The Good Life: Matthew 5:7: “Blessed Are the Merciful…”

If we have received God’s mercy, our greatest desire should be to pass it on to other people. But how can we go about doing that?

MATTHEW 5:7: “BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL, FOR THEY SHALL OBTAIN MERCY.”

INTRODUCTION

I want to share with you two stories I read in the news recently.

This story was reported just last September:
A man named Ed Peirce of Rock Hill, South Carolina, was retired but went back to work full time to cover the costs of two families who live in rental property he owns.
Just recently the fathers of both families lost their jobs.
Mr. Peirce, their landlord, would have been perfectly within his rights to send his tenants, including their small children out on the streets, especially since he needed the money from their rent for his own living.
But Mr. Peirce refused to evict them. Instead, he left retirement and went back to work to cover their expenses while they looked for jobs.
Mr. Peirce told the reporter: “I sat with them and prayed for better times. These are stand-up guys. Proud. They paid me before, when they were working. You don’t show your faith, your Christianity, in words. You do it in deeds.”

The other story came from The New York Times, August 2005
Ryan Cushing, a 19-year-old was one of six teenagers out for a night of joyriding and crime.
Ryan’s companions were charged with stealing credit cards and forgery, but Cushing was charged with assault for tossing a frozen turkey through the windshield of a car and nearly killing a woman named Victoria Ruvolo. Ms. Ruvolo needed many hours of surgery to rebuild her shattered facial bones.
Convicted, Ryan was facing 25 years in prison.
Upon leaving the courtroom the boy came face-to-face with his victim, Ms. Ruvolo.
He said he was sorry and begged her to forgive him.
Ms. Ruvolo did. She cradled his head as he sobbed. She stroked his face and patted his back. “It’s O.K., It’s O.K.,” she said. “I just want you to make your life the best it can be.”
The prosecutor wanted to impose harsh punishment on a crime he denounced as heedless and brutal, but Ms. Ruvolo’s resolute compassion, changed his mind.
The story ends with this observation: “Given the opportunity for retribution, Ms. Ruvolo gave and got something better: the dissipation of anger and the restoration of hope, in a gesture as cleansing as the tears washing down her damaged face, and the face of the foolish, miserable boy whose life she single-handedly restored.”
The story doesn’t say that Ms Ruvolo is a Christian believer, but I am sure that her generous act of mercy came from her love for God.

I. Jesus said (Matthew 5.7): “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

A. As we saw from the two stories from the news, mercy has two ways of expressing itself:

Mr. Peirce was merciful because he had compassion on his renters. His mercy cost him something. He went back to work to keep from having to evict them from their homes. Mr. Peirce’s mercy is also called “compassion.”

Ms. Ruvolo was merciful because she forgave a terrible injury, and by her action helped to redeem a young man from the consequences of his crime. Ms. Ruvolo’s mercy could also be called “forgiveness.”

B. Mr. Peirce and Ms. Ruvolo were like God.
To be merciful is to be like God.
In his beautiful song of praise in Luke 1, Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father speaks of how God gives salvation to his people. He says,

"By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sat in darkness
and in the shadow of death."

II. Jesus says that the merciful will obtain mercy.

A. A lot of people think that God is bound to love us no matter how we behave. They say, “God is love,” and that’s the only verse they know.

It’s true that God loves even the worst of us. Nothing that we ever do can make God stop caring for us and seeking to draw us to himself and make us his children.

But if we experience the love of God, it has to make us different from the people we were.

Jesus told a story about a master whose servant owed him a gigantic sum of money. When the slave begged to be allowed more time to pay off a loan (which he actually could never have paid) his master generously forgave him the entire loan.

But that servant found a fellow servant who owed him a small sum. When his debtor begged for more time, first servant refused.
When the master heard of what the ungrateful servant had done, he revoked the forgiveness of the loan and handed the wicked servant over to the tormentors.
Then Jesus said something very serious: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

We have no special claim on God’s mercy just by being alive.

We have no special claim on God’s mercy just by going to church or by believing certain things in the Bible.
Only when we reproduce God’s mercy in our own lives, do we place ourselves in the position where we can experience the fullness of God’s mercy.
If we are unmerciful, we are proving that we have not really experienced the mercy of God.

In the Lord’s Prayer we say, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

In the story of judgment in Matthew 25 Jesus, as judge, tells those who were unmerciful, that because they have not fed the hungry, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, taken care of the sick, and visited those in prison, they have rejected him.
For them only awaits judgment.

B. The gift of mercy is especially precious because it doesn’t only come from one human being to bless another, but it also comes from God’s heart and God’s hand through his servant.

A Christian, grieving about all the suffering in the world, cried out to God, “Why don’t you do something! Why don’t you do something!”
And then he heard God say, “I did do something. I made you.

A reporter challenged Mother Teresa: “When a baby dies alone in a Calcutta alley, where is God?”
Mother Teresa answered, “God is there, suffering with that baby. The question really is, ‘Where are you?’”
CONCLUSION

God wants to bless us, but only when we let him change us into channels of his mercy into a lost and sorrowing world can we be truly blessed.
I have a prayer I use that ends like this:

"And seeing that it is thy gracious will
to make use even of such weak human instruments
in the fulfillment of thy mighty purpose for the world,
let my life today be the channel
through which some little portion of thy divine love and pity
may reach the lives that are nearest to my own."

(from John Baillie, Diary of Private Prayer, day 2, morning)