"Blessed
Are The Merciful"
The
Lord's Day, July 9, 2000
|
The ECF Pulpit |
If you would turn in your copy of the Scriptures to Matthew
chapter 5, I'd like to continue our study there of the
person and work of Christ and of this portion of the Sermon
on the Mount. Well so far, we have covered.... Oh, he's
telling me that I'm not on [the microphone]. I'm the
most on person I know. Well I've got all the switches on,
but I have no power, so I'll tell you what, I'll stand here
at the pulpit and I won't walk. Folks, this is going to be a
short sermon. That's like cutting my arms off. You know,
it's impossible to talk without those, and it's impossible
to talk without being able to walk. But we'll
try.
As you know, as we've been working through these and we want to make just a couple of quick observations before we get into our text this morning, which is the seventh verse, which is the fifth beatitude: "Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy." But I want you to note first of all there is a shift in this, in moving to this one, from the previous beatitudes that we've seen. The others all have to do with the internal life of the individual and their relationship to God. But now, Jesus interjects an entirely new concept, and that is dealing with the relationships man to man. For when he says "Blessed are the merciful," he's talking about us; he's talking about the Christian, the one who's been regenerated and knows the blessedness of being Christ's, of having received of His Spirit, and in that blessedness, we are to show mercy. We are to be merciful. And in fact, He then adds that those who do this, "Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy," we'll go back and look at that in just a second, but I want you to see, first, this shift--that the merciful is us, and that means that we are called to be merciful. Now we can't be merciful to God--He needs no mercy, and we are not to be merciful to ourselves. We have to be merciful to other people. It's something we can only do to the outside. If I can steal from one lexicon on this word, merciful, so that we have a good anchor point, "eleamon" is the word in the Greek. And one writer put it this way, "It means to be compassionate--benevolently merciful involving both thought and action--and not merely those who express acts of mercifulness [We're going to discuss that in a minute.] but who have this as an attribute as a result of the indwelling presence of God." This is something, an attribute, that is brought into us by virtue of the fact that Christ himself has wrought mercy in us. That's an extraordinary thing. He has shown mercy to us; He makes mercy alive within us; and then, on the day of His appearing, He will be merciful to us in that final judgment. And we're going to discuss that more in just a minute. But as this is an attribute that's to be wrought in us, it dawns on me that the truth is that as Christians, we're often not a very merciful bunch. In a conversation with someone I had just this week, they made mention of the fact that Christians are the only group who shoot their wounded. We do that, and it's a problem. And it's one of the things that Jesus is going to be addressing here.
I'd like you also to note that the central thought is not that it's those who perform acts of mercy shall as a reward receive mercy, for that's never the concept in the New Testament. But instead it's that those who have had mercy wrought within them shall, on the Day of Judgment, and we have seen that that shall is a future that's worked in all of these [beatitudes] except the first one and the last one, where we receive a measure of the kingdom now, but this shall is with the coming of the fullness of the kingdom, and that's when His final wrath is poured out and we shall certainly receive mercy then, that wrath will not be ours because it's been poured out on Christ. So blessed are those in whom mercy has been wrought for they shall receive the fullness of that mercy when Christ comes in His kingdom.
And I'd note lastly that the relationship here between mercy and grace is an important one for us to mark out. It's a distinction that needs to be made, and there's a way that I was always taught to keep the two separate, and they are distinct ideas--mercy and grace--but they are never ideas found separate from one another. So we need to be careful we don't divide too closely here. It's kind of like the separation between the bone and the marrow. They are two different things, and yet if you have a bone without marrow or you only have marrow without a bone, you don't have anything that's living and functioning. You need the two in their proper relationship for there to be health. And that's true with mercy and with grace. And to put it simply, mercy is the idea of God not giving us what we do deserve, where grace is when God gives us what we do not deserve. In mercy He doesn't give us the judgment that is truly due us, and in grace He gives us rewards and blessings that we've never earned and never merited. So mercy is the relinquishing, if you will, of God's right to punish us to a certain level, or even more so to show compassion toward the effects of sin and fallenness in men. That's what mercy really does. It ministers to us by God relieving the effect of what the fall has caused. Well in order to understand that then, and to see mercy in it's complete context, we need really to look at three things. And the first is we need to look at the fact that mercy is a constituent aspect of God Himself. He is not just One who does merciful things; He is a merciful God. It's intrinsic in Him. Secondly we want to look at how that mercy finds its crowning moment in the salvation of men by preserving us from the wrath of God. And then lastly, we'll look at the extent of God's mercy. And I want to spend a little time dwelling on this idea of how God deals with guilt, because I think it's something we don't see very often.
