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I invite you to turn in your
copy of God's Word to the gospel of Matthew, Matthew chapter 5,
and we continue our look at this wonderful gospel. And we've come
now, last week, starting with the Sermon on the Mount. And
as we've said before, I see some new faces out here, so it might
be worth recapping a little bit. The Sermon on the Mount is the
most well-known sermon in the world. It is the first of the
five major discourses that we find in the gospel of Matthew. And in this well-known sermon,
what Jesus is doing is describing life in the kingdom of God. And as we've seen already, the
kingdom of God is one of the major themes throughout the gospel
of Matthew. This is a kingdom that is not
a future kingdom yet to come, as we've seen the kingdom arrived
with the coming of the King. When Jesus came into our midst,
he brought the kingdom with him. And he's bringing us, his people,
into that kingdom. So in the Sermon on the Mount,
we have the description of what our life is to be like. It talks
a lot about our conduct. How are we to behave? What does
it mean to be a disciple and a follower of Jesus? But before
Jesus starts getting into all the heavy things that he's going
to talk about of how we are to conduct ourselves as his followers,
he first talks about who we are. And he does that in what is the
most well-known part of the most well-known sermon in the Beatitudes. In the Beatitudes, we have this
pattern that we've seen before. Blessed are the... Because they
are... And that first part, the blessed
are, describes who we are in Jesus. Very much like you see
the Apostle Paul doing in his various letters where he tells
us who we are in Christ, and because of who we are in Christ,
then he tells us how to behave. You see him doing that in all
his epistles. So Jesus does that here before he gets to telling
us how we are to behave as his followers, he first describes
our character. Who are we as followers of Jesus? Now, we started the Beatitudes
last week. Today we're going to be looking at two more. We'll
be looking at verses 5, rather 6 and 7. But if you'll notice
in your bulletin, we've printed all of them. So let's start with
the top, and we're going to work our way all the way through the
end of the Beatitudes. So let's start, let's see, you
guys have... I don't always look at the same
thing you do. Okay, we're starting in verse
3, not in verse 1. So let's start in verse 3. 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 in 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. And 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. And again, today we'll be focusing
on verses 6 and 7. Blessed are those who hunger
and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
And blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Well, thus far, the reading of God's Word. May He bless it to
our hearing, especially as it's preached to us this morning.
Well, people of God, as we look at the Beatitudes, and really
we look at all the Scripture, we realize that each and every
one of us has two basic spiritual needs. The first of those is
that we have to understand who we are. We have to understand
ourselves, especially in the same way that God sees us. In
other words, we have to understand who we are before God. And that's
what we looked at last week in the first three Beatitudes. In
verse 3, it told us that we are poor in spirit. You remember
that what that meant is that we are spiritually bankrupt.
We have nothing that we can offer to God. We're sinful people.
We're a broken people. And because of that, in verse
4, he told us that we are those who mourn. We are those who grieve
over our sin. A disciple of Christ, a follower
of Jesus, doesn't just recognize that they are sinful, but they
mourn over it. They are brokenhearted because
of their sin. And verse 5, as we saw last week,
tells us that because of this, then we become those who are
meek. That doesn't mean weak, it doesn't mean effeminate, it
doesn't mean powerless, but it means that we become humble in
how we treat others. We see ourselves as broken, so
when we see other people who are equally broken in sin, we
don't think that we're better than them. We recognize that
we're all in desperate need of grace. So that's the first thing
that we all need spiritually. We have to understand ourselves
as we truly are before God. Now as important as that is,
there is a danger, at least a caution, because while we do need to look
inside of ourselves to see who we are, Martin Luther was right
when he says that we have this danger that our basic problem
is that we tend to be curved in on ourselves. We tend to become
self-centered and so if you're just looking all the time on
the inside, if you become morbidly introspective, after a while
you'll go nuts because you'll despair, you'll realize, if you're
honest with yourself, that you don't have the resources by which
you can do anything to change your broken sinful condition.
