Welcome to Unveiled Faces, a Redeemer Presbyterian Church podcast. Please enjoy our feature presentation. He who follows righteousness and mercy finds life, righteousness, and honor. He who follows righteousness and mercy finds life, righteousness, and honor. Heavenly Father, we pray that the reading of your word will land upon our hearts as rich and fertile soil to produce the crop, the fruit upon which you have ordained for it. Father, may we walk into good works which you have ordained. May we receive the justifying and sanctifying grace that comes through Jesus Christ and him alone. We pray this in his name, amen. Some of the promises that are contained in the Bible, they land upon our ears as if God is ready to give anything and everything to anybody and everybody. It's kind of like God places his signature on a blank check, hands it to us and says, here, fill in the amount, go to the bank and cash it. John 15, seven is such an example. Jesus says, ask what you desire and it shall be done for you. And that's an exact quote from John 57. Ask what you desire and it shall be done for you. This is a promise. And it sounds like Jesus is telling me that if I ask for anything I want, just so long as I include the name of Jesus in my request, that God will give it to me. So if I ask for a beach house in Malibu, guess what I'm gonna get? A beach house in Malibu. but is that really what Jesus is promising? If not, then what does that do for our confidence in the scriptures? What does that mean for all the other promises in the Bible? Are we to believe that some of the promises that we read are just wishful thinking? that some of God's promises are exaggerations that will never really come true here on earth, but God gets away with it because there's a technicality. There's going to be something better than a beach house for me when I get to heaven. And so the promise will eventually be fulfilled. Well, that's not how we understand the promises of God. All of God's promises are true. All of God's promises are reliable. It's just that we need to understand that God often specifies conditions in which the promises will be fulfilled. So in the case of John 15, 7, it helps if we read the context. And we don't even have to read a lot of context, just the whole sentence that contains the phrase I read. Because the context provides the framework for understanding what the actual promise is. Listen as I read John 15, seven again, only this time I'm gonna read the entire verse. Jesus said, if you abide in me and my words abide in you, you will ask what you desire and it shall be done for you. Abiding in Christ and having his words abide in you is the specific condition in which this promise is to be fulfilled. There's nothing in John 15, seven that would obligate God to respond to the desires of the man who does not abide in Christ and who does not have the words of Christ abiding in him. You see, when you abide in Christ and his words abide in you, then that has a profound effect upon the things that you desire. In Christ, you're a new creation with a new heart, which means you have new desires. You no longer love the things of the world, but you begin to seek first the kingdom of God. When the words of Jesus abide in you, then the things you desire, and therefore the things that you ask for, are things that are aligned with the will of God. Those are desires that the Lord is pleased to provide to you because he has given you those desires. And so he gives you what you ask for because you're asking for those things that have been determined by the word of Jesus, which abides in you. Our sermon text from Proverbs 21, 21 is a similar promise of God. In this verse, God promises life, righteousness, and honor to people. And these are blessings that anybody would want, right? After all, most people say that life is something to be valued, right? And most people say that righteousness is a good thing. And who doesn't want to be honored? But this is not a promise that's fulfilled universally and indiscriminately. Not everybody who desires these blessings will receive them. Why? Because God specifies that he will only give these things to those who pursue righteousness and mercy. So if you're not pursuing righteousness and mercy, then you really have no reason to believe that you'll receive the blessings promised in Proverbs 21, 21. Listen as I read this proverb aloud. He who follows righteousness and mercy finds life, righteousness, and honor. Now, my aim with this sermon is for you to know what it means to follow righteousness and mercy. That's the condition in which the promise is fulfilled. Therefore, it's important that we understand what following righteousness and mercy is and how we can do this in our own lives. Whenever we read Something like this in the Bible, something which impresses upon us the importance of a particular action. It's always a good idea to pay attention to the verb that is used to describe that action. In this case, the new King James, as well as the old King James, translates the verb into English as follows. He who follows righteousness and mercy. Yet when we look at, say, the ESV, the English Standard Version, it translates that verb a little bit differently. There we read, whoever pursues righteousness and kindness. This demonstrates why it's good to compare and to check different Bible translations when you study the Bible. Even if you don't know Greek and Hebrew, you can gain some insight into the original languages simply by comparing how different Greek and Hebrew scholars have translated the Bible into English. If we check a few more translations, we see that these particular English verbs keep coming up as a translation of the Hebrew verb that Solomon used as the human author of this proverb. The New American Standard Bible. He who pursues righteousness and loyalty. the American Standard Version, he that followeth after righteousness and kindness. Interestingly, the NASV and the ASV are built upon the same text, and so the same manuscript