Well first of all that the nature of mercy is that mercy itself is a revelation of God's nature to us. We read that already this morning as Jeff read for us out of Psalm 145, but would you turn to Exodus chapter 34. I want to go back and just look at something here that I think is vitally important for us. Exodus chapter 34: You know the occasion here was at the giving of the law. And you'll remember that the first time that Moses descended the Mount he had the tablets; he found the Israelites reveling in worship of the golden calf that Aaron had cast for them, and in his anger he smashed the tablets. And then God tells him that he has to carve out two more and bring those new ones up on the mountain and God will reinscribe, with His finger, the law on them. And this is his second time up the mountain then. Starting in verse 4 it says, "So he cut out two stone tablets like the former ones. And Moses rose up early in the morning and went up to Mount Sinai as the Lord had commanded him. And he took the two stone tablets in his hand." It's at this time then, that the Lord descended in the cloud and stood there with him as he called upon the name of the Lord. And this is amazing recollection because now God is going to reveal Himself in His essential glory to Moses. "And the Lord passed by in front of him, and he proclaimed the Lord." The first thing God wants him to understand is that as God He is Lord. He's sovereign. He wants him to see Him in that capacity. Moses, understand Me, if you're going to see My glory, know My glory, you need to know Me, as Lord. But secondly, He is the Lord, not only the Lord by Himself, but the Lord God, and then compassionate, merciful (if you have a King James, and I think merciful is actually the better word in this place; I think the NAS misses it with compassionate), and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth, who keeps lovingkindness (or you've got 'mercy' again in the King James there), who keeps mercy for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin and yet He will, by no means, leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and of the children on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generation," which in chapter 20 and in verse 5 He tells us, "to those who hate Him." How does He display Himself? How does He want at this great moment--this pivotal moment in Israel's history, how does God want Himself to be understood? He wants to display Himself as merciful, as compassionate, that He hasn't written man off. But from the very beginning it has been in His heart to redeem fallen men, and to forgive their sin, and to rescue them from all the effects of that fallenness and that sin. What an extraordinary God!
We don't think of Him in those terms very often. We often hear people preach about the wrath of God, and rightly we should because that's what all of condemned men stand in danger of. And we preach about the love of God, and well we should because God is a loving God. But here is this great, holy, infinitely wondrous God who someday will judge all the world for its sin--at the same time saying but I've not forsaken My own. I haven't forsaken those who have fallen and sinned against Me because I'm merciful. I'm compassionate. There is within God a heart that knows the pain and the misery that our fall has caused, and He stretches out His hand to touch it. He's a merciful God. If I might say, there are times when it's Christians who need to hear the reality of the mercy of God more than the world does. We forget that He didn't save us and then leave us on our own to stumble and to fall through life and to be cast off eventually. But by His great mercy He continues to be compassionate to us every time we blow it. Folks, we sin. We sin grievously. As His children we sin daily; we sin weekly, but we have a merciful God who doesn't stop loving, and doesn't stop displaying His compassion because we blow it. Because we blow it, is why we need a compassionate God. That's why we need One who is merciful.
