Beatitudes 5

I've been giving two different series of sermons at the same time. We've been going through an overview of biblical prophecy, which will take about a year, and we've been going through the Beatitudes. And of course, two weeks ago when I was here, I talked about how we can understand the framework of prophecy in terms of the covenants, especially the Abrahamic covenant, the Sinai covenant, or the Old Covenant, and the New Covenant. And if you remember, the first sermon was on the proto-Evan Gelium, the first good news in Genesis 3.15, and how that sets the basis. I mean, yes, we're going to get into 666 and the beast and all that stuff, but we need to understand God's underlying purpose and what he's doing in spite of Satan and in spite of humanity. And so we've had two sermons in a Bible study now on that basis that we have to build off of. So I want to go back to the Beatitudes. We've been going through the Beatitudes, and it's easy to look at the Beatitudes, as I've said, it's just sort of fluff. They're nice sayings, but they don't have a lot of meaning. The truth is, when it comes to our Christian lives and how we make our decisions, how we live, there's nothing more complex or profound than the Beatitudes, the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount. And we've gone through four of them so far, and I don't know about you, but as I prepare the sermons, I become uncomfortable with all four of them, because they're not exactly what I want to be told. Because, you know, Beatitude just means perfect happiness. And the reason why it's called that in English is because he starts all these statements with, Jesus does, blessed are you, and then there's something else that happens, he talks about. These are the blessings from God. You want blessings from God. We all do, but it's not the car or the job. I mean, he gives us those things, but that's not what he's concerned with. These are the blessings he wants to give us, and we've gone through them. Four of them. We're going to go through a fifth one today. Let's go to Matthew 5.

And as usual, when I went through this, I thought, huh, I haven't received this blessing entirely, because I haven't done what it says you have to do to receive the blessing.

Remember in verse 3, we start with the first one, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. We want to have eternal salvation. We have to be poor in spirit, and we talked a lot about what that actually means in the scripture. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Mourning is part of life.

Living in Satan's world with humanity in a mess, we're all going to have losses. Losses of loved ones through death, losses of friends who just because they don't want to be our friends anymore, losses of jobs, loss of money, loss of health, we're all going to lose things. And as we lose things, we mourn. He doesn't say blessed are those who never mourn because mourning is part of life.

He says blessed are those who mourn because if they have this right relationship with God, they shall be comforted. The blessing is the comfort. The blessing isn't never mourning. It's the comfort that comes from God. He said blessed are the meek. They shall inherit the earth. And we went through what that actually means and basically what we consider a great attribute in our society. The sort of arrogance and the pride is not a blessing from God. It doesn't produce a blessing from God.

So we had to go through what meekness is. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. And once again, the problem with the blessing is in order to receive the filling, you have to hunger and thirst. That's uncomfortable. If you've ever really been hungry, if you've ever really been really thirsty, I don't mean just the Day of Atonement, but I mean really hungry and thirsty. That's uncomfortable. And he's saying if you want this blessing, you actually have to suffer in your desire for righteousness, which is a right relationship with God.

Righteousness is a right relationship with God and is expressed in our relationships with other people. Well, that's not the blessing I wanted. I wanted more money. And he says here, if you want this blessing, this is what it costs and this is what God will give you. So let's look at the next blessing on the list, what we're going to cover today. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Now, you and I want mercy from God. Literally, and it's in Greek and Hebrew and English, the word has a general meaning. There's subtly of meanings, but basically the same, which is literally that you feel sympathy for someone who's in misery or has a problem, and you have pity on them. You feel sympathy for someone, and you show them mercy. And we all want God to have empathy with us, right, and show us mercy.

Be patient with me. Be gentle with me. Help me when I have a problem. Physical problem. I'm sick. Please, heal me. Be merciful to me. Have pity on me. Have empathy with what I'm going through. Now, to be merciful basically is this is how you have to be. You want to receive God's mercy. We have to learn to be merciful, too. We have to learn to imitate His mercy. And we can apply this in two broad ways.

Let's start in Micah 6. Let's go to the Old Testament, then we'll come back to the New Testament mainly. But Micah 6, these few verses we're going to read, sums up Micah's entire ministry and what he's teaching on this prophetic ministry. But he's talking to, writing it to ancient Israel about their sins and how God's going to punish them. But here's the summation of his entire message. This is verse 6 of chapter 6.

