Video transcript below
Welcome to video six, which is based on the beatitude in Matthew chapter five verse seven, where Jesus said, blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.
“Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.”
Matthew 5:7
Do you think you need mercy? I mean, I’m going to be honest with you, I have clients who come into my office and they have been charged with a crime, and they know they’re guilty, right? And they would love to get some mercy for the judge. In other words, that is weighing on them, their need for mercy is weighing on them. I’m thinking to myself, the average person, you know, Jesus is talking to Christians here, right? We established that in the first video. The average person isn’t thinking that they need mercy in order to live this abundant life and be blessed, right? Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. The average person isn’t thinking in terms of, this is really important for me, especially if you’ve been born again because you think, well, I’ve obtained the mercy of God. It has secured my eternal life. So what is Jesus talking about?
This is an attitude, an attitude of mercy that we’re supposed to develop. Well, remember, these are attitudes that we are supposed to have to represent the kingdom of heaven, okay? Because we talked about this in the first video, that these beatitudes are the attitudes that people who belong to the kingdom of heaven should be representing. And Jesus said that if we have this attitude, we are blessed. He wasn’t just wasting words here, okay? He wasn’t just saying, this is not an important beatitude. You could skip this one, right? So, you know, this is important. So we’ve kind of built this foundation where we’ve talked about being poor in spirit, which is completely dependent upon God for everything. Mourning sin, hating sin, developing an attitude towards sin, that it causes everything bad in our life, right?
Becoming meek, which is completely dependent upon God, so that his power can course through us, we’re living in his strength, not our own, and hungering and thirsting for righteousness. So we can sustain our first three, and also draw ourselves into the presence of God. And instead of hungering and thirsting after the things of this world, the things that will destroy us, we’re hungry and thirsting after his rules, his ways, okay?
And so now Jesus says, blessed are those who are merciful because they’re going to obtain mercy. I don’t think that we can truly understand how much mercy we need to exist on a planet that is full of corruption, full of hate, full of all the devious schemes of the enemies that want to destroy those who live in after Christ. We can’t understand how much mercy we receive every day from God. All the things I like to say, I’m thanking God for all the things that have not gone wrong today. God in his mercy prevents so many things from going wrong for us, because he loves us. It doesn’t mean everything because we are able to glorify him in a totally different way through trials. But I bet I know that someday we’re going to stand before the throne of God, and God’s going to show us all the things that were, that were the people that were us, the enemy’s ways that he had to destroy us, that didn’t happen. And if we can learn to live with that awareness now, we are going to have a much more merciful attitude towards those around us.
I like to talk about mercy also, synonymously with forgiveness, even though they’re different, you know, forgiveness is more for us, right? It’s, we have somebody who has offended us and we forgive them so that we can repair our relationship with God so that we can keep from becoming better. Because Jesus said in Matthew chapter six, he said, if we don’t forgive, then our heavenly Father will not forgive us, either. Says, if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you don’t, your father won’t forgive you either. We have got to, if we want to keep those lines of communication open we have to forgive. And of course, we’ve talked about in our video series, our 4 trillion in forgiveness that we’ve received through the gift of salvation. And so forgiveness is an internal thing, right? It keeps the communication open with God, and forgiveness of mercy, our sister attitudes. But forgiveness again, is personal. It resolves internal attitudes towards someone who’s wronged us. Mercy, on the other hand, is withholding a harsh treatment when you have the absolute authority and or right to inflict it.
So I’ll use this example, because it seems to come up in my law practice a lot. You know, a client comes in, he hired, you know, Mr. Repairman to fix his floor. He paid $5,000. The floor is worse than when he started. And the client’s mad. He is like, I have the right to have my money back. I have the right to have this floor fixed. And you know what? The client’s correct, he paid $5,000 to have this nice floor put in, and it wasn’t done. He has the right to enforce the contract. And Mercy’s saying, I don’t care. I’m going to let you keep my money, and I’m just going to not worry about it. That’s mercy.
And you know, I know that, and I’m not suggesting that, you know, you need to let people get away with things. There’s a time to inflict justice. But the power of mercy, see, we in, in our own, in our own strength. We cannot just give this kind of mercy away the way God does because we don’t have the ability without Jesus Christ to give and give and give and give without expectation of receiving. And so God’s saying, by being merciful, dealing with others, merciful, we’re going to receive mercy. And this is where God comes in. This is where the power of God comes in. And this is so remarkable. When we have the right to demand that somebody else make things right, and we choose by God’s spirit and by his leading not to do that, what Jesus does, what that does is our merciful attitude pleases God.
