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.