Beatitudes Part 3

Be seated. God bless you. Good morning everyone.

Grace and peace be to you in Jesus name. If you would take your Bibles and turn to Matthew chapter 5. I'm curious this morning how many people feel like they can sing verses 1 through 12. Anybody, show me your hands if you think you can sing it.

Me and Benjamin. Okay. I was hoping some people would have done some homework, but that's okay.

We can still say it. Or Benjamin, you want to do it together? No, just not you and me. We would be a helpful.

Well, we can say it together. So let's all stand. We're going to say Matthew 5, 1 through 12.

I'm hoping we can memorize this. That's why I asked if we could all try to sing it. So maybe next time I preach, maybe some more people can try to listen to it and see if you can learn the song.

It helps to memorize things. I find that 10 years later, I can still say the verse. Where if I memorize something quick, 10 years later, I can't say the verse.

So anyway, something as important as the Sermon on the Mount, I think is valuable to learn. Matthew 5, verse 1, let's say it together. In seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain, and when he was set, his disciples came unto him.

And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are you which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.

Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. Thank you. You may be seated.

Well, at least I saw a lot of you saying it without singing it. So that's good. At least we have a lot of people who have memorized it.

All right, so let's continue on here. Does anybody remember from the last two sermons what the word blessed really means? Just take a guess, if you can remember at all. What does blessed mean? When Jesus said, Blessed are you, and he went through all these things, what did he mean by that? Happy, okay.

Yes, an enviable state. Somebody you'd look out there and be like, man, I'd like to be like that guy. Like today, when you would first hear it, you would say, people would think of maybe somebody like Elon Musk or Bill Gates or somebody that's popular or has lots of money.

So blessed is an enviable state. But then of course Jesus turns it all around and he starts off with the poor in spirit, people who are broken, who are zeros in their own eyes. And Jesus goes on to say that theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Then he goes on, we looked at last time, blessed are those that mourn. It goes from something that's just not just intellectual, I'm nothing, I'm nobody, I'm broken, I'm contrite, I need God, to something that's emotional, something that affects us emotionally. Mourn, we mourn over our sin.

It says godly sorrow works repentance. And the promise there is they shall be comforted. And then we looked at meek and meek not meaning weak, but meek meaning strength under control.

Like Jesus was. Somebody who said, not my will, but thine be done. Somebody who woke up every day and was about his father's work.

And Jesus was actually just quoting right out of Psalm 37, they shall inherit the earth. And so that brings us to the fourth beatitude. And I find it interesting, I don't know how much to dive into things deeper, but these first three are like people who are broken, contrite, needy, hungry, dependent.

And then on the fourth one, it says this, we could read it in, let's maybe we'll just say it together. Verse four, let's all read that together. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.

Let's see if we can say it without looking. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Now, I don't know if anybody here's ever been really hungry for a day.

How many of you have fasted before? Or maybe I shouldn't ask you to raise your hands, because we're not supposed to do it before men. But, you know, have you ever fasted for a day or maybe just not had food for a day and been really hungry? By the afternoon, you know, maybe around two o'clock, your stomach starts crumbling and you start thinking about what? Food, right? You start thinking about things other than, it's funny how your mind works. It's amazing how often, have you ever been fasting before? And you know, you walk in the house and you walk by and there's a bowl of grapes or a bowl and you go to grab it and then, oh, wait, I'm not supposed to do that.

And how often that happens throughout the day. Maybe you're used to snacking and like, it really, it really starts affecting you all day as you realize how much it is to go without food. Have you ever been really thirsty before? I remember one time, years ago, we were down in Yosemite, beautiful place to visit, waterfalls and rocks and amazing, amazing landscape.

And we went on a hike. We went up to this Vernal Falls and we were going as a family. And I remember my wife turned back because she was, I don't remember all the circumstances, but we went on.

Well, as we came back down from there, we, I hadn't brought water and we're still up at the top there and there was no place to get water. And I just remember this feeling like you ever been really thirsty and your, your mouth starts to get pasty and in everything you start thinking about water. Like you actually start thinking about pure, clean water, the river that's flowing by you.

You're just thinking, oh, that looks so good right now. And I just remember that walking back and thinking about water and, and all of my mind was consumed with water. And, you know, we've been hiking, exerting energy.

So we wanted, and I wanted water. And I remember getting down to that, um, drinking fountain and, and how amazing just having water was. And I don't think we quite understand the idea of hunger and thirst.