I can't imagine what Moses must have been thinking, because the first time up the mountain all he saw was God, and it was an earthquake, and it was darkness, and lightning, and thundering, and the ground shook, and he tells us that he trembled and he was afraid. And he was given those tablets and went back down the mountain. And I can only imagine what must have been going through his head as he went back up the second time..."How shall we ever be received before God again when we've broken His law to the utmost?" He smashed it! And it was blasted into smithereens! And yet God says, "Come back. And when you come up I'll display something to you you didn't get the first time. You saw My law the first time. You saw My holiness, but My holiness by itself. Now you see My holiness, but you see it also in the context of My mercy and My compassion and My goodness." I think we need to keep that vision in our minds. So what has He done there in that place? He has revealed to Moses, at that moment, and to us by virtue of the Scriptures, that He is a merciful God inherently. It's within Him. He's opening His glory to us, opening His glory to Moses and showing us that mercifulness is part of what He is. And that's why Jeremiah in Lamentations 3, after seeing the hand of God in such chastisement upon the people, could rejoice and say, "But this I call to remembrance that it is of the Lord's mercies that we're not consumed; they're new every morning." Maybe you came to church this morning under that load of the sin that you've committed just in this past week. I want to tell you that you've come before the throne of your merciful God, again. In Second Corinthians 1, Paul writes, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort." Mercy, in it's very nature resides in and begins in God and then issues out from there. I don't know if you've ever thought about it much, but the truth is nature in itself is not a very merciful thing. Nature doesn't have much mercy in it. A tornado doesn't care whose house it tears down. A hurricane doesn't care whose property it completely destroys. Earthquakes are not very discriminating things. Wild animals don't run off plagued with guilt after they've killed someone who's traipsed through their territory. Nature in and of itself has no mercy. We can't see mercy until God reveals it in Himself.
But secondly, we find out that God, in fact, demonstrates that mercy in a very common fashion. He doesn't just pour it out on the elect; He pours it out on all men. This is one of the great damning things against all people who turn their hearts against God. The truth is God has been merciful to all men, not just to the redeemed. If you were to look in Hosea chapter 14, we know that He speaks specifically of the fact that He has a compassion, a unique compassion for those who are fatherless, for those who are orphans. This is repeated for us in the New Testament. In James we're told that the church ought to have a special place of compassion for those who are orphans, and who are widows, and who are without. That's part of our responsibility. In Daniel 4, Daniel tells us that God has a unique compassion for the poor--those who are destitute--those who are without. And that's why when we go further around in the Sermon on the Mount, one of the three things that Christ considers normal and characteristic to the Christian life are first that when we pray, secondly when we fast, and thirdly when we give alms. And giving alms is ministering to the needs of those who don't have. And matter of fact I think this shows itself beautifully in Mark chapter 10 when blind Bartimaeus is calling out for Christ, and he's in his pitiful condition. And he cries out, "Son of David have mercy on me." Blindness and affliction of all kinds are a result of what took place in the fall. And when Jesus was walking about healing the sick and raising the dead, he was demonstrating the mercy of God, the compassion of God upon the effects of sin, even to those who would not be redeemed in the process. Matter of fact, I think if we read it in just a few lines down in this very fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus is going to say, "Don't forget, the rain falls on the just and the unjust." God's merciful to this fallen world, and merciful to fallen men.
In Matthew chapter 25, when Jesus is giving His final discourses, He tells the disciples that at the day when He will divide the sheep from the goats, He will make note of the fact that some gave a cup of cold water; some fed; some took one into their house when he was hungry, and they went and visited those who were in prison--an act of mercy--visiting those who by virtue of their sin are suffering the affliction of their sin. But I'd have to say that that does not necessarily mean that a person's been touched redemptively. And we need to be careful to make that distinction. When I was growing up, I knew a man, who, as I was a little boy, I remember him giving his testimony--many a time--in church, saying how he had been diagnosed with a cancer that was certainly to take his life, that was incurable. The state of the art was not quite what it is today. I think back in the sixties, when I was a lad (oh sure), there was probably not a whole lot of the types of treatments we have today, certainly not as sophisticated. And God had healed him from that. And I heard him tell people that God had healed him from that, many a time. But he never submitted his heart to Christ in redemption. And just because God has healed someone, or just because He has met you in a particular need, doesn't mean that you're saved. When Christ stood on the hill and fed the multitude, the five thousand, do you think that everybody there was redeemed? No! He displayed His mercy and His compassion on their hunger and their fainting at that moment. And He did it in a magnanimous and a generous way to everybody that was there. That didn't mean that they were necessarily His. And we can have Him minister to us miraculously, and yet that doesn't mean, necessarily, that there's anything been done redemptively. We need to be careful that we don't draw the two together unnecessarily. His mercy is common to all men to some extent. The rain does fall on the just and on the unjust.