And so the second thing that we need spiritually is once we've
been driven to look inside of ourselves, we now have to be
driven out of ourselves and to look outward. Once you discover
that you lack the ability, that you lack the resources by which
you can save yourself, then you need to look outside of yourself
to Jesus. in order to be saved. You have
to be able to look to Jesus and realize that in Him alone can
we find all the needs of the world being met. You see, every
other religious system, every other religion looks on the inside. Think about Buddhism, Hinduism,
Islam, and so on and so on. Taoism, Confucianism, I could
just go on. All of them look on the inside for salvation.
It's how you behave, it's what you're able to do, it's whether
you can become dead to the world and eliminate suffering as in
Buddhism, whether you can do good things so that the gods
will look down on you with favor, whether that be Islam or Hinduism
or so on. But in all of those, you look
on the inside for the strength and for the ability. to be able
to save yourselves. I hate to say that even some
flavors of Christianity have devolved to the point where even
though they recognize Jesus, Jesus just becomes like a battery
who charges you so that you or yourself are able to do what
you need to do to save yourself. But only in biblical Christianity
is it outward focused, that the only way that you can move forward
is to look outside yourself to Him who saves you, which is Jesus. So that's what we see here as
we begin to look at the Beatitudes and Jesus begins to tell us who
we are. And like we saw last week, these
Beatitudes are like a golden chain. They go along in steps
showing us who we are as we move in our spiritual growth and walk.
So in these first three Beatitudes that we saw last week, we looked
at the first of those spiritual needs that we need to understand
who we are, broken, sinful people without any hope except in Jesus. And now the two Beatitudes that
we're going to look at here, the fourth and fifth one, tell
us then once we recognize that we're so broken, then we have
to turn away from ourselves and our own righteousness from which
we have none, and we need to focus on God and His righteousness
in order to meet our needs. And in the fifth of these Beatitudes
we're going to see that then we turn to other people. And
we realize what their needs are and in mercy we reach out to
them to help them in the same way that God has reached out
to us. And this requires a change of heart. Moving away from being
absorbed with our own interests to a heart that reaches out for
God and a heart that reaches out for others. And when you
see that, that's a sign of a spiritually mature disciple. spiritually
mature believer. So as we look at these two new
Beatitudes today, we're going to see that a mature disciple,
a mature follower of Jesus is a person who, one, longs to be
right with God, two, longs to live rightly for God, and three,
longs to see righteousness established everywhere. You see that word
right being used again and again, the word righteousness. That's
going to be at the center of what we talk about today. We
long to be right with God, we long to live rightly for God,
and we long to see righteousness established everywhere. So let's
look at the first of those points, which is that we long to be right
with God. In verse 6, Jesus says, blessed
are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall
be satisfied. So this is who we are as disciples. We hunger and we thirst for righteousness. And just like before when we
looked at, for example, in verse 3 where it says that we are poor,
not poor as in materially poor, but poor in spirit, spiritually
poor. So here we don't hunger and thirst
literally for food and water, we hunger and thirst for righteousness. It's a spiritual characteristic
of the follower of Jesus. Now, let's look at this word
righteousness because it's going to be at the center of everything
we talk about today. What does that mean? And if you've
been a Christian for a while, you've been reading your Bible,
you probably have a pretty good idea. In general, in our culture,
we tend to see righteousness not always in the way it was
meant to be. Often we talk about people who
are righteous are people who are better than others. Whether
they realize it or not, you know, self-righteous are those who
think they're better than others. But to be righteous means to
be better than others in our minds many times. That's really
just a comparative term. In the scripture, what the word
righteous means is that things are the way they ought to be.
Things are the way they ought to be. So a person who is righteous
is a person who behaves the way they ought to behave, right?