Like in Jesus day, you know, with everything we have today, we have refrigeration, we have electricity, you know, we have, um, faucets that we just turn on and cold water comes out that's clean enough to drink and hot water comes out the other side. And we, we just think this is normal. In fact, us Americans even get frustrated when it doesn't work.

Um, and yet in Jesus day, none of that existed when you think about it. And in many places in the world today, um, even in Belize where we live for a while, it didn't exist. You know, also on top of that, we have modern agriculture and I know many people feel bad about pesticides and they want to, um, they want to say, you know, we should all eat organic and that's good thought.

But you do, you realize by having pesticides, how much it's cut out of famines, how much it's cut out of people actually dying of hunger, like once happened by having tractors and all the modern things we have, uh, abilities. Some of the farmers are all waving their heads right now, so I'm on their side. But, um, but you know, uh, uh, ways to water it's, it's, if you go back in time, there was a time people didn't live very long, um, because of diseases and because of things like hunger and famine.

And so we live in a world where I think it's hard for us to quite understand what it was like when Jesus said hunger and thirst, these people would have known what it was like to have droughts, to have famines, to have wars. And so it would have been a normal experience for them. I just remember coming down from that height and yeah, I wasn't struggling with lust.

I wasn't struggling with thinking about, you know, the money. I was thinking about water and I wanted water. Uh, my mind was on water and Jesus used that for some reason in his, uh, in his beatitude here, that that's the desire we need to have for righteousness.

And I don't know how to get it. I'll think about it in any other way, but a strong hunger and a strong, um, thirst for righteousness. Now he doesn't say you just need to want it casually or, you know, maybe say in some prayer, Lord, I really would like more righteousness.

I'd like to be more like you, or maybe like we sing on Sunday morning Lord to be like the, that's not what he's saying. He's saying it needs to be a strong desire, hunger and thirst, relentlessly pursuing it as though our life depended on it. And the promise is they shall be filled, right? It says, blessed are they which do hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be filled.

So we can learn from this that true righteousness doesn't come from ourselves. It's being filled from a different source. If you're being filled, it's coming from somewhere else.

Jesus said that without him we can do nothing. And so true righteousness comes from the Lord. So if our desire is to be filled with righteousness in the same way that we would hunger physically for food and water, the promise is that we will be filled.

But the inverse is true. Maybe you would say this morning, I, um, I just, if I'm being totally honest with you, I really don't have a desire for righteousness. I mean, I do it.

I check off my box every day and read the Bible and I, I try to do the right things, but I just don't have a desire for that. I don't have it like Jesus said, like to hunger and thirst for it. Maybe you're praying for it.

Maybe, you know, um, you even desire it, but it's just not happening. Well, it's not God's fault. We know that it's not God's fault, but the answer is in this verse.

Something is wrong with our desire. Something is wrong on our part. In the same way that food and water are needed to, to, to sustain physical life, righteousness and the hunger for that righteousness in our lives is needed to sustain our life.

So what would you say if you, in real life, if somebody wasn't hungry, they just weren't hungry, what'd you think would be wrong? Somebody give me an idea. Sick. You know, I was sick two weeks ago and, uh, it's just interesting.

I lost all desire for food. Um, I didn't even want coffee in the morning. It just did not sound good.

Matthew also got sick and, um, he didn't want to eat either. Then Jonathan the other day got sick and he didn't want to eat either. It's interesting how when we get sick, we just don't want to eat.

Could this be the case? One of the reasons why we might not desire righteousness because we're spiritually sick. And what would you do if you knew you were sick and it went on for days and days and days, what would you do physically? Pretty soon a week goes by. You're not hungry.

I'm just not eating. Something is wrong. I have no desire for food.

What would you do? Yes, you would lose weight. But what would you do? Like, would you just try to force food down? Like, what would you do? Elijah would try to force food down. Well, it might just come back up, but I think a lot of us will go to the doctor and we'd have a scan done and we'd say, what's wrong with me? Something's not right.

Right. And in the same way in the spiritual, that would be a humble way of admitting something is not right. And then I think many times when we're sick, that could be a, uh, what we need to do is go to Jesus.

He said, come to me and asked me to anoint your eyes with ice out. So you can see, um, he came, he said to call the sick and not the righteous. And so Jesus is there to help us if we are sick, but it takes us first of all, um, recognizing that we're sick.

