For a month now, we’ve been studying the beautiful attitudes about which Jesus spoke from the side of the mountain. And if you look closely at the material we’ve covered so far, you’ll notice that each of these four not only are related and build upon the beatitude that precedes it, you’ll also notice that each of these four are attitudes that are expressed in the inner person. It is from this point that we notice a transition; from inner-person attitudes, to outwardly-expressed attitudes. Read with me Matthew 5:1-12.
Do you see it - up to and including verse 6, the attitudes are internal. At verse 7, the transition is made. Here is how one scholar states it: “Those who in poverty of spirit recognize the need or mercy are led to show mercy to others. Those who mourn over their sin are led to purity in heart. Those who are meek always seek to make peace. And those who hunger and thirst for righteousness sake are never unwilling to pay the price of being persecuted for righteousness’ sake.”
Today, we’re going to look at three beautiful attitudes together, verses 7-9, to examine the audience, the assurance, and also the attitude. Now, you won’t find a third part on your outline, so you’ll have to add it on, but that shouldn’t be too difficult.
So, without further ado, let’s look at the audience. If you’ll remember, we have said that these are situational blessings that are promised, but rather are categorical. I cannot emphasize this enough, for God is not a situational God, and we should not be situational Christians. One major indictment upon the Christian community is just that - that too many are situational. That one Christian can exercise different ethics and different morality in different situations is not in agreement with the character and nature of God. James 1:17 says that there is no “shadow of turning” with the Father. The Bible says that God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This is why He is reliable, He is trustworthy, and yes, in some regards, He is even predictable.
Too often, though, Christians - Christ followers - don’t follow God in this practice of Christian life. Rather than being categorical Christians, we are situational Christians. This is what leads Christians to speak out strongly on one sin, while dismissing their own. This is what leads us to behave one way in public and another in private. And friends, if you are a situational Christian, don’t make the mistake for even a moment that these are blessings promised to you. Because they’re not. The reality is, you cannot be situationally merciful, situationally pure in heart, and be a situational peacemaker. But these categories of believers are indeed to whom the promises of blessing are extended, so let us look at each now.
First, blessed is the merciful. This one seems easy enough to understand. Blessed is the one who is full of mercy. There are a lot of people in the world who consider themselves merciful because they have extended mercy from time to time. But this category does not encompass the person who is occasionally merciful. Why? Because occasionally is synonymous with “situationally.” To be merciful from occasion to occasion is to be merciful from situation to situation. Instead, this category of person is categorically merciful. This word ‘merciful’ literally means ‘to be actively compassionate.’ It means to be extending mercy on a continual basis. It means to have your heart moved to action.
There is a catch here - for mercy to truly be mercy, it must be extended to those who don’t deserve it. You can’t say, “I was merciful to this person because they were really sorry for what they did,” then you aren’t truly being merciful, because their sorrow was an effort, was labor, and your “mercy” was the wage earned for their work. No, for mercy to be mercy, the recipient can’t deserve it.
This is the way it has to be because this is the way God showed His mercy to you. Romans 5:8 says “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” This means He died for us in our worst state. We didn’t hadn’t done anything good to merit salvation. He didn’t do it because He saw our potential for doing good. He did it simply because He was actively compassionate. He looked from heaven, throughout time, and He was moved with compassion that man could not have a redeemed fellowship with God on his own. In fact, Paul says it this way in Romans 7:18: “I know that in me (my flesh), nothing good dwells.” On our own, apart from God, we would seek nothing good. We would seek out the things that satisfy our flesh, our lusts, our wants, our desires, and we would flee from God at each and every opportunity to have an encounter with Him. Despite this, God, with active compassion, left heaven, became man, and reconciled sinful man with Himself, by His own sacrifice. Friends, that is mercy.
The second category expressed here is “the pure in heart.” Now, this is a challenging scripture, that we could probably park at and discuss until the Lord comes again. So know that the short attention it gets today doesn’t adequately do service to the depths of the human condition that this Scripture plumbs. What does it mean, then, to be pure in heart?
To understand this promise a bit better, let’s take a historical look at the heart. Throughout history, the heart has been an incredibly important organ. It always been more than just a tireless muscle pumping blood throughout the body. In fact, its also been for much of history, the seat of the human emotions. In fact, the people who were contemporaries of Ezekiel knew that God would one day come and exchange their hearts of stone with hearts of flesh. They knew from Jeremiah that the heart was deceitful above all things and that it could not be trusted. They knew from Solomon that the heart must be watched diligently, for from it flow the springs of life. They knew from David, that man’s desire should be for God to create in him a new heart. They knew from Moses, that God’s wrath resulting in a flood was ultimately a bad heart condition. Genesis 6:5 says, “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” And they knew from Jesus that “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders.”
So, to be “pure in heart” means to be clean in your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions. And friend, this is exactly opposite of what the world wants from you. Every day, the world seems to be shouting out messages like “Follow your heart. What does your heart tell you to do? This is an ‘affair of the heart.’” God is saying, to be blessed, you must be pure in your heart, which means to be pure in your thoughts, in your emotions, and in your feelings. And this is where you have to be very careful.
