Blessed Are The Merciful

I need to be more merciful. God has been so merciful to me and because of His great love and mercy towards me, I should, in turn, be merciful and loving to others.

Mercy is: kindness, compassion, charity, leniency. Mercy is not: cruelty, intolerance, meanness, ruthlessness, uncompassion. (Answers.com)

John Piper on Blessed Are The Merciful (this was so helpful!):

... [T]he first three beatitudes in verses 3–5 describ[e] the emptiness of the blessed person: verse 3: poverty-stricken in spirit, verse 4: grieving over the sin and misery of his condition, and verse 5: accepting the hardships and accusations of life in meekness without defensiveness.

This condition of blessed emptiness is followed in verse 6 by a hunger and thirst for the fullness of righteousness. Then come three descriptions of how righteousness abounds in the heart of the hungry. Mercy in verse 7, purity in verse 8, and peacemaking in verse 9.

So the answer to the first question is that mercy comes from a heart that has first felt its spiritual bankruptcy, and has come to grief over its sin, and has learned to wait meekly for the timing of the Lord, and to cry out in hunger for the work of his mercy to satisfy us with the righteousness we need.

The mercy that God blesses is itself the blessing of God. It grows up like fruit in a broken heart and a meek spirit and a soul that hungers and thirsts for God to be merciful. Mercy comes from mercy. Our mercy to each other comes from God's mercy to us.

The key to becoming a merciful person is to become a broken person. You get the power to show mercy from the real feeling in your heart that you owe everything you are and have to sheer divine mercy. Therefore, if we want to become merciful people, it is imperative that we cultivate a view of God and ourselves that helps us to say with all our heart that every joy and virtue and distress of our lives is owing to the free and undeserved mercy of God....

This part rung true with me. Often I am impatient with imperfection in the church. Oh, how prideful I am!

....And a biblical Deacon will call public sin in the church to account and exercise discipline and even exclusion from the fellowship (1 Corinthians 5:1–13), but will also remember the parable of the wheat and the tares that teaches patience with the imperfection of the church till the end of the age (Matthew 13:24–30).

The message also comments on the question: Should a merciful person always show mercy? Here is only a part of the response.

"The beatitude says, "Blessed are the merciful," not, "Blessed are those who know exactly when and how to show mercy in all circumstances." We must be merciful people even when we act with severity in the service of justice. That is, we must be

• poor in spirit,
• sorrowful for our own sin,
• meekly free from defensiveness and self-exaltation,
• hungering and thirsting for all that is right to be done,
• perceptive of a person's distress and misery,
• feeling pity for his pain,
• and making every effort to see the greatest good done for the greatest number.

So the answer to our third question (Should a merciful person always show mercy?) is a qualified "no." No, you will often support the claims of justice and recompense a person the way he deserves, in order to bear witness to the truth of God's justice and to accomplish a greater good for greater numbers of people."

I think I will read and meditate on the Beatitudes. I want to become a person who understands my spiritual bankruptcy. I am far too often prideful and self righteous.