And let us turn now together to our scripture text this evening from Matthew chapter 5, page 1029 in your pew Bibles, Matthew chapter 5. We're looking particularly at verse 7 this evening, verse 7, although I will read all of verses 1 to 12 again to remind ourselves of Christ's words to us as his followers. Indeed, this is God's word, so pay attention in its hearing. Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure at heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. This is indeed God's word, let us pray. Ask him to bless it. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the purposes that you have set out to accomplish. by your word, and indeed from your eternal perspective, which you have already accomplished by your word. We ask that you would make those true and apparent and real in our hearts and our souls and our spirits this evening, that through your precious truth, we might be changed more into the image of the one who is the truth, the way, the truth, and the life, Jesus Christ our Savior. We pray this in his name, amen. Well, just after the new year, our family unfortunately had to gather together for a funeral. A relative of mine had passed away. And as we were reflecting after the funeral, my mom mentioned that she had seen her old driver's ed teacher at the funeral. Well, okay, that's interesting enough. But then she said, and I wanted to go over and give him a hard time again for giving me a B. And I thought, That was in the 1960s that she would have been taking driver's ed. I took driver's ed in the 2000s. I don't think I would have recognized my teacher from Adam. Certainly not would have remembered what grade I got and certainly, certainly not have remembered some incident that caused trouble in my driver's ed class. My mother is not the sort of woman to hold a grudge. I don't want to speak poorly of her at all. She's not one to hold a grudge or to be bitter. I thought there must be a story behind this. How could she have, I remember this man who surely doesn't quite look the same as he did in the late 60s, and this incident in driver's ed class. Well, the first time that the class had field study, I went out in the car with the teacher. You know how it is, often three or four students will be with the teacher and the teacher started out driving and after a few minutes pulled over to the side of the road and said, all right, now it's your turn. So what I want you to do is to pretend like we're back at school and we're starting out on the day for a drive. You know, do everything that you would do if you were starting out for a day's drive. And Joy, my mom, or Joy-Ann as she would have been called then, you can go first. So we'll get out and we'll trade places and you can get in and go about this first lesson. So she did that, she got out and got in the driver's seat, did everything that you're supposed to do when you start out. You adjust the mirrors, make sure the seat is in the right place. I don't think they had seat belts at that time or so that she wouldn't have put on her seat belt. But thought everything was good, put it into drive and started going and the teacher immediately said, no, stop, you failed. My mom's like, what did I do wrong? And he said, Every time you start out, every day, you've got to check your tire pressures. You've got to open the hood and check your oil pressure. My mom thought, you know, you don't like to. I've never heard of this in my life. And worse, all the other students now knew the secret to this man's instruction. So she got failed that day while they all very dutifully went out and checked each tire, opened the hood, checked the tire pressure or the oil pressure, checked the washer fluid level. And it's silly. And now I remember, now I know why so many years later that you remember this incident and wanted to bring it up again. Maybe not at a funeral, which he didn't. But as silly as that is, we all know that there are things that will immediately show that you are not yet worthy of a driver's license. There are things that you could do, perhaps on a driver's lesson or a driver's test, that would show you're not a driver yet. Some things are, if you barely veer just over into the center line, you might be OK. If you run a stoplight, you're gonna fail. If you forget to check your tire pressure, you should be okay. If you happen to run into another car, that's immediately proof that you are not worthy to drive, you're not yet ready to drive. They're not gonna give you a driver's license and label you a driver, one who has fulfilled all the obligations of obtaining a driver's license. You may wonder, what does this have to do with Matthew 5, verse 7? In the life of someone who claims to be a Christian, Jesus, our Savior, tells us that there are some things that are not optional. There are some things that it's not okay if it does not describe you, if it is not true about you. And as Jesus says in the gospels, to be a Christian is to be merciful. Jesus says one who does not show mercy is like a driver's ed student who blows through a stop sign. shows that he is not a driver, shows that he is not a Christian. And it is not merely from Matthew chapter 5. We'll return to this parable later. But think of the parable of the unforgiving servant, the servant who had 10,000 talents of debt forgiven him, but refused to forgive just a few hundred denarii that someone else owed him. Jesus concludes that parable by saying this. In anger, his master delivered the unmerciful servant to the jailers until he should pay all his