In line with God's Word, in line with God's will. And so, comparatively,
that person may be better than the rest of us because it's a
recognition that so many of us are not the way that we ought
to be. But that's really what the word righteousness and righteous
means. It means that things are the
way they ought to be. We're talking about putting things
right that was once wrong. And as we look at that term righteousness,
and we look all throughout the scripture, we see that there
are three aspects of righteousness in the Bible. And we're going
to see all three of them here today. There is a legal, there
is a moral, and there is a social aspect to righteousness. The
first one, legal righteousness, is where we are right with God. We have a right relationship
with God. And there's the great doctrine
of justification that we talk about, where God declares us
righteous to be in a right relationship with Him. By the way, in English,
the word righteousness and justification, these are two different words
that sound very, very different, don't seem to have anything in
common. But all throughout the Scripture, they are the exact
same word. This is just a translation issue
that it seems like they're two different words. Of course, in
the language of heaven in Spanish, they use the exact word, just
like they do in the Greek and in the Hebrew. and so on. But
we have legal righteousness, being right with God. We also
have moral righteousness, which is a righteousness of our character.
It speaks about conduct which pleases God. And there's also
a great doctrine for that. There's sanctification, where
God is at work to make us behave in the ways that are right. That's
moral righteousness. And then we have social righteousness,
which is that we want what is right to be done throughout the
world. That's where the word justice
comes in. When you see justice, we're talking
about we want things to be the way that they ought to be. We
want wrongs righted. So in social righteousness, we
want to see what is right done. all throughout the world, not
just for us personally. So as we look at that, we're
going to see these three aspects here. But the first thing that
applies for all of them is that when we look at this beatitude,
we realize that this is a righteousness, whether it be legal, moral, social,
but this is a righteousness that is given to us. It's not a righteousness
that we achieve on our own. Remember, as we kept looking
last week at that word blessed, That tells us that this isn't
something that's been given to us. It's not something that we
achieve. We may hunger and we may thirst for it, but in the
end, there's this passive term, we shall be satisfied. God is
the one who satisfies us. We do not achieve this righteousness
on our own. It is a gift of God. And that's
a very important point. One of the things we saw last
week is that the term blessed, when we look at it in Scripture
and we unpack it, ultimately means that we have been brought
into a right relationship with God. So let's start with that
one, with the legal righteousness, which is a gift. And this is
an important thing because whether we ask this question or not,
the most important question for every human being on the planet
is, how can I be right with God? Earlier in the service, Elder
Grimes read from Romans chapter 3, where Paul was giving the
14-point indictment of the human race. And he was saying, it doesn't
matter whether you're a Jew, God's chosen people. It doesn't
matter whether you are a Gentile, a pagan, or whatever. We all
stand condemned because no one is righteous. No, not one. And
he goes through and he lists all these different, they're
all coming from different parts of the Psalms and so on. So the big question
is because of our sin breaking our relationship with God, how
do we restore that right relationship? Sadly, a lot of people try to
restore that relationship and achieve righteousness through
their own efforts. In Romans chapter 10 verse 3, Paul says,
they ignore God's way of righteousness and try to set up their own.
And people throughout all the ages have been doing that, working
towards their own righteousness. Jesus Himself says at the end
of this chapter, you therefore must be perfect as your heavenly
Father is perfect. So it's not enough to be able
to say, I'm going to achieve this on our own. You see people
all the time, they try to essentially be good and upright moral people,
right? Try to avoid, as one commentator
said, the gutters of life. You might be a person who's never
been arrested and never thrown into jail. Maybe you've been
faithful to your spouse and you've avoided divorce. Maybe you've
done all these things and you've begun to think that you are a
good and moral person. But in the end, we're really
not able to achieve that righteousness on our own. Galatians 3.10 says, So the standard is, as Jesus
says, you have to be perfect, you have to obey everything in
the law. That's the only way in which you can achieve righteousness
on your own. And since none of us is capable
of doing that, we are in trouble. So the righteousness that Jesus
is talking about, the righteousness that is given to us is just that,
it's a gift. That is what satisfies us, it's
not something that we're able to do on our own. But the good
news is that when we do hunger and thirst for this righteousness,
when we recognize that we have nothing to give to God and we
owe Him everything, and we grieve over our sin, He tells us that
if we hunger and thirst for it, He will satisfy us. And the good
news here is that word satisfied literally means to be well-filled,
to be stuffed. Like when you go and you have
your nice big Thanksgiving turkey, you know, and you walk away and
you can't eat anymore. That's the word that's being used here.