But another reason, what's another reason other than being sick, might somebody not be hungry. Now, how many of you youth have this happen? You come home, your mom made a really good meal. Maybe I should ask the mothers.

They came home and she made a really good meal and you just kind of scratch at it. And it's just not that doesn't look that good. And, and the mom's sitting there thinking what this is like high end beef and good vegetables.

And they've not, they're not interested in it because what were they doing on the way home or about four o'clock in the afternoon, they were at the gas station getting chips and cookies and candy. You guys are all looking at each other. Yeah, that's, that's the deal, right? You filled up on something like junk food, right? And how often can this be the case when we are saying, I just don't have a desire for righteousness in my life.

How often, maybe more than being sick, is it that we're eating junk food in the spirituals? Like, well, you name me some, what are some junk foods might we eat that would take away our desire for righteousness? Can't think of any? YouTube shorts. Thank you. Entertainment.

Course language. Good. The world's music.

Okay. Social media. Right.

Or even such as things like podcasts and audio stories. Right. They're not super healthy, but they're, you know, they're just like eating chips.

Yeah, I'll survive on it, but will I be feeding my spirit? Will I be eating that steak and mashed potatoes and green beans versus nerds and Doritos? That, that's really what it is. Honestly, it's eating junk food and we don't have a desire. We don't have a desire.

And so we need to look at our life and say, why don't I have righteousness? It's because I don't have a desire for righteousness. Why don't I have a desire for righteousness? It's because I'm eating junk food in my life. And it's spoiling.

Have you ever heard your mom say that? You've spoiled your appetite. It's spoiling your spiritual appetite. In fact, God says this in Jeremiah, he says this, for my people have committed two evils.

They have forsaken me as the fountain of living water. So here this fountain, you walk up and there's a beautiful fountain. It's clear.

It's requires no maintenance. It just flows. You can drink right out of it.

Doesn't have any contaminants, but they said, we don't want that anymore. And what do they do instead? It says, they've forsaken me and have hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns that hold no water. Here's God saying, they've come up with these man-made cisterns.

They require all this maintenance. The water gets stagnant. They break, there's holes in it.

And they would rather that than they would want this, the fountain of living water. And in a real way, is that not what we do when we spend a lot of time with spiritual junk food? We've come over to this cistern and it's like broken and stagnant and diseased, but we still would rather that. Because sometimes if you're just honest with yourself, sometimes this is more work, right? Watching a YouTube short is a whole lot easier than seeking God or listening to an audio story is a whole lot easier than listening to a chapter in the Bible.

And we could go on. This is just the lazy approach. It's the easy, just stick it in neutral approach.

And so my, my encouragement to us this morning is what substitutes do we have in our life that is robbing the desire for hungering and thirsting for righteousness? Because that's how we're going to get righteous. It's not just trying harder. It's not just pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

And that's not the answer. Jesus didn't say, blessed are you when you try to become righteous. He says, blessed are you when you hunger and thirst for righteousness, your desire is for him to fill you.

But you've got to get things out of the way in your life so that desire can flow. Now I want to move on to the next one. Blessed are the merciful.

So we, we talked about righteousness and the desire for righteousness and being filled. And it's interesting, the next one and how they're connected. Now, I don't know if you've ever noticed this pattern in people's lives, but you ever noticed it might be even in your own life.

You know, you're walking in sin. You're, you're not seeking God. And one day the Lord shines the light and it comes on and you realize I am in need of salvation.

I need to repent. And you wake up and you wake up to righteousness. And then immediately you notice all those around you who are not righteous, right? You ever had that feeling? And immediately you, you, you feel burdened.

And then you might even with time, even despise them, despise the unrighteous around you because, you know, now you're in righteousness, but they're not. It's interesting. These two are connected verse to the next verse.

So we first talk about being hungry to be filled with righteousness. But as soon as we learn how to be filled with righteousness, we need to learn about how to have mercy on others who are not necessarily walking in righteousness. There was a mother who approached Napoleon Bonaparte and she was pleading for the life of her son who had been sentenced to death.

The French commander said to her, justice says your son should die. She responded. I didn't come to ask for justice.

I came to beg for mercy. Napoleon looked at the woman and said, but he doesn't deserve mercy. She said, sir, it would not be mercy if he deserved it.

And mercy is all I'm asking for. Napoleon was moved and he replied, well, then I will show mercy. So what is mercy? I enjoyed our talk, our Bible study this morning, the conversation.