And it works mercy towards us. And many times it’s in ways we don’t even understand. You know, it may be the wreck we don’t have. It may be an unexpected restoration of a relationship. It may be even an unknown healing. Maybe we have cancer cells that are multiplying in our body and God heals us. We don’t even know. Maybe just maybe. And these are the best things I’ve seen that workman who did us wrong, maybe because of our mercy, it opens a door for us to share the gospel with that person. And we share the gospel with them, and they come to know Jesus Christ because they saw mercy they’ve never seen before. And the Holy Spirit uses that to draw them to salvation. Because the Bible says that the goodness of God draws us to repentance and mercy is a good thing, right?
I think that God is at work in millions of unseen blessings for those of us who choose to live in mercy. And it’s not something we can do on our own power. You know, we don’t. If you make a mistake, or if you do something you know is wrong and the person you’ve wronged gives you mercy, man, there’s such relief. You know, I’ve made mistakes with my clients. I, I’ve filed the wrong thing. I’ve missed deadlines, I’ve done things. And just because I’m human, right? And I’ll go to my client and say, man, I screwed this up. And when they say, you know what? It’s okay, Man, that just feels so good.
And they didn’t have to do that. But when we recognize that we received mercy instead of justice from someone else, especially God, it creates blessings of humility. It creates blessings of gratefulness. And when we recognize the great mercy that we receive from God every day, because our flesh sins every day. But God’s mercy covers us. And, you know this mercy that we need, we need it from God. We need it from each other.
You know, we’ve got to understand that we aren’t just these self-existing people. We depend on each other and we depend on other people’s mercy. And when we learn to develop that attitude that not only should we give mercy, but that we need it from each other, that we need it from God, it humbles us. It makes us grateful, and then we experience, we enter into the experience of grace because we’re experiencing mercy, both from both ends, the giving and the receiving end. And God is empowering us through his spirit to give and, and, and so we’re not even doing it on our own. We’re being empowered by God through his spirit to give mercy. When we could demand justice, we could demand our rights. But see, God shows us through his spirit that we can do something better than demand our rights. We can and enter into the same mercy that we have received from him, we can enter into that for others.
So, how do we develop a spirit of mercy in a world culture that encourages entitlement, retaliation, and personal justice, right? Those are the things we hear about all the time. Well, the Bible says, the mercy of the Lord is from, this is Psalms 103:17-18, The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him and his righteousness to children’s children, to such as keep His covenant and those who remember his commandments to do them.
You see how these beatitudes are cycling back poor in spirit means we depend upon God, right? Hunger and thirst after righteousness. When we would respect God so much and what he’s done for us so much that we would rather have his presence, then we would, rather than, than to have our own personal justice. We would rather have his presence than to have to be entitled towards other people than his mercy will be multiplied in our lives. God’s abundant mercy is given to those who live with a deep respect for God’s presence and his commandments. When we live in these beatitudes, we have a huge head start on this mercy cycle. When we are poor in spirit, we live with a deep acknowledgement of the mercy that we have received from God. And that’s through his precious gift of salvation, right? We not only want to be merciful to others, but we’re grateful for God’s mercy and teaching us humility. When we are filled, we’ll become filled with God’s mercy. We are awakened to how much mercy we have received from him.
There’s a song that I wrote called Glass House, and it describes mercy like giving mercy as a miracle. It is a miracle. It’s a miracle in a culture that demands individual rights, demands retribution, demands reparations. We don’t have to live that way. When Jesus set us free, he set us free from having to demand our own way. And he freed us to live in the miracle of mercy. You know, one of the lyrics in that song is look through the window of your glass house outside stand vacant eyes and broken heart created like you by holy God. Oh, how very like her you are. So before you cast that first stone remember the glass in your own home, in our glass house lives amazing grace, miracle of mercy. And the song goes on. Remember that wretched place you came from all those sleepless nights and hopeless dreams, dying slowly, fearing the unknown, then blessed redemption fills your soul. Now, in God’s mercy, we find no stones, only his heart that welcomes us home in our glass house. We find in our glass house lives amazing grace, miracle of mercy.
This beatitude of mercy places us in the extraordinary experience of God’s amazing grace places us squarely in the experience of grace. We see it all around us. And when mercy surrounds us, and we desire to have, not just have an awareness of God’s mercy, but also to give it away as fast as we are getting it, you know what? We are ready to go to the next level in our relationship with Christ. We are ready to go to the next level in living in the abundant life that Jesus planned for us.
Isn’t this amazing? I am loving this. So join us for the next video, and it’s the next beatitude. Missed the previous videos and want to watch them? Watch video series.
