“Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” (Matt. 5:7)
Thank God for His mercy in our lives. We all talk about it, hear it preached and are thankful for it. But do we really know what mercy is?
Mercy is not a pardon. As we know from examples in recent history, a pardon occurs when a person is found guilty of something but is set free by a higher authority, usually after a conviction and sentencing. The most newsworthy pardons for many of us are those of Richard Nixon (by President Gerald Ford) in 1975 and Scooter Libby (by President George W. Bush) in 2007.
Mercy is not acquittal. That is a finding of absence of guilt, whether through insufficient evidence or a jury decision. Acquittals happen to guilty people, as most of America believes occurred in the O.J. Simpson murder trial in the 1990s.
Mercy is not parole. After being sentenced for a crime, a person often is released after serving a portion of that sentence behind bars. Parole can be awarded for good behavior or other circumstances.
So what is mercy, especially for the sinner? Mercy is applied when you do not get what you rightfully deserve from God, and then you live your Christian life in such a way that you do not seek vengeance or vindication – returning evil for good.
The truth is that every one of us is a guilty sinner who deserves God’s wrath. “The wrath of God abideth on him” that does not seek Christ, according to John 3:36. But God has chosen not to give us what we deserve if we accept Him. Then, God says, “Because I have chosen to demonstrate mercy to you, I want you to demonstrate mercy to others.”
In contrast, justice is the act of getting exactly what we deserve. You rarely see someone who knows he is guilty stand before a judge and say, “Give me justice.” But we are all quite familiar with the phrase, “I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”
When I was a student I often heard a Christian school teacher pray, “Lord, help these students perform on this test according to how they studied.” That is the most ridiculous thing a teacher in a Christian school could say. A more appropriate prayer would be, “Lord, show mercy to these students as they take this test, because most of them have not studied as they should.”
So while justice is getting what you deserve and mercy is not getting what you deserve, grace occurs when God gives you something extra that you don’t deserve. God demonstrates mercy by not sending you to Hell if you accept Christ, and He demonstrates grace by giving you Heaven, the Holy Spirit, the Bible and all of the wonderful things of God. We should thank Him daily for His mercy and grace.
God’s mercy is factual. He knows that you are a sinner. Not only has He always known you are a sinner, He also knows the sins you haven’t committed yet. Most of us think that we confess our sins so we can clear the slate with God, but we fail to understand that Christ died on the cross for all of our sins – past, present and future. Before He laid the foundation of the world, God knew what you were going to do. But if God brings mercy, Satan will bring guilt. You can count on it.
God’s mercy is full. It is a complete demonstration, not a partial one. Either you are forgiven or you are not. There is no “half” mercy with God.
God’s mercy is forever. We live in a time where some men preach that you can do so things that get you so out of favor with God that He takes your name out of the Lamb’s Book of Life. That is not true. When God gives you mercy, you have it forever.
There are a number of instances in the Bible that illustrate mercy. In I Samuel 24 we see David, a good man who was despised and marked for death because of the jealousy of King Saul. While Saul had taken his entire army out to hunt David down and kill him, God turned the tables as only He can. David and a few of his men found themselves standing over the sleeping body of Saul. None of Saul’s men had a clue.
One of David’s men asked, “Should I kill him?” David said no. He knew that he was not to touch God’s anointed. We are conditioned to think that if we have that kind of bitter mortal enemy, the only to stop him is by killing him, because he is not going to rest until he has killed you. David could have eliminated all of his problems by killing Saul, but he didn’t. He demonstrated mercy.
Most of us think that if we can just get rid of So-and-so, it would fix our problem. But God says, “No. Show mercy.”
In Acts 7, Stephen was stoned to death for nothing more than believing in Christ and telling others about Him. As these large rocks were pummeling him, breaking his bones and his teeth, causing him to fall to the ground in a bloody heap, he could have cried out, “Lord, vindicate me! Rain your vengeance down from Heaven!” But he didn’t do that. Instead, Acts 7:60 recounts this prayer: “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.”
Of course, the ultimate example of this type of mercy is Jesus Christ, who hung on a cross as wicked sinners mocked and spat upon Him. His response is recorded in Luke 23:34. “Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do.”
Mercy is not an easy thing to administer. When you offend me or hurt me or my family, my natural reaction is to bring vengeance upon you. But the Bible teaches us to do exactly the opposite.
When you get saved, you receive God’s mercy. After you get saved, you must live to experience God’s mercy. The problem for many of us is that we receive His mercy but have trouble experiencing it or living in it. But we also are commanded to share God’s mercy with others.
