Kingdom Logic (Part 4) - Mercy

Welcome to episode 242 of Grasp the Bible. In this episode, Pastor Drew continues our study entitled Kingdom Logic. Today, we will cover mercy.  Specifically, 

• “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” — Matthew 5:7

• What mercy truly is.

• What happens when our faith starts to show.

Key Takeaways:

· The first four Beatitudes reveal our new spiritual condition — mercy is the outward expression.

· Mercy is compassion in action — genuine compassion expressed in real help.

· Mercy to men doesn’t bring mercy from men — it brings mercy from God.

· Mercy is a gift from God — we cannot be merciful apart from Him.

Quotable:

· “When your faith starts to show.”

· “Mercy is not sentiment without action.”

· “Mercy to men doesn’t bring mercy from men — it brings mercy from God.”

· “We cannot have the blessing apart from the blesser.”

Application:

· Show mercy in action — meet needs, don’t just feel compassion.

· Choose mercy in your attitude — compassion over judgment.

· Practice spiritual mercy — pray, correct gently, and share the Gospel.

· Walk in the cycle of mercy — receive it, give it, and trust God with the rest.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Grass the Bible is a podcast of Spring Baptist Church that walks through selected books of the Bible verse by verse. We'll spend time exploring biblical ideas and topics to help you understand and apply God's Word in your daily life. This week's podcast will be joined by Drew Boucher, the pastor to students here at Spring Baptist Church. This is our two hundred and forty-second episode. I'm Marty Richardson. Thank you for joining us today. Pastor Drew, it's good to have you with us. Yeah, good to be here. Well, it is great to uh just uh be able to sit down and talk about a few things today as we get in to the the podcast. Now you have been in what's it beatitudes the last several weeks?

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

And uh we've we've learned a lot of great stuff. What is your topic today?

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Today we are talking about mercy, and we're actually pivoting in our progression from studying about our inner condition to now our outward expression of what God is changing inside of us as we look at this beatitude.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

So this is kind of where the rubber meets the road, huh?

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Yeah, this is where we start to say, hey, what is my life gonna look like now that Jesus is changing me?

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Oh wow. Man, this like it's okay to talk theory, but you start talking action and it gets pretty deep in a hurry, doesn't it? Absolutely. Well, sounds great. Let's jump into today's study.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