With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings with calves a year old? He says, what is it that God really wants? How many offerings can I bring? How much money? How many animals can I sacrifice? How many times can I go to the temple? What is it He really wants from me? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams? 10,000 rivers of oils? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression? The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He says, what if I just give my children to God and say, here, my children, do with them what you want?

What is it that God wants from me?

Verse 8. He has shown you, O man, what is good. The answer is, God's actually told us what He wants, so it should be obvious to us. What does the Lord require of you? This is what He requires of us. To do justly. That's a fascinating concept. There's a whole sermon there. That means to be just. That means to be correct and right in all of our actions and thoughts, and it has a legal meaning to it, and how we treat people, and it has a moral meaning to it. So it's a very incredible statement He makes there. To love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. This is what He wants. Walk humbly with God in subjection and love and understanding that without God we're nothing, which we're back to the concept there of poor in spirit. Poor in spirit has to do with, I am nothing without God, and I understand that. To do justly. To love mercy. Not just to, okay, understand mercy. Not to receive, just to receive mercy, but to love mercy. Now there is a subtle difference in the Hebrew word of mercy because it literally, it's broader in its meaning. It means you have empathy towards others, and it creates an action. You can't have mercy without an action, basically, in Hebrew. In fact, that's why in old English translations of the Bible you will see that word many times. Chesed is the word. It's translated loving kindness. Mercy is loving kindness. It's an action towards people.

Now with that understanding, because the Greek may not be just quite as subtle, but that's what would have been understood by the Greek or the writers of the New Testament. Same concept. Let's go to what Jesus taught in Luke chapter 10. This is so well known because it's one of the parables. Everybody knows it. You know, if we ask, all of you can say, oh yeah, I know that parable, and you could talk about that parable. But this is a very important parable. Let's go back and look at it again. Sometimes we have to look at things over and over and over again.

Verse 25 of Luke 10. And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? I want a blessing here. And he was on the right path. He said, what I want is salvation. I want blessings in this life, and I want to bless life beyond this. How do I receive that? And he said to him, what is written in the law? What is your reading of it?

And he said, the man answered him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. A man pinpointed what is called the two greatest commandments. He said, this is it. This is the core of what we're supposed to be. Loving God with everything we have, everything we are, is dedicated to loving God, and two, we love our neighbor.

And Jesus said to him, you have answered rightly, do this and you shall live. He says, you want salvation, go do that. Now, that presented him with a problem because he didn't give him any details. It's an interesting discussion here that leads to the parable. So the man wants now some understanding, and what he says is, verse 29, wanting to justify himself. In other words, wait a minute, wait a minute. There has to be limitations on this loving God. Well, not loving God. There has to be limitations on loving God. And he said to Jesus, who is my neighbor?

That's the question we continue to struggle with all the time. Who is my neighbor?

Is it the guy on the street that asked for a handout? Is it the person that lives next to me? Is it a person I work with? Who is my neighbor?

Jesus answers the question, not by telling him who the neighbor is, but telling him what a good neighbor is. And in doing so, he answers his question. If we're still asking who is my neighbor, we've missed this parable.

If we're still asking that, we've missed the parable. Who is my neighbor?

I struggled with this very thing this week, so I'm going to give a confession here in a few minutes, I struggled with, and I shouldn't have.

He says, Jesus said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among feeds, who stripped him of his clothing, wooted him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Okay, so man gets beat up and robbed and left on the street. Everybody's ignoring him, right? Just another deadbeat.

Now, by chance, a certain priest came by down the road, and when he saw him, he passed by to the other side. Likewise, a Levite, when he arrived at the place, came and looked and passed by to the other side. These are leaders, religious leaders in Judaism. I mean, the priest was considered a person who directly served God. A Levite was a part of a tribe that directly served God, and took care of the scrolls. They were the scribes. They were the people who knew the Scripture, who protected the Scripture, and they didn't want to be by this. Who knows? Maybe he's drunk.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, Camry was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.

This is really hard in its context. The Samaritans were despised by the Jews, and the reason why the Samaritans were people, when the northern tribes were scattered, the Babylonians, or the Assyrians brought in other people who populated the place from all over their empire, and they brought with them all their pagan gods. But they worshiped the God of Israel because, well, we're now Israelites. And so they claimed to be Israelites, but they weren't.

