Daily Devotional

There is a difference between a merciful impulse and a merciful posture. An impulse is occasional — something moves us and we respond with kindness. A posture is the direction your life is inclined toward, the default setting of your heart toward people who are hurting. Jesus blesses the second kind. He blesses people whose bent is mercy, whose first instinct when they see wreckage is to move toward it rather than away from it.

Jay Adams draws a distinction that cuts to the heart of this beatitude: grace is directed toward sin, but mercy is directed toward the misery sin occasions. God extends grace to address the guilt of your sin. He extends mercy to come alongside the wreckage of it. Both are needed. And the person who has received both is the one most equipped to give both to others.

The sermon asked a searching question: where are you withholding mercy because you have forgotten how much you have received? The unmerciful servant in Matthew 18 had just been forgiven a debt he could never repay – and immediately went out and threw a fellow servant into prison over a fraction of it. The parable is not really about the servant’s meanness. It is about his memory. He forgot what he cost his master. And a forgetting heart becomes a withholding heart almost automatically.

The promise attached to this beatitude is worth sitting with: the merciful shall receive mercy. This is not a social principle about how nice people tend to attract nice people. It is a word about how God deals with those who live like he does. The God who is described in Exodus 34:6 as abounding in steadfast love and mercy is inviting you to share his most fundamental characteristic – and promising to keep meeting you with it as you do.