Every one of you reading these words has probably committed some sin that would destroy you if evidence of it were displayed for the world to see. I have a feeling that, in the deep recesses of your mind, there are some things that you don’t want anyone to know about.
There have been occasions in my life, even recently, where I was on such a high in the things of God but then had a thought so wicked that I wondered how a person could even be saved and think like that. There are people who have served God faithfully for decades but still have Satan remind them of sins from 30 or 40 years ago. No one remembers your sin in those situations except you and the Devil.
The Bible has several things to say about what happens to your sin. Is. 43:25 says, “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.” God Himself has blotted out your sin, never to remember it anymore.
Look at Is. 44:22. “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud thy sins: return unto me, for I have redeemed thee.” The Lord can no longer see your sin because it is covered with a cloud that cannot be penetrated.
God doesn’t know what you did because He has chosen not to remember it. Your sin has been removed from the mind of God.
The Bible says in Ps. 103:10-14, “He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.”
He has removed our sins from the east to the west, which have no point of origin. We know where the north and the south begin, but not the east and the west. God has thrown your sins out through the timeline of eternity in two separate directions, and they can never be found because there is no end to eternity.
Micah 7:19 says, “He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.” I have heard that there are caverns and holes at the bottom of the ocean that cannot be traversed by man with all of his present technology. No one knows for sure why those places exist, but my personal theory is that God has made some places so remote, and He does not allow man to acquire the wisdom necessary to get there, because there are some things down there I did when I was a boy and God doesn’t want anyone to ever bring them up again.
Look at Is. 38:17. “Behold, for peace I had great bitterness: but thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption: for thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back.” Now that doesn’t sound as cool as some of these other examples, but think about how hard it is to get something off your back. Every time you turn around, your back turns around also. God does this because He doesn’t want to find it again. When we bury the hatchet, we mark the spot so we can retrieve the hatchet if we want to. God puts something behind Him and never goes back. He is always going forward.
Jer. 31:34 says, “And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.” When you pray and ask God to forgive you for that sin you committed yesterday, God is able to say, “What sin are you talking about?” He has the divine ability to forget because all of our sins were covered by the blood of Christ when we were saved.
When you ask God to “forgive” you of your sin, you are acknowledging before Him that you know you have done wrong. He has already forgiven you; you are just coming to grips with it yourself. You are agreeing with God that you have done something that grieves His spirit, so you can restore fellowship with Him.
When you hit an emotional high after several days in a revival meeting, Satan comes along to slow things down by hitting you with things you did last week, last month or 10 years ago. The Devil is the only one who reminds you of your past. You need to remind him of his future and let him know what God has done for you through His mercy.
Too many of you are like Pilgrim in “Pilgrim’s Progress,” who walks under the weight of his sin throughout the story before coming to Calvary and trusting Christ as his Saviour. The big difference is that Pilgrim leaves that weight at the foot of the cross and you insist on continuing to carry yours, making it difficult if not impossible to have a joyous Christian life because you are weighted down with the guilt of the past.
As far as God’s view of your sin is concerned, you don’t have any past. It’s been blotted out and washed in the blood.
We don’t enjoy the forgiveness we receive from God as we live the Christian life. Every step we take, the Lord tells us, “Come on, you can do this,” and Satan says, “No, you can’t.” We can’t serve God because of what we did 20 years ago. You cannot live a victorious life and have the joy of the Lord while carrying the guilt of the past.
Much of the counseling I do today concerns things that people should have gotten over a long time ago. People think they can’t be used of God because of past addictions, or their current marriage can’t work because of problems or mistakes that ended a previous marriage.
People who don’t experience forgiveness are always defensive and self-conscious. They take everything as a personal attack. I can be talking to a fellow church member about the weather, and someone else who sees us thinks that we are gossiping about him. A defensive person thinks the whole world revolves around him and his little problems, and an innocent comment is taken as a frontal assault. You think everyone sees your baggage, when in reality you are the only one who sees it.
A person without forgiveness has a defeated spirit. Full of moodiness and negativity, he is high one minute and low the next. Sometimes you will bask in His majestic glory and let go of those burdens for just a little while. But you always pick them back up. You build your life on what other people do to help you with your burden that you shouldn’t even be carrying in the first place.
Someone without forgiveness deals totally in the realm of feeling and not in fact. Your entire attitude rises and falls on how you felt when you woke up this morning or what kind of song you just heard on the radio. Let me help you right here. I don’t feel saved half the time, but I know I’m saved because God said so.