The Samaritans were a people who weren't from Israel, and they didn't worship the true God. If you go through and look how even Jesus confronted the Samaritans and said, you don't worship God in truth. You think you do. Well, that's just because you Jews, you worship down in Jerusalem. We worship here. We don't go to Jerusalem. So you have someone who's at best on the fringe of society and religiously looked down upon, and participated in sort of a semi-worship of God mixed with pagan practices. So to put this in the modern context, let's just say a Catholic priest came along and journeyed and came and had compassion. Now we're in the context of that time.

So he went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, and he let him on his own animal, brought him to the inn, and took care of him. And the next day when he departed, he took out to Tanairi and gave them to the innkeepers and said, take care of him, and whatever more you spend, when I come again, I will repay you. See, the Samaritans didn't keep the first commandment of loving God, but the point is in this one, the Samaritans doing the second commandment. That doesn't make him right with God. That's not the issue he's making here. He's using someone that they would have looked on as someone who was at best a marginal worshipper of God, at worst someone who was an absolute rebellion against God, and he uses him as a hero to make a point, because he asked him the question, to which of these three do you think was the neighbor to whom him who fell among thieves? You want to know who is my neighbor? I want you to look at the man on the street and who was a neighbor to him. He really twisters around. I mean, using the Samaritan was such a slap in the face did he do of the day.

But he's making his point. And he said, the man got it, he who showed mercy on him, and Jesus said to him, go and do likewise. He who had empathy for him and did something for him. Didn't know him. I struggled with this this week. I had a person call me that said, I say struggled, I shouldn't have, but I did. They called me and said, hey, I'm from Alabama. I have my daughter who's moved to Murfreesboro. She had a job working for Walmart as a delivery person, and she had to use her own her own vehicle, and it broke down. And she's out of money. So I thought, since she's part of the Church of God, I said, part of the Church of God, what job is she looking for? She says, she's looking for another job. She says, she's looking to be working at a hospital as a pastor in a hospital. So, okay, that's a different Church of God. I said, that's a Pentecostal Church of God. There's a couple of them here, big ones. She said, okay. She said, well, do you have their numbers? And I said, no. And she said, could you just give her food for two or three days? She said, that's it. I don't want money or anything. She says, it's my granddaughter. It was her granddaughter, not her daughter. It's my granddaughter, and I'm just so worried. I said, okay, have her give me a call. So she called me, and we talked a little bit, and I said, I can't give you much. Tell you what, I personally will give you enough food for two or three days. She said, oh, thank you so much. Given I got in the car, went to Walmart, because she lived close to Walmart, got her a little food thing, and went in and gave it to her. And I struggled with it. I'm thinking, why am I giving this person money? I don't know them. And then I was in the middle of preparing the sermon and said, oh, okay, I get it. You know, before I can preach it, I got to do it. Now, I'm not saying you go give everything to everybody. I'm saying, she was, in that moment, my neighbor. She had come to my house and called me, and I wasn't going to give her a lot of money. I wasn't going to give her, you know. Now, I don't know how much of the story you're giving me was true or not, but all she asked for was food for two or three days. So I could have her food for two or three days. This says I'm supposed to do that. That's what it says. Boy, I want a blessing of mercy. God, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. Then you be merciful. You have empathy, and it doesn't say on those who deserve it. Now, you don't give certain, you don't give money to someone that they're going to go get drunk on or go shoot up on. Okay, you don't do that. That's not being merciful. I'll give food to anybody because I've started to realize, yeah, that's the point.

Blessed are those who are merciful, for they shall receive mercy. As we receive mercy from God, we are to be merciful to others. Once again, that doesn't mean being taken advantage of.

But why would He give that parable? Why would He use the Samaritans, the good guy?

Because He didn't say anything nice about the Samaritans in His ministry either, by the way. Jesus didn't. This is all on purpose.

Look here in Matthew 5 again. Let's go back and look just a few verses beyond what we've been looking at. Let's look at verse 43.

Here, part of the Sermon on the Mount, you have heard that it is said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. So once again, in order to fulfill that statement, which is interesting, it's not actually in the Old Testament. It doesn't say that exactly. So it must have been part of the oral law. But to do that, you have to define who your neighbor is, right? I have to define my neighbor. Then to define my enemy. But I say, do you love your enemies? Bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you. That you may be the Son of your Father in heaven. And here's the example he uses. We know God punishes evil people. We know that God says that we're to withdraw from evil people. We know that God says we're to stand up against evil people. The point is, he's saying, can you have empathy even on a bad person in a certain situation? And our answer is, no, he's not my neighbor. He's a bad guy.

