'BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL' (Matthew 5:7)

Rev. Juliet Schimpf By Rev. Juliet Schimpf     ___________________________ Broadcast Notes

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LINK to CFRA broadcast of Sunday, July 31^st, 2016)

http://proxy.autopod.ca/podcasts/chum/6/44719/good_news_220_jul31.mp3

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'Blessed are the merciful'

(Matthew 5:7)

1.  MERCY IS SALVATION EXTENDED
2. MERCY IS SYMPATHY EXPRESSED
3. MERCY IS SUFFERING EXPERIENCED

1.  MERCY IS SALVATION EXTENDED

·                     WARREN WIERSBE:  “Mercy is not a quality natural to man; it must be received as a gift from God.”

·                     WARREN WIERSBE:  “You cannot _(extend)_______ mercy until you have __(received)_____ it.”

·                     1 JOHN 4:19  “WE LOVE BECAUSE CHRIST FIRST LOVED US.”

·                     “Grace is getting what you don’t deserve; mercy is not getting what you do deserve.”

·                     Mercy and grace are two sides of the same coin. 

·                     RICHARD LENSKI:  “charis (grace) always deals with the sin and guilt itself…The noun eleos (mercy)…always deals with what we see of pain, misery and distress, these results of sin; the one [grace] cleanses and reinstates, the other [mercy] extends relief, the other pardon; the one cures, heals, helps,.”

·                     Grace says, “I pardon you; Mercy says, “I pity you.” 

·                     MERCY IS A DIVINE QUALITY!  IT IS A CHARACTERISTIC OF GOD HIMSELF!

·                     TITUS 3:5  “He saved us…according to His mercy.” 

·                     EPHESIANS 2:4-5   “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions”

·                     WARREN WIERSBE:  “But the receiving of mercy cannot be a mere commercial transaction between me and God; I must experience it in my heart.”

·                     “The longest journey a man must take is the eighteen inches from his _(head)______ to his __(heart)_____.”

·                     BEATITUTIDES ARE ALL ABOUT EMULATING GOD

·                     Ephesians 5:1  “be imitators of god”

·                     LUKE 6:36  ‘BE MERCIFUL, JUST AS YOUR FATHER IS MERCIFUL.”

·                     WARREN WIERSBE:  “The problem with the unmerciful servant in Christ’s parable was that he looked upon the king’s mercy as something that could have been earned if only there had been time enough to work.  “Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all!”   The man was never really broken by the debt of his sins, and therefore, his attitude was that of a prankster who had been let off the hook and not of a rebel who had been delivered from death.  He received mercy in a commercial way; he did not experience mercy in a spiritual way.  For this reason he was unable to extend mercy to his fellow worker, who owed him a paltry sum when compared with his own debt.”

2.  MERCY IS SYMPATHY EXPRESSED

·         BILLY GRAHAM:  “Christianity is, first, a coming to Christ—an _(in-flowing)_of the Living Water; second, it is a reaching toward others—an _(out-flowing)__…A body of water which has an inlet but no outlet becomes a stagnant pond.”

·         Matthew 9:36 (New Living Translation)  ³⁶ “When he saw the crowds, he had [mercy]compassion on them because they were confused and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

·         MATTHEW 5:7  THE MESSAGE:  “You’re blessed when you care.  At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.”

·         WILLIAM BARCLAY:  “The Hebrew word for mercy is chesedh.  It does not mean only to sympathize with a person in the popular sense of the term; it does not mean simply to feel sorry for someone in trouble.  Chesedh, mercy, means the ability to get right inside the other person’s skin until we can see things with his eyes, think things with his mind, and fell things with his feelings.”

·         MATTHEW 5:7 [WILLIAM BARCLAY]  “O the bliss of the man who gets right inside other people, until he can see with their eyes, think with their thoughts, feel with their feelings, for he who does that will find others do the same for him, and will know that that is what God in Jesus Christ has done!” 

·         The word itself, “merciful”, is from the Greek eliamosuna, from which we get the word eleemosynary, which means benefactory.  The word is used in this form only one other time in the New Testament.  The other is in Hebrews 2:17, “Therefore, He had to be made like His brethren in all things, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest.”  Christ is the great illustration of mercy.  He is the High Priest who intercedes for us, and it is from Him that mercy comes.