debt, which, remember, he could never do. It was 10,000 talents. Jesus says, so also my heavenly father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart. In other words, Jesus says being merciful is not optional. It's not merely for the The saintly saints, those who are more sanctified than we are, is indeed the duty of all Christians, all believers, all those who say they are disciples of Christ, to show it by being merciful. But more than being a duty, friends, Christ tells us it is a blessing. For by being merciful, we both demonstrate that we have received the mercy of Christ. And we then have the opportunity to be like Christ and showing mercy to others. We are blessed in knowing that we have received the mercy of Christ and have the opportunity to show that mercy to others. There's something refreshing about mercy, isn't there? Like a breath of fresh air, something that can even bring us to our knees, bring us to tears sometimes when we witness it, when we see it. Perhaps you have heard stories. I can think of several in recent years of grave sins that were committed against others. I think of one in Pennsylvania. Remember that shooter went to an Amish school and murdered innocent children. And yet the parents, the families of those children forgave that shooter. Or a few years after that, when a man went into a church in Charleston, South Carolina during a Sunday school prayer meeting and murdered Christians as they gathered together. Yet he was forgiven by those churchgoers. Not because he deserved it. Not because he earned it. Not because those people thought they were going to get anything from him for doing so. because they understood that they had first been forgiven by their Heavenly Father for the work of Christ. So they freely forgave another. And so we love, we delight. We are moved to the core by pictures and stories like this. Yet for us it is often so difficult, is it not, to be merciful. I'll be the first to admit it is sometimes hard to show mercy to those who have wronged us, who have wronged me. But indeed, friends, we see that this is at the ground floor of what it means to be a disciple, someone who gets Jesus. You can be mistaken in your theology about the end times, You can be mistaken about your soteriology, about your doctrine of salvation, and still be a believer. But Christ says, if you don't understand mercy, if you don't understand the mercy of a God who humbled himself, who took on flesh, who became the wrath-bearing substitute and sacrifice of God on your behalf, You don't understand what it means to be a follower of Christ. For to show mercy is God's very desire for you as his people. You surely heard Micah 6 verse 8. He has told you, O man, what is good? What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness or steadfast love or everlasting mercy? and to walk humbly with your God, to love it, to have one's affection oriented by the mercy that you have received in Christ, and that therefore you show towards others. Christ says, blessed are those who are merciful. Because you cannot separate being forgiven from being forgiving. cannot separate those two. That's the whole purpose of the parable that I mentioned at the beginning of our time together, the parable of the unforgiving servant. You may recall in Matthew 18 where that parable is delivered by Christ, it's in the context of Peter coming to Jesus. Do you remember this? What question Peter asked Jesus, Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother? Let me pick something wild, like seven times? Peter thought, outrageous, surely. Jesus says, no, I say to you not seven times, but seven times seven, or 77 times. And then he says it could be compared to a kingdom where the king wants to settle his debts. And so he's merciful to this man who, who knows how, has racked up a debt of 10,000 talents. Friends, that's a picture of our sin in the parable. The 10,000 talents are a debt that we can never repay. Our transgressing of the law of God, our rebellion against our maker, our delight in evil, our idolatry, is likened to a debt that is astronomical. Today, we could figure it in the millions and the tens of millions and the billions. Someone in that position who has been forgiven, Christ says, must understand forgiveness. Somebody who has been forgiven cannot separate it from being forgiven, and that is why This man becomes a negative example to us because he runs into a fellow servant who owed him only 100 denarii. He demands what he owes. And the king calls this man wicked. Doesn't say he's weak. Doesn't say he's a carnal Christian or a young Christian. He says he's wicked. He is to be thrown into prison until he can repay the debt, which would be an eternity. It's a picture of hell. It's a picture of someone who knows not the Lord's mercy, therefore shows it not to others. I remarked from Micah chapter six where the Lord says he desires mercy. Likewise, the prophet Hosea delivering the word, the Lord says, I desire mercy and not sacrifice. And many people misunderstand that statement. They think that the Lord is saying that the Old Testament Levitical system of sacrifices was to be rejected in place of some sort of wishy-washy, non-objective religion. But what is the Lord actually saying? He's saying if you stop merely with a sacrifice, If you stop merely with having your sins atoned for at the altar and do not exhibit mercy, what good is that? That is mercy that has not reached your heart. The Lord desires mercy and not merely sacrifice because He desires someone who, because of the sacrifice, understands mercy. that just as that animal was slain and laid on the altar on behalf of that worshiper's sin. So Christ was nailed to the cross for my sin. That is true mercy. And so the only response, that which Christ tells us, that which the Lord desires, must be mercy. That's why when Jesus is criticizing bringing woes onto the Pharisees in Matthew chapter 23, he says this in verse 23, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. Jesus says, don't neglect the others. Don't get rid of that which I have commanded you with worship, with understanding what it means to be my covenant people. He says, well, that must move, that must drive you towards justice, forgiveness, faithfulness, mercy. This is why Christ taught us to pray what? Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors. The implicit point there is how can we come before our heavenly father and ask him to forgive us of our daily sins? If we have not forgiven others, if we have shown that we have no understanding of our own status as sinners in need of forgiveness, just like those around us who may have wronged us. And by the way, we've probably wronged others too. And we long for their forgiveness. So how could we not likewise forgive them? Brothers and sisters in Christ, this is what Christ calls us to be. He says we are blessed as we are merciful. But never forget that this is rooted in the very character of your Heavenly Father. When Moses asks the Lord to show him his glory, the Lord passes by him and tells him his name. That is, that representation of his glorious character, Yahweh, Yahweh, the one who is says the God merciful and gracious. The very first perfection that he lists of himself is that he is merciful and gracious. How sweet that would have been to Moses in light of his experience with those people down on the plain in front of the mountain who had just rejected the covenant the Lord had just made with him for a golden calf. Oh, if a people ever needed to understand the gracious and merciful character of God, it was those. That is the glory. That is the name. That is the perfection of the Heavenly Father that he shows to them. He goes on, doesn't he? Slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear guilty. You see, mercy is not pretending like sin doesn't exist. Mercy is not merely, oh, let's let bygones be bygones and pretend that never happened. Let's just sort of have a a sort of existence where bad stuff doesn't really happen or it's merely you wave your hand and it goes away. No, the Lord says, I am merciful and I by no means clear the guilty. We have the greatest privilege of being able to look back through the cross to Exodus 34 and understand how those could be reconciled. That for those who come to Christ, Their guilt was cleared as it were at the cross. But for those who reject that mercy and show that they reject that mercy by not being merciful to others, the Lord says they will have that sin visited upon their head. You see, to receive mercy, is recognize that you understand mercy, and to show that you understand mercy is to be merciful. In 2013, one of my favorite actors, Colin Firth, was in a movie called The Railway Man. In this film, Firth plays a World War II veteran. During the war, he was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and sent to work on the Thai-Burma Railway. This railway was later made famous by the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. But this railway was little more than a death camp. There were 180,000 laborers in that valley working on that railway, half of whom died. Including 60,000 allied prisoners of war. 32 Japanese soldiers after the war were executed for their war crimes that they perpetrated. On the allied soldiers there. During his time in the camp first character is tortured by the Japanese for building a radio receiver from spare parts that he had gleaned around the camp. The Japanese thought that he had made this receiver so that he could communicate as a spy, but in fact he had merely made the radio so that they could have some entertainment as they were suffering. They could catch radio signals from elsewhere just to have some music. hear some news to boast, boost their morale. He was tortured. He was beaten, waterboarded. You can imagine, years later, he was still struggling with the trauma, the shock from that experience. And with the help of his wife, Patty, and his best friend, he decides he's going to go and confront one of the captors who had tortured him. He was obviously not one of those who was executed after the war. But the reason he decided to pursue this man is because he had read in a news account of someone interviewing this Japanese soldier who said that he felt forgiven. And this enraged Lomax. He said, I never forgave this man. How dare he feel forgiven? He still needs to pay for what he did to me. And so Lomax's whole point of finding this man was to get in his face and to tell him, you are not forgiven, that he still hated them, that even as an old man, he still dreamt of harming this Japanese soldier. So he returns to the place of his torture, of his torment. He eventually tracks down this man. But instead of harming him, instead of strangling him as he had dreamed of doing, he forgives him. And in this film, it's the most beautiful picture of someone who understands what it means to be forgiven. This Japanese soldier had gone to the news media and said that he felt forgiven. But he had no context, no right to say that. But this soldier comes to him, and not because the