And I think that is a good place to start. What is mercy? The Good Samaritan, the story of the Good Samaritan. We read it this morning, a lawyer asking, what do I need to do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus looking at him and saying, what does the law say? How do you interpret it? And the Good Samaritan, or sorry, not the Good Samaritan, but the lawyer said to love God with all of your heart.

And then he said to love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus said to him, do this and you will have eternal life. But then as we read, he was willing to justify himself.

And so then he asked the question as Benjamin brought, he narrowed it down. He wanted to narrow the interpretation. Well, then who is my neighbor? And so then Jesus told a story to define who our neighbor is and to define and illustrate mercy, which we're talking about.

Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. What does it mean to have mercy? Jesus went on with a story. He said there was a man who was beaten, left half dead.

And first a priest, a Jewish priest walked by, then a Levite, which was a person who served in the temple. Some of them were singers, some of them were servants, but they worked there in the temple. It says both of them saw him, turned and crossed the road away from him and passed by.

So they saw him, but they walked and left him. And then it says, lastly, a Samaritan walked by and saw him. And this Samaritan had compassion on him.

Now the Jews despised Samaritans. I didn't quite understand how much they despised them until I studied out who were the Samaritans this last week. But the Jews kind of looked at Samaritans as like half Jews.

Way back in the book of Ezra, when Babylon came in and conquered Assyria, they took the Jews out. And one of the things they like to do was transplant people back in to kind of wreck their culture and change that culture that was there. So they took all these Jews out and they sent these Babylonians or some kind of foreigners back in.

And there are some still leftover remnant Jews there. And these mixed together. The Jews mixed with these people the Babylonians send in.

And with time, they became a people. In fact, if you look where Samaria is, it's up in the northern tribe area. And it's like right in the middle of Israel, of where the promised land was.

And now you have these people who are occupying half Jews. They've done what God doesn't want them to do. Bred with other nations.

Maybe I shouldn't say bred. They had children with other nations. And they even had their own temple.

They called it, it was up on Mount Gerizim. And they mimicked it like the Jewish temple. And so they not only had their own temple, they had their own scriptures.

They had the first five books of the Torah, the five books of the law of Moses, but they even altered it some. The 10th commandment, they had 10 commandments, but the 10th commandment was a little bit different than the Jewish 10th commandment. It said you had to worship on Mount Gerizim to be authentic.

Now the Samaritans thought they were the true Jews. They really did. They thought that these other Jews got deceived and they were truly following the right God.

The Jews, on the other hand, viewed the Samaritans as these half breed, half Jews that the Babylonians mixed in. And now they're trying to have their own temple, their own scriptures, their own doctrine up there. And so if you place yourself into their shoes, these people are religiously different.

They're ethnically different. They're doctrinally wrong. They're in sin.

And I don't know how we would translate that for us today, but that's the picture when Jesus told the story. I mean, not only so much that the Samaritans were trying to evangelize the Jews and get them to go up to the temple on Mount Gerizim. There's even a story where they snuck in and put a bunch of dead bones of humans in the Jewish temple to try to defile it.

The Samaritans did. So you can imagine there's some there's some disgust for this tribe of people. But Jesus tells the story, and I don't know why, or maybe we do know why.

He used a priest and a Levite, and he used those for a reason. And then he uses this Samaritan as the third person in the story. And the Samaritan is the one that not only has compassion in his heart, but then he, out of that heart, he actually takes an action to somebody that was vulnerable, and he relieves their distress in spite of the religious and ethnical tensions.

I don't think Jesus' point for us to read the Good Samaritan is to say, okay, so we can have sin in the church now, and sin doesn't matter anymore, and doctrine doesn't matter anymore. I don't think that's his point. What I think his point is, is somehow the Samaritan who was religiously and ethnically, and even could be argued to be in sin, but he was doing better in the area of mercy.

He was doing better than the Jews, than the religious Jews, than the Jews that were even the ones teaching the law and going into the temple in the air of mercy. And we can tend to be that way. We can tend to almost become parties and not see any good in anybody, and only the bad over there, and not see any bad over here, and only the good.

And Jesus was trying to say, you know, this guy who is not even what you would consider religiously correct, still showed more mercy than you're showing. Now, Jesus himself said about the Samaritans, he told the Samaritan woman, he said, salvation, he said, you guys worship what you know not, he said. And he said, salvation is of the Jews.

So Jesus himself said, Samaritans are wrong. Their doctrine is wrong. They're not worshipping in the right place, and salvation is not coming through them.

