Blessed are the Merciful
You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.
Matthew 5:7 MSG
How blessed you are when you demonstrate tender mercy! For tender mercy will be demonstrated to you.
Matthew 5:7 TPT
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Matthew 5:7 NASB
This might seem like a ho hum beatitude. Yeah, yeah we get it show mercy and get mercy sounds familiar. You reap what you sow and all that. I think there is something deeper here that if we look carefully will set us up to be entirely transformed.
-Sowing and Reaping
You’re blessed if you are merciful because you will receive mercy. The low hanging fruit of this scripture is that you reap what you sow. Life presents us with many choices; particularly in the area of our relationships. People are unpredictable, even the people we know and love well. We can learn to react to that unpredictability or we can learn to see situations for what they are. Jaime has been teaching us that there are many factors to our behavior. While everything impacts us spiritually sometimes our issues start with our body or our souls. Learning to see what is impacting us and others helps us to treat people better when they are having bad moments. We take into account the things that they are going through that might potentially impact their behavior. Learning to be merciful tends to create opportunities for others to show mercy to us as well. But I believe there is also a deeper level that the Lord is calling us to.
-Mercy triumphs over Judgment
Blind Bartimaeus cried out to Jesus for Mercy, understandable because he was blind and wanted to be healed but I have a feeling it went deeper than this. In John 9 we read about another blind man, this one had been blind from birth. The question was asked who sinned, this man or his parents for him to have been afflicted with blindness since birth. The Jews believed that if you were sick it was because you had done something wrong. I believe that Blind Bartimaeus was asking for healing by asking for mercy because he probably believed his sin caused his affliction. Could it be possible that our sins cause us to have physical problems? Sometimes that is true but not always. The truth is that even if we don’t have something wrong in our bodies, we all need Mercy. All of us have sinned, we have all fallen short but the message of Jesus and the new covenant is that by his mercy and through His grace we have been rendered innocent (Justified). God has redeemed us, He has redeemed our failures through his great mercy for us by faith. Faith shifts my perspective to God’s perspective. Now instead of just demonstrating mercy’ I can become it. This is bigger than sowing and reaping. It is receiving His inheritance.
-Mercy vs Grace
Mercy is getting what I don’t deserve. Grace is getting what He deserves. We receive grace through His mercy for us. Grace gives us the ability to do what Jesus says we can do. Operating in grace is the reality of being seated with Him in Heavenly places. I believe that God is calling us to live in a new understanding of this grace. Before the last 3 years I know that I settled into life being comfortable I relied on things in my life being stable and predictable but all those things seem to have melted away. There is really only one thing that has stayed stable throughout all of this. Jesus is the most stable force we can have in our lives. His love is constant and sure. No matter what we face He is always there to comfort us. We are in a season where I believe he wants to create a heightened awareness of his stability in our lives. He’s inviting us into a great adventure with Him believing Him for impossibilities. Our world needs to see the reality of Jesus in our lives.