When God satisfies you because you recognize your brokenness
and you turn to Him, He will satisfy you fully. He doesn't
just give a little bit. And that's great news for us.
Because when you're sitting there and crying out, oh God, I have
nothing I can offer you. Where can I go? You know that
He's not going to reject you. You know that He's not going
to just meet a little bit of your need, but He meets the whole
of your need for righteousness and for a right standing with
God. He fully satisfies us. And the way that he does it is
through Jesus. As we saw last week when we started
the Beatitudes, Jesus is not just the one who's proclaiming
the Beatitudes, but he's the one who actually brings them
into being. He's the agent, the doer, the one who makes them
possible. Because he's the one who satisfies
our hunger and our thirst for righteousness. As he said in
John 6, 35, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall
not hunger and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. And
the way that he satisfies that hunger and that thirst is by
giving us what we need, by giving us his righteousness. You see
that clearly in Romans 10, 4. Christ fulfills the law so that
He provides righteousness to everyone who believes. You and
I cannot live up to the law. You and I cannot fulfill it,
but He did. He lived the perfect life that
you and I are incapable of living. He pleased the Father in every
way and always obeyed, and because of that, He then gives us that
righteousness. His merit is granted to us. And
the flip side, we read about in 2 Corinthians 5.21 where it
says, And this is what the Puritans called the great exchange. You take our sin and you lay
it upon Jesus and He suffers and He pays the penalty that
you and I deserve. He bears the full wrath of God
there on the cross for our sin. But His righteousness is given
to us, which we don't deserve. So each one gets what they don't
deserve. But out of grace, Jesus is the one who takes the bad
stuff on himself. And that is what the word justification
is. We're declared righteous before God, that legal righteousness,
because the righteousness that we have is not our own, but it's
Jesus. And he's given it to us as a
gift. It's all based on the merit of
Christ, not on our own. It's like the old hymn writer
said, Edward Mote, who wrote, My hope is built on nothing less
than Jesus' blood and righteousness. And that is the hope of the follower
of Jesus. It's a gift, and a gift that
you receive by grace through faith. There's nothing left for
you to do. Remember, as we saw last week,
you are poor in spirit. You have nothing to offer in
the first place. So it all comes through Him.
We kind of saw that all wrapped up when we finished our confession
of sin, and then we read in the assurance of pardon from Romans
3.21, where it said, the righteousness of God has been manifested apart
from the law. You can't get it by keeping the
law. Although the law and the prophets bear witness to it,
it is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ
for all who believe. For there is no distinction for
all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified
by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ
Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to
be received by faith. That one little passage really
sums it all up, that great exchange. Jesus takes our sin, we receive
his merit, we're made right with God, all because of a gift. And
people of God, when you can grab a hold of that truth, it is liberating. Because no longer do you have
to be the one who strives to be perfect and to achieve. Jesus
has done it for you. Martin Luther comments on this
passage when he finally discovered this idea that it was not his
righteousness, but Jesus' righteousness that saves. He said, Paul teaches
us that the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel is
passive, given to us in Christ. As this truth dawned on me, I
felt I was born again, which he was, and was entering at the
gates of paradise itself. There and then, the whole face
of scripture changed. Just as much as I had hated the
phrase, the righteousness of God, I now loved it. It seemed
the sweetest and most joyous phrase ever written. And indeed
it is once we comprehend we have nothing that we can offer God.
We can never achieve his righteousness on our own, but he gives us his
own through Jesus. And if we will but just seek
for it wholeheartedly, if we hunger and thirst for it, he's
the one who will satisfy that intense longing that we have
for it. So this is the first dimension
of righteousness that we see here, legal righteousness. We
are justified and put right with God. But there's another dimension,
and we're going to see that in our second point, which is that we long
to live rightly for God because just because we've been declared
righteous, we have that legal righteousness, we've been made
right with God, we wear, as it were, to use Paul's language
in Ephesians 4, we wear the righteousness of Christ as an outer garment
covering up our own sins. Just because that is true does
not cancel our obedience. And that's been the problem with
a lot of Christians through the age. Now that I'm saved, now
that my sins are paid for, then that means I can live however
I want. And that's not at all the case.
