Sermon Tone Analysis

\\ There is something enticing about a movie plot dealing with revenge.

From The Godfather to Hamlet to one of my favorite westerns The Outlaw Josie Wales,

 

the characters change, but we are drawn to stories of where people get even.

\\ \\ Revenge is so natural; it is like a reflex action.

But when a story breaks the cycle of bloodshed and an eye for an eye, we stop.

We sit up.

We pay attention.

\\ \\ Such was the response to a movie made about five missionaries who received their crowns at the end of a spear.

It’s the story about Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Roger Youderian, Pete Fleming and Ed McCulley being brutally killed in the jungle of Ecuador by a tribe that anthropologists said was once the most violent society ever documented.

\\ \\ The movie doesn’t tell us the story from the perspective of one of the missionaries.

We learn what happened from the son of one of the missionaries.

Our heart is in our throat as we watch the plane take this young Christian man to his death and his little boy looks after him until he is out of sight.

We know the sense of foreboding the wife and child had would be proven true.

\\ \\ Here is where the story diverges.

The boy grows to manhood, and what will he do?

He goes back to the tribe.

He doesn’t go back to find his father’s murderer and get even.

No, he goes back to introduce them to the One his father served that was speared but did not spear back.

\\ \\ As amazing as that act of mercy is, the real miracle was what happened to the Auca Indians upon receiving these acts of mercy.

They broke the cycle of revenge.

\\ \\ Five young men at the beginning of their lives are not supposed to die so needlessly, nor so violently.

Revenge is our human way of fixing what seems broken,

Revenge is our human way of restoring the precarious balance of justice, of peace, to the universe.

But the problem is that revenge doesn’t restore peace.

Revenge moves a victim to the place of perpetrator and begins a whole new chapter of life not the way it is suppose to be.

The Auca’s prove this.

Maybe your life proves this.

But mercy caused these people to break their spears and lay them down.

When they did that it blessed their lives.

We have already noticed in our study of the first four beatitudes that the order in which they occur is intentional.

In one respect all of the Beatitudes describe the character of the Christian man.

The man who possesses this divine and divinely given character (and only he) is instructed to live as the rest of the sermon indicates.

If it is true that the first three beatitudes show how a man must stand in his relation as a sinner to God—

 

spiritually bankrupt, sorry for sin, and meekly humble—

 

and if it is true that the fourth beatitude contains the promise of God’s provision of righteousness for the man who so comes to God,

 

then it is logical to expect that the remaining beatitudes will reveal the transformed character of the one who now has been touched by Christ’s Spirit

 

The one who is now being progressively remade in Christ’s image.

This, in fact, is precisely what we do find.

The first four beatitudes deal entirely with inner principles, principles of the heart and mind.

They are concerned with the way we see ourselves before God.

The last four are outward manifestations of those attitudes.

Those who in poverty of spirit recognize their need of mercy are led to show mercy to others.

Those who mourn over their sin are led to purity of heart and mind and action (v.

8).

Those who are meek always seek to make peace.

And those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are never unwilling to pay the price of being persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh of the beatitudes, beginning with “blessed are the merciful,” describe the outward workings of the inner character of the Christian.

He behaves as one who is merciful, pure in heart, and always ready and anxious to make peace.

Mercy is first, because it is what we experience first when we are saved by Jesus Christ.

According to Jesus the man who has tasted God’s righteousness is to show mercy to others;

 

he is to be pure in heart; he is to be a peacemaker.

What is mercy?

Shakespeare defined mercy in the well-known speech by Portia in /The Merchant of Venice/—

 

 

 

 

 

The quality of mercy is not strain’d.

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.

’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown—

 

Shakespeare covered some of mercy’s qualities: impartiality, gentleness, abundance.

But this is not the full definition.

It is only the Bible that gives the word “mercy” its true scope and spiritual significance.

In some ways mercy may be compared with grace; that is, it is undeserved.

But it is not grace itself.

In the pastoral letters Paul even adds mercy to his normal Christian greeting—grace and peace—thereby implying a distinction between them.

/“Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord”/ (1 Tim.

1:2; cf. 2 Tim.

1:2; Titus 1:4).

What makes mercy different from grace?

 

Primarily it is the quality of helplessness or misery on the part of those who receive mercy.

Grace is love when love is undeserved.

Mercy is grace in action.

Mercy is love reaching out to help those who are helpless and who need salvation.

Mercy identifies with the miserable in their misery.

Mercy forgives the unforgivable.

We can’t state the definition of mercy without thinking at once of the cross of Jesus Christ.

It was there that God acted out of grace in mercy to fallen, sinful man.

In fact, God’s act was so complete at the cross that there is a sense in which it is only there mercy can be seen by a sinful man.

In his sinful, fallen state man could do nothing to save himself,

 

so God stepped forward to do everything that needed to be done.

Paul wrote of it in (Eph.

2:4–7).

/But God, //who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,// ////even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been s//aved), ////and raised us up together, and made us sit together //in the heavenly// places in Christ Jesus, ////that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in //His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.//

/

 

We correctly sing: Mercy there was great,...

 

Now because we have experienced this mercy from God we in turn are to show mercy to others.

* *

A popular Roman philosopher called mercy “the disease of the soul.”

It was the supreme sign of weakness.

Mercy was a sign that you did not have what it takes to be a real man and especially a real Roman.

The Romans glorified manly courage, strict justice, firm discipline, and, above all, absolute power.

They looked down on mercy, because mercy to them was weakness, and weakness was despised above all other human limitations.

During much of Roman history, a father had the right of /patria pitestas/,

 

of deciding whether or not his newborn child would live or die.

As the infant was held up for him to see, the father would turn his thumb up if he wanted the child to live, down if he wanted it to die.

If his thumb turned down the child was immediately drowned.

Citizens had the same life-or-death power over slaves.

At any time and for any reason they could kill and bury a slave, with no fear of arrest or reprisal.

Husbands could even have their wives put to death on the least provocation.

Today abortion reflects the same merciless attitude.

A society that despises mercy is a society that glorifies brutality.

The underlying motive of self-concern has characterized men in general and societies in general since the Fall.

We see it expressed today in such sayings as, “If you don’t look out for yourself, no one else will.”