If I had to rely on feelings, I would only preach every other Sunday. If I only read my Bible when I felt like it, I would get through Genesis and Exodus before dying in Leviticus. If I only came to Sunday school when I felt like it, you wouldn’t see me there very often.
When we operate on feelings, the smallest thing will make us stop doing what we’re supposed to do. We let a bad feeling keep us home from a revival meeting. We hear something negative and it ruins our entire day. You cannot let circumstances dictate what you are going to do for God. But people who don’t live in forgiveness carry around a load that makes them susceptible to anything.
Even worse, most of them consistently doubt their salvation. Sometimes Satan comes along and tells me that I’m not saved. “A saved person wouldn’t do that or watch that or think that,” he says. But my salvation doesn’t depend on how I feel or what I’m doing; it is totally dependent upon what Jesus Christ did on the cross of Calvary when He offered me an eternal pardon through His mercy and grace.
If you have a defeated attitude, you will second-guess yourself every time you hear a sermon about lost church members because you keep dragging around all of that sin and letting it control your life.
People without forgiveness in their own lives will deny forgiveness to others. Some of you are hesitant to forgive your spouse or your children for the smallest thing because you are not experiencing and enjoying forgiveness in your own life, and you can’t demonstrate what you don’t know.
The biggest culprit in this kind of defeated life is Satan, whom the Bible calls “the accuser of our brethren” in Rev. 12:10. His greatest tool is your past. Your own actions and failures also play a role, along with your bad attitude that keeps you thinking you can’t have victory.
If I didn’t believe you can have victory, I would quit preaching and get out of church today (and I would encourage you to go along with me). But I am convinced that there is victory in Jesus Christ, and He will do everything He wants to do in your life if you will just let Him.
Don’t give me some ridiculous excuse about a “disease” you have. Your problem is a sin problem, and I know a Man who came to wash away sin and give you a new life in Him. You may still have some tendencies and sin issues to deal with, but if our God cannot deliver us from what we face, then we don’t have much of a God in the first place. If you know of one person who has gotten victory over a troubled past, then you can rest assured that it is affordable and available to all.
I still have fleshly things that I must deal with, but I don’t crave them like I used to because God has given me victory over them. I have to keep safeguards in place and be careful how I conduct myself, but some of things I used to think I needed to have a happy life just aren’t important at all to me anymore. I don’t give them a second thought.
If you want to get rid of that burden, you need to receive God’s Word as truth with a capital “T.” Christ said in Matt. 16:18, “Upon this rock will I build my church.” Since we also know that “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” according to John 1:14, then we can take comfort in the fact that we have His Word just as if He were standing right next to us.
Ps. 32:1-5 says, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the LORD imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile. When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah. I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.”
Your sin is settled and forgiven because God said it. It doesn’t matter what your feelings tell you. What matters is what the Bible tells you. Your feelings will come and go, but God’s Word is settled forever in Heaven.
You need to start refocusing on your future instead of your past. Phil. 3:13-14 says, “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
Too many of you keep staring at the burden behind you and don’t even see the prize ahead of you. You are focusing on what you used to do or should have done and not on what you can and should be doing now and in the future. Wouldn’t you rather focus on the good things God has for you right now?
We need to rely on God’s Word. Col. 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.” The way to keep going as you should is by reading the Bible, hearing it preached, singing about it and meditating on it. Make it the main priority in your life and stop loving the world.
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “He’s so heavenly minded that he’s no earthly good.” That’s one of the most idiotic things ever said. We need more heavenly-mindedness instead of the hell that too many people are going through here on Earth. Just stay in the Word and follow wherever it leads you.
We all know about the infamous rape allegations involving the Duke lacrosse team in 2006. An overzealous prosecutor went too far and the lives of many players were ruined even though the evidence was extremely weak. Once the accusations got out in public, they could never be taken back.
Eventually a higher court got involved and the case was dismissed. But the prosecutor was disbarred and faced variety of civil and criminal charges of his own, partly because the families he had targeted wanted vindication for what he did to those innocent young men.
If you fail to demonstrate mercy, don’t feel too bad when things come around hard on you. I’ve been around long enough to know that the time will come when I desperately need grace and mercy, so I’m going to try to show some of that to people I encounter today.
Make sure you have obtained the mercy of God. You don’t want His justice. Once you have His mercy, see that you share mercy with others as you live your Christian life.