Paul deals with that when Romans 6 and he just about has a conniption
fit and he says, which in Greek just means something along the
lines of may it never be or how insane are you? Are you kidding
me? Any one of those phrases will work. He's just saying,
no, no, no, it can never be that because you've been saved, you
can then behave however you want. You see, whenever you take that
gift of forgiveness but neglect the demands that are about to
come here in the Sermon on the Mount for Right Living, what
you end up with is the biggest tragedy in the church, which
is that idea of cheap grace. that once Jesus saves us, you
can behave however you want. A little later in this chapter,
in verse 19, Jesus himself is going to say, whoever relaxes
one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the
same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever
does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom
of heaven. Remember the Sermon on the Mount, as we saw right
at the very beginning in the prologue, Jesus is talking not to the world,
he's talking to his disciples. And he's telling us, you need
to do these things. Now what does that mean? You
need to be doing them. Didn't we just say we don't need to
be doing them? You're right. Your legal standing before God
does not depend on your ability to obey because we can't ever
obey to the point where we achieve our own righteousness. And yet,
here this hungering and thirst for a right standing with God
also means that we hunger and thirst to do what is right. We
hunger for a moral righteousness because with passion we want
to do what's right in order to please our Savior. You see, it's
a wholly different thing. We are saved from the consequences
of the law, right, which is death. We're saved from the consequences
of the law, but if we look what we're saved to, we are saved
to the law so that we can keep the law, so that we can behave
the way that God would have us to do. Isn't that the righteous
thing, when we no longer cheat, when we no longer steal, when
we no longer lie, when we no longer hurt one another? This
is what God intends from us. And he's calling us here to say
that we should have just as much a hunger and thirst, not just
to be right with God, but to live rightly for him. And that
means much more than just obeying some rules or conforming externally
to these commandments. It means that you have a deep-seated
commitment where you want to obey God. It becomes the pattern
of your life where you want to conform to God's will. And you
do so because it pleases him. You do so because out of gratitude
for what he's done for you in Christ. Some of you have heard
the story, so I'm gonna repeat it again for those who have not
heard it, but the two dogs, Sable and Skinny, right? I know some
of you have heard that before. Right around the same time, my
mom and Mary Jo and I got dogs. So Hurricane Andrew had come
and destroyed my mom's house, and they had found, after it
was rebuilt, they found this dog in the street, and he was
so skinny, they called him Skinny. She fed him, he didn't stay skinny
very long. But we have a feeling that Skinny was maybe abused
or just had a rough life before he came into my mom's home because
he was perfectly obedient, but he obeyed out of fear. He was
constantly afraid that if he didn't obey, there would be suffering,
there would be consequences. And so many Christians still
act like that and don't realize that all the consequences for
our disobedience have already been laid on Christ. Now right
around the same time, Mary Jo and I, who didn't have kids at
the time, it's 1992, just a year before that, before Hurricane
Andrew, we had picked up a little dog, and we got it straight from
the breeder, and her name was Sable. Cute little dog, and she
did not know anything other than us as her owners. And so you can imagine a young
married couple with no kids, and all the love is lavished
on this little dog. And so Sable also was very obedient. But her obedience wasn't driven
by fear, it was driven by love. It was driven by a desire to
please us. And this is what God calls us to be and to do in our
relationship with Him. We long to obey Him, not because
we're afraid that He's going to strike us down, not because
we think that by doing it we'll earn His approval. We already have His approval
in Christ. That's the legal righteousness. But we long to obey Him out of
gratitude and out of love because of what He's done for us. And
so this is what this hunger and thirst also includes. It means
that we long to do these things. That we can say, like Jesus said
in John 4, 34, that my food is to do the will of Him who sent
me and to accomplish His work. When He says, that's my food,
He says, this is what feeds me. This is what drives me. Reminds
me of what that great Scottish preacher, Robert Murray McShane,
in the 19th century once wrote. He said, oh God, make me as holy
as a pardoned sinner can be. Here's a man who longed to be
right, to obey out of a desire to glorify God and to thank Him.