But thirdly, mercy as it's displayed in God is also extremely contrary to the world's notions of mercy. God's mercy is vastly different than the way we think of it. As a matter of fact if you were to read Proverbs 12:10, the second half of the verse says this: "But the compassions of the wicked are cruel." The mercies of fallen men are ultimately even a cruel thing--a grave difference between what God does and what we do, often, as fallen men. Let me give you a few examples of that. Just a few years ago, and if you're any fan of current literature you'll know that in the standard bookstores today, what has been high on the reading list for the past few years, are stories, (and one book that I read particularly about a year ago) a medical doctor spending a great deal of time telling people that death is no big deal; this is just a natural process of life and you should be comfortable with what's taking place, and be ready to ease out into eternity--without a second thought for the state of the souls of these people. The current wisdom is show them some sort of mercy while they're dying. But what a cruel mercy that is. What a wicked mercy that is. To tell someone and to try and soothe them in their suffering at that moment, and yet to know all the while that they're going out into a Christless eternity and never deal once with their souls. We can be wicked in the way that we display mercy.
I think we see it in this country in the welfare system that we've concocted. What is it? It's an attempt, and the intention in itself is right; it's to show mercy to those who are in need. But the way that we display it today, it has become a system whereby men are enslaved to the system. And they lose all of their human dignity, and they're bound to it. That's a wicked and a cruel mercy because it's a mercy that comes from man and from his fallenness and not from God. I think our criminal justice system shows exactly the same thing when we are more merciful to criminals than we are to the victims of the crime, when all we're concerned about when we hear debates about the death penalty is whether or not it's cruel for the individual who is going to go to the electric chair, or whatever the case may be. How can we be that way? How can we allow our mercy to become so perverse that we have more mercy on that individual than the ones who were the victims of the crime.
But see, that's fallen mercy. It's always going to be perverse. I think it finds its way into the church when as the church we preach only a gospel of love when men don't know that they are damned to an eternal hell first. If we don't tell men that they are in danger of losing their mortal souls, of perishing into a Christless eternity, that they are guilty before a holy God and that they need [to be] reconciled to Him through the blood of Christ, what good is it to tell them that God loves them, and soothe them as they enter into that Christless eternity? But we do it here, we do it in our own pulpits. We do it in our churches. We make men feel good in their sin! That's a perverse and a twisted mercy. It's not God's mercy. God's mercy doesn't put Band-Aids on cancer. God's mercy deals with men at the root of the problem. I might say that it differs, too, in the reality that mercifulness is supposed to be a matter of the nature, and not merely outward acts. I'm reasonably sure that Adolf Hitler was probably kind to his dog. He loved Eva Braun. He was magnanimous to those who were near him. He could show great mercy to those he loved and wanted to demonstrate it to, but he was the most wicked of men. God's not like that. And he calls us to be merciful and not simply to get off the hook by displaying a merciful act from time to time, but to be merciful.
