Blessed Are The Merciful

Good morning ladies!

Today we are continuing thru the Beatitudes with Matthew 5:7, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” The word “mercy” basically means compassion, kindness and forbearance. The Bible mentions many times that we are to be merciful and shows that Jesus was merciful. One of the definitions of mercy is “the discretionary power of a judge to pardon someone or to lighten the sentence.” I never thought of mercy in that way but it does make a lot of sense.

Since we are all sinners, we are in need of a pardon which Jesus so generously gave. A pardon releases a person from liability for an offense. That’s the beauty of the pardon, it’s not just forgiveness, it’s erased completely like it never happened. If a judge or governor pardons us for something, it’s still there, there will be a paper trail leading back to it. But when Jesus pardons us, it’s gone, forever!

It would seem that if we expect to receive mercy from God, then we need to show mercy to others. It’s like the Golden Rule which says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Often we prefer to do unto others as they have done unto us. We can be very thankful that Jesus didn’t take that stance. Even the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6:12 tells us, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.’ This indicates that if we want forgiveness, we have to be forgiving. The Old Testament taught “an eye for an eye” but Jesus taught love and forgiveness.

How easy is it to forgive others? Often it isn’t easy and doesn’t feel natural. Our nature wants to be vengeful, if you hurt me, I want to hurt you. And when we say that we’ve forgiven someone, have we really? Is their transgression always in the back of our minds? I think as humans it can be hard to forget a wrong done. I believe God just doesn’t want us dwelling on a wrongdoing committed against us.

Let’s look at a few other verses on mercy. Matthew 17:15 says, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he has seizures and he suffers terribly. For often he falls into the fire, and often into the water.” We don’t know if the boy is epileptic or demon-possessed but the father knows that his son needs help and only Jesus can give that help. The problem is life-threatening and this father is desperate. Jesus does proceed to show mercy and heal the boy.

Luke 10:25-37 tells the story of the Good Samaritan which I won’t type out the whole story but it’s a good story to read. In this story, a man is severely beaten and left for dead along the road. The first two people who come upon him are Jews who should have helped him, but they went out of their way to avoid him and not help him. Eventually a Samaritan came along and helped the man. Jews and Samaritans didn’t get along with one another so this shows how someone had mercy not only on a stranger, but also someone who would be considered an enemy. Mercy and forgiveness are not limited to those we like or know. We are to be merciful to all people.

Another story of mercy that we are familiar with is the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. Again, I’ll give the basic story without typing the whole chapter. A son asks for his inheritance from his father and proceeds to spend it foolishly on worldly things until there is nothing left. He ends up broke, homeless and eating pig food and decides to humble himself and go back to his father to beg for mercy. His father sees him coming and runs to meet him and forgive him and have a party to celebrate his return. We should be like this father who happily shows mercy. More often we are like the boy’s brother who had stayed and worked with his father and was upset that his father was having a party for the prodigal son, we often think that person doesn’t deserve our mercy and they got what they had coming.

One of my favorite verses on mercy is in Lamentations 3:22-23 which says, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” This tells me that God loves us so much that His mercy and forgiveness is never-ending. So our mercy should be like that toward others.  Matthew 18:21-22 tells us, “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times’. Peter wants to know the limits of forgiveness and Jesus is telling him that forgiveness is limitless and we shouldn’t be keeping track of wrongs. And this passage comes right before the story of the Unforgiving Servant in Matthew 18:23-35 where a master forgives his servant’s huge debt and then the same servant goes out and demands repayment from his fellow servant for a much smaller debt. And this story shows the necessity of forgiving others as God has forgiven us.

So to apply this beatitude to daily life we have to remember that we have wronged others as well as God so we shouldn’t be holding grudges against others. Our mercy and forgiveness should be unlimited. God has forgiven much on our behalf and Jesus paid a hefty fine for us so let’s try to be a little more merciful to those around us.

We would love to have you join us at our little church on the hill, it’s really worth the drive.

Lori Hug