It's coming through the Jews. So Jesus said that, but yet he used this story to show that the Samaritans were outdoing the Jews. You know, like that verse, he says, even those two towns are going to stand against you in judgment because you didn't accept the kingdom.

That's the kind of answer. It's kind of like Jonah, you know, he comes into town, and he hates these people, and they repent. And so we need to be careful of that kind of attitude.

James says this, pure religion and undefiled before God, and the Father is this. True religion is this, to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep yourself unspotted from the world. Visiting the fatherless and the widows is mercy.

Keep yourself unspotted from the world is righteousness. And so somehow we have to find the balance of these two things. Imagine if the United States Congress would make an announcement this week and say that we're canceling all legislative sessions this year.

We're still going to gather three times a week, but for potlucks. They would decorate the chamber. They would debate casserole recipes instead of bills.

They would congratulate each other on attendance. They'd post photos on their Facebook account saying, great fellowship today. But no budgets would get passed, no relief bills, no defense decisions, no justice reforms, no infrastructure funding.

Can we make that same mistake here? Can we make the mistake of having our church services and choirs and Bible studies, and we say glowing words, and then we aren't even doing what our job is called out to do. True religion is to visit the fatherless and the widows, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. If what we do here doesn't turn into that, then we're just like the Levite, and we're just like the priest.

Jesus is against a religion that does not cultivate compassion to those in misery. I'll say that again. Jesus is against a religion, a church, whatever you want to call it, that does not cultivate compassion towards those in misery.

And he's against us this morning if we are not cultivating mercy. So we can learn from the story that mercy is compassion and pity to foreigners, to people of different religions, to people who are vulnerable. The lawyer wanted to reduce down the definition of a neighbor, and I think it's true if you analyze each one of our hearts, we want to do the same thing.

We want to narrow it down to justify ourselves. Let's talk about something, and I know this is a can of worms, but you know, maybe you all can talk about it afterwards and figure it out. But let's talk about something today.

Maybe Jesus would come back and tell some parable today, and it would be in our faces of where we're failing. I don't know if you've noticed all the stuff going on, and this is a terrible political issue, but we need to talk about it, with immigration, with ICE, with all of the crazy stuff happening. I think it's maybe taming down a little bit, but I don't know, maybe you feel your hearts being pulled one way or to the other.

Maybe you feel your hearts, as you see these ICE officers go in and, you know, riding horses and making a big show of everything, you think justice is being served, as they haul away immigrants. Maybe you're the merciful type, and you're thinking, oh, those poor people, and the fear, and the things that are happening to them. You know, words like, when we think about the word justice, we think of borders, we think of laws, we think of illegal, we think of undocumented, we think of criminals.

When we think of the word mercy, we think of refugees, we think of poverty, we think of broken immigration systems. And if we're just honest with ourselves, we have this political system out here that has now made this a political agenda. If we're just honest.

And if we analyze that the Republicans would tend to, my son and I were having this argument this morning, but the Republicans would tend to line up with justice, right? I'm making broad painting sweeps, but they would tend to say, they would tend to stand for things like law and order, accountability, constitutional limits, personal responsibility, getting what they deserve. That would be more of a Republican mindset. And a Democrat would be more, if anything, he would tend to be more merciful, although I'm not condoning everything he does.

Democrats stand for things that we are absolutely against, like trans, and gay, and abortion, and all these things they stand for. But they would tend to be a little more merciful. They would tend to have compassion, and equality, and systems that cause crime, and immigration relief, and alleviating suffering, and protecting vulnerable groups.

One thing I love about Anabaptists is we're not supposed to be into those two systems. We're supposed to be in the kingdom of God, and we're supposed to look over here at the Republicans and say, yeah, there's some truth there, and there's some false there. And we're supposed to look at the Democrats and say, yeah, there's some truth there, and there's some false there.

But what do we do? We tend to listen to the junk food of the world, whether that's podcasts or YouTubes, and we tend to, yes, I'm here, but I'm a closet Republican, or I'm a closet Democrat, whatever. And you tend to, your heart is really over here, and you're more moved by this system of thinking than the kingdom of God. And what I fear is sometimes these systems of thinking can destroy our hearts of compassion, our hearts of mercy.

Because instead of thinking when we see that person, how can I love them, and how can I help them? We think, why are they here? They're unlawful. They're criminals. Get them out of here.

