Mercy and Purity

Pattern in the Beatitudes: (see hand-out in bulletin)

Beatitudes #1-3: God makes us aware of our spiritual need.

1. Poor in spirit:

- as you stand before God, you realize you are spiritually bankrupt

- like the tax collector who cried out “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

- nothing to offer that will make you acceptable in God’s sight

2. Mourn:

- the reason you are spiritually bankrupt is that you have sin in your life.

- sin makes you unacceptable in God’s sight. God is holy. You are not.

- when you realize just how deep-rooted your sin problem is, you mourn.

- like Isaiah: “Woe is me for I am undone. I am a man of unclean lips.”

3. Meek:

- becoming poor in spirit and mourning over your sin gives you a different view of yourself.

- you see that there is no cause for pride; no basis for being self-satisfied.

- that causes you to be meek in your relations with other people.

- you aren’t trying to impress anybody with just how great you are, because you realize that you are not great.

The first three Beatitudes are beatitudes of need. If you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, God has to bring you face to face with yourself and your need for salvation.

- the first three Beatitudes are negative

- you have to get the bad news before there can get the good news. The diagnosis comes before the cure:

- the diagnosis is that there is a cancer of pride and self-centeredness eating away at your soul. This is the essence of what the Bible calls sin.

Isaiah 53:6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way

- that’s what happens when you put yourself at the center of your universe, not God.

Beatitude #4 marks a turning point. If Beatitudes #1-3 talk about a spiritual emptying, Beatitude #4 tells us how to be filled.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

In Beatitudes #1-3, Jesus tells us we have a need, now he tells us how that need can be satisfied.

- by hungering and thirsting to be right with God (righteousness)

- by desiring God’s will and God’s Word and God’s way in your life.

- not just a passing desire, but a consuming passion…

- hungering the way a starving man craves food

- thirsting as much as a man dying of thirst in the desert wants water.

- if you desire righteousness that much you will be filled, you will be satisfied.

Now we come to three more Beatitudes. The person who has recognized his spiritual need and has begun to find satisfaction by hungering and thirsting after God’s righteousness is a person who is going to live a certain way. There are going to be some distinguishing characteristics in his life. His spiritual need is being satisfied as he hungers and thirsts after God’s righteousness, and that begins to yield practical results in his life.

This is what Beatitudes #5,6,7 are all about. They are about the results that God produces in your life. And the really amazing thing is that each of the results that God produces in Beatitudes #5,6,7 corresponds very closely with each of the needs that were expressed in Beatitudes #1,2,3.

5. Merciful

When you’ve come to the place where you are poor in spirit, not only does that give you a different perspective on yourself, it gives you a different perspective on others. Now that you are hungering and thirsting for God’s righteousness, you’re going to be merciful to others. You’re not going to be hard on them or judgmental or condemning. This Beatitude is a result of being poor in spirit.

6. Pure in Heart

Remember in Beatitude #2, you mourned because you saw that it was your sin that made you unholy in the sight of God. Now that you are hungering and thirsting for God’s righteousness, you’re going to want to overcome that sin. You’re going to want to begin to unwrap its tentacles from around your life. You’re going to want to live a pure life - pure from the inside out. This Beatitude comes as a result of mourning over your sin.

7. Peacemakers

Remember in Beatitude #3, God made you meek before others as He helped you to put away your pride. Now that you are hungering and thirsting for God’s righteousness, you’re going to become a peacemaker. You’re going to want to work toward reconciliation between enemies. You’re going to want to bring people together and bring them to God, where they can find real peace that lasts. Your pride no longer is in the way of your doing that. This Beatitude is a result of being meek.

Finally, in the last Beatitude, which he expresses a couple of ways, Jesus says these results in you are going to produce a reaction in the world. The world isn’t going to step back and say “My, what a wonderful person you’ve become! Now that you are hungering and thirsting after righteousness, you’re such a good example to the rest of us. All these terrific results that God has produced in your life - you’re just the kind of person we want to have around all the time.”

No. The world is going to hate you. It is going to persecute you. It is going to try to get rid of you. Why? Because you have left the world’s kingdom of pride and self-centeredness and sin and you’ve gone over to the enemy! You have defected! You have become a citizen of God’s kingdom. You are under new management. In the world’s view, you are a traitor. You’ve sold out.

The world doesn’t want you around. You have become a threat to the ruler of this world, because your life challenges the principle of sinful pride by which he enslaves the people of this world. You are a living example of the fact that a human being doesn’t have to live that way. You have been set free from the law of sin and death and now you’re living for God. You have found happiness and blessedness without having any of the things that the world says is necessary to be happy and blessed. You are a living rebuke to the world. Your life is a vivid reminder that the world is wrong. So you have to be eliminated. That’s why the world persecutes you for righteousness sake. The more righteous you are, the more the world will persecute you.

So that’s why the Beatitudes are in this order. There is a definite logic to the arrangement.

Now, let’s go back and look at Beatitudes #5 and 6.

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

A famous politician once sat for a photographer to take his portrait. When the photographer submitted the proofs to him for his approval, the politician was outraged. He said “These photographs are terrible! None of these pictures does me justice.” The photographer calmly replied “Sir, with a face like yours, you don’t want justice, you want mercy.”

Mercy is being kind to someone because of their need. Mercy is being aware of a person’s need and being willing to do something about it. The Bible is full of examples of mercy. Take the Good Samaritan for instance. A man was waylaid along the road and left for dead. Several people came by — upstanding people in the community, religious people — and they didn’t do a thing to help him. But along came a Samaritan, a man despised by the Jews because of his race, a man who had probably been mistreated himself, and he showed mercy to this poor man.

