Kingdom's Keys Fellowship
Where God's Kingdom Meets Man's Heart.
Lent 11 Matt.5:7 The Call to Mercy
Lent 11 Mt.5:7
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
The Beatitudes measure our spiritual accountability. Step by step, they give us a progress report on the state of our heart as it is being restored to its originally intended image and likeness of God.
The first Beatitude about spiritual poverty is the foundation upon which each of the succeeding Beatitudes builds on the one before. It’s like showing your passport going from one country to the next. Your basic identity, who you are, is checked at each entry point. When you enter the Kingdom of God your passport is your relationship with Jesus, your spiritual awareness of and dependency on His Spirit, your humility before God and your hunger and thirst for being right in your heart like Jesus is right. Each one opens the door to the next.
Say Lent is a time of concentrating on spiritual growth. What better way to start and end each day than to rehearse the Beatitudes? They not only keep you grounded but they do help you to recount how you reacted that day when one or the other was demanded. They keep us spiritually focused.
Every day we are faced with situations that demand we exercise one or the other. Our daily task is to be spiritually aware of the situation is which we find ourselves and respond ‘Beatitudinally.’ We need to approach each day with these basic teachings in mind until they become the way we automatically operate from the heart.
This was a rather long introduction to the fifth Beatitude about mercy. If anything mercy could not have been brought up until the first four had been opened. The quality of mercy is such that apart from God it is a vicious tool of pride. With God it is the operating quality that can open the most bitter alienated heart to God. Mercy is the enemy of fear and pride. It is the extension of God’s humility in the presence of others. It arrives in our hearts only after we have hungered and thirsted for God’s rightness.
The secular mind sees mercy as the power over others. One has the power to save a life. Why would it be done? Perhaps to satisfy one’s need to feel good and look good. Then there is the superior who chooses to show he has power by overlooking the mistakes of an underling to gain his loyalty and some further down-the-road support. Another is the bully who uses his physical strength as a means of social control and gives a ‘by’ to the ones he chooses not to pick on.
Every day we are faced with situations in which God’s mercy is called for. A ‘Beatitudinal’ heart, a heart that is spiritually aware, will know the demands of the moment. Hosea the prophet, citing God’s reaction to His people thinking that religious rituals could be a substitute for His spiritual qualities said, “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings (6:6).”
Intellectual, emotional, economic, social and psychological conditions place others in varying degrees of vulnerability. How we react is always a matter of the moment they occur. The trust we have in the Lord’s presence will determine our response. He is the source of mercy; we are simply His agents who let it happen.
The beginning of our practice of mercy is to acknowledge that God has mercy on us who are sinners and therefore His enemies. But His mercy was seen in His willingness to send His Son to die on the Cross for our sins. That is why anything less than God’s mercy is no mercy at all, just pretense.
Three closing considerations:
First, seeing ourselves as the recipients of His mercy, can we do any less than to extend it to those about us?
Second, we don’t gauge the response of others to determine whether or not it ‘worked.’ It is God who determines the effects and results.
Third, the fact that we have shown His mercy means His mercy has already doubly blessed us. The one who receives mercy and the one who gives mercy is the double blessing, for the giver sees what he has been given in the one who received the same regardless of the response. Stay tuned.
Lent
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
The Beatitudes measure our spiritual accountability. Step by step, they give us a progress report on the state of our heart as it is being restored to its originally intended image and likeness of God.
The first Beatitude about spiritual poverty is the foundation upon which each of the succeeding Beatitudes builds on the one before. It’s like showing your passport going from one country to the next. Your basic identity, who you are, is checked at each entry point. When you enter the Kingdom of God your passport is your relationship with Jesus, your spiritual awareness of and dependency on His Spirit, your humility before God and your hunger and thirst for being right in your heart like Jesus is right. Each one opens the door to the next.
Say Lent is a time of concentrating on spiritual growth. What better way to start and end each day than to rehearse the Beatitudes? They not only keep you grounded but they do help you to recount how you reacted that day when one or the other was demanded. They keep us spiritually focused.
Every day we are faced with situations that demand we exercise one or the other. Our daily task is to be spiritually aware of the situation is which we find ourselves and respond ‘Beatitudinally.’ We need to approach each day with these basic teachings in mind until they become the way we automatically operate from the heart.
This was a rather long introduction to the fifth Beatitude about mercy. If anything mercy could not have been brought up until the first four had been opened. The quality of mercy is such that apart from God it is a vicious tool of pride. With God it is the operating quality that can open the most bitter alienated heart to God. Mercy is the enemy of fear and pride. It is the extension of God’s humility in the presence of others. It arrives in our hearts only after we have hungered and thirsted for God’s rightness.
The secular mind sees mercy as the power over others. One has the power to save a life. Why would it be done? Perhaps to satisfy one’s need to feel good and look good. Then there is the superior who chooses to show he has power by overlooking the mistakes of an underling to gain his loyalty and some further down-the-road support. Another is the bully who uses his physical strength as a means of social control and gives a ‘by’ to the ones he chooses not to pick on.
Every day we are faced with situations in which God’s mercy is called for. A ‘Beatitudinal’ heart, a heart that is spiritually aware, will know the demands of the moment. Hosea the prophet, citing God’s reaction to His people thinking that religious rituals could be a substitute for His spiritual qualities said, “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings (6:6).”
Intellectual, emotional, economic, social and psychological conditions place others in varying degrees of vulnerability. How we react is always a matter of the moment they occur. The trust we have in the Lord’s presence will determine our response. He is the source of mercy; we are simply His agents who let it happen.
The beginning of our practice of mercy is to acknowledge that God has mercy on us who are sinners and therefore His enemies. But His mercy was seen in His willingness to send His Son to die on the Cross for our sins. That is why anything less than God’s mercy is no mercy at all, just pretense.
Three closing considerations:
First, seeing ourselves as the recipients of His mercy, can we do any less than to extend it to those about us?
Second, we don’t gauge the response of others to determine whether or not it ‘worked.’ It is God who determines the effects and results.
Third, the fact that we have shown His mercy means His mercy has already doubly blessed us. The one who receives mercy and the one who gives mercy is the double blessing, for the giver sees what he has been given in the one who received the same regardless of the response. Stay tuned.
Lent
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