And I think the third contrast between God's mercy and the world's mercy, or our perverted notions of mercy, is that God's mercy has the power to change men. And this is a mistaken notion that we have often, and I think one of the reasons why we've gone so haywire in some of the things that we do in today's world. Our mercy has to be tempered. Let me give you a case-in-point. Say I'm home next week and in the middle of the night someone breaks in my house and this gentleman decides to bludgeon my wife to death in her sleep, and he's caught and he's sent to jail. And, as a Christian I am required to show mercy. Absolutely! And do I display that mercy? I need to display that mercy. But does that mercy, then, require that I say no charges should be brought against this man? No, because that's to be cruel to society, and to unleash him in his present condition upon others. But God's mercy doesn't make that mistake, because God's mercy has the power to change men. And we need to be careful that we don't think that our mercy necessarily brings that type of change. We don't have that power. And ours has to be tempered; it has to be utilized in a way that doesn't make us think that we're gods, and that just being nice to somebody is going to change them. How's that mercy, then, to be demonstrated? Does that man still need to be evangelized? Absolutely! And once he's evangelized, does that mean that he should be free from the punishment? Not on your life! Because again, our mercy also has to extend to our neighbor. God's mercy is vastly different from the way that the world understands mercy.
But it isn't until we come to the concept of redemption that we really understand the extraordinary nature of what God's mercy is and what it does. The crowning glory, if you will, of God's mercy, is found in the redemption of lost men; it's found in salvation. I'm going to run through a bunch of Scriptures here. I just want to show you how intricately connected with salvation mercy is, because we ordinarily think of salvation only in terms of grace; but again, you can't separate the two. If I might, whenever God displays mercy that is a gracious act. Out of unmerited favor, He bestows the blessing of relieving (and having compassion over) the pains and the necessary trials of those who have sinned. And, grace itself is a merciful thing. You can't divorce the two from one another. But boy, I think we miss how much mercy is involved in our salvation. Ephesians 2:1 "And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them too we all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest." And here's where mercy shows itself in salvation in the most extraordinary way: first and foremost, it delivers the believer from wrath. Wrath is what we're due. That's the justice. That's the penalty that's rightly ours. But in His mercy, He relieves the penalty. He removes it from us. He completely takes away the danger of being judged by His holiness. If you can recall the episode in Luke chapter 18 when the Pharisee and the sinner are together in the temple, and how the Pharisee lifts up his prayer to God and says, "I thank you God, that I'm not as other men, that I fast twice a week, that I tithe of all that I have, that I'm one who's careful and meticulous about the things of the law." But Jesus said there was a man in the back and he was heavily laden down with his sins, and he couldn't even lift his eyes toward heaven, but instead he just beat his breast and said, "God be merciful to me the sinner." Oh, that's what the mercy of God does. It is mercy to the sinner because He forgives sin in His mercy. And the forgiveness of sin alleviates the penalty--takes it away, removes it entirely. When a debt is forgiven, you don't owe anymore. When it's been taken care of, there's nothing more to do. When you've received (if you're one of the fortunate people that have ever done it), when you've paid off a mortgage, and you've received that letter from the bank which is a discharge of your debt, that's exactly what it means; you don't have to send them any thing more. It's been completely paid for. That's what He does in salvation. That's His mercy. In salvation, He's relieving the debt, forgiving the sin, saying you don't owe me anymore.
Mercy is central to salvation in Romans 9. When Paul is laboring the point and trying to really get across the whole concept of God's electing grace in salvation, he says this, "For He says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it does not depend upon the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy." Oh merciful God! In Ephesians 2, Paul says, "But God being rich in His mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead, made us alive together with Christ." In Titus 3:5, "He saved us not on the basis of deeds, which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Spirit." In First Peter 1:3, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy, has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." First Peter 2:10, "For you once were not a people, but now you are a people of God. You had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy." In all of that so that in Hebrews chapter 4, we can hear Him also say, "Therefore, let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy, and find grace in time of need." The removal of wrath is based upon the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ. The wrath assuaged, man freed.