We're continuing with our Kingdom Logic, a series on the kingdom, but we're diving into the Beatitudes. And before we dive in, uh this the title for tonight's sermon is When Your Faith Starts to Show. And we're gonna see where we lead in our progression of the Beatitudes. But before we continue, everybody turn back there and say, Hi, Diana. That is my mother-in-law, yes, and uh she's here tonight. But hey, listen, you wouldn't just believe, and this is totally off the cuff, okay? Because I didn't know she was coming in here right this second, okay? But I knew she was coming in town. So you wouldn't know that she's my mother-in-law just by me saying that. But maybe if I had something that proved that she was my mother-in-law, like custom socks with her face on it. Yes, yeah, exactly. So, now I had to show you that, right? Now, she gave me these for Christmas a couple years ago as a joke, and I only wear them if I'm trying to mess with my wife, because she's like, do not wear those in public. And one time, side story, one time Lydia was like in Shawnee and I was here by myself. Uh, she was in Oklahoma, I was here by myself, and uh, I was going to the store, and uh I was like, I'm gonna wear your mom's socks to the store with sandals on and like me on shorts, and she's like, No, you're not. And then Dee Dee is encouraging me, and she goes, she goes, I'll buy your dinner if you do it. And I'm like, Okay. And so I wore these socks to H E B and like stood outside like this, right? And sent them a picture. And uh, and so all that to say, uh, when our faith starts to show, not something silly like socks, something that's hidden inside of us when it starts to show and we start to see it. You know, my hope for this message uh is that you see something tonight. Now, this shirt right here, it's not Hebrew or Greek. It's God is greater than the highs and lows, right? It's a cool phrase that we use, but you guys use the phrase I even love more, right? God is good in all the time, right? And I love that because God surely is good all the time, no matter the season, highs and lows. And so, what I want us to see and to feel tonight as we dive into God's word is that God truly is good all the time. And so I want to read for us uh the Beatitudes we've read so far, and then dive into uh tonight's lesson. So here's where we're at. Here's verse three of Matthew chapter five. It says this Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Well we see here, we see blessed, blessed, blessed are those, are those, are those. And we see that the blessed life or the good life is not normal, it's faithful. Right? It's not normal to say, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who are meek, blessed are those who are poor in spirit, blessed are those who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness. That's not normal. That is radically different than the way the world thinks. But that's the good life. And the good life is not normal, it's faithful. And not only is it faithful, it's faithful, because we get to experience all the blessings from God. And I'll remind us, because it's been a couple weeks since I've been here, we have this progression that we see in these first three. We see, blessed are those who are poor in spirit, right? Which means they come before God and they realize that they are in desperate need, that they're poor, that they have nothing to offer, and they need to be filled. And then we see that after, upon filling, we see, blessed are those who mourn, not just mourn in general, but who are broken over their sin, who are mournful over their sin, right? We go from coming into the presence of God, realizing we need a Savior, to realizing our sin has hurt him and we're broken over it, to finally our third one, blessed are the meek. Or the word we used that week was blessed are those who submit to the Lord, who place themselves under the mission of God, who say, Your will be done in my life. And so those three express man's need. I need to be filled, I need my sin and the punishment of my sin paid for, and I need someone to direct me. And then last week we saw the remedy for our need. Are those who are blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. And so now he puts in us a desire to hunger and thirst for righteousness, and we will be satisfied. So the first three express the need, and the fourth provides the remedy. We pursue righteousness, and we learn that righteousness is him, comes from him, and is something that can be pursued. But now we're gonna pivot and we're gonna see a transition. We're gonna go from this inward condition to this outward expression. The beatitudes are about to change from an inward condition of our heart to an outward expression of our inward condition. And so we have to know that in order to do these next three weeks that we're gonna be talking about, only one tonight, in order to do these next three beatitudes, it starts with emptying ourselves, mourning our sin. It starts with becoming meek and saying, Your will be done, and then it starts with being hungry and thirsty for righteousness. And when we do that, our faith begins to show. And our faith begins to show like this. Tonight's verse is uh Matthew chapter 5, verse 7, and it says this Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. The Beatitudes here we see are a self-portrait of Jesus and a portrait of us that is still being completed. You see, there's this word epitome, right? Now it's kind of I have a funny story about the word epitome because I knew what it was my whole life, right? But one time I was in a big group of people, it was actually in college, I was in a group of probably like 50 people, and I was the leader of the group. I was the president of our choir in college, right? And so I'm in the front and I'm reading something. We're doing Secret Santa, I'm dressed as a Santa thing, and I'm reading what this on this thing. And my professor had put a picture of himself dressed as Santa, holding his like chihuahuas, right? And that was his gift to somebody as a joke. And it said, the epitome of greatness, right? And he gave them this present, right? And I read it in front of everybody. I said, the epitome of greatness. And they all were like, What? And they're laughing at me, and they mean, you mean epitome? And so, see, we can't even get words right half the time, right? But see, Jesus was the epitome of the Beatitudes, he was the perfect portrait of these. That though he needed nothing, he hungered and thirsted for righteousness, that he submitted himself to the Father, that he mourned over sin and its effects in our world, that he was poor in spirit, even though he was God. And see, the Beatitudes are a self-portrait of Jesus and a portrait of us that is still being completed. So let's see how our faith starts to show. Would you join me in prayer and then we'll dive into our message? God, we love you and we're grateful for you. God, right now, as we dive into this, God, fill