Mercy and Purity

One day a couple of caterpillars were crawling along the ground when a butterfly flew over them. They looked up at it, and one of the caterpillars said to the other “Boy, you’ll never get me up in one of those things.”

The Christian life is not a matter of gluing wings onto caterpillars. It’s about caterpillars being changed into butterflies. There’s a total transformation that takes place. And Jesus talked about the process of that transformation in the Sermon on the Mount, which is found in Matthew 5–7.

Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount with a series of eight short statements about blessedness. We call those statements the Beatitudes. Let’s review the Beatitudes that we have studied so far.

The first one talks about being poor in spirit, and we learned that that means coming to the place in your life where you see yourself as God sees you: a sinner. Being poor in spirit is the opposite of being spiritually proud. It’s realizing that you stand before God dressed in spiritual rags without a penny to your name. That’s what it means to be poor in spirit.

The second Beatitude teaches us about mourning, and we learned that this is what proves whether you’re really poor in spirit: Do you really feel that deep, heartfelt anguish about your sin? Do you weep because you know that you have offended your Creator and turned your back on him?

Or do you just shrug and say, “Well, I’ve sinned. That’s too bad. What a shame.” Mourning over your sin proves whether the Spirit of God has broken down the walls of pride in your heart.

Then the third Beatitude is about meekness—meekness towards other people. If you’re poor in spirit and mourn over your sin, it’s because you’ve finally realized that you have no cause to be proud of yourself. No basis for being smug and self-satisfied. And that realization causes you to become meek in your relationships with others.

You give up trying to impress everybody with just how wonderful you are, with what great things you’ve done, with how much appreciation and praise you deserve, because you’ve come to realize that you’re not so wonderful after all.

So you’re willing to let others go first. You’re willing to let them have preeminence. You’re willing to let them have the praise and the recognition.

Beatitudes 1, 2, and 3 tell us about the spiritual emptying that needs to take place in our lives if we really want to be part of God’s Kingdom. Beatitude #4 marks a turning point, because it tells us how to be filled. We need to hunger and thirst for righteousness if we want to fill up the empty spaces deep down inside our hearts.

Hungering and thirsting for righteousness means wanting God’s will to be done more than anything else in our lives. It means hungering for it the way that a starving man craves food. It means thirsting for it the way that a man lost in the desert yearns for a drink.

Now if we hunger and thirst for righteousness, that’s going to produce some practical results in our lives. And those results are what Jesus describes in the next four Beatitudes.

1. we’re going to be merciful in our dealings with others. We’re not going to subject people to the “performance principle”.

2. we’re not going to let anything hinder us from pursuing after God. That’s what it means to be pure in heart.

3. we’re going to want to bring others into a relationship with God and into obedience to His will (that’s what it means to be a peacemaker)

4. we’re going to be willing to bear whatever abuse and mistreatment the world throws at us for the excellence of knowing God and living for Him.

Today we’re going to look at Beatitudes 5 and 6, that deal with mercy and purity.

With a last embrace from her father, the teenager stepped from the dark tunnel into the brilliant lights of the arena. At the edge of the rink she stopped and removed her skate guards. Her heart was pounding, her mouth was dry, her palms were clammy.

The announcer spoke her name. The huge crowd roared. Dimly she could see flags from her home country waving here and there in the stands. She forced a smile and glided to center ice, stopping there. A hush descended on the crowd. The house lights were dimmed. Then the music began.

Her sharp skates bit into the ice as she began her program. This moment was what she had worked so hard for. The pre-dawn practice sessions, the long, exhausting hours at the arena, the tears, the bruises, the expense. All for the goal of skating in the Olympics.

She flew around the ice gaining speed for her first jump, a triple toe loop. It was a tough, ambitious move, and she had placed it first in her program so that she could attack it when she was fresh. Ready now… UP and SPIN 1,2,3… and DOWN… ouch! a little glitch on the landing. Not much, but she knew the judges had seen it.

