Review:

            What is a true faith or what is truly righteous if the pharisees faith is insufficient?

            Journey of personal transformation

• Begins with acknowledging your true carnal, depraved, or unholy state before God.
• This leads to a grieving of your sin and your status before God.
• When you grieve of your sin, your spirit is changing to a more humble and meek spirit. God’s work is becoming more evident.
• You begin to hunger for being in right relationship with God and others.

Progression of God’s transforming work

• In contrast to the Pharisees standard of self-confident righteousness will not enter heaven, the one who acknowledges they fall short of God’s standards will be a citizen of heaven.
• Our grief will be comforted.
• Our meekness and humility will overcome in the present.
• Our desire to be in right relationship with God and others will come to fruition.

The inner work of God is becoming evidential in mercy.  Matthew 5:7

• Mercy (eleew)- to show or operate in compassion, to pardon or forgive.
• Mercy embraces both forgiveness for the guilty and compassion for the suffering and needy. EBC
• One who is truly connected to God as a recipient of mercy, will be merciful.
• A merciful person will only continue to find mercy from God in abundance.

Ephesians 2:4-7 “⁴ But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, ⁵ made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.⁶ And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, ⁷ in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”

God delights in our becoming merciful.  Matthew 18:21-25

            Peter- How many times should I forgive someone who has sinned against me, 7x?

• 7x was a traditional round number that would justify.

            Jesus- Not 7x but 77x

• Not a ceiling but a number that suggests we have been forgiven more than we will ever forgive. EBC
  

Jesus tells a story to make his point. 

The parable of the unmerciful servant. 

• A servant owes a master 10k bags of gold (talents)—worth 20 years of a laborers wage.
• Lawfully the master demands the selling of the servant, his wife, and his children into slavery.
• The servant pleads for mercy.
• The master takes pity (mercy) upon him and forgives the debt.
• The servant in turn goes to a fellow servant who owed him 100 silver coins (denarii)—worth about 100 days of work.
• In an enraged state physically assaults his peer and demands repayment.
• The fellow servant pleads for mercy.
• He receives none and is lawfully thrown into jail.
• The observers were enraged and told the master.
• He is enraged and the mercy was rescinded.

Jesus’ Conclusion: God delights in giving mercy and even more delights in that mercy being paid forward.

Take aways:

1. Consider listing the top five things you have done in your life that the Lord has extended you incredible mercy.
2. What relationship(s) are you withholding mercy and choosing to keep an account? Why—7x?  How can you begin to pay forward to this broken relationship the mercy you have received?
3. Appeal to God for mercy for being merciless and offer gratefulness for the mercy you have received.