Tag Archives: Mercy

Before your head hits the pillow

Who is Jesus?

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As Christians we are told that it should be our goal to live as Jesus lived, to act as He acted.  When my children were growing up it was all the rage to where bracelets that contained the letters WWJD, standing for What would Jesus Do?  But it is pretty hard to act as Jesus would act if we don’t even know what He was like as He walked this earth or who He still is today.

First and foremost we must understand that Jesus, the man who walked this earth some 2000 years ago was indeed God.  There are few people who deny that Jesus existed.  It is accepted in nearly every religion and among many non-believers that Jesus was indeed a real figure in history.  But this is where it stops for many people.  They want to say that Jesus was a great man, a kind and loving man, or maybe even a prophet but they don’t want to profess that He was God.

C.S. Lewis says this about this suggestion, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that option open to us. He did not intend to.”

C.S. Lewis knew that our Lord Jesus Christ was and still is God!  People who try to say that Jesus was just a great teacher are certainly deluding themselves.

But if we are to follow Jesus, to emulate Him, to act as He acted, we need to know about who He was when he walked this earth. GotQuestions.org and some great insight into the question “What was Jesus like as a person?”

Jesus was not a good looking person like so many of the pictures we see of Him. Isaiah 53:2 says that he had “no beauty that we should desire Him…”  It wasn’t His good looks that drew people to Himself, it was His personality and His character.

Jesus was intensely compassionate.  His compassion found Him feeding 5000 hungry people.  It was His compassion that caused Him to intercede for the woman accused of adultery.

Jesus was serious and focused.  He knew what His mission on earth was.  He knew why it was that he came to earth and His whole ministry was centered on that day when He would die for our sins.  Jesus had a servant’s heart.  Mark 10:45 says that, “He did not come to be served, but to serve.”  Jesus was kind and selfless.  Jesus was constantly thinking about the feelings of others.  He cared about little children and their parents even when His disciples didn’t want the children bothering Him.

Jesus was submissive to the will of His Heavenly Father.  In His final hours, while in deep anguish Jesus asked His Father to “take this cup of suffering from Me: but let what you want be done, not what I want.”  Jesus was even submissive to His earthly parents.  Luke 2:51 says that “He continued in subjection to them…”

Jesus was full of mercy and forgiveness.  He asked His Heavenly Father to forgive those who put Him to death.  He called the disgusting tax-collector Matthew to be one of His disciples.  He showed mercy to the centurion when He healed his servant.

Jesus cared for the most wretched and despised of people.  He cared for the Samaritan woman at the well.  He cared for prostitutes and adulterers.  He cared for children and lepers.  Jesus was the epitome of caring and love.

Jesus was not afraid of confrontation but was most condemning of people who professed to know God but were more about religion than they were about love and service.  Jesus often confronted the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the Jewish leaders of the day.  Jesus confronted the money changers in the temple who were defiling God’s sacred house. And Jesus even confronted his friend Peter when Peter tried to interfere with His mission. Matthew 16:23.

Jesus spent much time in prayer and fasting.  He fasted and prayed for 40 days and 40 nights as He prepared for His ministry.  Jesus prayed at His baptism, He prayed before He selected His disciples, He prayed before feeding the 5000, He prayed before raising Lazarus from the dead, and He prayed many, many more times!

Jesus was honest and truthful.  He never told a lie, He never stretched the truth, but rather spoke the truth everywhere that he went.  Jesus was patient.  He was patient when His disciples failed to understand Him, He was patient when Peter all too often spoke before he thought, He was patient when they argued about who would sit at Jesus’ side in heaven.  Jesus was patient.

So there we have it.  If we want to live like Jesus lived, these are things to strive for: Compassion, serious focus, being submissive to God and those in authority, have mercy and forgiveness, be caring for those who appear to be unlovable, do not be afraid to confront when evil exists, spend time in prayer and fasting, be honest and truthful, and be patient.  That is our recipe for happiness and joy.  If we live in this way, completely surrendered to Christ, we will have great peace and immeasurable joy.

From Our Readers

Bible verses about Mercy as Larger Obligation

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Our reader Elsie Mckenzie writes:

Bible verses about Mercy as Larger Obligation

Matthew 12:1-8

Jesus truly knew God’s law and that other concerns (mercy, in this case; verse 7) may sometimes override the strict letter-of-the-law approach the Pharisees used. The Pharisees no doubt thought Jesus a flaming liberal, but to Jesus, He was simply working within the liberty God’s law allows (see Psalm 119:45; John 8:31-32; II Corinthians 3:17; James 1:25; I Peter 2:16).

Forgiveness
Matthew 23:1-39

In one chapter, Matthew 23, Jesus Christ rips the scribes and Pharisees to shreds. Eight times He pronounces on them woe—defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “deep suffering, grief, affliction, ruinous trouble.” He dubs them “hypocrites” seven times, “blind guides” twice, “fools and blind” twice, “blind” once, “whitewashed tombs” once, and finishes His name-calling tirade by designating them “brood of vipers”!

He then accuses them of being the children of those who had killed the prophets—a heavy-duty insult considering how proud they were of their ancestry. He predicts they would do the same themselves and declares that He would have nothing to do with them until they accept and bless the ones He sends.

Jesus was really worked up over this! Why? These people were extremely careful in keeping every minor article of the law. They even added many precise rules themselves to ensure they did not overlook the law’s details.

Their lives, and the lives of those under their jurisdiction, consisted of endless, mindless details. Endless, for they continued to break branches of the law down to twigs down to leaves. Mindless, because this focus hampered their ability to think and properly weigh what was most important. They became so involved in making sure everyone else obeyed their demands that they no longer remembered the fundamental purpose of the law or kept it properly themselves. Even worse, they used the law against others and took advantage even to the point of “devouring widows’ houses” (verse 14). Hence Christ’s remonstrance: Hypocrites!

Yet they LOOKED good, publicly counting their mint, cummin and anise. It is not wrong or unlawful to count each seed; tithing should be done, as Christ pointed out (verse 23). But there are far more important issues of the law to consider than counting individual seeds—namely, JUDGMENT, MERCY AND FAITH.

Notice Christ’s scathing indictment of the Pharisees’ religion and it’s effects:

• They set a horrid example by not following their own teaching (verse 3).
• They abused their office by burdening others with strict requirements while not requiring the same of themselves (verse 4).
• What they did do was only for vanity and show (verse 5).
• They were social climbers (verse 6).
•Their teaching had negative results, driving people farther from the Kingdom rather than closer to it (verse 13).
• Their twisted reasoning led them to steal even from the weak (verse 14).
• Their misguided zeal made their proselytes twice as bad as they were before they were even “converted” to Pharisaism (verse 16).
• Gold, money, and greed became their main focus and god (verses 16-18).
• Their perspective was so perverted that they would pay more attention to keep from swallowing a gnat than they would a camel (verses 23-24).
• How others saw them was far more important than moral values (verses 27-28).
• While they extolled the virtues of past men of God, they were so deeply hateful and murderous that they would kill Christ and any of His followers that they could (verses 29-37).
• Their religious house was utterly worthless and desolate, bereft of any contact with or influence of God, though they thought they were perfectly righteous. In a word, they were self-righteous.

We could easily break these attitudes down into many more categories of sin, but the point is obvious: The total of all their religious efforts was zero. Actually, Pharisaism had negative value, for the scribes and Pharisees took what people already had and made them even worse off than before!