bodies were used to make this translation, yet the translators, in two different cases, came up with similar but different words. and the Young's literal translation, whoso is pursuing righteousness and kindness. And what this suggests is that neither the word follows nor the word pursues are directly equivalent of the original Hebrew word that Solomon used when writing this proverb. In other words, they don't capture individually, they don't really capture the full essence of what the original Hebrew is trying to express. I checked two different Hebrew dictionaries and they both indicate that the verb used here to describe the action of following or pursuing is a word that carries intensity to it that we have difficulty expressing in the English language. It's chasing after, would be one way to put it. Chasing after with the intent to capture. It's used in other passages of the Bible, that Hebrew word, to describe warriors pursuing their enemies in battle. Psalm 18.37, such an example. I have pursued, that's the word right there. I have pursued my enemies and overtaken them. Neither did I turn back again till they were destroyed. I know a man who has a passion to hunt bears. To do this, he has several dogs, which have been trained to track bears. And the way it works is that he drives out into the woods or wherever the bears happen to be, the forest, and he lets his dogs loose. And the dogs take off running, knowing that they're supposed to be tracking a bear. The problem is they don't know where the bear is. So initially, they have no idea what direction to run. They just start running. And they run until they get the scent of a bear. And once they get the scent of a bear, they begin to follow and track that scent. And once they find the bear and they catch up to the bear, the dogs circle around the bear, barking at the bear, nipping at the bear until the bear tries to escape these dogs by running up into a tree. And once a bear is in a tree, it becomes an easy target for the hunter. They call that treeing a bear. The man who explained this to me told me that once his dogs tree a bear, they won't leave that tree until the bear has been shot and captured. He said that their goal, the dog's goal is not just to tree the bear, but to actually capture the bear until he rewards his dogs by letting them interact with the bear once he's shot it. Those dogs want to possess the bear. And so until the hunter comes and shoots the bear out of the tree, these dogs are going to remain under the tree. They'll remain there for days. It's uncertain how long they'll remain there. They may die there because of their infatuation, their dedication, their drive to attain that bear. That's the type of determination with which Christians should be pursuing righteousness and mercy. It's the person who comes upon the scent of righteousness and mercy and then follows that scent, tracking that scent until he's able to take hold of the source of that scent. And the person who gets close to righteousness and mercy, but doesn't actually lay hold of righteousness and mercy, should persist pursuing it until it's actually attained. That's the person Solomon is telling us will find the blessings of life, righteousness, and honor. That's the person who will be the recipient of God's fulfilled promise. But we still need to ask ourselves what it means to pursue righteousness and mercy. I've just explained how we are to pursue righteousness and mercy. We're to pursue it with great zeal and determination. But I haven't yet explained what we are to be pursuing. Our sermon text says righteousness and mercy are the objects of our pursuit. And that seems like a pretty easy to understand explanation. But let me challenge you to think through this just a little bit deeper. And let's begin by defining terms. Righteousness is a moral term. It refers to holy living, which is in accordance with God's law. The object of righteousness, therefore, is always God's holy character. That is to say, the orientation of man who pursues righteousness is always towards God and his character. It's setting one's eyes upon the holiness of the triune God, and then desiring for our own life to conform to that holiness, as it says in Romans 8.29. Mercy is different in that its orientation is towards man. More specifically, mercy is always directed at the suffering and the misery of our fellow man, of other people. Mercy is the compassion which inclines one person to come alongside another person, assisting them in their time of suffering, bearing burdens with them as if to relieve some aspect of their affliction. So when Solomon writes about the man who pursues righteousness and mercy, he's referring to the man who understands his responsibilities to God as well as his responsibilities to his fellow man. It's the man who's mindful of his vertical relationship with God as well as his horizontal relationship with his fellow man. And when you think of it in these terms, Pursuing righteousness and mercy is really just another way of articulating the two greatest commandments, which are to love God and to love neighbor. To quote Jesus' words from Matthew 22, 40, all the law and prophets hang on these two commandments. So when Solomon describes the man who pursues righteousness and mercy, he's describing the man who's pursuing the whole law of God, all the law, all the prophets. It's a Psalm 119 thing, if you know that Psalm. Yet in our fallen human nature, this type of pursuit can take two forms. One form is established in the work of man, and the other form is established in the work of Jesus. or to put it in different terms, one form is established in the works of the law, and the other form is established by faith in Jesus Christ. Both of these have a long history within the church, yet the works of the law always lead to death, condemnation, disgrace, whereas faith in Jesus Christ always leads to life, righteousness, and honor. From man's perspective, both forms of pursuing righteousness and mercy can look misleadingly