But I think it's in this last point that I find the most extraordinary understanding of what mercy does. Because the extent of God's mercy in salvation is that He not only delivers us from wrath, but He does this amazing, unbelievable work of delivering the penitent sinner from guilt. Justification has to be more than mere pardon. If it doesn't also deal with guilt, if it's not simply the removal of the wrath and not also the declaration of our righteousness in Christ, we only have half the equation. But I think we live like we only have half the equation! I think we forget that He has also dealt with our guilt, that He doesn't leave us guilty, that He doesn't leave us still waiting [for] some hidden wrath from somewhere, or still waiting for us to fill up what needs to be done. But that in His great mercy, He relieves the greatest of all the pains of sin, which is the guilty conscience-- the heart and the mind confronted with its sin, and so utterly blasted apart by the reality of our deserving of His righteous judgment. Mercy transcends mere forgiveness or pardon because it includes the removal of guilt based on the imputed righteousness of Christ. (I really, really want to walk. I just had to say that. I can't do it [because of a microphone problem] so I had to say it.) A man may commit a crime and be sent to prison. And once he's been sent to prison, he may be granted a pardon. Governors have the ability to pardon; Presidents have the ability to pardon. We've seen it happen in our own history in this country, on both levels--both the federal and, certainly, within the state governments around this country. But a pardon never removes guilt, and neither does the serving out of a sentence. When a man goes to prison and serves his term, when he comes out, no one says when he comes out "Oh, you're not guilty anymore." He is guilty of what he has done for the rest of his life. He will always be guilty. The books are sealed. He went through the trial; the trial was concluded; he was found guilty; he was judged guilty. He served the sentence. But, he still remains guilty!
I don't know if you've ever heard interviews with those that have committed heinous crimes, but they talk about how they still deal with the guilt of those things after the years have gone on. I daresay everybody in this room knows that to some extent or another. You know what it's like, still, to wrestle with the guilt of things that you did before you were saved--that there are times when the floodgates open back up, and all of those things come crashing back in--and the heart is melted. And you find yourself going to the throne of grace all over again, and saying "please forgive me," for things He forgave years ago. But that's the nature of guilt. It drives at the heart! It eats at the soul! And it keeps you in that bondage continually. But it is the great mercy of God that He not only delivers from wrath, but He also delivers from guilt! He puts an end to the guilty status of the sinner when He makes him His child. This we don't preach very often; and folks, this is the real good news of the Gospel. Because as Christians, in practical terms, a lot of us live our lives knowing that God's wrath has been taken away, but thinking inwardly that somehow it's our job to live with the guilt of it forever--that that's kind of our cross to bear. That's not it at all. And it's a slight upon the glory of Christ and what He did at Calvary. When men are released from prisons, how do we refer to them? They are ex-convicts; but they're still convicts aren't they? They're no longer serving time. They're no longer dealing with the wrath of that particular thing. But the guilt and the stain is on them forever. If you doubt that (and you probably haven't done this in quite awhile), but go fill out a job application somewhere. And find that box on the job application that says, "Have you ever been convicted of...." 'Cause that guilt never leaves. That guilt remains. Might I say this, quickly, before we move onto the applications, and we'll do that in just a moment: If you are one of those who manipulates other people by guilt, that is an ungodly and horrid thing to do. Let me give you the most spiritual thing I can say to that: Stop that--because that's not how God deals with you. He never holds the guilt of our former sins over our heads as a way of keeping us in line. But in His miraculous salvation, He deals with the guilt itself. And how does He do that? He cleanses the conscience from it.
In the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, you know, as the book of Hebrews tells us, that every year there was a remembrance made again of sins. Well that showed itself in two ways. The first was that, at the Day of Atonement even though throughout the year you had been a good practicing Jew, you had been faithful to the commands of God, that when you committed your sin, and when you committed your crime, you went and you did the appropriate sacrifice, and you did the appropriate thing, and whatever sacrifice was necessary was executed, and you moved on and you continued in your life; yet, at the end of the year on the Day of Atonement, at the beginning of the new time, on that Day of Atonement, the high priest would gather together again with the whole congregation. And what would he do? He would lay his hands on the head of that scapegoat. And once again he would confess the sins of the people. There was a remembrance made of all those sacrifices that you've already done. Yet here on the Day of Atonement those things are brought before the remembrance again. But it's even worse than that. Because not only would he confess the sins on the head of that goat again, but every year on the Day of Atonement there was a red heifer that was killed. And that red heifer was burnt as an offering unto God. But then the ashes of that red heifer were gathered up and they were preserved until the following year. And then when the new year came, when the new Day of Atonement came, and they went through the whole process again, they would take some of the ashes of red heifer and mix them with water and use that for sprinkling. What was He doing? Every year God was saying there's a remembrance of the former sins. Here's the ashes to prove it.