us with you. Remove everything of me and just let your word come to the forefront. We love you and we couldn't do anything without you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. So, like we mentioned, the first four lead us to our new spiritual condition. And that leads us to when we have this new spiritual condition, right? And really what we see here is that those beatitudes are also the way that you come to Jesus for salvation, right? Is that you come to him with all of those things and he will save you, right? When you cry out to him and say, I need you, I can't do this, I'm gonna follow you, not my plan for your life, and you repent of your sins and turn and follow him, he will save you. And when he does that, after our spiritual condition is changed and we become new, we get a new outlook on life and we get a changed behavior. Okay, so the meaning of mercy. So I want us to dive into the meaning of mercy, and we'll we'll spend lots of time here this evening. So I want to start with a quote from Shakespeare that he gets some of the attributes of mercy, right? But he misses some of them too. And here's what we see the quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed. It blesses him that gives and him that takes. It becomes the throned monarch better than his crown. Now he got aspects of it. This idea of this quenching uh thing coming from the heavens, right? This this idea that it was better than the crowns, right? But only scripture can we find the true scope of mercy. See, the days of Jesus, when he said this, the crowds would have not been about what he said. They would have misunderstood it or totally been against this idea of mercy. See, the days of Jesus were not characterized by mercy. See, the Jewish and especially the religious elite, they were not inclined to be merciful, right? Jesus calls them out time and time again for their hypocritical mercy or their fake mercy or their fake belief, right? It went against them being proud, self-righteous, and judgmental, right? Mercy was not seen as an attribute in them. And even more so when you look at the Gentiles, specifically the Romans. One philosopher, one Roman philosopher said, Mercy is the disease of the soul. Mercy showed that you did not have what it takes to be a real man in Roman culture. See, mercy was considered weakness in a culture that believed absolute power is what you was necessary. Mercy was a weakness. You know, I don't have to show you this, but just to show you how real mercilessness was in that culture, they had a rule called patria opatestis, where the father at birth could choose whether the child lived or died. When the child was born, they would either go thumbs up or thumbs down. And they could kill their slaves without any repercussions for any reason at any time. And even, in fact, they could have somebody in their family killed if you know the patriarch decided that they had wronged them. So to say that mercy was totally against this culture is huge. And you see, when Jesus said mercy, they had these different opinions that they were bringing into this conversation. The Jews, but all of them, here's what most of Jesus' audience would have believed. Mercy was seen as one of the least, if even a virtue at all. A proverb from that day said, if you don't look out for yourself, who else will? Mercy was seen as one of the least, if not a virtue at all. Uh it also says this in another kind of proverb, it, like love, was reserved for those who had been merciful to you. So basically what they believed about mercy is that listen, if you're merciful, right, then you're not claiming what's yours. And if you're merciful, uh then if you're merciful, then you should only do it to the people who have been merciful to you, to help you get ahead. And Jesus condemns this kind of mercy, kind of uh talk, right? He clarifies it later. So I want to read where he talks about this a little bit in Matthew chapter 5, verses uh 43 through 47. He kind of clarifies, uh, not only was he talking about, blessed are those who are merciful, he clarifies what what kinds of heart should be behind our actions. It says, You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven, for he makes his son rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the justs and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. So what we see here is that mercy wasn't just to be shown on those who were merciful to you. Right? Love wasn't to be shown. The Father, he makes the sun rise on the evil and the good. He sends the rain on the just and on the unjust. And so we are to show mercy on those who show us mercy and those who don't. And so when he's saying this, this was counter-culture, countercultural. And we see uh that God works differently than the world. See, God has mercy on those who are merciful, and if you've and those who aren't. And if you forgive, then you will be forgiven. See, another platitude that they said, right, again, the the platitude that they said, that he's also counterculture to this, the great truth of life. If people see us care, they will care, right? If people see us care, they will care. You've heard that, right? I've even heard it in some of my ministry circles, right? People don't care how much you know till they know how much you care, right? Well, see, part of that is true, sure, because words and actions should go together, right? And you can tell easily when someone is fake. But part of that is not true, right? If I care and I share words, I still might be told off, right? I still might be disagreed with, right? How many passionate and caring and outspoken people are there in this world? And they're all disagreeing with one another, right? And what we see here is that it highlights the sinful nature of fallen man. What's in it for me? And I'm gonna do me and I'm gonna get mine. Mankind is not inclined to repay mercy for mercy. Just look at what they did to Jesus, right? The epitome of mercy. And I want to read this for us. The best illustration of that fact is the Lord Himself. Jesus Christ was the most merciful human being who ever lived. He reached out to heal the sick, restore the crippled, give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and even life to the dead. He found prostitutes, tax collectors, uh, and the drunken, and drew them into his circle of love and forgiveness. When the scribes and Pharisees brought the adulteress to him to see if he would agree to her stoning, he confronted them with their merciless hypocrisy, in their merciless hypocrisy. He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her. When no one stepped forward to condemn her, Jesus said to her, Neither do I condemn you. Go. From now on, sin no more. Jesus wept with the sorrowing and gave companionship to the lonely. He took little children into his arms and blessed them. He was merciful to everyone. He was mercy incarnate. Jesus, uh, just as he was love incarnate. Yet, what was the response to Jesus' mercy? He