The judges sat impassively on a raised podium at the side of the rink, pens poised, watching… always watching. Behind the judges’ bench sat gray haired matrons who had never even attempted a triple toe loop, let alone landed one. Middle-aged men in rumpled suits who owed their power to their political connections, not their skating excellence. They watched her with unsmiling faces and cold, critical eyes as she poured out her life’s work before them.

In five minutes it was over. She had made it through, with some mistakes, but no disasters. Her chest was heaving. She glided over to the side of the rink. The audience applauded warmly and her Dad greeted her with another big hug. Someone handed her a bouquet of roses, which she held onto nervously as she waited for her marks.

When they flashed the results on the board, her smile never wavered, but her heart broke. The hopeful light in her eyes went out when she saw the numbers. 5.2… 5.4… 5.3… The judges had killed her. Whistles of anger rose from the crowd. But the judges didn’t care. She was only an unknown, skating early in the line-up. They were saving their best scores for the big-name skaters who would come later.

Have you ever felt like that figure skater? Have you ever felt that you were being judged by people who didn’t even know you, much less cared about you? Who didn’t know how hard you tried, how much pain you endured, how soft and tender and fragile your dreams were? Have you ever felt the pain of having your faults magnified, and your best efforts minimized by people who just didn’t care?

If you have, then you know how hard it is to live life by the “performance principle”. Living your life for the applause and the approval of others is a pretty tough way to live. People’s expectations can be impossible to meet. The bar is always being raised, and you can never jump quite high enough. And while you’re trying and trying, inside you’re crying and dying, because you’re seeking your significance in the acceptance of others.

If there is just one thing I could single out that I appreciate most about being a Christian, it would have to be that the Christian life is not based on the “performance principle”.

God is not sitting behind the bench like some frowning figure skating judge, just waiting for us to mess up. He’s not scoring us on our faults and our failures and on how far short we fall of his standard of excellence.

No, far from being the judge, God is more like the Father who hugs us before we get on the ice and after we get off. His acceptance is unconditional. He knows all our weaknesses—our faults, our failures—but He loves us anyway. He relationship with us is predicated on mercy, not justice, on forgiveness, not performance.

God is not our Critic. He’s our Redeemer. That is a tremendously liberating concept. It’s liberating in that it gives us the freedom to show the same kind of mercy in our relationships with others that God has shown to us.

Once we realize that we’re not on a performance standard with God, we can throw away our performance standard for other people as well. We can begin to see them for who they really are—sinners just like us who have hurts and heartaches, struggles and needs. People who need from us mercy, grace, and forgiveness, not anger, criticism, and condemnation.

Author Stephen Covey tells the story of how one Sunday morning, he was sitting on the subway in New York. People were sitting quietly—some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene.

Then, suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole atmosphere changed. The man sat down next to Covey and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s newspapers. It was very disturbing. And yet the father did nothing.

Covey found himself becoming more and more irritated. He could not believe that the man could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and not do anything about it. The father seemed to have no sense of responsibility at all. By this time, everyone else was getting upset, too.

So Covey finally decided to do something. He turned to the man, and with as much patience and restraint as he could muster, he said “Sir, your children are creating a disturbance. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more.”

The father lifted his eyes as though he were seeing the situation for the first time, and he said softly, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. You’re right. I do need to do something about the children. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I’m having a hard time handling that, and I guess that my children are too.”

How quick we are to judge others for the things that they do, or fail to do, when we don’t know what’s going on inside. We put the people who walk into our lives on a performance standard. If they measure up, we accept them. If they don’t, we condemn them. That’s not mercy.

When we do that, we are just showing that we have never truly appreciated what God has done for us. Jesus told a story about it. It’s found in Matthew 18:23–35. (p.975)

The kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. (1 talent = 75 pounds. 10,000 talents = 375 tons = 65 million dollars at today’s silver prices)

Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. The servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.

But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. (1 denarius = 1 day’s wages) He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’ But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.

When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’

When that servant demanded payment of that relatively minor debt he showed that he had totally lost sight of the fact that he himself had been forgiven a far greater debt than the money that was owed him. He had lost sight of the fact that he was a forgiven debtor himself.