And then here's the example he uses. That you may be the sons of your Father in heaven, for he makes his Son rise on the evil and on the good and says, rain on the just and on the unjust.

He says, you know, God punishes people. But every day, even the wicked people of this earth receive a blessing from God. They have life. The Son rose today. He's not directly blessing them, but there's just blessings in the creations that are there.

He says, for if you love those who love you and rewards, what word do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? Remember, the Romans made the Jews collect taxes for them. So if you were a tax collector, like Matthew, you were considered a traitor to your country, because the Romans made them do it. You're a traitor to your country, and as bad as as low a person as you could be, because you collected taxes for the beast power. So once again, he uses these terms. Look, even your Jewish brothers who are tax collectors love their own families. Is that the standard that you're looking for, shooting for? And if you greet your brother and only, what do you do more than the tax collectors? Therefore, you shall be perfect, just as your Father in Heaven is perfect. I'm not saying you should participate in other people's sins. You should stand up against other people's sins.

You should refuse to participate.

You know, there's this big thing that's happened, and I don't know if you keep up with what's happening in the evangelical world, but there's an evangelical pastor who is actually very good at understanding certain parts of Scripture. And he got up recently and said, well, if a member of your family is a transgender and they're getting married, go ahead and go to the wedding. And of course, all the other evangelicals are saying you shouldn't do that. I agree you shouldn't do that. You don't go to a transgender wedding. It's not a wedding.

I won't participate any. But you know what? If I had a family member that was a transgender and they called me and said, Gary, I lost my job, I broke my leg, and I need some food, I'd take them some food. Because God let the sunrise on them today. I'm not going to participate with them. But I'll give them that little that even God makes for them, right? This isn't, oh man, I wanted all these blessings, and now we're in the milk of the Word, you know? All these blessings and this part of this whole thing of the sermon of the mouth, that's sort of the milk of the Word. No, you won't get anything tougher than this. Who is my neighbor? It's the person right in front of you. No, I won't give you anything. You want a hamburger? No, I need five bucks. I had a guy recently say, walked in. Well, it wasn't a good idea. Kim and I were traveling, and I wanted, I don't know, a drink of Coke or something. Well, I don't drink Coke. Anyways, I went into this rundown gas station. When I got in, I realized, oh, because Kim kept saying, Kerry, look at the neighborhood, you know, this night. And I walked in and I thought, yeah, I'm the only guy here not armed. And so I bought my thing. I went to check out. This one guy was watching me the whole time. As soon as he got outside, he said, man, I need a smoke. Will you buy me a cigarette? And I said, no. He said, he says, just, just not even a pack. You can keep half the pack. I said, no, I'll buy you a cigarette. Got the car to a what?

You're not going to participate in the damage of somebody. Like, if he would ask for a bottle of wine, no, I'm not going to buy you a cheap bottle of wine. No. If he had asked me, and if he would have said, would you buy me a loaf of bread and some cheese? I'd have said, okay. I'd have gone and bought for him. Because at that moment, he's my neighbor, and I won't help my neighbor sin, and I won't help him kill himself. I will not participate in another human being's self-destruction. I just won't do it. They're too valuable to God to participate in their self-destruction. But will we show mercy? Because in that moment, he's my neighbor, or she's my neighbor.

But still, we're usually asking, is that really my neighbor? I don't know that person.

Okay. The second broadway that mercy is shown, and we understand this greatly, is in forgiveness. God's mercy. He has empathy and pity on our misery. That's a fascinating definition. Empathy and pity on a person's misery. I think that's the Greek definition. He looks at us in our miserable state and has pity on us and shows us mercy. And he takes what? Actions of loving kindness to do that. The life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a human being was what? To save us. To come into our misery, experience our misery, and die in misery in order to say, see, I do have empathy with you. I do understand who you are and what you go through.

And therefore, I can show you mercy and loving kindness, even though you and I, in the eyes of God, are the useless bum on the street. That's what we are before he calls us. Before he works with us, that's all we are. We just have a little more money. But morally, we're no different.

So, what do I do then to show mercy to someone who sinned against me?

Sometimes people come and say, I've committed a terrible sin, and I just want to tell you I'm so sorry. And I'll say, why? You didn't sin against me. You sinned against God. You haven't hurt me. Let's get you to God and get this fixed.