shamed the woman's accusers into inaction, but they did not become merciful. By the time the accounts of John 8 ended, when this story took place, Jesus' opponents picked up stones to throw at him. When the scribes and Pharisees saw Jesus eating with sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples why their master associated with such unworthy people. The more Jesus showed mercy, the more he showed, the more, the more Jesus showed mercy, the more he showed up the unmerciful unmerciless, uh unmercifulliness of Jewish religious leaders. See, words are hard, right? The more he showed mercy, the more uh they determined, they were determined to put him out of the way. The ultimate outcome of his mercy was the cross. In Jesus' crucifixion, two merciless systems, a merciless government and a merciless religion, united to kill him. Totalitarian Rome joined intolerant Judaism to destroy the Prince of Mercy. So to say that mercy is received with mercy is just not true. Because the earth received the Prince of Mercy with death on a cross. So what does the fifth beatitude show us? Mercy to men doesn't bring mercy from men, mercy to men brings mercy from God. Merciful is from the word elamen, and from which we get the word beneficial or charitable. And Hebrews 2 17 speaks of Jesus as our merciful and faithful high priest. See, Christ is the supreme example of mercy. And actually, I want to point this out because even though he's the supreme example for it, it's also in the Hebrew from the Old Testament. The word Hesed is Is used to describe God's character many times in the Old Testament and can be translated to love, loving kindness, steadfast love, or mercy. And the basic meaning is that God gives help to the afflicted and rescues the helpless. So if we were to have a meaning for the word mercy, I think a simple meaning is it is compassion in action. That's what mercy is. It is compassion in action. It's not sentiment without action. It's like I really feel for them, but I'm not going to do anything about it. It's not false mercy that helps to quench a guilty conscience or to impress others. It is genuine compassion expressed in genuine help. It's selfless, selfless concern expressed in selfless deeds. It's compassion in action. And so to help us understand mercy, I want us to look at four comparisons, right? You're probably like, how is he going to do a sermon on one verse, right? This is how, okay? Now we're going to look at comparisons on four different words that are really closely associated with mercy. And the first is the relationship between mercy and forgiveness. I want to see how they work together. See, they have much in common, but yet they're distinctly different. Titus 3, verse 5 says, He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit. So what I want us to hear from this is God's forgiveness flows from his mercy, right? Forgiveness flows from his mercy. But guess what? Mercy is bigger than forgiveness. And here's what I mean by that. God can bestow mercy on us even when it's not dealing with sin. He can show mercy on us. He can give us things we don't deserve. He can have compassion in action even when it's not in response to our sin. And so can we. I mean, many of you have served and showed compassion with action on people that you didn't even know before you met them. Right? So mercy is bigger than forgiveness in terms of it's not limited to only being dealing with forgiveness of sin. God's mercy doesn't just forgive our transgressions, but reaches to all our weaknesses and needs. Lamentations 3.22 says, The Lord's mercies never cease, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness. I love that verse. And actually I'll dive back into it here in a little bit at the end, but I love that verse because we have new mercies from the Lord every single day. The second relationship I want us to see is the relationship between mercy and love. And forgiveness flows out of mercy, but mercy flows out of love. Love is a defining characteristic of who God is. Mercy is one of the ways in which his love is outpoured to people, right? That is what he does. And so Ephesians 2, 4 through 5, let me turn there for a moment. Ephesians 2, 4 through 5 says this. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love, right? Because of the great love. And so mercy flows out of love. Love is more than mercy. It manifests itself in many ways. Some involve mercy and forgiveness, but not all of the ways in which he loves us involve mercy and forgiveness. Just think about the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They all perfectly love each other, and none of them are sinful. So mercy and forgiveness has nothing to do with their outpouring of love. And one day when we enter heaven, we're going to experience his love continually and eternally, and it's going to have nothing to do with sin anymore. He's just going to love us eternally. You see, it's kind of like squares and rectangles, right? Yeah, you know where I'm going with this, right? Not all rectangles are squares, right? But all squares are rectangles, right? Okay? Not all rectangles are squares, but all squares are rectangles. I'm saying that, right? Yeah, okay. All right. And so that's what we see here. There can be no mercy apart from love, but there can be true love apart from mercy, right? Mercy is wrapped in God's love, but God's love goes way beyond just mercy, right? And so mercy is the physician, love is the friend. Mercy acts because of need, love acts because of affection, whether there is need or not. Mercy is reserved for times of trouble. Love is constant. See, the next thing we see is the relationship between mercy and grace. So I love to define it in terms of when we think about salvation and sin, right? Mercy in terms of our sin is not getting what we deserve. Grace, in terms of our sin, is getting what we don't deserve, right? And so these are the closest two words in relation to each other, and they both flow from love. See, mercy deals with our sin problems, but grace deals with sin itself. Mercy deals with symptoms, grace deals with the cause. Mercy offers relief from the punishment, grace offers pardon for the crime. Mercy eliminates the pain, grace cures the disease. See, think about the Good Samaritan. Mercy was when he bound his wounds. Grace is when he took him to the nearest inn and paid for everything he needed until he was ready to go on his own. Mercy versus grace. Mercy relieved the pain, grace provided the healing. And finally, we see probably the most interesting, and the one that you could probably dive into for hours and hours, but the relationship between mercy and justice. And I'm going to say it simply for us, because they seem to be at odds with each other. Because justice is Jesus giving us exactly what we deserve. And mercy, Jesus doesn't give us what we deserve. So they appear to be at odds with each other. But see, that's because it seems incompatible, but that's because of its