And just like we saw with the legal aspect of righteousness
where you need Jesus, so you also need Jesus for this aspect,
for this moral righteousness. In justification, Jesus saves
us from the guilt of sin, from the penalty of sin. But here,
we see that He also saves us from the power of sin. from the
influence of sin. We call that sanctification.
So you have justification, legal righteousness, where God declares
you to be righteous. And then he begins to work in
you in sanctification where he makes you what he declared you
to be. And that's what we see happening
here. God declares us righteous and
then He begins to make us righteous and to work in us. Again, an
act of grace all through what Jesus has done. It all comes
from Him. Romans 5 21 says that God's grace
reigns in us through righteousness through Jesus Christ our Lord. God's grace reigns in us. How? Through Jesus it says. Jesus
who reigns in us as King. And he empowers us through his
spirit to live that righteous life before him. So that's moral
righteousness. The second aspect of righteousness
that we see here. We don't just long to be right
with God, but we long to live rightly for God. Now, our last
point. If we enjoy right relationship
with God, then we're going to want to see others have that
same relationship as well. We want what's right in our lives
to be right in their lives. And that's the last point. We
long to see righteousness established everywhere. When you look at
the word righteousness all throughout the Old and the New Testament,
we see that it's much more than just some private and personal
affair. It's much more than you, your Bible, and the Holy Spirit
alone, and just that's it. It's a cosmic thing. And so when
we hunger and thirst for righteousness, we also need to desire to see
that righteousness prevailing in all parts of this broken world. We're going to see that in the
very next chapter in the Lord's Prayer. One of the things we
pray in chapter 6 verse 10. Your will be done on earth as
it is in heaven. To be righteous, again we said
is to put right what's been wrong, to see things made right, that
things are the way they ought to be. And so when we pray, your
will be done, isn't God's will the way things ought to be? And
so we're praying that that righteousness will not just be a personal thing,
but one that expands to meet the deepest needs of this world.
And so when we see that, we see this desire in the disciple,
the follower of Jesus, to see that passion, that righteousness
go on. And there should be a passion
in us as believers for that social reformation. The great Anglican
preacher from the last century said that a mature disciple of
Christ will seek liberation from oppression, will seek the promotion
of civil rights, will seek justice in the law courts, will seek
integrity in business dealings, will seek honor in home and family
affairs. Now, when evangelicals hear this,
we begin to cringe because we start thinking, oh, he's talking
social justice. Has John gone off the deep end?
Has he started going in those directions? But it's right here
in Scripture. Earlier, Adam read from Isaiah
58. And it made very clear that we
are called to care about these things, that things be right
in the world. The problem that we have with
our progressive brothers and sisters or people in these liberal
churches is that they have focused so much on social justice, the
social righteousness, but they've done so at the exclusion of legal
and moral righteousness. They've made that the full end,
making things right in this world, not recognizing that at the same
time. First and foremost, you have to be right with God. And
you have to be obeying Him, that moral righteousness. So, it's
just become this idea of helping people by giving them a cup of
water in Jesus' name. And that is vitally important
and is all throughout Scripture. But you can't do that at the
expense of making them right with God, because I can go out
there, you can go out there, and we can meet people's physical
needs. We can help them build homes. We can feed them. We can
clothe them. We can do all of those things.
But if they're not made right with God through Jesus Christ,
they will die, and the consequences will be eternal. So we need all
of that put together. You can't just have, and unfortunately
evangelicals for a long time really only focus on legal righteousness,
justification, and moral righteousness, sanctification, be good, and
we forgot social righteousness. And another segment of the church
just ran with social righteousness and forgot everything else. Thankfully,
we're seeing amongst conservative evangelical Christians in the
last generation, a growing concern for a just society. You know
who did that? The millennials did that. And
Gen Z has been doing that. The boomer generation came along
and was very focused on itself and a lot of the believers who
are boomers, were so much trying to push back against a lot of
their excesses that they never got around to doing that. But
the millennials, you know, all you guys that are now in your
30s and hitting your 40s, and now the Gen Z folks right after,
you all have been bringing this to the fore, and good for you.