We have to go to God and get this dealt with here. But there's no need to apologize to me. Now, if you just hacked into my computer and stole my checking account, yeah, you owe me an apology. We get a problem, okay? As you stole from me, you and I have a relationship problem we have to solve. But otherwise, our individual sins are personal between us. They're between the person and God.

But when someone does something against us, we have to forgive. Forgive. We're told to forgive. There's all kinds of commandments about forgiveness. We could go through an hour of just going through the Scriptures in the life of Jesus, or what the apostles wrote about forgiveness. And there's all kinds of Scriptures in the Old Testament.

Forgiveness doesn't mean ignoring the offense. It doesn't mean accepting the offense in terms of, oh, that's okay. You drove drunk and hit and murdered my child. But that's okay. I'm going to go to the judge and say, forget it. It's okay. No, there's penalties for those things. Breaking laws requires penalties. There's Andy Deamer. We did a Beyond Today program with him years ago. He's a minister in the United Church of God. A unique experience. His daughter got involved in drugs and just ended up left home and was out living on the street and got in with some guy. And he murdered her. He murdered her. And he went to the trial, and he was there the whole trial. And I've talked to Andy about this. We interviewed him, but I've talked to him personally about it, too. He said, I watched this man whose whole life was doomed from the beginning. His whole background. He had no way of knowing God, treated terribly as a child, learned to be a criminal as a child, drug addict. He's just hopeless. And he said, when they said you're guilty, and they put him in jail for, I think, I might have been his whole life, I don't remember. He asked the judge if he could say something. And the judge said, yes. And he said, you know, son, God gives second chances. You have a second chance. You better take it. He said, God's given you a second chance to turn your life around. A lot of times people don't get a second chance. He said, so I encourage you to take it. The judge said, I've never heard anybody say anything like that before. He said, usually what they say is, I hope you go to hell and burn. And Andy said, yeah, it's the hardest thing I ever did. But he says that what was required of me. You get a second chance, son. You better take it.

You better take it. Forgiveness is, he said, so I don't hate him. He says, I could. And this is what forgiveness is. He didn't say, judge, please don't put him in jail. He didn't say that.

What he said was, you get a second chance, do something with it. He said, but now I don't hate him. He says, I just look at a burned out evil human being that maybe God can save if he'll just turn to God. He says, that's what I see. That's forgiveness. It's not saying it's okay. It's not withdrawing penalties. It is saying, I will not hate you. I will not be consumed with the sin you did. I will not have my life ruined by you. Now, Andy says his life was, you know, in some ways ruined, but not, no. He says, it isn't totally ruined. I still have God. I'm going to see my daughter again. I still have my wife. I have my ministry. I do, I serve God. As a parent, I know how I can imagine how difficult that would be. But I understand what he did. Because he knows the man has to be judged by God. He just hopes he doesn't end up in the lake of fire. That is something that could happen. But he hopes that doesn't happen. Forgiveness means I'm not going to let you control me because of the sin you committed against me. Can you imagine what would happen if God was controlled by all of our sins? None of us would be alive. He hates our sins. We don't accept sin. He hates our conduct. And there are people going to the lake of fire. But God has to have mercy.

Because if he doesn't have mercy, we don't have a chance. No human being has a chance. Because every one of us is corrupted. And no human being has a chance. Not before the total goodness of God. We just don't. But because he's totally good, he has mercy. And he's willing to forgive. He's willing to work with us. He's willing to change us. He's willing to make us children. Yeah, I want sons and daughters here. This is what I want.

Forgiveness means giving up the need to make the other person meet your expectations. We've all done that. But they never gave me an apology. Okay. But it was 10 years ago. Yeah, well, I'm still waiting for my apology. Well, you're not going to get one. Probably. Although there's lots of apologies people give later in life when they realize how evil they've been. I've counseled many people who were sexually abused as a child by a family member. And the family member never apologized. And they carry that their whole lives. And of course you would. You can't not carry that. But you know what I found interesting in most cases? When the person who did the crime is dying, they say, all I wish I could do is hear, I'm sorry. So that we could somehow be, you know, connected again. Somehow. But they won't. I say, well, you can't have a relationship with someone who won't repent. You can't even God won't have a relationship with someone who won't repent. But they may repent in the resurrection. And then every once in a while, someone will say, the person, the uncle, whatever, sat down with me and said, I just need to tell you how horrible I've been. And what I did to you 40 years ago is so terrible. And there isn't a day that I haven't been torn up over that. And he says, I don't pray to God because I know he can't forgive me. And they have the person say, oh yes, he can. Let's pray. All of a sudden, there's this, no, I can help you there. If we can't show mercy, we can say, oh good, don't pray. I hope you go to the lake of fire.