incomprehensible beauty. See, sin will always be paid for, always. But the thing is, Jesus paid it himself. So he's still perfectly just and perfectly merciful. And they go perfectly together because he's the one paying the price. So now that we've kind of dissected mercy and we found that it's compassion in action, I want us to look at the source of mercy. The attribute of mercy that we can have is a gift of God. It's not natural for us to be merciful, but it's a gift that comes when we've been transformed and made new. For those who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who are meek and hunger for righteousness, it's a gift from God. We cannot have the blessing apart from the blesser. Blessed are those who are merciful, for they shall receive mercy. I want you to see how cool this is. We can't even be merciful without God. So here's what it says: we are blessed by God when we are merciful to others. And we are able to be merciful because we have received salvation's mercy. And when we share the mercy we have received, we shall receive mercy beyond that which we already have. Do you see how like we can't be merciful unless we've already received his mercy? And then when we show mercy, we get more mercy, right? And so the practice then of mercy is shown in so many different ways. Mercy can be shown most easily seen through physical acts, taking care of the needy, uh, loving those who are less than, who are in need, uh in like we saw with the Good Samaritan. But we also see it in our attitudes. Mercy is shown in our attitudes, the way we perceive the world, the way we look at people, the way we consider people. Because when I look at you not as whatever fill-in-the-blank item you are, right? Political or uh whatever your agenda is on the school board, or whether you like the church budget or not, or whether you go to this service or that service. When I think of you as someone who's in need of Jesus and who's loved by Jesus, and who it's my job to show you how much Jesus loves you, then it changes radically my attitude towards you. But mercy is also shown spiritually. And it starts with pity when we see the lost and the hurting, and then it can happen in confrontation with gentle correction. It can happen through prayer that we spiritually are showing mercy to people, but the most merciful thing we can do is share the gospel with other people. And that leads me to the result of mercy. See, I kind of pointed out just a minute ago this cycle of mercy, right? That it's like endless mercy, right? And and actually in one of the commentaries that I read, it's kind of like if you were to pray, God have mercy on me, it's kind of like uh like he already did, right? Like he sent Jesus, he died on the cross, mercy was given, right? And until you accept that, like, and now it's just a free-flowing mercy for all of eternity, right? And you can have it. And if you are a Christ follower, you have access to it every single day. And the requirement to get mercy is to be merciful. And so God is merciful to us by saving us, and in obedience, we are merciful to others. And then God, in his faithfulness, gives us more mercy. And see, Matthew 18 talks to us a little bit about this, but it talks to us in such a way that we see this parable, right, of the of the servant who goes before like the king and he has this huge debt, and the king's like, I forgive you, I'm gonna like wash your debts clean. And he's like, Oh, thank you so much. Then he runs over to this somebody who had like a percentage, a small amount of debt in comparison to what he owed to the king, and he goes, and he just like, he, I can't remember exactly right now, so I don't want to misportray it, but he does not show mercy, right? And so this is what Jesus is saying. He wants us to say, hey, God may have to discipline you, God may cut off the flow of mercy for you if you're not merciful. When we hold back mercy, God restricts his flow of mercy to us and we forfeit blessing. Right? When we're not living like him, sometimes the way that he shows mercy is to say, okay, I'm gonna let you live in your sin for a little bit. I'm gonna let you deal with the consequences of what you're going on. But we see that his mercy never runs out. It just sometimes looks like a father disciplining his children. All that to say, I want us to see how sweet is the flow of his mercy. See, he could have stopped at not sending us to hell, right? That's mercy. Not going to hell, not spending eternity from him. But instead, we get so much more. And then he gives us mercy every single day. And all we have to do is just act right, right? We tell our kids, like, when someone gives you something, say thank you, right? Like, hey, the Lord of all has given you everything you ever need, and now you should live like Jesus, right? See, faith shown means that I'm gonna start looking more like Jesus. But how sweet is it that his flow of mercy happens even when we don't do anything. You know, my wife, Lydia, I love her so much, right? And she is one of the sweetest people, right, in the whole world. And, you know, it's been a hard couple of days, right? And in the middle of chaos, everything going crazy, there's a thousand things to do. We we had this rare moment where we were sitting at a coffee shop in Hallettesville, Texas, with a thousand different things on our minds and on our hearts, and we had an hour until we had to be somewhere. And so we decided, hey, we're gonna have some Jesus time, we haven't got to do that today. We're drinking coffee. And I'm looking at my wife, just trying to help her with anything I can, and she looks at me and she says, How good is our God that even in the moments of chaos, he gives us a sweet moment like this, just to dive into his word and to experience his love, right? He knows everything we've ever needed, and he has new morning mercies for us every day. And most of the time we miss them because we're not paying attention. So I just want to encourage us that mercy is compassion in action. And you have a God who's taking action for you every single day. Are you gonna take action to the people around you? Let's pray. Dear Jesus, we love you and we're grateful for you. Thank you for bringing us here this evening to dive into mercy and to see uh what it means. God, we we thank you that you saw beyond what was normal and you saw what was right, and you have a desire for us to be faithful. God, in our weakness, make us strong and help us in our journey to be more like you. Thank you for giving us everything we need. Help us to learn your wisdom and to gain your knowledge to be able to walk with you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Thank you for that. Now, as we like to do, we like to kind of sum up or wrap up the big idea, the key takeaway, and then talk about some application for that when we're done with the teaching time. So, Pastor Drew, thank you for that message. Now, what is that key takeaway from today's teaching time?