Mercy is when you actually feel what someone else is feeling and try to help. It’s when you come alongside someone in need and say “I know what you’re going through, because I’ve been there myself.”

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were good friends of a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Tulloch. Mr. Tulloch happened to be the principal of St. Andrew’s School. By a sad coincidence, Prince Albert and Principal Tulloch both died at the same time in 1861. Though consumed by her own grief, Victoria went to see Mrs. Tulloch. When the queen’s entrance was announced, Mrs. Tulloch struggled to get up to curtsey before her sovereign. But Victoria said to her “No, my dear, don’t rise. I am not coming to you today as a queen to a subject, but as one woman who has lost her husband to another.” That’s mercy.

The way you show mercy to others says a lot about your relationship to God. If you are quick to condemn others, quick to judge, critical, bitter about other people, it means that you have never really understood where you stand in relation to God. Jesus told a parable about this very thing:

Read Matthew 18:23-35.

Jesus says that the merciful man will be shown mercy. What does he mean?

If someone is unmerciful, as this servant was, it is because he has lost sight of your own condition. When the servant demanded payment of that trivial debt, he had totally forgotten that he himself had owed his master an impossible debt, which his master had graciously forgiven. He no longer saw himself as a forgiven man - a man who had received mercy from his master.

Now when we go around being unmercifully critical and judgmental of others, we’re doing the same thing. It’s our pride that makes us critical. We become so impressed with ourselves that we think we have the right to pass judgment on other people. We think that they somehow owe it to us to live up to our expectations of them.

Now when we do this, it is because we have lost sight of where we ourselves stand with God. We have forgotten that the debt we owe Him is inconceivably greater than any debt we calculate that other people owe us.

When our pride blinds us like this, we literally put ourselves beyond mercy’s reach. We won’t get mercy, because we won’t even want mercy. We are so proud, that we won’t even think we need mercy! We’re saying “I’m not the problem, it’s the other guy that’s the problem.” This person cannot give mercy, nor can he receive mercy because he is not poor in spirit. His pride cripples him from ever experiencing mercy, on either the giving or receiving end.

How merciful are you? Do you wish that you were less critical of others? Do you want to learn how to be more merciful to people? Then simply consider what God has done for you.

Ephesians 4:32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Colossians 3:13 Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.

The motivation for forgiving and showing mercy is remembering the mercy God has shown you.

Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.

There is a fundamental difference between true Christianity and religion. Christianity focuses on the interior. Religion focuses on the exterior. Christianity is about cleaning up your heart. Religion is about cleaning up your act. Christianity is living for God with your whole being. Religion is living up to a set of external rules.

The reason that religion doesn’t work and Christianity does is that religion never gets around to dealing with the fact that the biggest problem man has is the problem with his own heart.

Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?

Matthew 15:19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.

Some people think that the reason man is evil is due to his circumstances, or his environment. If you could just change his circumstances, or improve his environment, he’d get better. But I’d like to ask you “Where did the first sin take place?” It took place in the Garden of Eden - a perfect environment with perfect circumstances. That is because the human heart is the fountainhead of sin.

That is why religion never really works to improve man’s condition. Religion, in fact, usually reveals just how black man’s heart is. Look at the things men have done to each other in human history in the name of religion. Look at the Middle East today. It is, without argument, the most religious area of the whole world. Yet it is the area of the greatest hatred and strife. Religion says “Try to be good.” But we can never be good if we are controlled by a heart that is bad.

Jesus came to cleanse our hearts. He came to deal with the sin that blackens our hearts and is killing us from the inside out. He came to take it away. Now a person who is hungering and thirsting for righteousness is a person who is undergoing “spiritual open heart surgery”. He’s letting God work on his heart. Christ died on the cross to take away the penalty of our sin. Now, he wants to take away the power of sin in our lives. He starts by working on our heart. He starts on the inside, not the outside.

When Jesus talks about being pure, he used a word that means single, or undivided. The Greeks used this same word to describe corn which had been separated from the chaff, or wine which had not been diluted by water, or metal in which there were no impurities.

Sin is impurity. It’s like a giant oil slick that fouls the waters of our life. A person who is pure in heart is a person who, with God’s help, is seeking to root out sin wherever he finds it in his life. Like David, he cries out “Create in me a clean heart, O God!” He’s a person who wants to be undivided in his attitudes and his motives toward God. David said in PSA 86 “Teach me your way, O Lord, and I will walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name.”

The problem with so many of us today, though, is that our hearts are not undivided. We’re trying to mess around with sin while we live the Christian life at the same time. It won’t work. We’ll never be happy. The most miserable person in the world is a Christian who is not living for God.

But blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. What does it mean to see God? Well, I don’t think it means that you’ll literally see God in a physical sense, although someday, when we get to heaven we will, as the Bible tells us.

I believe it means that we will have a better sense of God’s presence. A new awareness that God is real, and that he is with us in all that we do. A deeper appreciation of God’s majesty and His power and His sovereignty. That’s what it means to see God.

When an ordinary person goes out at night, chances are he seldom looks up at the sky. He never really thinks about what is up there above him. Perhaps he is aware that the moon is out, and a few stars, but he doesn’t really appreciate their significance. But when an astronomer goes out at night, and looks into the night sky, it is full of meaning for him. His eye is trained to discern the movement of the stars and the planets. He knows the phases of the moon. He can see Rigel and Sirius and Andromeda in their appointed places; Jupiter and Saturn and Mars as they march along the ecliptic. He really sees the stars; the other man doesn’t.

This is how it is for the pure in heart. They see God in a way that others do not. They are conscious of God’s presence, and of His working in their life and in their world around them. That is why they are blessed. They are happy. They are content. Because they see God.