When we fail to show mercy to one another, we’re just proving that we have forgotten the mercy that God has shown to us. When we pridefully take a seat at the judge’s bench, we show that we have lost sight of the fact that, but for the mercy of God, we would be standing before that bench ourselves.

Jesus says in the fifth Beatitude that the person who is merciful will receive mercy. What does he mean? Well, there are two dimensions to this: the vertical and the horizontal.

On the horizontal level, you can sum it all up by saying that if you live by the sword, you’ll die by the sword. If you make a career of criticizing and condemning people, that’s what you’ll get in return. Critical people don’t make many friends.

But there’s an even more important vertical dimension to the problem of being unmerciful. We’ve seen that when we fail to show mercy toward others, it is because our pride has blinded us to our own need for God’s mercy. We become spiritually cold and hardhearted. We go back to living on the “performance principle”.

And if we do that, we’re putting ourselves beyond the reach of God’s mercy. We don’t receive God’s mercy—not because He doesn’t offer it—but because we’ve come to believe that we don’t even need it.

How merciful are you? Do you wish that you were less critical of others? Do you want to learn how to be more compassionate, more sensitive to the needs of others? Then make it a practice of focusing your thoughts on 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.

1 John 4:11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

All those verses teach that the one thing that will make us more merciful, is an appreciation of God’s mercy for us.

The sixth Beatitude says “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

There is a very basic difference between faith in Christ and religion. True Christianity focuses on the interior. Religion focuses on the exterior. Religion is about cleaning up your act. Christianity is about cleaning up your heart. Christianity is about having a relationship with God that involves your whole being, from the inside out. Religion is about trying to live up to a set of 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 we have is the problem with our heart. We all have heart disease.

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.

It’s popular nowadays to believe that evil is due to environment. Change the environment, and you’ll change people. But where did the first sin take place? It took place in the Garden of Eden - a perfect environment. The problem of evil is deeper than environment.

Religion has never been able to eliminate the problem of evil. Religion, in fact, only reveals how deep-rooted the problem of evil is. Look at the things that religious people have done to each other down through the years in the name of religion.

Take the Middle East for example. The Middle East is, without argument, the most religious region in the whole world. Yet it is the area of the most deep-seated hatred and strife.

The message of religion is “Try to be good.” But the message of the NT is that you can never be good because you are controlled by a heart that is bad. We all have spiritual heart disease. But 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 begins to understand that is a person who is described by the Beatitudes. He understands that he has heart disease. He understands where the problem of evil comes from, and he knows where that puts him in God’s eyes. He begins to hunger and thirst—to yearn—for God’s solution to the problem.

The person that Jesus describes in the Beatitudes is a person who is undergoing “spiritual open heart surgery”. He’s letting God work on his heart. He letting God work on the inside of his life, and those inner changes begin to make an outward difference.

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

When you refine gold, you put it into a furnace and heat it until it turns to liquid. The impurities in the gold then float to the top and you can skim them off.

Being pure in heart means saying to God “I want you to refine me. I want you to take away the impurities in my life. Like David, I want you to create in me a clean heart. Make me the kind of person you want me to be; undivided in my devotion to You.”

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.”

Is that your desire this morning? If it is, Jesus said “You will see God.” What did he mean by that? Did he mean that you’re going to have visions and dreams of God? No, it’s something more like this…

When you go out on a clear night, do you ever look up at the sky? If you’re like most people, you probably don’t. Oh, you might notice that the moon is out, and a few stars, but you probably don’t give it much more thought than that.

But when an astronomer goes out at night, and looks into the night sky, it is full of meaning for him. He can discern the movement of the stars and the planets, because his eye is trained to pick up such things. He knows the phases of the moon. He can see the constellations in their appointed places. He can identify the planets as they march along the ecliptic. He really sees the sky in a way that you and I don’t.

This is how it is when God begins to make you pure in heart. You begin to see God in a way that other people do not. You become more conscious of His presence, and of His working in your life and in the world around you. You begin to see His fingerprints on everything.

And that is a tremendous blessing. It brings great joy and peace and contentment to you life to see God that way. But that kind of seeing comes only to those whose attention is undivided, whose purpose is single, whose heart is pure.