You see, we hear these words, “in order to have God’s blessing, I must have a clean heart,” and the first thing we do is we begin to explore what we can do to make our heart clean. And right now, this very moment, we must understand and embrace the futility of that effort. Proverbs 20:9 asks the rhetorical questions, “who can say, ‘I have cleansed my heart?” the answer is obvious: nobody can. The cleansing of a heart does not begin with man, it begins with God. How do we have a clean heart, then? By recognizing our weakness and calling out to Him to create that cleanness in us. God’s Word says in John 15:3, “you are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you.” The only way to have a clean heart, to be pure in heart, is to have your heart of stone circumcised by the Holy Spirit and your heart of flesh being filled with the Holy Spirit, and serving as the dwelling of your High and Holy God, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Third, blessing is promised to the “peacemakers.” Literally, ‘peacemakers’ means, ‘those who make joined.’ It doesn’t take too much deep theological thought to realize that God is the author of peace. This is one of His titles: The Lord of Peace. The scriptures are replete with evidence that man, in his flesh, is at war with God. Romans 8 says the carnal mind is enmity with God. James 4:4 says to be friends with the world (or to be situational in your Christianity) is to be at enmity with God. But God made peace with warring man, through Jesus Christ, and has given reconciled man this same ministry: Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18). This is what it literally means to be ambassadors of Christ. This is why we call God’s message the gospel of peace - that sinful, fallen, warring man can be reconciled back to God through Jesus Christ.
So here is the audience. Blessings are promised to those who are actively compassionate, who live with hearts that have been purified by God, and who are ambassadors of Christ to the world. And to those who find themselves identified in these categories by the grace of God, here are the assurances.
First, to the merciful, you will be shown mercy. This is so much more of a blessing than simply the mercy of salvation for one who does not deserve it. David praised God saying, “With the kind, you show yourself kind.” Likewise and conversely, James 2:13 says, “for judgment will be without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. This isn’t telling us that we must show mercy in order to earn salvation, but rather, that because we have been shown so much mercy, we must show mercy. Remember, He gracefully gave you His mercy, and expects us to do the same. This is the heart of this blessing - God has given us mercy in salvation . We therefore extend mercy liberally because this world is so desperately in need of it. In turn, God extends mercy upon us, withholding the punishment we deserve as sinners.
Second, to the pure in heart, you will see God. Remember, since holiness, like mercy, is a gift given from God, and not something you earn, we recognize that God alone makes us holy. God alone makes our hearts pure. To we who are made pure by God’s grace and mercy, will we see God in His fullness. Surely, this promise will be experienced completely in eternity, but many of you can give testimony how this blessing is extended even now to those who are made pure in Jesus Christ. Think about the experiences of your life where you can look and see the fingerprints of God all over your circumstances. Maybe it was a job you got even through you were apparently under-qualified. Maybe it was a job you lost, but only to get a better one. Maybe it was the death of someone deeply beloved, or an unexplainable illness, or freak accident. To those who are pure in heart, they are able to see God at work all over the world, and all over their individual lives.
Before we move on - we as a church must pay heed to this reality as well. We keep saying that we want to see where God is at work and join Him there. The only way we can see God is if we are corporately pure in heart. That means we’ve got to set our selves aside. We cannot have personal agendas. We cannot have selfish motives. We cannot have any preconceived ideas - we must simply present ourselves as empty vessels before God, and say, “thy will be done.” If we are willing to do that, we will have no difficulty seeing the activity of God amidst this body, and we will be able to join Him and serve Him for His glory’s sake!
Third, to the peacemakers - they will be called sons of God. Literally, this blessing means, those who make peace will receive the surname of God. This means that when we are peacemakers, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we will be identified as children of God. A person who is continually divisive, destructive, demeaning, or degrading has reason to doubt whether or not they are truly saved. These are not God’s ways. I’ve heard people say, “I’m always going to vote against anything that goes on in the church - God has called me to be that voice of opposition, just so we don’t get cocky. Friends, that simply is not biblical. There are times when God is moving in the body, and to step outside the will of the Father just to teach a lesson is not the way of peace, it is the way of division. But God says that those who are peacemakers will be called the sons of God. I know some of you who carry your testimony with you as you go out into the world. As your pastor, I’m pleased to be able to say that some who you have encountered know that you are child of God. They’ll come to me for one reason or another, and they’ll ask me, “Is so-and-so a member of your church?” And I’ll say, “why yes he/she is, why do you ask?” And they’ve said, “because I’ve noticed there is just something different about them.” Friends, they are identifying you with the family of God, and praise His name for it. Remember, too that this promise of blessing also has eternal implications. We’ve been saved by Jesus Christ so that He’ll be known as the first born of many brethren. That means that in the kingdom of God, in heaven, we will be known and identified as his children. There will not be any distinction between Jew or Gentile, between man or woman, between young or old, but we will be his children, all equally receiving His blessing of inheritance!
