with people
now.
He can say like Joseph did even to
those whom ill-treat him, you meant evil
but God meant well and he sent me
beforehand beforehand to do something that would be
of value to you as well as to
other people.
That's mercy.
That's meekness.
And then a man is brought to hunger
and thirst after righteousness.
Righteousness before God to be justified before him.
Righteousness is a principle of life so that
a man does that which is right in
relation both to God and to man.
Now as a man moves in this direction,
says our Lord Jesus I believe according to
the inference here, he will discover something new
in his home.
He'll begin to become less concerned with himself
and he'll begin to think of others and
he will see that he isn't only dependent
upon God for mercy, he must show mercy
to others.
My friends the only Christianity we know is
a Christianity which exhibits mercy from beginning to
end in life and in death.
Now this is very very startling.
You follow the footmarks of our Lord Jesus
Christ and I tell you it will stagger
you.
Wherever he went and saw people in need
his heart went out to them.
Wherever he went and saw people in need
his heart went out to them.
Right from the baptism of John.
You know if you go back to the
end of Matthew chapter 4 there just before
the Beatitudes, Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in
their synagogues preaching the good news of the
kingdom and healing every disease and sickness among
the people.
News about him spread all over Syria and
people brought to him all who were ill
with various diseases, those suffering severe pains, the
demon possessed, the epileptics and the paralytics and
he healed them.
Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea
and the region across the Jordan followed him
and he has mercy on them.
Now can you see the point?
Jesus looks at a man in a synagogue.
They've gathered as you were good people are
gathered here this morning and Jesus saw in
the synagogue a man with a withered hand.
We can't forget about that man and get
on with the sermon surely.
Oh no he couldn't.
He said to that man what's the matter
with your hand?
I'm concerned about it.
Get on with your sermon man.
Get on with the service.
Don't linger.
Don't make it too long but I'm concerned
about the man's hand and so you can
go through the gospels.
He sees people that are blind and he
takes time with them and he's gentle with
them and he puts his hands on their
eyes and you can go through the whole
book.
You see he didn't just look at them
and he didn't just hurl healing at them
through the air and said be healed but
don't come too near to me.
He cared.
He touched the leper.
To me one of the most glaring and
one of the most wonderful illustrations of this
of course is that day when he went
into the city of Nain.
Do you remember?
Luke chapter 7 I think and he goes
into the city of Nain and hears a
funeral ceremony coming out.
Now you don't normally disturb funeral processions and
here they're coming and our Lord knew that
the chief mourner was a woman and a
widow woman and that the boy in the
casket, there was no casket like ours of
course, was her only son and the blessed
son of God knew it.
Well let them pass, let them go, let
the dead bury their dead.
Oh no not he.
Stop he said to the people, stop he
said and as if he was a crazed
man he turns and speaks to the to
the corpse and he says young man I
say to you arise.
When he arose he gave him back to
his mother.
That's what he was concerned about all the
time you see mercy.
He thought of the widow.
The bread earner's gone.
You don't get a check from the government
every week or every month or every year
in those days and he thought of the
widow.
He was concerned he had mercy on the
widow when he gave him back to his
mother.
You see what I'm getting at.
This is the God of mercy revealed in
the old testament come in the new embodied
in Jesus.
I felt for people.
Do you feel for people?
I must close the nature of the blessedness
which the merciful inherits.
What is this quality?
What is the blessedness that comes to us?
Blessed are the merciful for they shall find
or be given or be shown mercy.
I have to hurry through this.
I hope I don't say what is improper
or unworthy in so doing.
There are two main interpretations of this.
The first sees this statement in close connection
with two other passages namely the phrase in
the Lord's Prayer forgive us our sins or
transgressions just as we forgive them that are
trespassed against us and again linked up with
the parable of the cruel servant in Matthew
18 who had been forgiven an amazingly large
debt by his master then went out and
found somebody who owed him a little trifle.
He wouldn't forgive him.
He wouldn't have mercy on him at all.
He would squeeze the last drop out of
him like a deadly Shylock.
Now are these passages connected?
Well on the face of it it might
seem that these passages including our text are
connected and suggest that we can only be
forgiven or receive mercy if we have already
first forgiven other people and some people go
on to interpret this as a kind of
tit-for-tat.
You can only be forgiven by God if
you have forgiven others and on the basis
of your forgiveness of others some people interpret
it as if to say we earn our
forgiveness by forgiving other people.