That social righteousness begins and has to begin with evangelism,
making sure that others know that they can be right with God
through Jesus. But it can't stop there. We have
to hunger and thirst for righteousness in the whole aspect of what it
means to be human. So we have to be able to deal
with all the brokenness that we see around us. Martin Luther
addressed this. He talked about us leaving our
spiritual bunkers and turning to the needs of the world. And
he says when you do that, that shows a real shift in the maturity
of the Christian. He said, the command to you is
not to crawl into a corner or into the desert, but to run out
if that is where you have been and to offer your hands and your
feet and your whole body and to wager everything you have
and can do. What is required is a hunger
and thirst for righteousness that can never be curbed or stopped
or sated. One that looks for nothing and
cares for nothing except the accomplishment and maintenance
of the right, despising everything that hinders this end." And then
he comes up with this line. If you cannot make the world
completely pious, then do what you can. What a realistic assessment. We hunger and we thirst to see
all things put right. None of us is going to go and
change the entire world. You know, you ever been to these
commencement speeches and the guy gets up there and says, you know,
you're the ones who are going to change the world. I want somebody
to get up there and says, no, you're not. You're not going
to change the whole world. Not the whole world all at once.
But you can do what you can. And you can long to meet the
needs of the person next door and across the street and somewhere
else in the town and in the city. You can help them meet the needs
of people right here in your church and so on. And that's
where we get, and we're almost done here folks, bear with me,
to the last of the Beatitudes. Blessed are the merciful. for
they shall receive mercy." Because now we long. You see how this
flows. Like John Chrysostom said in the fourth century, these
things flow one into the other. When you hunger and thirst for
this righteousness that goes out to the whole world, then
you become merciful. You have compassion for those
people who are in need. I think it's important for us
to distinguish between grace and mercy. Grace and mercy, we
use those terms a lot. Mercy deals with pain, it deals
with misery, it deals with the distress of life. The goal of
mercy is to relieve the effects of sin. Sin has brought into
this world pain and misery and distress. Mercy seeks to relieve
it. Grace, however, deals with the
sin itself. It pardons the sin, it pardons
its guilt. Mercy extends relief from the
consequences of sin, grace extends pardon for the very sin itself.
That's the difference between those two. God has shown us grace
and so now we extend mercy as a sign of God's grace to those
around us. That's how this thing flows. And a couple of key things
that we should say when we talk about showing mercy to others.
For one thing, it's clear here and actually clear all throughout
the New Testament that there aren't any special categories
of people to whom we're to show mercy. Not too long ago, when
we went through our vision statement, we looked at Luke chapter 10,
the parable of the good Samaritan, and we saw that it doesn't matter,
Samaritans and Jews, they were enemies. We are to show our love,
as Jesus will say later on in the Sermon on the Mount, even
to our enemies. Our mercy should not be limited just to those
whom we favor. And another thing worth saying
about mercy is that we extend it to people regardless of, in
other words, if people are suffering from the consequences of sin,
we extend mercy to them regardless if they are the one who's been
sinned against or if they have caused their own misery. Now
what do I mean by that? It's very easy to look at somebody
and say, well this person was beaten, this person was raped,
this person was stolen from, this person had their home destroyed
in a storm or whatever. These are people who are suffering
the effects of living in a broken and fallen world. They are suffering
the effects of sin. We should extend mercy to them.
That's absolutely true. But we then tend to look at those
who are suffering the effects of their sin as a consequence
of their own behavior. We look at a drug addict who
has brought on his or her own suffering and we say that person
does not deserve our mercy. And you know what? That's true.