But that only continued until Christ was crucified at Calvary. And as of that point there is no more remembrance of sins made every year. When you come back for forgiveness on a daily basis, when you come before His throne on a Monday or a Tuesday or a Wednesday or a Thursday or whatever day of the week it is, and you cry out to Him, "Forgive me," He doesn't say, "But I already forgave you ten times." There's no more remembrance of sin! He cleanses from the guilt, and says, don't bring those things back; they're gone! And I know we think in human terms. We talk about people forgiving in the natural, and we say you ought to forgive and forget. God doesn't forget. We all know, here, that David was an adulterer and a murderer because it's written in God's eternal Word. God can't forget that anymore than we can. But what does He do with our guilt? He says, "I never remember it against you again. It's not brought into account in the way I deal with you." It's a settled thing and you don't have to live under the heaviness of it anymore. And that's why in Hebrews 10 the apostle can write, "Let us draw near with a sincere heart, in full assurance of faith having our hearts sprinkled clean...' From what? '...an evil conscience." Oh, to have the conscience soothed and cleansed before God. Beloved that's the salvation we have--a conscience that has had the guilt of former sins expunged. It's one thing for a criminal to have received a pardon, it's another for someone to have gone back and looked at the court records and said, "Not only is this man pardoned, but his record is expunged. He was not guilty." That's what it means to have the righteousness of Christ imputed to us. In His sacrifice, in His atoning sacrifice, He paid the just wrath that was due; but in His life of righteousness and His righteousness being imputed to our account, He then causes us to be looked at before the throne of God as pure, and holy, and without guilt. And He bids the redeemed to remember that their guilt has been met in Christ. So the believer can rightly say, knowing that the guilt has been removed, "That I am righteous with the righteousness of Christ Himself. Not merely pardoned, not merely set free, not merely forgiven, but pronounced, declared justified in the eyes of God.
Well, just a few applications to wrap this up and we'll be on our way. Beloved if that's the nature of the salvation that we have, then how much more do we need to have compassionate hearts on others who are suffering the effects of their sin. Oh we're so hard-nosed sometimes. We're so difficult on people sometimes. And I know Christians are held to a higher standard. We should be. The power of God, the Spirit of God indwells us. We should be living in a fashion that's better than the world. But every last one of us in this room, and every Christian who has ever lived, outside of Christ Himself, sins. And we need to remember that there is a remedy for that sin, continual cleansing. Both in and outside the church we need to be compassionate on those. In James 1, James says that, "Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of God and the Father is this, to visit the orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world." He didn't say just visit the Christian orphans and the Christians widows; he said, "the orphans and the widows." It's good that we help those that are in distress--saved or unsaved--especially the household of faith. I don't think there's any question about that. Our first responsibility is to the household of faith, to those who are God's children. But beyond that our mercy should spill out; our compassion for the effects of sin and fallenness in all men's lives has to be part and parcel of our living.