similar. In fact, from our perspective, they're often indistinguishable. This is because we only see the outside of people. We only see outward conformity to God's moral standard. People could do that in their own power, they could do that in the power of Christ. But from God's perspective, the difference is like night and day, because God sees the heart of each person. He knows who's trusting in his own abilities to keep the law, and who's trusting in the substitutionary work of Jesus Christ to keep the law. The question is never about whether the law should be kept. The question is always about who is able to keep the law, to keep it perfectly as God requires. The answer to that question defines the difference between those who strive according to the flesh and those who rest securely in the finished work of Jesus Christ. It should serve as a sobering reminder to us that history is replete with people who have pursued righteousness and mercy by their own works of the law. With zeal and dedication, I might add. but according to their own works of law. And this is because fallen humanity has such a strong conviction within us that we want to think that we can do what it takes. We can do it on our own. We have what it takes. We have this strong yet unwarranted conviction and confidence in our own flesh. And what history proves That's a misplaced confidence. It never, ever results in righteousness and mercy. The poster child for this unwarranted self-confidence is the Jewish people under the Old Covenant. An explicit example of this is seen in the Pharisees and Sadducees during the days and time of Jesus. And all throughout the New Testament, but particularly in the Gospels, the self-confidence of the Jews is exposed as a pursuit of righteousness that always ends in failure. The apostle Paul wrote about this to the Romans, and I'm gonna read aloud Romans 9, verses 31 and 32. And I ask you to listen closely to Paul's explanation for why the Jews did not attain the righteousness that they were so zealously pursuing. Romans 9, 31 and 32, Israel, pursuing the law of righteousness, has not attained the law of righteousness. Why? Because they did not seek it by faith, but as it were, by the works of the law. You see, there are two ways to pursue righteousness and mercy. What Paul is saying here in Romans 9 is that the Jews never attained what they were pursuing because they were going about it in their own strength. They were not seeking it by faith. And what does Hebrews 11, six tell us about the role of faith in our life? Without faith, it's impossible to please God. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. So what are you doing in your life? Are you pursuing righteousness and mercy? I hope you are. I hope you're constantly looking at the righteousness of God and saying, that's what I want for my life. That's what I want for my character. I want to be righteous. I want to be holy. I want to live my life in accordance with God's perfect standard of morality. And I hope that you're constantly looking for ways to show mercy to your fellow man. I hope you're aware of the pain and suffering of the people around you in this world. I hope you have a heart full of compassion for those who are poor, for those who are grieving, for those who are in distress. I hope you empathize with those who are sick, particularly with those who are dying. I hope you show kindness to the elderly. I hope you provide food and clothing for the homeless. I hope you defend the life of the unborn, that you take up the cause of the widow, and that you show hospitality to strangers. But above all these things, I hope you're paying attention to what Paul wrote in Romans 9 about why the Jews did not attain the righteousness they were pursuing. It's because they did not seek it by faith. They did not seek it by faith. They had religion. Boy, I tell you, did they have religion. But they did not have faith in Jesus Christ. Do you understand the difference between those two? You can do all the acts of righteousness and mercy that I just listed a moment ago. But if you're not doing them in faith, then you're doing them according to your own strength. And like the Jews, it's simply an act of religion. If you're not seeking righteousness and mercy and faith, then you'll never attain the blessings identified here in our sermon text. You'll never attain life, you'll never attain righteousness, you'll never attain honor. Yet what does it really mean to say that we have to seek these things by faith? We use that term, faith, all the time. We say, you have to have faith in Jesus Christ to be saved from your sins. But what does that really mean? Suppose you're talking to an indigenous person who just walked out of the Amazon rainforest. He's never read the Bible. He's never even heard about Jesus Christ. He listens to your gospel presentation and he says to you, what do you mean when you talk about faith? What is faith? How are you gonna answer that question? Some people would answer by saying something like this. Well, faith is the same thing as belief. If you believe in Jesus, then you have faith in Jesus. That isn't a complete answer, though. It's a partial answer, insofar as it gives part of the definition of faith that's correct, but it doesn't properly define what true saving faith is. If you tell the indigenous person that all he needs to do is believe in Jesus and he'll be saved, then you haven't really communicated the gospel to him. But you say, whoa, hold on, pastor. Didn't the Philippian jailer ask Paul and Silas, what must I do to be saved? And didn't the answer that Paul and Silas gave, wasn't it a simple answer? Believe the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved. So if that was good enough for the Philippian jailer, why is it not good enough for the indigenous man from the Amazon forest? Because that's not the complete answer Paul and Silas gave to the Philippian jailer. If you read the account of the Philippian jailer in Acts 16, you'll see that he does ask them