INTRODUCTION
I heard about a wife, who had a terribly rough day with her 3 small children, all day and they had been terrible. Her husband got home about 5:30 that evening and before he could sit down, she lit in on him about the children’s behavior...He came back, with, she’s home, and it’s her fault if they act like that. Their argument grew in intensity and loudness. Finally after two hours of fussing and fighting...the husband said, "I’ll tell you what, let’s start the whole evening over again. I’ll go back outside and come in again and we’ll start over." She agreed. He went outside on the porch turned around came back to the door, opened it and called out, "Honey, I’m home." To which she replied with a sarcastic snarl, "It’s about time, it’s 7:30, where have you been for the last two hours?"
This message is the last one from the series, “Attributes of Our Awesome God.”
I hope that as we have looked at some of the attributes of God that you have gained a better understanding of who God is and what God is all about.
I want to ask you a couple of questions. How many of you have done things in your life that you did on purpose, then you were caught? When you were caught, what were you hoping for?
How many of you have done something on accident or without thinking that hurt someone? What did you want from the person that you wronged?
One more question. When you have been wronged, what do you want as payment for the wrong that was committed against you?
In our society, we really want to see justice given out to people. Justice seeks to give people what they deserve for what they have done. Justice seeks to get back at the person who perpetrated the wrong against us. Is there a place for justice? Yes there is.
There are people who are just looking for reasons to get mad at people. This is not the way we ought to be.
I am thankful for the attribute that we are going to look at today. This attribute will be one that allows us to stand before God and accept a ticket to heaven. Today we are going to look at the attribute of mercy.
The word’s mercy and compassion basically mean the same thing in the Bible.
The word mercy in the Old Testament is related to the word for “womb”. This may reflect a mother’s affection toward her child (as in 1 kings 3:26) or the bond sibling’s have for one another as in Genesis 43:30 where Joseph saw his brothers for the first time in years.
Other variations of the word have their roots in human relationships. The husband/wife, the father/son. One who experiences the mercy of another is to reciprocate when the opportunity presents itself.
Mercy is the willingness to spare or forgive someone.
Compassion is sorrow or pity with a desire to help or spare. It is sympathy for pain or sorrow that prompts one to help a person.
When we are dealing with family members, we usually give them a lot more leeway than we would a stranger. If our own children needed money or other help, we would try to help them. A compassionate, merciful person will extend those same graces to other people, as if they were a part of their family.
Today we will see that our Great God is a God of mercy and compassion. We will see that you need mercy. We will also see that a person who is a Christian needs to be a compassionate, merciful person.
SERMON
I. GOD IS FULL OF MERCY
Listen to just a couple of passages with me.
2 CORINTHIANS 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort;
EPHESIANS 2:4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
Paul tells us that God is rich in mercy because He loves us with a great love. Remember in the introduction when I said that mercy has is roots in the relationship between a mother and her child. That bond will allow a child to do some pretty bad things before a mother will not show mercy and compassion to her child.
When man has dealt with God throughout history, God has been merciful toward man. As I studied for this message, I found instance after instance where God could have administered justice to mankind, but instead dealt with them with mercy and compassion.
When God led the Israelites out of Egypt He then called Moses on the mountain to give Him the Ten Commandments (In Exodus 32). Moses had been on the mountain for about 40 days (Exodus 24:18) and the people thought that something happened to Moses. What did the people do? The commissioned Aaron to build a golden calf for them to worship. God knew what they were doing and He could have taken them out right then and there. As a matter of fact, that what He considered doing until Moses convinced Him not to do that (Exodus 32:10-14)
God has proved Himself merciful time and time again.
JAMES 5:11 Behold, we count those blessed who endured. You have heard of the endurance of Job and have seen the outcome of the Lord’s dealings, that the Lord is full of compassion and is merciful.
Job was faithful to God and God rewarded His faithfulness.
Mercy is at the heart of the character of God. (Exodus 34:6-7; Deuteronomy 4:31; Psalm 62:12)
God has compassion for us because He loves us. Jesus felt compassion for the people also. MATTHEW 9:36 Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd.
Since God is full of mercy we can know that we can go to Him. His love and mercy is the basis for the forgiveness that He offers to us through Jesus.
God is a just God, but He is merciful. His justice will be satisfied on judgment day, His mercy will also be satisfied by the offer of salvation for those who accept Jesus.
God cannot allow a person who rejects Jesus into heaven because God is just and the way God’s justice is satisfied is by accepting Jesus as our Lord and Savior.
Since we have all sinned (Romans 3:23) and the penalty for sin is spiritual death justice says that we are to receive death. God sent Jesus to pay the price for our sin. This is why you read about Christians being redeemed. GALATIANS 3:13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us – for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” –
The curse of the Law was eternal death. LUKE 19:10 “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
If you love someone, won’t you show them mercy when they need it? God loves us so He shows us mercy.
II. WE NEED GOD’S MERCY
How many of you have needed someone to show you some mercy sometime in your life?
Some people go through life not thinking that they need mercy extended to them, but the fact of the matter is that all have sinned and fallen short of glory of God.
