Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: We hear this great lesson again and again in the New Testament. We echo it every time we say the Lord’s Prayer, for Christ taught us not even to pray for more mercy than we have given. God may show us more mercy than we have shown others — we base our faith, in fact, on God's express willingness to expunge our sins by the sacrifice of his sinless Son. God's capacity for forgiveness is perfect and infinite; ours is not. Nevertheless — the repeated blandishments of the Epistles, and of Jesus Christ himself, that we should not expect more mercy than we give, come as close to being a normative theology of works as we find in the New Testament. As difficult as it may sometimes be to show mercy, its importance outweighs the difficulty. Looking at the original languages of Matthew adds an enormous dimension to the Fifth Beatitude. These words were spoken in Aramaic, copied down in Hebrew, transcribed in Greek, and then translated to English! The Hebrew word, which we read in translation as “mercy”, also connotes a gut-level sympathy for why a person would act wrongly. “Do not criticize a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins,” says an old Native American proverb; the unstated assumption of mercy is that, if we fully understand another person, we will be more apt to forgive a transgression. A great number of the secular world are, indeed, so self-absorbed or so arrogant that they simply do not care about others. Not to pick on Justin Timberlake, but he did say, “Cry me a river, build a bridge, and get over it.” We hear this sentiment repeated often: “Get over it.” It is a sad reflection on the state of the person who says it. What about the Christian, though? We may accept the need to show mercy, but it can be terribly hard. There are limits to our time, our strength, our energy. If someone has injured us, hurt and anger are powerful emotions. And we have troubles of our own! We must consider Christ himself. First his words: “Then Peter came and said to Him, 'Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?' Jesus said to him, 'I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.'” (Matthew 18:21-22) More importantly, consider Christ's life; his very purpose was to show sympathy for our plight and give his entire life for us, that we would not need to pay the terrible cost of our sins. We cannot let this slip our minds entirely, simply because we are angry or tired or frustrated. We have to try. None of us can carry the weight of the world on our shoulders; but we can find enormous strength in the Holy Spirit. The key to this Beatitude, like so many other challenges, is honest prayer. If we pray, the Spirit will hammer away relentlessly at our anger, our self-righteousness, and our fatigue, and we can show the love for our fellow man, for Christ, and even for ourselves, that the Bible promises we can accomplish.