what he must do to be saved. And Paul and Silas do respond in verse 31 with, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household. But we need to keep reading. The next verse continues to describe the rest of the conversation Paul and Silas had with the jailer. Verse 32 reads, then they spoke the word of the Lord to him. So when Paul and Silas said, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, that wasn't the complete answer. That was just the beginning of their answer. They continued to speak the word of the Lord to the jailer, explaining in much greater detail all aspects of faith. Biblical faith can be understood to have three different components to it. Faith is comprised of knowledge, conviction, and assurance. Knowledge is the content of faith. It's the information. It's knowing what the Bible teaches about God, man, sin, and redemption in Jesus Christ. Conviction is believing that the information contained in the Bible is true. Think of it this way. Somebody can know what the Bible says about God, man, sin, and redemption, and Jesus Christ, but they may not believe it's true. So knowledge and conviction are both necessary if a person's going to possess genuine faith. But then there's yet still one more component necessary, and that's assurance. Assurance is another word for trust. Assurance is trusting that what you know to be true, that is your conviction about what the contents of the Bible says, what you know to be true is a reality for you personally. It's trusting that the promises God gave have been and will continue to be applied to your life in accordance with what the Bible says. Consider what James tells us about demons. Demons do not have saving faith in Jesus Christ, right? They don't, they're not saved. But James 2.19 tells us that they have knowledge of God. We know from Jesus's interaction with the demons that they have better knowledge of Christianity than any member of the church militant here has on earth. They know the identity of Jesus. with certainty. They know that a time has been appointed for them to be thrown into a bottomless pit. They know that there are things about spiritual warfare, they know things about spiritual warfare that if we knew would blow our minds. So the demons definitely have knowledge. James 2.19 also tells us that the demons have conviction. Even the demons believe and tremble, James writes. And so not only do they have knowledge, but they believe that what they know is true. Their conviction is so strong that they tremble just at the name of Jesus Christ. So they have both knowledge and conviction, but demons do not have assurance. They don't trust that the atoning work of Jesus has actually been accomplished and applied to them, to redeem them from their sin and misery. For faith in Jesus Christ to be genuine, the person must possess all three of these components. He must know what the Bible says about God, man, sin, and redemption in Jesus Christ. He must believe that this information is true. And he must trust that the blood and righteousness of Jesus has actually accomplished redemption and has been applied to him personally. That's what faith is. So when the Apostle Paul says that the Jews did not attain righteousness, the righteousness that they were pursuing because they weren't seeking it in faith, he's saying that one or more of these three components of faith was lacking in their lives. If you read the Bible, then I think you know which of those components was lacking in the case of the Jews. The Jews certainly had knowledge. They knew what the Bible said, and they also had conviction. They believed it was true, but they didn't have the assurance that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, the one who would attain the perfect righteousness required by God and impute that righteousness to them as if it were their own. So when the Jews read verses like Isaiah 54, 17, which says, This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is from me, says the Lord. They didn't trust that that promise was fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and that it was applied to their own personal lives. They knew what Isaiah 54, 17 said. That's the knowledge component. And they believed that it was a true promise. That's the conviction component. But they didn't trust that it was fulfilled in Jesus Christ and applied to themselves. And so the assurance was lacking. The person who pursues righteousness and mercy in faith is the person who knows what the Bible says who has a firm conviction that the Bible is true, and who's trusting that Jesus has already fulfilled all the requirements of righteousness and mercy, and that the fulfillment of those requirements has been applied to him personally. Let me repeat that. The person who pursues righteousness and mercy in faith is the person who knows what the Bible says, who has a firm conviction that the Bible is true, and who's trusting that Jesus has already fulfilled all the requirements of righteousness and mercy, and that the fulfillment of those requirements has been applied to him personally. Does that describe you? Romans 8.4 explicitly says that Jesus fulfilled the righteous requirement of the law so that it might be fulfilled in us. Did you know that the Bible teaches that? That the righteous requirements of the law would be fulfilled by Jesus? Do you believe that this claim is true? Is that your conviction? And are you trusting that the righteousness of Jesus has already been given to you personally? Do you have that assurance? How you answer these three questions will indicate how you're pursuing righteousness and mercy. My guess is that most of the people sitting here this morning have knowledge of what the Bible says. My guess is that just about as many people have the conviction that the Bible is true. So in this regard, we have a lot in common with the Jews that Paul was writing about in Romans 9. The question I want to burden you with this morning is whether you have the assurance that Jesus has fulfilled