·         JOHN REDHEAD:  “But the kind of mercy which will fulfill the Golden Rule needs to be more than compassion for the unfortunate:  it involves an imaginative understanding.  If you wish to do for some other person what you would like him to do for you, then you must be able to put yourself in his place and see what life looks like through his eyes…[we must see] men as one sees stained glass in a cathedral window:  not from without in, but from within out.”

·         Queen Victoria was a close friend of Principal and mrs. Tulloch of St. Andrews.  Prince Albert died and Victoria was left alone.   Just at the same time Principal Tulloch died and Mrs. Tulloch was left alone.  All unannounced Queen Victoria came to call on Mrs. Tulloch when she was resting on a couch in her room.  When the Queen was announced Mrs. Tulloch struggled to rise quickly from the couch and to curtsey.  The Queen stepped forward:  “my dear,” she said, “Don’t rise.  I am not coming to you today as the queen to a subject, but as one woman who has lost her husband to another.”

3.  MERCY IS SUFFERING EXPERIENCED

·         “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”  Jesus does not mean that if you care for the needy, then others will care for you.  At least it did not work out that way for him.

·         EXTENDING MERCY RESULTS IN SUFFERING--^{1 PETER 4:12  “}Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. ¹³But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.^”

·         WILLIAM BARCLAY:  Sympathy is derived from two Greek words, syn which means together with, and paschein which means to experience or to suffer.  Sympathy means experiencing things together with the other person, literally going through what he is going through.”

·         WILLIAM BARCLAY:  “This is much more than an emotional wave of pity; clearly this demands a quite deliberate effort of the mind and of the will.  It denotes a sympathy which is not given, as it were, from outside, but which comes from a deliberate identification with the other person, until we see things as he sees them, and feel things as he feels them.  This is sympathy in the literal sense of the word.

·         NICKY GUMBLE:  “First, we are to be merciful to those who are in need, like the victim in the parable of the Good Samaritan.  We are to look out for those who are hungry, sick, outcast, unpopular or lonely, and we are to have mercy ont hem—our mercy will lead naturally to practical help.”

·         NICKY GUMBLE:  “Secondly, we are to be merciful to those who have wronged us, even where justice cries out for punishment.  This is the opposite to what we see happening all around us in the world, where ‘tit for tat’ and revenge are the order of the day.”

·         LOVING THE UNLOVEABLE--DICTIONARY DEFINITION OF MERCY:  “A COMPASSIONATE OR KINDLY FORBEARANCE TOWARD AN OFFENDER, AN ENEMY, OR OTHER PERSON IN ONE’S POWER”  [DICTIONARY GIVES A SYNONYM FOR MERCY:  FORGIVENESS]

·         A servant had broken open and drunk several bottles of the Governor Oglethorpe’s (of the Georgia colony) rare wine.  Wesley interceded for the offender and tried to calm the enraged Oglethorpe. ‘Sir,’ shouted the irate governor, ‘I never forgive.’  ‘Then,’ replied Wesley, ‘I hope you never offend.’

·         LOOK WHAT PRECEDES THE PARABLE OF THE UNMERCIFUL SERVANT:  MATTHEW 18:21:  “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?  As many as seven times?  Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”

·         Who do you need to forgive?

·         Mercy means not only kindness to the unfortunate but grace to the guilty.  It is the Good Samaritan helping the poor traveler, but it is more.  It is Jesus on the cross, praying for those who put him there, with a prayer for forgiveness.

Let’s pray:

Our Heavenly Father, we thank you that you are rich in mercy. You are rich in mercy towards us, and we desire today, to be rich in mercy towards others.

I pray, right now, that you will fill every listener with your mercy.

I pray, Father, that they will receive your mercy gladly, that they will recognize that they are in need of your mercy; and then, that they would extend it to those in need and also those who have offended.

Help us to expressly forgive those who have wounded us, and I’m praying for the listener, right now, who is holding onto bitterness and pain.

I pray that they would release their offender to their highest good. And would you then bless them with inner peace, as a result?

We thank you Father, that you are good, and always faithful.

We love you and adore you, and we say all this in Jesus’ name. AMEN.

