Discipleship Part 6: Character Traits
Scriptures: Matthew 5:3-11; Ephesians 5:1-2; 1 John 3:1-3
Introduction
This morning we will continue with the character traits of a disciple using the beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as our reference. To date we have discussed three traits: being obedience; being poor in spirit; being mournful; being gentle and/or meek; and hungering and thirsting for righteousness. This morning we will continue beginning with verse seven of Matthew chapter five.
I. Being Merciful
Matthew 5:7 says “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” As I shared with you a couple of weeks ago, when someone does something wrong to us we desire justice; swift and immediate justice. However, when we are the ones in the wrong, we do not want justice, we want mercy. In order for us to receive mercy from God, we must first be willing to give it.
Jesus said that those who are merciful will receive mercy. Webster’s dictionary defines mercy as “refraining from harming offenders and/or enemies; a disposition to forgive.” To better understand what Jesus was saying, let’s examine the two Greek words for merciful and mercy. The Greek word eleemon when used as an adjective means merciful. It does not mean someone is just possessed with pity, but someone who is actively compassionate. There is a difference between someone who is filled with mercy and never shows it and someone who actively gives and/or demonstrates it. The person who proactively shows mercy when faced with situations when others would demand justice is who Jesus was referencing here. When we choose to be merciful instead of demanding justice and revenge, we open the door for God to show us mercy when we least deserve it. The Greek word for mercy is eleeo. It means to have compassion or mercy on. As a verb it signifies in general, “to feel sympathy with the misery of another.” So consider when we are the guilty party and we must come clean before our Lord. When we stand before Him we desire mercy not justice. We are guilty and are deserving of the punishment that we should receive. However, because we have been merciful to others, God shows mercy to us. He has compassion on us when we least deserve it because we have shown that same compassion to others. Many do not understand this concept and continue to treat those who have offended them as guilty parties deserving to be punished. But if we remember that we too have been the guilty party and we asked for and received mercy, should we then not do the same for those who request it of us? Of course we should, but that is the first step. The trueness of being merciful comes when we have mercy on an offender without them requesting it. This is what the Greek word for merciful refers to; someone who proactively demonstrates compassion. As you might imagine, this mixes with how the world operates like oil mixes with water.
Last week I shared with you about being gentle – being gentle or meek while walking in the true strength that lies within you. Being merciful is also about strength. You see, the world teaches us that we should be strong without feeling. We should exercise our strength by crucifying our enemies and making sure everyone knows that they should not cross us. The world teaches us that there is no room for weakness; especially for those who are leaders. The world teaches us that we should be strong; stand firm; and when we are crossed to take immediate action to deter anyone else from crossing us in the future. This is what the world teaches us. This is why there are many conversations that take place where someone says “If I was you and they did that to me, I would do ________.” You can fill that blank in with a lot of words but the one word that probably would not often find its way there is mercy. We generally do not recommend having mercy on someone; we demand justice because we have been wronged and someone should compensate us for our being wronged. There is a true strength that lies within those who are merciful that the world does not understand. It takes a very strong person to forgive and wipe the slate clean when the other person does not deserve it. But the person who is merciful understands that it is not about the other person, it is about them and their relationship with God.
Paul told us in Ephesians 5:1-2 to “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.” He encourages us to be imitators of God just like children. The Greek word translated as imitators is mimetes and it means a follower as in a continuous sense. What we became during our conversion is what we must diligently continue to be thereafter. For those of you who have children you know that they often imitate their parents. They try to walk like them; to their dismay, they try to talk like them; and sometimes they might even try to wear their parent’s clothes as they are “imitating” their parents. Paul says that like these little children who imitate their parents, we should imitate God by walking in love just as Christ loved us. God is a God of mercy and if we begin to imitate Him, we will become children of mercy. This is not a one time act; but a way of continuous living. It becomes a part of who we are at our core. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy.” Let’s move on to the pure in heart.
II. Pure In Heart
Matthew 5:8 says “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Some of you might be thinking that this is no big deal since all of us will one day see God. Some of us will be shouting and praising Him while some of us might be dreading the day because we know how we have lived our lives. Truly we shall all see God on the Day of Judgment; but the pure in heart will see God here – spiritually. Let me explain it this way.