Secondly, I might say, that we need long-suffering hearts. I've often told you my favorite word in the Greek language is this word long-suffering. Not because it's a great word, it just feels so good when you say it, "macrothumia." Isn't that a great word? Long-temperdness. We're pretty short with one another. But think about how God is long-suffering with you. When was it that He should have just closed the books and said, "Enough with this idiot; I've had it up to here. I'm going to cancel out the contract. It's too hard"! He hasn't done that yet, has He? He never just wrote you off. You may have come in here this morning as a child of God, but fresh from sins committed just last night. And lightning hasn't come down out of heaven yet. And you haven't been cast into the bowels of hell because he is long-suffering in His mercy. And we need to be long-suffering with one another. I love this passage, and we'll deal with forgiveness in a great deal more as we move through this Sermon on the Mount, but in Luke 17 Jesus says, "Be on your guard. If your brother sins, rebuke him." It's not mercy to ignore someone's sin; that's to leave them to their sin; and that's a cruel thing. We don't just ignore sin, we deal with it. "If they sin, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times a day, and returns to you seven times saying, 'I repent,' forgive him." And you gotta say, after the second or third time, "This guy isn't very sincere." How many times this week did you go back to Him and say, "I repent; forgive me." And did He say, "I don't think you're very sincere"? He forgives. How much more then, in the third place, should we have forgiving hearts with one another. Having been forgiven crimes against an infinite and an absolutely holy God, how can we do anything but forgive those who have sinned against us? And in our forgiveness, we need to absolve men of their guilt. Now I know how we forgive each other. Let me be sexist for a moment. Men you've all lived through this. You're in the middle of an argument, and all of a sudden, something about a dress that she didn't look right in fifteen years ago shows up in the conversation. "I remember that time when..." We [men] do it too. We just have sneakier ways of doing it. Every time we say to the other individual, "I remember when...," what we have just declared is we did not forgive you. We just stuck it in the drawer until a convenient time to use it against you. God never dredges up an old sin against you. Men might. The enemy might. But God never does. That's what His mercy does. He takes away the guilt. So that it can never be brought back again. That's how we need to forgive one another. Take all the IOU's out of the drawer and burn'em. If you said, "I forgive you." You made a covenant with that person to say, "I will never remember this against you again." And don't do it. Leave it alone, because that's how He's dealt with you, and me, and all those who are His children.
Might I lastly say then, what a great Gospel we have to preach to the lost. Listen to this Gospel: Wicked and fallen men with no merit of their own, can cry out to God in the depths of their despair and in His mercy, He will forgive them. And not only will He forgive them their sins, but He will take away their guilt by imputing to them the righteousness of Christ. Isn't that a glorious Gospel to tell fallen men? You won't have to live with the guilt forever. He dealt with it in His Son. And He's made you His own. That's the Gospel to preach to the world. Christ forgives sinners. And, in His mercy, the extent of His mercy, is to take away the guilt as well as the penalty.
Let's pray: Heavenly Father, what a glorious gift You've given us, in that we might preach this gospel to a lost world. Oh Father, I know that far too often they don't even know that they are lost and in sin yet. And they need to be confronted first, with Your holiness and the righteous demands of Your law. They need to know they are separate from You, and undone. We know that Father. But when the time comes, Oh, God, keep us from watering down Your gospel because it's almost too good to be true. But let us tell them the fullness of the glory that our God forgives sins, and He removes guilt and stain for eternity, and declares unjust men just with the righteousness of Christ. Lord, teach us how to proclaim it clearly, and properly, and rightly to all those around us. Father, if there are any within the hearing of my voice, this very moment, and they know their guilt, and they know the shame, and they know their lostness before You, plant in their hearts the faith necessary to trust Christ for their salvation. Give them the belief that they don't have. Change them by the power of Your Spirit, we pray. And Father, for my Christian brother and sister who are gathered here today, or may hear this through some other medium, who have been struggling with the guilt of past sins. They've known Your salvation; they've come to the knowledge that there's no wrath yet to come, and yet the guilt of those old things comes back and haunts them over and over and over again. Teach them how to answer those haunts with the knowledge that they have had the righteousness of Christ imputed to them, and no man may bring a charge against God's elect. For it is Christ who died, and Christ who has justified us. And our guilt has been removed in Him. Set the restless heart of Your child at ease. And make them to be able to rejoice in the fullness of what You've given in this great and wonderous salvation. Oh Lord, set us free from those bondages that our fallenness has kept us in, that we might show forth Your glory unhindered. Thank You for Your goodness. Thank You for Your forgiveness. Bless these words to Your people this morning we pray, in Jesus' blessed name. Amen and amen.
Transcribed by Charlotte Hansen
Copyright © 2000 Reid A. Ferguson. Permission granted to quote in context.