Rev. Juliet Schimpf

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To listen to the above broadcast, click on the following link:

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'BLESSED ARE THE MEEK' (Matthew 5:5)

Rev. Juliet Schimpf By Rev. Juliet Schimpf     ___________________________ Broadcast Notes

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LINK to CFRA broadcast of Sunday, July 24^th, 2016)

http://proxy.autopod.ca/podcasts/chum/6/44602/good_news_219_jul24.mp3

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'Blessed are the meek'

(Matthew 5:5)

BILLY GRAHAM:  “Most of us forget that what happens 

within us is more important than what happens to us.”

HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF BEATITUDE:

• Matthew was writing primarily for the Jews
• The whole story of Jesus falls within the framework of a nation in bondage to Rome.
• In 63 B.C., A little over a half century before Jesus was born, Pompi had annexed Palestine for Rome.  And thus Jewish independence came to an end.  And that independence had been gained in a blood bath revolution called the Maccabean Revolution.  And they had fought to be free from Greece.  And it wasn’t very long that they knew that freedom until they were under the bondage of the imperial power of Rome. 
• From 63 B.C. on, the land was ruled partly through Herodian kings.  They were a family of kings appointed by Caesar. 
• The Jews despised this Roman oppression.  In fact, they wouldn’t even admit it.  When Jesus was talking to them in John 8, talking to the Jewish leaders, he said:  “you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”  And they answered, “We are Abram’s seed and were never in bondage to any man.”  They wouldn’t even admit it that they were slaves to Rome.
• The Jewish group knows as the “ZEALOTS”  were looking for a Messiah to overthrow Rome.  They were looking for a great General who could set up a Jewish revolution that would bring about independence by military action. 
• The “PHARISEES” were equally anxious to overthrow Rome; only they weren’t looking for a military kingdom, they were looking for a holy commonwealth.  They were looking for a restoration of the Old Testament theocracy. 
• BUT failed to see that Jesus came as a suffering servant.  Isaiah 40-66—this whole section presents the Messiah as a suffering servant. 
• When Jesus declared who He really was, He quoted from Isaiah 61.  In Luke 4:18  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor…To heal the brokenhearted…To preach deliverance to the captives….To give sight to the blind…To set at liberty them that are bruised.”

OUR SOCIETAL CONTEXT:

• We have glamorized vice and minimized virtue.  We have played down gentleness, manners, and morals—while we have played up rudeness, savagery, and vice.  We have reverted to the barbaric era of ‘tooth and claw,’ ‘the survival of the fittest,’ and the philosophy of ‘might is right.’  We are rich in knowledge but poor in wisdom; rich in the know-how of war but sadly lacking in gentleness, meekness, and faith.
• BILLY GRAHAM:  “We say, ‘Happy are the clever, for they shall inherit the admiration of their friends’; ‘Happy are the aggressive, for they shall inherit prosperity’; ‘Happy are the talented, for they shall inherit a career’; Happy are the rich, for they shall inherit a world of friends and a house full of modern gadgets.”
• 2 Timothy 3 [GODLESSNESS IN THE LAST DAYS]  ^1”But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. ²People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, ³without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, ⁴treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— ⁵having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.”

1. MEEKNESS:  A RESPONSE TO A HOLY GOD

2. MEEKNESS:  THE BLISS OF A DISCIPLINED LIFE

3. MEEKNESS:  A TRUE VIEW OF ONESELF

1. MEEKNESS:  A RESPONSE TO A HOLY GOD

• John MacArthur:  “Meekness is different from being broken in spirit, though the root word is the same…Broken in spirit focuses on my sinfulness.  Meekness focuses on God’s holiness.  In other words, I am poor in spirit because I am a sinner, and meek because God is so holy in comparison.  Two sides of the same coin.”
• It is important to note that in the beatitudes “the meek” come between those who “mourn over sin” and those “who hunger and thirst after righteousness.”
• John MacArthur:  “Broken in spirit is negative and results in mourning.  Meekness is positive and results in seeking righteousness.  That’s the beauty of the sequence, of the progression in the Sermon on the Mount.  First, there’s the brokenness, the tremendous sense of sinfulness.  But there is no despair because you begin to see the other side of it.  You see a holy God and begin to hunger after His holiness.”
• G.K. Chesterton:  “What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place…A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.  Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself.  The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason…We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.” 
• The Hebrew word for meek is “anaw”, and it mainly deals with a man’s attitude toward God. 
• “Anaw” describes the man, who in loving and obedient humility accepts the guidance of God, and who never grows resentful and bitter about anything which life may bring to him.
• It is the quiet certainty that God is always working all things together for good.
• It describes the man who gives to God the perfect trust, the perfect obedience, and the perfect submission.
• It is the attitude of Job when he said:  “The lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21)
• It is not so much the blessing of the man who is self-controlled, for such complete self-control is beyond human capacity; rather, it is the blessing of the man who is completely God-controlled.
• GALATIONS 5:22-23  “The fruit of the spirit is gentleness, goodness…meekness.”