They don't deserve our mercy. Just like you and I didn't deserve
the mercy that God extended to us. As Romans 5.8 says, God shows
His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ
died for us. Christ showed us mercy when we
were rebelling against Him. We didn't deserve it and yet
He still reached out to us. And so yes, you're right. Those
who you see who themselves have created their own problems and
now need help, they don't deserve our help, but we still help them
anyway because it shows, it's a reflection of the same grace
that God has shown us. Can you see that? So we relieve
everybody's suffering regardless of whether they are suffering
because of the consequences of somebody else's sin or suffering
because the consequences are of their own sin. So as we wrap
this up, I just ask you when you hear those things, when you
hear something like this that we just read where Christ died
for us, how far are you willing to go to help others? How far
are you willing to extend mercy? Because whenever you do that,
it always comes with a cost. Especially when we forgive those
who have wronged us. It's been such a powerful statement
you saw last week when Erica Kirk in that memorial service
for Charlie Kirk forgave the person who murdered her husband.
Less than two weeks after that had happened. And it's been capturing
the attention of people all throughout the world. Tons and tons of people
who are not believers have looked at that and said, how can she
do that? And she can do it because she recognizes that God has shown
her grace. And that's what enables her to
extend that grace to others. That's what it means to be merciful.
How far are you willing to do that? John Stott says, nothing
moves us to forgive others like the wondering knowledge that
we ourselves have been forgiven. Nothing proves more clearly that
we have been forgiven than our own readiness to forgive. That's
the supreme place where we show mercy to others. And if you see
that you have very little desire to show mercy to other people,
it could be because you have not yet felt in your own heart
your need for mercy. It's a real sign of maturity
when you have a healthy and hearty spiritual appetite to serve others,
to care for others, even to forgive them. And if you don't see that
in your life, it may be that you have a diminished appetite
because you yourself have not felt that in your own life. And if that's the case, then
I would invite you to once again turn to Christ and see how desperately
you need His grace and how much you could not have done anything
outside of His enabling. Don Carson once said that the
alcoholic who will not admit he's an alcoholic hates all other
alcoholics. And it's the same thing here.
When you don't recognize your own sin, when you don't recognize
your own need, then you end up hating all others in that regard. But when you see your own need
and recognize that you don't have anything, that God has done
everything for you in Christ, that moves you to be compassionate
to those around you. And let's face it folks, what
we see in Scripture today, or rather what we see in the world
today is a lot of people out there hurting others, and they're
going to hurt you. And many of us have been wronged,
and many of us are going to be wronged. And so God is calling
us to show them mercy, even as the Lord has shown us the same. So, here we end with the three
forms of righteousness that we looked at, legal righteousness,
moral righteousness, social righteousness. All of these, again, are beyond
your and my ability to do in our own strength. We always are
called back to Christ, called back to being able to look to
Him to be able to carry us forward. May we do that today. I call
each and every one of you to hunger and thirst for righteousness,
yes, to recognize that you can only be satisfied in Jesus Christ.
And when he does satisfy you and you become so grateful and
so thankful, it will move you to want to be merciful to others
who also are suffering the effects of sin, whether from somebody
else or their own, usually a combination of the two. And then we want
to extend that to them as a sign of grace, even calling them to
join us in coming to Christ. May we be faithful to do that
in his strength. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you
that our hunger and thirst for righteousness, even that desire
comes from you. You give it to those who are
your people. You do it by calling us and making us a new people,
giving us a new heart. making us new creations who long
for you. And we're so thankful that when
we do that, you satisfy the deepest needs of our heart, as only Jesus
can. Father, there may be those, perhaps
even here this morning, who hunger and thirst, who are longing to
be put right with you, and may they, even this morning, recognize
that that fulfillment comes only in Jesus Christ. And for us who
have been followers of Jesus, perhaps for many, many years,
may we continue to grow in our gratitude for what you have done,
and may that move us to reach out to our brothers and sisters
first, and even into a dying world, even when that world wrongs
us, even when that world hurts us, to be able to reach out with
the gospel. Reach out with the good news
and not just stop with calling them to be right with God, but
also to meet their needs as you give us the ability to do. And
we pray, Father, that if we do that as a church, we know that
it will glorify your Son, Jesus, and we know that many people
will be attracted to Christ, as we have seen even in the last
few weeks in our nation. And what we are praying for is,
in fact, a new spiritual awakening.
Blessed are You… Part 2
Series The Gospel of Matthew
| Sermon ID | 92825141176835 |
| Duration | 43:08 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | Matthew 5:6-7 |
| Language | English |
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