We all need God’s mercy extended to us so that we can see heaven.
The neat thing about God is that He wants to extend mercy to us no matter what we have done.
In the book of Jonah, God sent Jonah to go to Nineveh to preach to them. The thing about Nineveh is that they were a cruel vicious people, yet God was willing to give them a chance. In Jonah chapter 4:10-11 we have the following exchange: Then the Lord said, "You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work, and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight. "And should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?"
The cruel people of the Assyrian capitol needed mercy and God was willing to spare them if they were willing to repent and chance their ways.
In the book of Nehemiah, Nehemiah had overseen the rebuilding of the city walls and Ezra the scribe opened up the book of the Law to read it to the people. After the book of the Law was read for several days, the people started confessing their sins before God. In Chapter nine, the Levites’ then stood up and recounted the history of the people starting with creation going through their present day.
As they recounted the history, they pointed out how God had been merciful to them even though they had turned their backs on God several times. God loved them so much that He hung in there with them.
God will do the same with you. God loves you too much to just write you off. There will come a day when His mercy will end, that is the day that you die or the day that Jesus returns. God is patient with us until then.
1 PETER 2:9-10 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; for you once were not a people, but now you are the people of God; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Peter says that Christians are God’s people, they will receive the full measure of God’s mercy!
1 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,
It is God’s great mercy that allows us the opportunity to be born again! It is His mercy that gives us a living hope. People who do not have Jesus do not have this living hope.
This leads me to the last point. If you are a Christian, you have been given a large measure of mercy from God. We do not deserve God’s mercy, we do not deserve to go to heaven. The only reason that we receive mercy and salvation is by the grace of God. Grace is unmerited favor, we did not earn what we have from God we accepted His gift.
III. CHRISTIANS NEED TO BE MERCIFUL
COLOSSIANS 3:12 And so, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience;
Paul spends most of chapter 3 of Colossians telling us where our priorities are supposed to be since we belong to Jesus. He also tells us that we need to put on this heart of compassion.
Paul is telling us that since we belong to God that we are to put on a heart of compassion. God gave us mercy when we did not deserve it; we should also be compassionate to those who do not deserve it.
If we put on a heart of compassion, we will not always look for the worst in people. We will not be out there looking to be offended by others.
We will have compassion for the lost, and our compassion will lead us to try to do something about their condition by taking the gospel to them.
If we have true compassion for people, we will do what we can to help get them into the kingdom of God.
If you have heard the testimonies of others who gave their lives to Jesus, ask them if they were thankful for the person who cared enough to share with them.
Being a Christian means that we are trying through the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives to be more Christ-like. Jesus was compassionate toward people.
MATTHEW 9:36 Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd.
On two occasions in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus told the Pharisee’s that compassion was more important that sacrifice. READ MATTHEW 9:9-13
The people during Hosea’s time were turning away from God, Hosea was trying to get them to see that God did not care about them going through the motions of religion, He wanted them to be sincere and He wanted them to be a compassionate people.
The Pharisees were upset because Christ associated with tax collectors and sinners. But Jesus was more concerned about helping people than about doing what seemed socially acceptable
In the other instance in Matthew 12:7, Jesus and the disciples were walking through a grainfield on the Sabbath. READ MATTHEW 12:1-7
The Pharisees criticized the disciples for picking and eating grain from the fields on the Sabbath. The established leaders were operating by the letter of the Law, but Christ was focusing on God’s intent.
Christ said the disciples were guiltless. Therefore, he was not attempting to justify their conduct on the basis that David had also been guilty of Sabbath breaking. Christ’s quotation from Hosea 6:6 was a plain reference to the corruption and guilt of the Pharisees, and suggests that a proper attitude of mercy in their hearts would have rejected the criticism of this action before it was made. The real trouble was not in Christ and his disciples but in the hearts of the Pharisees.
JAMES 2:13 tells us, For judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.
If we will not show mercy toward others, GOD WILL NOT SHOW IT TO YOU EITHER! We will reap what we sow.
One of the ways our heart of compassion will show is what we do for other people. Our compassion should lead us to do something. If we have a heart of compassion towards the lost, we will try to reach them for Jesus. If our church has compassion and a passion for the lost, we will do what we can to fulfill our church’s stated mission statement. I will ask that you all repeat it with me. THE PURPOSE OF THIS CHURCH IS TO GLORIFY GOD THROUGH MAKING DISCIPLES OF JESUS CHRIST.
This WILL not happen unless those of us who belong to God put on a heart of compassion.
CONCLUSION
I am thankful that our Awesome God is the God of mercy and compassion. I am thankful that God did not give me what I deserved when I sinned against Him.
Every one of us needs God’s mercy and we need to show mercy to other people.
I want you to know that we serve an awesome God. Everything about Him is awesome.
We serve a God in heaven that loves us. We serve a God who loved us so much that He sent Jesus to satisfy His justice so that we can receive grace from Him.
Next week we will start on our Journey through the Gospel with Jesus. Next week I will start this new series by answering the question, “Is the Roadmap Reliable?”
This is a message that will show you why we can trust the bible as being the true word of God.