2. MEEKNESS:  THE BLISS OF THE DISCIPLINED SELF

• GREEK word for “meek” is praus
• The word praus had two standard Greek meanings:

• 1.  It is used to describe an animal which has been tamed and domesticated, and which has been trained to obey the word of command, which has learned to answer to the reins.
• It is the word for an animal which has learned to accept control.  It is, for instance, used of a horse which has been broken in and which has become obedient of the reins.   
• So a possible translation of this beatitude is: 
• Blessed is the man who has every instinct, every impulse,

every passion under [GOD’S] control.

• 2.  Aristotle defined meekness, praus, as the mean between excessive anger and excessive angerlessness.  As Aristotle saw it, meekness is the happy medium between too much and too little anger
• so a possible translation of the beatitude is: 
• “Blessed is the man who is always angry at the right time, and never angry at the wrong time.” 
• This type of self-mastery is critical for leaders, for only when a person has hastened himself is he able to rule others.
• ^{PROVERBS 13:32} “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, And he who rules his spirit, than he who captures a city.”
•   JOHN MACARTHUR:  “Meekness is a gentleness and a mildness and a subdued character, but it is not weakness.  It is power under control.” 
• It is a by-product of self-emptying, of self-humiliation, of brokenness before God.  It is the taming of the lion.  [So] meekness does not mean impotence.
• It is the virtue of the man who acts with gentleness, when he has it in his power to act with stern severity. 
• It is used of a king who might have exercised vengeance on a rebellious people, but who treated them with kindliness.
• It is said also that if you place a straw parallel with the Gulf Stream, the Gulf Stream will flow through the straw. 
• Meekness is a man placing his will in line with the will of God and saying, “O God, flow through me and make me strong.” 
• It is Moses (described as very meek, more than all men that were on the face of the earth—Numbers 12:3) standing before Pharaoh the king and saying “Let my people go.” 
• It is Jesus before Pilate, saying with his silence, “Stop me if you can.”
• It is Peter and John standing before the Jerusalem police, saying “We must obey God rather than man.”
• It is Martin Luther, defying the pope and saying to his princes, “Here I stand.”
• It is John Knox in Scotland pounding his pulpit in St. Giles, and putting Mary Stuart the queen in her place. 
• So meekness turns out to be not weakness, but strength.

3. MEEKNESS:  A TRUE VIEW OF ONESELF

• Dr. Lloyd-Jones:  “Meekness is essentially a true view of oneself, expressing itself in attitude and conduct with respect to others.  It is therefore two things.  It is my attitude towards myself; and it is an expression of that in my relationship to others.”
• Dr. Lloyd-Jones:  “You see how inevitably it follows being ‘poor in spirit’ and ‘mourning’.  A man can never be meek unless he is poor in spirit.  A man can never be meek unless he has seen himself as a vile sinner.  These other things must come first.”

• 1.  Dr. Lloyd-Jones:  “But when I have that true view of myself in terms of poverty of spirit, and mourning because of my sinfulness, I am led on to see that there must be an absence of pride.  The meek man is not proud of himself; he does not in any sense glory in himself.  He feels that there is nothing in himself of which he can boast.”
• [NEW LIVING TRANSLATION]     ⁵ “God blesses those who are humble, for they will inherit the whole earth.”

• 2.  Dr. Lloyd-Jones:  “It also means that he does not assert himself.  You see, it is a negation of the popular psychology of the day which says ‘assert yourself’, ‘express yourself’.  The meek man does not want to do so; he is so ashamed of it.”
• [NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE]   ⁵"Blessed are ^(G)the ^[a]gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.”