all the righteous requirements of the law and has imputed His righteousness to you personally. If so, then there's nothing left for you to do other than to praise the Lord for His grace and goodness to you. You hear that? There's nothing left for you to do other than to praise the Lord for His grace and mercy to you. And that praise will manifest itself in a multitude of different ways. You will want to worship Him. You will want to proclaim His name to others. You will want to serve Him. You will delight in His goodness and His love. You will enjoy an inner peace even while walking in the midst of trials and tribulations. But specific to the topic of this sermon this morning, You will desire to live a holy life, a righteous life, in response to the righteousness which you have been given by Christ. In other words, your motivation for living righteously is gratitude for what has been given to you, rather than some desire or some ambition to merit what you believe God will reward to you. Your attitude, your desire, your motivation will be to live righteously out of gratitude, having received complete righteousness from Jesus Christ. The same can be said about pursuing mercy. You will have mercy upon others because God has had mercy upon you. not that you perform works of mercy to attain some level of status with God, but rather because God has given you status, because he has given you life, because he has given you righteousness, because he has given you honor, you now perform works of mercy to others in response to the mercy you've received from Jesus Christ. Those blessings that come to God's people who pursue mercy and righteousness and faith are the ones given in our text. Life, and we're talking spiritual life here, eternal life. Righteousness, the righteousness of Jesus Christ. And honor. Not necessarily the honor of men, although that may be, but certainly the honor of God. He has given you status within His kingdom. He has transferred you from being one who is enslaved to sin and misery to one who is empowered with the Spirit to walk in light. He has transformed you from a child of the devil to a child of the living God. Tell me that's not honor. Tell me it's not honor to be able to proclaim that you are a citizen of the kingdom of Christ, a child of the living God. That's the honor that he confers upon those who seek him and who pursue righteousness and mercy through faith in Jesus Christ. This speaks to the great grace of our triune God. How while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us to redeem us, to restore us to this position, to impute to us the righteousness necessary that we may have the faith, that he grants us the faith required to pursue these things. I appeal to you this morning with the question of assurance. I have no doubt all of you have knowledge of the scriptures and have conviction concerning the scriptures. My question is whether you have the assurance that is required for faith to be complete. That assurance is what distinguishes between the person who pursues righteousness and mercy through their own strength and the one who pursues righteousness and mercy through the strength of Jesus Christ. May the Lord grant you that very assurance. May he grant you the faith necessary that that assurance may be manifest to yourself as well as to others around you. And may you glorify the Lord as you pursue righteousness and mercy out of gratitude for all that he has done for you. Our God is good. He is a great God. Would you join your hearts with me as we pray to him and give him thanks? Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you for being such a gracious God. Lord, you have glorified yourself in tremendous ways with every sinner that you have redeemed from their sin. Your son, Jesus Christ, has done a remarkable expression of love on earth as he marched steadfastly toward the cross as he has set his face to endure the wrath, your wrath, that was in store for us as we are the sinners and he was not. But Father, through his deliberate atonement and through his work upon the cross and subsequent resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven, you have magnified your name above all your enemies and you have restored your people to a position of fellowship and you have reconciled us that we may be in communion with you. And Father, in doing this, you have magnified and glorified your name here on earth. And Lord, we pray that we may reflect that glory to others as this earth continues to strive to live under the conditions in which we live. Father, we pray that we would continue to seek righteousness and mercy, but Lord, not in our own strength, We pray that the righteousness that we pursue is that of Jesus Christ through faith, and the mercy that we show to others is that which is in faith in Jesus Christ as well. For those who have not the assurance or even the knowledge or the conviction, Father, we pray that you would be so kind and so gracious as to give the faith necessary for these things to develop. And Father, we pray that we as a church collectively might take up and continue in practice of righteousness and mercy and Father that we as individuals, as families, as individual people may continue pursuing righteousness and mercy as well. May we do so with zeal. May we do so with dedication. May we not give up. until we have attained it. And Father, when we do attain it, like the martyrs who cast their crowns at the throne in heaven, may we as well cast any accolades to you that all may glorify you for your goodness and your grace. We pray this in the name of our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. This has been a presentation of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. For more resources and information, please stop by our website at visitredeemer.org. All material herewithin, unless otherwise noted, copyright Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Elk Grove, California. Music furnished by Nathan Clark George. Available at nathanclarkgeorge.com.