SPEAKER_01 39:06

Yeah, the key takeaway for us is kind of the definition of mercy. It is compassion in action. It's not sentiment without action, it's not false mercy that helps us quench a guilty con conscience, it's compassion in action, it's genuine compassion expressed in genuine help. It's selfless concern expressed in selfless deeds. And it's it's a beautiful thing that we get to be a part of that once Jesus has had mercy on us, now we can have mercy on others. And guess what? We get more mercy when we're merciful to others.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

Oh wow. Oh, that's great. That's great. And what's interesting about it is, you know, to me it's a little bit like evangelism. You know, it can be listed as a spiritual gift, but it is a prerequisite for being a believer. Yeah. You know, and and so it's one of those things where you may struggle with the gift of mercy, but that's what makes it even greater when you show Jesus' work through you, right?

SPEAKER_01 40:05

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

Is that you're seeing his power in action. Oh, I love that. That's great. You should make sure you like highlight that in the show notes, make it like blink or something. Make it blink, yeah. That is such a great thing. Now, now to the hard part. How do we apply this?

SPEAKER_01 40:20

All right. Well, what what we see here is that uh mercy as an application for us, uh, what we do to practice spiritual mercy is that we can pray, uh, we can correct uh others gently, and one of the most merciful things that we can do, the most merciful thing we can do is share the gospel with other people. And so, and when we do that, we see this cycle of mercy that God kind of puts us in. We're only capable for mercy if we have received mercy. And then once we receive mercy and now can exhibit mercy is uh through sharing the gospel and we get to walk in this cycle of mercy, uh, that will now we can show mercy even more. We can walk in this cycle of mercy uh if we'll practice it, uh, if we get to see the world uh like like Jesus does, and that's how we can exhibit mercy is we see these people in need and we see this compassion and we see that hey, they're broken and they need us, and now we can take that action. And so the gospel is the biggest way we can do that.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

That's a great word. And I think sometimes our lack of thankfulness for the mercy of God, we sometimes in that lack of thankfulness forget how merciful he's been. Yeah. That's a good word. Anything else as we kind of wrap up today? No, I think that's it. Well, it's been so good at to be here today, and thank you for joining us. As always, we don't take it for granted that you've taken your time to be with us. We know that the Bible changes lives, it's changed ours, and we hope the same for you. Join us next week as we continue to grasp the Bible.