• 3.  Dr. Lloyd-Jones:  “Likewise, the meek man does not demand anything for himself.  He does not take all his rights as claims.  He does not make demands for his position, his privileges, his possessions, his status in life.”
• PHILIPPIANS 2:    ^3”Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves…Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:  ⁶Who, being in very nature^[a] God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
   ⁷but made himself nothing, taking the very nature^[b] of a servant, being made in human likeness. ⁸And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross!

• 4.  Lloyd-Jones:  “The man who is meek is not even sensitive about himself; he is not always watching himself and his own interests.  He is not always on the defensive.  We spend the whole of our lives watching ourselves…Is it not one of the greatest curses in life as a result of the fall—this sensitivity about self?...  But when a man becomes meek he has finished with all that; he no longer worries about himself and what other people say.  To be truly meek means we no longer protect ourselves, because we see there is nothing worth defending.  So we are not on the defensive; all that is gone.”

• 5.  complete absence of the spirit of retaliation
• Christ, is described as “meek and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29)
• MATTHEW 21:5  “See, your king comes to you, gentle [meek] and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” 
• In 1 Peter, we’re told that when Christ was reviled, “He did not revile in return; while, suffering, He uttered not threats, but kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously.”
• Forbearance and patience

INHERIT THE EARTH

• What does this mean?  Well, it’s not a promise that the children of God can own oil wells, or blocks of downtown Manhattan, or orchards in southern California. 
• This Beatitude is a direct quotation of Psalm 37:11, and so we will begin with the Old Testament meaning of “inheriting the earth”
• “inherit the land”
• Originally, this verse had to do with the entering of the children of Israel into the promised land.
• God had promised Abraham that he would give him the promised land to inherit it (Genesis 15:7)

• With the coming of Jesus Christ, this Beatitude acquires a new width. 
• For Christians, this verse means more than the possession of any territory upon earth.

1.  In one sense, the meek will inherit the earth now. 

• MARTYN LLOYD-JONES:  “The meek already inherit the earth in this life, in this way.  A man who is truly meek is a man who is always satisfied; he is a man who is already content.”
• [THE MESSAGE]  ⁵"You're blessed when you're content with just who you are—no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought.”
• PAUL  2 CORINTHIANS 6:10  “having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

2.  Yet the promise that the meek will inherit the earth is also a promise for the future.

• JOHN 18:36  “My Kingdom is not of this world…”
• PHILLIPIANS 3:20  “our citizenship is in heaven…”
• What Christ means here is that when you enter the kingdom, you come into the original inheritance of dominion over the earth that God gave to Adam. 
• It’s paradise regained.  The people in the kingdom shall inherit the earth.
• GEORGE MCDONALD:  “We cannot see the world as God means it in the future.  Safe as our souls are characterized by meekness.  In meekness only are we its inheritors.  Meekness alone makes the spiritual retina pure to receive God’s things as they are mingling with them neither imperfection not impurity.”

THE WAY OF CONTRADICTION—THE WAY OF THE CROSS

• This Beatitude is one of the paradoxical sayings of Jesus; that is, one of the sayings that seems self-contradictory.  Meek people shall inherit the earth? 
• One would have expected the opposite.  One would think that ‘meek’ people get nowhere because everybody ignores them or else rides roughshod over them and tramples them underfoot.  It is the tough, the overbearing who succeed in the struggle for existence; weaklings go to the wall.  Even the children of Israel had to fight for their inheritance, although the Lord their God gave them the promised land.  But the condition on which we enter our spiritual inheritance in Christ is not might but meekness. 

Would you join me in prayer?

Our Heavenly Father, we thank you that you are always at work for our good and your pleasure. And so, we need only trust in you and line up with your will.

I pray for the listener who finds it hard to be meek. I pray they’d stop trying and start trusting.

Would you fill them with your Holy Spirit, and birth in them the Fruit of the Spirit, which is meekness?

Lord, it seems so contradictory to us to be meek, in a world that is arrogant, boastful and aggressive. It seems almost like a contradiction, but isn’t that the way of the Cross --- a contradiction?

We thank you that you lived out meekness for us, Jesus, by way of the Cross. You died for us, that we might live.

Lord, I pray for the listener. Encourage them and equip them, and would they be salt and light through their meekness?

In Jesus’ name, AMEN.

Rev. Juliet Schimpf

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To listen to the above broadcast, click on the following link:

http://proxy.autopod.ca/podcasts/chum/6/44602/good_news_219_jul24.mp3