And it's a lot of these are coming from the politics that we hear. I'm just going to come out and say it. If you remember, I don't know when Trump said this, but he said something.

I wrote it down if I could find it quickly, but I don't think I'm going to find it here. But he said, he made the statement. He's like, oh, here it is.

I just saw it. He said, they're bringing drugs. They're bringing crimes.

They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. Is that truth? Some are good people from Mexico or wherever.

That's not what the data shows. The data does not show some are good people, and the rest of them are all criminals. We could go into that after.

But the point is, those kind of things we listen to ruin having mercy for people. You see an immigrant on the side of the road, you don't think, how could I stop and help him? Hey, he's selling tamales. Maybe I'll stop and buy some tamales from him just to help him out.

We think, he's a criminal. He's a rapist. He's bringing drugs.

Get him out of here. It's not good for the kingdom of God. We're becoming Protestants.

We're becoming what I came from, Baptists, which would love to talk about this and would love to focus on those things. We need to stay focused on the kingdom of God, whether side. And the thing is, is that it's a tension between justice and mercy.

And we have to figure that out. But the Bible teaches justice. The Bible talks about Romans 13, obey them.

Well, it doesn't say obey them. It said, let every soul be subject to the higher powers. The Bible talks about countries having laws, and we must obey them.

It even talks about in Acts and in Deuteronomy that God has laid out the boundaries and he's figured it out. We all know that the Tower of Babel, if you remember, God was the one that broke them up into different places. He didn't want them to be globalized in one people.

And so that whole thought is scriptural, that countries have borders, that countries can make laws within their borders. There's even a story about, um, uh, I'm just, I don't even remember where I'm at, but there's a whole story about, um, it's either Ammon or Moab. I think it's Ammon.

And Israel comes up to their border and he says, they say, we want to pass through and we won't drink any of your water. And we won't turn to the left. We won't turn the right.

We'll just stay on course and just let us pass through. And they say, no, we won't let you pass through. And they have to go all the way around.

And later God brings up a judgment against him. He never says, you know, what you did to them was wrong. You know, what he judges them for is that they didn't help Israel with their borders.

When people came in and raided their land, he said, you stood by and you just watched them raid and you actually helped the raiders. So I don't know how it all works, but God is a God that allows laws and allows justice and he allows obedience to those laws, but God is a God of mercy too. In fact, listen to these verses and they very much challenged me.

It says this, he said, he does execute the judgment, or let me read it in a, let me just read it with a little modern way of saying it. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and he loves the foreigner. He loves the immigrant.

And then he says this in giving him food and raiment. And then he says this love you. Therefore the foreigners for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.

So mercy, we learn remembers where we came from. You know, everyone's sitting in this room probably came, was an immigrant to this country. You think so? You think anybody here was a native? Your grandpa, your great grandpa, your great, great grandpa probably was coming over here for some reason.

And so all of us in a sense have had the blessing of God to come here, right? I mean, my, I think it was my great, great, great grandpa that was came from either Scotland, I think, or somewhere over there, but we all came over here and we're immigrants at one time to have an attitude of like there, get out of our country. This is our country is not a Christian attitude. God says to love the foreigner.

He said, for you were foreigners. And this is the thing with mercy. We have to remember the mercy we've been shown.

I talked about the drug earlier. A way to cultivate mercy is to remember that we were shown mercy to even be put in a godly home, to be taught how to work, to be taught the values we've been taught. And so we need to remember we've been shown mercy.

And like the story Jonathan read this morning, he forgot that quick that he was forgiven all of this debt. And he went out and grabbed his fellow servant by the throat and said, pay me all that you owe, because he had already forgotten the mercy he was shown. We need to remember the mercy we have been shown.

God went on to tell the Israelites, he said, you know, when you have a field, leave the corners, leave, don't go over the olive trees twice. Don't go over the grape trees twice. He said, leave that all for the widows, the fatherless, the orphans, and the foreigners.

God looks out for foreigners. They're vulnerable people. He said, when you make your laws, he says, make one law for you and the foreigner.

Don't mistreat them, he says in another passage, don't vex them. He says, but you shall be unto you as one born among you. Treat them kindly.

Now you might be thinking, Jeremy, are you like preaching that we need to get involved in politics and start immigration reform? No, I'm not. But I'm saying that we can obey the laws of this country and we can obey God by loving them, showing them mercy. When we see them, be kind to them, be merciful to them.