And you're damaging yourself.

Blessed are those who are merciful because they'll receive mercy. This ability to hate sin, to live in sin. And remember, if the person won't repent, you can't have a relationship with them. You know, you can't have somebody who punches you in the nose every day. And then what happens is, you just, please don't punch me in the nose. Oh, okay, I'm sorry. And they punch you in the nose again the next day. After a while, it's like, no, I don't even want to talk to you, right? Stay over there because you can't live like that. So for a relationship, there has to be repentance. For us to be healthy spiritually and emotionally, we have to have mercy, even if they haven't repented. Be merciful, but we're not passing a penalty. The penalty, God puts the penalty on them. Or the, or the law of the land, if they broke the law of the land. There's a penalty on those people. Believe me, nobody gets away with anything. There's a penalty. Unless you repent, and then guess what? God's mercy. You and I all have things in our lives that are terrible, but God, through His mercy, has forgiven us.

And He can forgive anybody who repents. The scary thing is someone won't repent. If we don't, if we're not merciful, every time someone hurts us, you've all been sick, right? Just ask somebody how they're doing, right? And they've been sick.

I still find myself, I have to be careful. Did you have COVID? Oh, let me tell you the story. You know, I almost died. I was in a hospital, you know, because I don't. Now it's in the place. I had diphtheria, Barry Barry, and bubonic plague at the same time. It was terrible.

But we get, I mean, when you're really, really sick, isn't it amazing how your world gets smaller smaller smaller until you're just in a room? That's all there is. Because nothing outside can affect and help your sickness. And we've all done that because that's normal. Here's what happens when you refuse to forgive. Those emotions become a sickness, an emotional-spiritual sickness. And if we're not careful, we get to the place where we live in a room, a dark closed-off room filled with bitterness for people who weren't nice to us or heard us or were mean to us. And we live in that dark room, emotionally in spirit. And mercy frees us from that. It says, you know what? I hope you get better someday. I'm better now. I'm healthy. I can't hang around with you because you're contagious, right? What does the Bible say? Don't hang out with a furious man because you'll become angry? Okay, you have a problem and I've been abused by your anger. I can't hang out with you, but I will pray that God helps you overcome your anger. And if you ever come up to me and talk to me nice, I'll be merciful enough to talk to you.

Once again, I don't have a relationship with you, but I'm not going to be controlled by what you've done to me. It's a very hard place to be. When you don't forgive, two things happen. The first one is, we erect a barrier between us and God.

Blessed are those who are forgiving. You can put forgiving in there. That's part of the meaning of the word mercy. Blessed are those who are forgiving, for they shall be forgiven. Blessed are those who are merciful, for they will receive mercy. So God has given you mercy before you ever forgave anybody else. He gave us mercy while we were completely oblivious of these teachings. We might have known them, but we didn't understand them. But now God says, you want to continue to receive mercy, you have to be like me. You have to be merciful. Hating sin, but trying to show loving-kindness even to sinners when possible. Sometimes it's not possible. Peter said, live peaceably with all men, if possible. There are some people you just can't live with. They're not peaceable. So you just ignore them. But you don't want to hear what happens. We ignore them, but not really. We ignore them, but all we do is think about them. Right? Well, I won't talk to that so and so. Well, that's the fifth time you've said that today. Yeah, well, I am. Talk to them in a week. Okay. But really, you still are. You're talking to them in your mind. You're not letting go of that. You just hold on to it. And that eventually builds a barrier between us and God. Let's go to Colossians 3.

Colossians 3 verse 12. Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, long-suffering, we talk about these things all the time. But these are literally things we have to put onto ourselves. But through God's word, He clothes us in these things that they become who we are. Bearing with one another, forgiving one another, if anyone has a complaint against another, even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do. So you must go always back to square one. If God forgave me through Jesus Christ, I can forgive that person. I may not be best friends, but I can forgive them. Because that second thing is if we refuse to forgive, we get locked into an emotional moment. An emotional moment. You ever have—the brain's a funny thing. It'll pull out a memory from all over the place because there's something related. How many times have you said something like or thought, well, that reminds me of the time you know someone does something mean to you and suddenly you're remembering something someone did to you 15 years ago. So I forgot about that. No, it's still there. You don't want to get frozen in an emotional time. You never get out of it. You're just frozen in that. So almost every day, those events control who you are today because then we're not growing spiritually. I'm sort of wrapping this up and headed towards the end here. There's things you must also understand is the difference between justice and vengeance.