There has been a lot written about the heart of man. We recognize this word as having two meaning. The first meaning is the physical organ that is the core or key component of our internal system. The heart keeps us alive and truly we cannot live without the heart doing its job or pumping blood throughout our bodies ever minute of every day. And just as our physical heart is the core of our physical bodies; the “other” heart is the core of who we are. When you see this word used in the Bible, often it means the center of one’s being, including the mind, will and emotions. This is what the song and poem writers talk about in their writing. When someone says their hearts were broken; they are not talking about the physical organ; but that part of them that encompasses who they are (the mind, will, emotions, etc). This part of us is so crucial to our lives that Solomon wrote “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones.” What he was saying was that our hearts, not the physical organ but the core of who we are, is as good as medicine when it is happy or joyful. Likewise when it is not, it can kill us. It is a very true statement when someone says that they knew someone who died from a broken heart. This is what Solomon is referencing. But let me get back to the reference in Matthew.
Jesus said that the pure in heart will see God. That word pure in the Greek means clean. Someone whose heart has been cleaned and is not allowed to be cluttered again. This person sees the good in people and acts without hidden agendas. They do not stand in judgment and are always willing to help someone in need. The way they think; how the feel spiritually and emotionally is often linked to God and resources not of this world because this conflicts with this world. The world operates on a standard of deception. We are trained to deceive and to be deceived. We have to teach out children to tell the truth but we cannot figure out who taught them to lie. The world that we operate in is centered on deception which is masked as truth. We can find it in almost every place we look. It exists in our homes; on our jobs; in the Church; schools; you name it. If people are involved then sooner or later deception will raise its ugly head. If we, as disciples of Christ, are not careful, we can easily live in this world according to this standard. We can easily find ourselves justifying our deception for the “better good”. When deception is involved, there is no better good, even if it does get us out of a tough situation. We cannot walk in this world with a pure heart if we allow the world’s standard of interaction (deception) to be the basis for how we interact with others or the foundation for which we get out of trouble.
In recognition of what Jesus taught, John wrote the following in 1 John 3:1-3: “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.”
John’s desire was that we recognize that we are children of God and that because of that we will not be recognized by the world. As we have gone through each of the beatitudes to date, each has conflicted with the standard by which the world chooses to operate by. People recognize their own. If we are living as a part of the world, the world will recognize us as its own. However, when we begin to live according to God’s standard, the world will not recognize us because the world does not recognize God. Does this make sense? The day will come when we will see God as He is and we ourselves will be changed. John states that everyone who has this hope for their future will begin to purify themselves because God is pure. We have been encouraged to take the steps to do what we need to do to ensure that we adequately represent the One we say we serve.
I will not stand before you and tell you that purifying your heart is an easy thing to do. It is amazing how much negative, corrupt and destroying “stuff” attaches to our hearts as we grow up in this world. When we accept Christ as our Savior, He cleanses us, but sometimes we can still see the stain even though Christ has wiped it clean. This is like you wearing your favorite shirt or blouse and you spill something on it. You wash it and do the best you can to get the stain out. When you wear it, you can still see faint signs of the stain even though everyone else does not see it. You can see it because you know where to look. You concentrate on that one area of the shirt that has that one stain and you find it every time. When everyone else looks at the shirt, they take in the whole shirt and so it is easy for them not to see the stain because they are not looking for it. When Jesus cleanses our hearts, we become clean. But because we have lived in filth for so long, we can still see stains that others cannot see because Jesus cleaned us. We must get to the point of understanding that although the memory of the stain is there, we have been cleansed and therefore we do not have to allow that memory to recreate that stain in our lives again. This is the process that we go through in purifying our hearts. We recognize the sin; the blood of Jesus covering it; and finally our freedom of it. Because we have come through we begin to look at others through the same blood covered grace that was applied to us. Hopefully this makes sense to you.
As Christians if we begin to show mercy in every situation where we have been offended we will be able to allow the Spirit of God to work within us in every situation. If we allow our hearts to be cleaned of the dirt that we have packed within it, we will begin to see our world differently. When we begin to operate with a pure heart, showing mercy to everyone proactively will be a natural transition from how we currently operate. All of us have been stained by sin and have had our vision clouded by the way the world operates around us. However, when we accepted Christ, we accepted a new way of living. We might not know everything that is coming, but we do know how we are to respond to whatever comes. By faith we walk and live and by faith we accept that our hearts are clean regardless of the memories we have of our dirty past. By faith we offer mercy to all we encounter because we too require mercy. We walk by faith and not by sight!
Next week we will finish with the beatitude and then move on with other traits of a disciple. May God bless and keep you is my prayer.