With that in mind, today we close with the attitude. If we’ve seen the audience to whom the blessings are promised, and we’ve seen the assurances of the promises themselves, then we should not be able to depart here today, without a resolve in our spirits to carry on through life in the proper attitude. So in closing, here are some general markers of an appropriate attitude to receive the blessings promised to the merciful, pure peacemakers.
First, we should have an attitude of humility. Remember, that we cannot be proud and experience any of God’s blessings. When we see this categorical list of promised blessings, we understand just how generous God is to extend them to such an unworthy, rag-tag group of individuals. There is no room, therefore, for spiritual arrogance when we step out in to this world. Remember, Jesus didn’t just go up to the Samaritan woman at the well and begin telling her everything that was wrong with her. He first addressed her by letting her know she had something that He needed. By bridging that gap, and accepting her gift of water, He was then able to extend to her the gift of Himself, the living water that quenches eternally. We must always remember that God has created every individual with inherent value. We must treat the lost person with respect, with value, with care, and with concern. We must bring the gospel of peace with a contrite heart and a humble spirit.
Second, we should have an attitude of purpose. Why does God bestow blessings? To glorify Himself! He doesn’t just do it so you can feel good about being a Christian. That is an additional benefit. God is consumed with glorifying Himself. And if you are not using God’s blessings to bring Him glory, then you aren’t using the blessing for the purpose that it was given. God extends mercy to you so He will be glorified in your life. We have way too many Christians who have never glorified God by telling someone else about Him. God showed you mercy by saving your hell-bound soul, and your only response has been to continue on the same way as you were going before, except now maybe you come to church more often. Friends, there is nowhere worse than hell, so what are you afraid of? You might as well tell them about heaven, because you never know, God just might use your obedience to grace them with mercy. Too many Christians are just stumbling through life with no purpose. They think the whole reason they were saved was because nobody else could make that chicken casserole that is so popular at our pot-luck suppers.
My purpose is to glorify God. If I’m not glorifying God, then I’m not living purposefully. God has given me every moment of every day to glorify Him. How well am I using my time? Do I glorify Him with my magazine subscriptions? Does the mailman know you are a Christian and wonder why a Christian is getting Playboy or Penthouse? Or does the mailman see your mailbox filled with magazines that glorify God? Do I glorify God with what I watch on television? Do my children struggle with trying to reconcile what they hear about in Sunday school and worship with what they see me watching every night on television? Do I glorify God with what I spend my money on? Is it really worth it to buy a six pack of beer when that same 5 to 10 bucks could be spent on feeding the hungry overseas, or helping fund a missionary. Is that carton of cigarettes worth more to you than giving to ministry? A pack of cigarettes and a six pack of beer - not a big deal, you say. And you’re right. I won’t think you’re a hell-bound heathen if I catch you smoking a Marlboro and sippin on a Budweiser. I’m not your Holy Spirit. I’m just asking - are you glorifying God? Make no mistake about it - that’s the entire purpose you were created. And it should be our attitude in everything we do. Only with an attitude of purpose can we truly be merciful, can we truly be pure in heart, and can we truly be peacemakers. Outside of God’s glory, there is no mercy, no purity, and no peace - just shallow, weak, counterfeits of each.
Finally, we should have an attitude of thankfulness. This is key.1 Thessalonians says Give thanks in all things. Philippians 3:1 says, “Finally, my brethren, I say again, rejoice.” We need to be rejoicing in all things, at all times. You just lost your job? Rejoice! God’s got something else planned for you. He’s shutting a door, so He may open another one that will allow you to glorify Him more. Your dear friend or family member just died? Rejoice! Either that person is fully healed in the presence of the Lord, or He has ordained to use that life to communicate the truth of heaven and hell! But what if that person you love is in hell? Rejoice! What? Yes, rejoice! Not that the person is in hell -- what a horribly sad event! But rejoice that God is God and His standards are never compromised, and that heaven is pure and His ways are good! We are to be thankful in all things. If you cannot be thankful, realize that you are complaining against God. So what if something didn’t turn out the way you wanted. It didn’t surprise God. So what if you went out on visitation and nobody accepted Christ and you missed what happened on whatever you watch on Tuesday nights. So what? That person heard the gospel, and you’ll probably catch whatever you missed later anyway. And even if you don’t, will your life be any worse for it?
Do you have an attitude of gratitude that God has given you mercy? Do you have an attitude of thankfulness that God has made your heart pure? Do you have an attitude of joy that God has made you a peacemaker that you might be called a son of God? If you say you have this attitude, does your life truly reflect your attitude? The Bible says that out of your mouth comes the overflow of your heart. The Bible says that faith without works is missing only a tag on its toe. Be a living epistle. This is what it means to be an ambassador of Christ to this world.
We live in time and in a place where peace is in short supply. We live in a time and in a place where purity is considered obsolete. We live in a place and in a time where mercy is a foreign concept. We are to exist in this world, and yet be strangers to it. Joyfully, purposefully, and humbly. Assurances of inheritance, fellowship, and mercy await those who themselves are merciful, pure, and peace-making.