Justice is concerned with doing what is right and lawful.

Doing what's right and lawful. And there are penalties sometimes. You know, you know that with children, they do something wrong and you forgive them, but they still have to pay the penalty for their good, right? If we're ever punishing a child for our good, then it's not going to produce any good. You know, you punish your child because it makes you feel better. Yeah. You punish your child because it's for their good. And every parent has to punish children for things. And you've already forgiven them before you do it. But it's for their good, they're punished.

So justice, even God requires justice of us, even when we are forgiven at times. There are certain penalties you and I carry our whole lives for stupid things we do sometime in life, right? We carry those. That's just justice. But forgiveness has taken place. And what happens is, because of mercy, those things get wiped out in the mind of God and never remembered.

Vengeance is based in a need to have the other person hurt and pay for what they did. And that's what talking to Andy Diemer has helped me understand. He said, I could have spent the rest of my life wanting that boy to pay. And being in jail for 30 years, you know, going in jail at 22 and coming out at 52, wouldn't have been enough. It wouldn't have been enough for what he did to my daughter and to our family. He said, I realized I don't want that. He's getting justice. His life is gone. I just want him to turn to God. That's all I want him to do. And he understood the difference between justice and vengeance. And that's a fine line. Emotionally, that's a fine line. Logically, it's not. Emotionally, it's a fine line. And aren't you glad God doesn't require of us, since we've reached salvation, full justice? Our justice was paid for in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's justice, because that's what we all deserve. So God is a God of justice. He's a God of justice. But he also, fortunately, is merciful.

One last thing I want to mention is bitterness. We can't be merciful when we're bitter. We all wrestle with bitterness. You know, repeated misuse by somebody. And after a while, you just get bitter about it.

You just feel, you know, it's like the person walks in the room, and it's like, ah, I didn't want to be in the room with this person.

The problem with bitterness, the person can move away. Or the person can die. I remember talking to a man one time, years ago. No, I don't think he's even alive now. I mean, I lost contact with this guy decades ago, but at his age, he's probably not alive. I was talking to him, and he was just filled with bitterness. It wouldn't go away. And what had happened was, there had been a man who had mistreated him. Really had. And the man was wrong. The man should have been confronted, and the man should have, you know, either offered forgiveness or paid a penalty for it. Or, you know, offered, not forgiveness, but repentance or paid a penalty for it. And the man died. And the man who was hurt said, I live every day feeling as if he's reaching up out of the grave, grabbing hold of me and pulling into the grave with him. I don't know what happened to that man. That bitterness drove him. He left the church. I don't know what happened to him. But he described it so well. He's reaching up out of the grave and grabbing a hold of me and pulling me into the grave with him, because I want him to pay for what he did to me. He's dead.

And he'll have to, he'll be resurrected and have to face his sins like everybody else does, between him and God. Bitterness is terrible. We have to fight that all the time. We can't let unresolved damage from other people make us bitter, because God wants to heal that. And in healing that, guess what happens? We become merciful.

See, that person's wrong. I want nothing to do with them. I hope God brings them to repentance. You know when you've taken a step, when you ask, when you go and say, God, this person is wrong. This person continues this wrong behavior. I'm asking you, you know, to remove them from my life or whatever, because they're hurting me. But I also pray that someday they will get to know you and repent. When you ask that, now you're actually asking for mercy. You're not asking for, you know, God to give up his standards of good and evil, because he's not going to do that. The person's wrong.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. God's given you a blessing already. He's been merciful to you. He's already blessed you. And now what he says is, because of that blessing, pass it on. Pass on some mercy to others, not allowing them to sin against you. Once again, I have to keep throwing those caveats in there saying some people become, you know, they'll let people just mistreat them terribly or commit sins against them. That's not what he's saying. When you have that opportunity to be a neighbor, be a neighbor. When you have that opportunity to show mercy, to show mercy, show it. But the only way you can do that is if you are understanding every day the mercy God's giving to you, and in accepting that mercy, realize that it is his will that you and I pass it on.