I learned this this week and I didn't, or maybe a couple of weeks ago actually, but you all know the word hospitality in the New Testament? Hospitality. What do you think of when you think of hospitality? You think of somebody having the church over, right? And putting coffee and popcorn out. Did you know that the word hospitality in the New Testament comes from two Greek words? Philos, which means friend, and xenos, which means foreigner.

A friend of foreigners, a lover of strangers. And it's interesting because in Timothy it says that, and Titus, that bishops, leaders in the church need to be given to hospitality and lovers of hospitality. It says in Romans 11 that the whole church needs to be given to hospitality.

Now let's just say that in another way, to love strangers, to love foreigners. It says in Hebrews, this is the one time the word's translated not hospitality, and you know the passage, but it says, do not forget to entertain strangers. That's the same word.

Philos, xenos, friends of foreigners or immigrants. In fact, there's a word I never heard of it before until this study, but xenos, phobia. Greek word again.

Xenos, which was foreigner, phobia. What do you think the phobia stands for? Fear of foreigners. That's a thing.

People can be afraid of foreigners, and if we're not careful of the things we're listening to, we can become that way. We can become like, they're all criminals. You know, they don't deserve our mercy and our kindness.

We can become fearful of foreigners. And coming back around to this Good Samaritan story, could that not be a modern day example of how we give into the things and the cultures around us, whether it's here in this church or whether it's the things we listen to, and we pass right over mercy and kindness because of the things we've been listening to, and we don't practice the kingdom of God, which is to show mercy. I'm not saying that justice shouldn't happen.

What I'm saying is, are you all thankful today that mercy triumphs over justice? Are you all thankful today that Jesus said, you know, my judgment is upon you for your sins, but I'm going to have mercy on you. As Christians, we need to be people that are showing mercy because of the great mercy we've been shown. So I'm not trying to define US politics or I'm not trying to say the Democrats are good and let's accept their agenda, but I am trying to say we need to, how should Christians think? How should they act? And how often are we more influenced by earthly systems than we are by Jesus and his way of thinking? And are we willing, here's the big question, are we willing to be challenged by someone who is wrong in a lot of areas, but doing right and maybe better than me in this area? That's the story of the good Samaritan.

He was wrong in a lot of areas, but he was better than them in one area. Are we willing to be challenged that we're better, that they're better than us in showing something? And to say, okay, I don't agree with 99% of what you do, but this one thing, that's good. And I want to be merciful like that.

Instead of being afraid that, oh, if I did that, I might be labeled a Democrat. Like, let's get out of that mindset. Let's get out of the mindset of, we're not Democrats and Republicans here.

We are from another country. My kingdom is not of this world, Jesus said. And so moving on a little bit here, still talking about mercy.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. There was a time that Jesus explained mercy in a way. It was in Matthew chapter 23.

And he was talking to the scribes and Pharisees and he said, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees. That's not good. That's bad.

And he said this, you strain at a gnat, but you swallow a camel. You strain at a gnat, but you swallow a camel. And he said, and then he explained how you've omitted the weightier matters of the law.

And then he gives those justice, mercy, and faith. So I want to think about this morning a little bit. What are the weightier matters that we can sometimes overlook? Because we're straining at gnats.

We're, I mean, how many of you want to drink gnats in your food or your drink? No, nobody, right? So it's good to strain at the gnats, but maybe sometimes we focus so much on the gnat, we miss. Somehow the camel creeps in the back door. What are the weightier matters in our lives that we can focus on small matters and become blinded to the bigger ones? I think we can do this in religious ways.

I think that's what he was talking about the Pharisees. He says, you tithe mint and cumin and all these things. So what are the things we can do that we get focused on so much aren't bad things.

And we leave out mercy. We leave out compassion. We leave out pity.

I think that's probably what the priest and the Levite did. They had something that was good. They were focusing on, but they omitted the weightier matter.

It could also be carnal things, honestly. What could be little things in our life that we're straining at and doing aren't bad, maybe hobbies and things, but we're missing the larger picture, the weightier matters, the things that really will matter one day. And so this first thought here, the first and the second is that we need to be people who are merciful and that we are remembering that we were shown mercy.

Another parable is the parable of the prodigal son. A son demands his inheritance. He wastes it in reckless living.

He crawls home rehearsing a servant's apology. The father runs to him, which is actually a very undignified act, and embraces him, restores him with a robe, with a ring, with a sandal, and throws a feast. And the son was not given what he deserved, but he was shown incredible mercy.