Japanese soldier deserved it, not because he'd done anything to earn this forgiveness. Really out of the grace and mercy of this soldier's heart and his own grasp of how the gospel had changed his own marriage and other things that the movie goes into that we don't have time to. And now their relationship totally changed. There's this sudden draining of hate. First character feels overwhelming liberation. Blessing by forgiving. Christ says, blessed are those who are merciful, for they shall receive mercy. It's been a few minutes at the end of our time this evening thinking about that second half of the Beatitude. What does it mean that Jesus says, blessed are the merciful for They shall receive mercy. Is this a quid pro quo, a this for that? If I'm merciful enough, then God will forgive me. Is this a paying off of what Jesus has done? As long as I'm merciful to enough people, I'll show that I deserved Christ's mercy. I hope that you've already heard plenty that shows that's not the case. Perhaps it's easiest to understand this if we work backward. Think about it. Who are those who receive the mercy of God, particularly the saving mercy of God? Well, to ask the question is to answer it. Those who are God's saved people, the disciples, those whom the Lord has loved and sent Christ to die for and to save. So who are those who receive mercy? Disciples. What kind of people are disciples? what we've been saying all along, those who show mercy. It's not that we can earn the mercy. How could you? Any more than that unforgiving servant could have found 10,000 talents in the couch cushions. It wasn't going to happen. The very point is that we cannot earn it. That's why it's mercy. It's that which we do not deserve. But by demonstrating mercy, friends, by demonstrating mercy to others, we demonstrate fruit. We demonstrate that we have been born again. We demonstrate that we are saved. These are those to whom Christ promises mercy. It's those whom he has already shown mercy in his ministry, in his death, in his choosing of them, in his love for them, in his uniting them to himself. All these acts of mercy are of a peace with the mercy that Christ promises. This is not some sort of works-based to-be-received mercy in the future based on who you are. Though Christ can call the merciful blessed, Because from his perspective, they have already received all mercy. They have been forgiven. They have been brought into his family. They have been assured that at the last day, they will be declared acquitted before the judgment seat of God because of the righteousness of Christ given to them and received by faith. And because that is true. Because he has showered his Holy Spirit upon them. Because that spirit is working fruit into the heart, into the life, to the witness of these disciples. They will show mercy, because that's what it means to be a disciple of God. I recognize we do get nervous here. Sometimes it sounds as if we are earning our salvation. But God makes it very clear in his word that salvation equals fruit. And what does he say about unbelievers and believers? You will know them by their fruit. You will recognize those who have received mercy by the mercy that they show to others. So if you want to bring delight to your heavenly father, If you want to demonstrate to the world the character of the one who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light, if you want to beautify and to glorify and to adorn that which Christ has done for you, you have every opportunity with those around you. When they sin against you, perhaps it's something as simple as they cut you off in traffic. Perhaps it's as grievous as those murderous examples I mentioned earlier. Whatever the case, by being merciful, you exalt and glorify Christ. You show that just as that person may not have deserved your mercy, well, so you didn't reserve the mercy of Christ either, but it was freely given to you. So you freely share it with others. And yes, you should also take this opportunity to examine your heart, to see if there be fruit there. If mercy is absent, the solution is not to try harder. The solution is to get your eyes fixed on Christ. To be realistic with your own heart about the depths of your own sin and the truckload of mercy that Christ has dumped on you, has showered upon you, has lavished upon you. That as those roots sink down deep into the loving, gracious mercy of Christ, they will flower and fruit into merciful behavior towards others. In so doing, we recognize that the acceptance we receive in Christ is, again, not even based on the merit of our fruit, but of the merit of the fruit producer or the merciful Christ. When he looks upon you and he sees your acts of mercy, he'll say, ah, this is someone beloved by my son. This is someone who has received the mercy of Christ. How else could he have been merciful with all those? And he will receive those Words, well done, my good and faithful servant. You will receive the full mercy of Christ as you demonstrate that Christ is yours, that you are his. Friends, we are blessed in Christ with mercy in order to bless others with mercy. Let us pray. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for these few minutes this evening that you've given us to reflect on the goodness we have in your Son. May our hearts and indeed our very lives demonstrate that we truly grasped what it means to be a disciple of Christ. Indeed, may the world know as they see us that we have a gracious, merciful, kind Heavenly Father and Savior and Spirit. Pray this in your name. Amen.