Well now that would completely run counter to
all that the New Testament says about grace
and evidently it cannot be that.
What then does it mean?
Let me try and crystallize it.
I think that what it means is this.
You and I cannot receive mercy and cannot
receive forgiveness unless we are repentant, penitent and
one of the essential characteristics that will be
expressed if we are really penitent concerning our
own sins is that we are prepared also
to forgive the sins who are penitent after
doing a wrong towards us or to us.
John Stott summarizes it in this way.
This is where he says we are not
forgiven because we are able to forgive other
people period but what our Lord is referring
to is something different.
This is not because we can merit mercy
by mercy or forgiveness by forgiveness but because
we cannot receive the mercy and forgiveness of
God unless we repent and we cannot claim
to have repented of our sins if we
are unmerciful towards the sins of others.
Now this is touching a very raw spot
perhaps in our lives.
There is someone that you cannot forgive.
He or she comes and asks your forgiveness
and shows penitence but you cannot forgive and
you cannot forget.
What you mean is you will not forgive
and you will not forget and that proves
says John Stott and I think this is
the correct understanding of this passage.
It means that I've never really repented of
my own sins.
If I had really repented of my own
sins then I would see that there is
no sin that man can commit against me
no wrong he can do to me that
is worthy of comparison with what I had
done against God my sin against God.
In that sense I can only receive pardon
when I am myself forgiving because my being
a forgiving person means that I am penitent
repentant broken in heart and contrite.
However I must mention in closing that there
is another thought that may well be here
and some of the older expositors were very
strong on this that it is only in
the act of showing mercy that I qualify
to enjoy the mercy of God.
There is a difference so some of them
say and I believe they're right in God
having forgiven us and our enjoying God's forgiveness
in God having had mercy upon us and
our capacity to to believe it and to
receive it and to enjoy it and to
have peace and certainty on the basis of
it and they would stress that possibly what
our Lord wanted to get across here was
this if you want to enjoy God's mercy
and God's forgiveness and find peace and contentment
and hope on the basis of it then
you've got to allow the grace of God
so to work in you that you equally
delight with God in having mercy upon other
people not because that will earn the favor
of God but it capacitates us to receive
of the infinite grace of God into our
soul.
Brothers and sisters in Christ we stand today
not only under the light of the word
but in the glare of Calvary the great
act of divine mercy as well as of
grace and I think of our Lord there
bleeding on the cross tortured his body twisted
and wounded and scarred and I think of
him having a thought first of all for
his mother that's down in front of him
and thinking about where is she what is
she going to do when he dies and
he calls upon John and he says John
there's your mother mother he says there's your
son look after her John that's mercy but
I go further I think of this blaggard
of a man on his left or on
his right this scoundrel of a man that
is according to himself a guilty a guilty
murderer and guilty of much else and here
out of his anguish he cries to the
Savior and says Lord remember me when you
come into your kingdom and Jesus has time
for him even in the midst of his
pain and his anguish such anguish on the
spiritual level has no man ever experienced and
yet he thinks of him and he says
today he says you shall be with me
in paradise oh can you see it this
is the mercy of God overflowing the heart
of the incarnate Son on all hands even
even to his death is Christ living in
you is the spirit of Christ given to
us then sooner or later we shall not
only be concerned to men insofar as they
are guilty before God and need a Savior
we shall be concerned about their burdens and
their wounds and their lacerations and their being
without food and without clothing and without justice
and without a hundred thousand other things and
the compassion of the Lord will begin to
blossom in us and as it does we
shall find that we are able to enter
into the full enjoyment and this is the
blessedness you see really to enjoy God's mercy
to us feast upon it live upon it
God grant it God grant it to every
soul in our service today if there's someone
outside of it I pray you I plead
with you do not leave the sanctuary today
this is a day of grace without turning
to us God not only to tell you
afresh of what it means but to make
it real to you pray and wait in
your pew in your seat and pray pray
that you may enter into the enjoyment of
it all and thus of life everlasting because
this is life let us pray oh Lord
our God grant that your word may both
penetrate into the depths of our beings and
there go on to work in us to
perfect that which you have begun forgive us
that we have not grown more in grace
than we have forgive us that we so
often staunch the incentives of the spirit within
us almighty God as we come to your
table help us help us to see again
what your mercy really is and may the
overflow come through to us as we partake
of the bread and of the wine may
we partake of the realities that they symbolize
and our spirits be strengthened to serve you
in a manner that is acceptable to you
through Jesus Christ our Lord amen