Some people refer to the story instead of as the prodigal son, they refer to it as the incredible father, because what the father did. And so this story shows us mercy is having forgiveness. The first story was mercy having compassion.

This story is mercy showing forgiveness. Or the one that Jonathan read this morning, the unforgiving servant, Peter asked him, how many times do we need to forgive Lord? And Jesus said, 70 times seven. And then he goes into a story about a servant who was forgiven an unpayable debt.

And it says that when he came to him, I don't know what he did, but somehow he cried out, because he later, the master says, you pleaded with me. You, in the King James, it says, you desired me. He must have fell on the ground when he heard that he was going to be sold, that his children were going to be sold, that his wife was going to be sold all for this debt that was so large, he could never repay.

And because of that, he fell on the ground and asked for mercy. And he had mercy on him. But then he immediately went out, found his fellow servant, grabbed him by the neck and demanded, pay me all that you owe.

When he gets called back in, he says this, the master says, shouldn't you have also have had compassion on your fellow servant like I had pity on you? He forgot somehow. We seem to be creatures that forget. And so in this story, once again, it was about forgiveness, but it was also when we don't show mercy, what happened in the story? The debt was unforgiven, right? Is it fair to say that? Or then this one, this parable is a tough one.

Have you ever kind of just not understood the parable of the workers in their vineyard? Jesus goes out, he gets the first worker early, early in the morning. He puts him to work. He says, I'll pay you this much for the day.

And then the next worker, and then the next worker, like 12 and then three, and then like five. And the five o'clock guy, I mean, this one translation says he was passing through the marketplace and saw one people standing around doing nothing, lazy. And he says, come work in my field.

And after the end, he pays him the same amount as the first. You remember that story? I mean, that story doesn't seem right. It doesn't feel like justice.

It doesn't feel fair. It feels to me like the late and the lazy are elevated, but the parable is supposed to just show us that mercy and grace are part of God's kingdom. And it's not just about justice.

And even what we might call fairness, which tells us that God's kingdom doesn't just run on justice, but on divine generosity. So once we've seen the blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness, and we start living righteous lives and God's righteousness starts pouring into us, and we start walking more holy and more righteous, you know what is so easy to happen is to begin to look down on others. As the next verse says, if I'm living by God's rules, why aren't they? If I'm working hard to provide, why aren't they those lazy people? If I'm following the laws, why aren't they those lawbreakers? And that's why righteous people tend to have a difficult time with mercy.

I don't know if we could define it as true righteousness, but when we start focusing on holiness, we can tend to do that to the disposal of mercy. The righteous think I've worked hard to earn my living and they're not keeping the laws. I follow the precepts that justice demands and then comes along some notorious sinner who repents and suddenly that person is entering the kingdom of God before me.

Are you kidding? But the story is about a master and owner who wanted to be radically, radically generous to someone who didn't want or to someone that wanted to work that day. I can see we're growing weary, but we will stop and maybe we'll pick this up later, but let's just take this home for today. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.

Jesus said, be you therefore merciful as my Father in heaven is merciful. This is a trait of God. God is a, it says he is, the Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and great in mercy, is good to all and his tender mercies are over all the earth.

God is merciful. He's a merciful God. He tends to like to put mercy even over justice.

And we're so thankful for that. Isn't it interesting how we all want mercy when it's about us? You know, you're driving fast down the road and you get a ticket and the whole church hears about it and you want the whole church to think, oh, but that's not as normal. Like he normally drives the speed limit.

He was just in a rush that day. Right? That's what you want the church to think. The church doesn't think that though.

They think, they think actions. They think, yeah, that was your action, buddy. But when it's us in the driver's seat, we want mercy.

But when it's somebody else, we want to be, we want to be judged by intentions. But when it's somebody else, we want to judge them by actions. That's just how we are if we're not careful.

So I'm going to leave it at that. Let's be merciful. Like our Father in heaven is merciful.

Let's find ways to love the foreigner. Yesterday we were driving and I saw this guy selling tamales and it just came through me. Go buy some tamales from him, but let's do some, you know, it's not against the law to love the foreigner.

Isn't that a blessing? You're not breaking any laws to have them into your home and to have a meal with them. Um, let's, uh, let's, let's be like Jesus and cultivate mercy in our hearts for the foreigners, for the vulnerable, for the, for the, um, widows and for the orphans. God bless each one.