Because we are merciful, God will bless us. This daily devotional looks at how God blesses us when our mercy leads to godliness.
Nuggets
- God does not promise to deliver us from trouble — He promises to deliver us out of trouble.
- We are blessed when we give generously with the right motivation.
- God blesses us with peace and tranquility.
- God rewards us when we share our possessions.
Devotions in the Being Merciful Leads to Godliness series
To read devotions in the Redo for Godliness series, click the appropriate button below.
Blair pointed out that these are external blessings. We are talking above and beyond salvation and even the joy and growth we get from being merciful.
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Let's Put It into Context
God’s mercy is the unexpected way God responds in love to our needs. Disciples’ mercy is a characteristic of compassion for the needs of others, especially those who are weak and unhappy.
Parker provided us with a definition of poverty. He wrote, “Sickness, weakness, fear, sense of helplessness, sense of desolation — all these may be brought under the definition of poverty. Some men are poor mentally, needing continual suggestion, direction, and recruital of mind. Want of money is the most superficial kind of poverty.”
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Deliverance Out of Trouble
“Blessed is the one who considers the poor! In the day of trouble the LORD delivers him” (Ps. 41: 1 ESV)
God does not promise to deliver us from trouble — He promises to deliver us out of trouble.
Oh, yes. We really like the concept of God not letting us get into any trouble. We don’t see trouble as a blessing.
Trouble is a blessing.
I’ve said this before, but Cairns said it so much better. He wrote, “The whole life of the Christian after his conversion is a discipline fitted to purify and exalt his character.”
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Once we ABCD, we are no longer spiritually dead. Spiritual death is the separation from God that occurred as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s original sin.
The ABCDs of Salvation
If you have not become a believer in Christ, please read through the
Plan of Salvation and prayerfully consider what God is asking you to do.
A – admit our sins
B – believe His Son Jesus is our Redeemer
C – confess God as Sovereign Lord
D – demonstrate that commitment by making any changes needed in our lives to
live the way in which God has called us
The Disciple’s Job Description
Individual Description
We do, however, have to work out our salvation. Salvation is deliverance from evil and the consequences of sins to replace them with good and eternal life. This deliverance is necessitated by the original sin committed by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which made everyone sinners.
We do this through the Sanctification Road. Sanctification is the transformation of mind, body, and soul, which begins with regeneration, gradually changes our nature through the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and ends with perfected state of spiritual wholeness or completeness. Regeneration is the change in us that God brings about when we go from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive.
Glossary
What God is going to deliver us from is the “… desire of [our] enemies “ (Ps. 41: 2 CSB). Our enemy desires our death. He desires us to deny God.
That is what from what God is going to deliver us. We aren’t going to know spiritual death because we have denied Satan when we have ABCDed.
If we look at the rest of Psalm 41, we see that the trouble is sickness and traitorous friends. Unfortunately, we are going to have those in life.
We have to cut out all of the sin in our lives so we are purified. That is a process, not something that happens at conversion.
It is in the trouble that we become purified. It is having to rely on God and His provision that grows our submission to Him.
Let me say it again. God does not promise to deliver us from trouble — He promises to deliver us out of trouble. Going through the trouble is how we grow.
But don’t we read Psalm 41: 1 to mean our deliverance is contingent on our showing mercy to the poor?
Horns contended that “… considers the poor! … (Ps. 41: 1 ESV) has to begin with wisdom. Wisdom is an enlightened acceptance of God’s principles that leads to knowledge, discernment, and good sense that is put into practice through salvation, increasing our goodness and virtue.
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Considering the poor God’s way is going to start with our acceptance of God’s principles. We should supply the needs of others after we have ABCDed.
Sadler made an interesting statement that I have to process. He wrote, “When God commends us, or encourages us to consider the poor and needy, He commands and encourages us to do that for our fellow-creatures which we, as poor and needy dependants on His bounty, ask Him to do for us.”
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That is a lot of words to say that we are to ask for others as we are asking for ourselves. What it means is we are to “…love your neighbor as yourself …” (Mt. 12: 31 ESV). Remember, that is the second greatest commandment.
Glossary
Oh, yea. I get to say this again. Love God is righteousness + love others is mercy = perfection/godliness.
Blessings on Our Labors
“Give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to (Deut. 15: 10 NIV)
We are blessed when we give generously with the right motivation.
We could all give generously, but we will never eliminate poverty. “For you always have the poor with you …” (Mt. 26: 11 ESV). There will always be work for disciples to do.
Now I have to process what Waugh said. He wrote, “The very act of charity is accompanied with the most refined complacency; it is answering that sympathy which is born in the heart of every man, and which, unless stifled by unnatural discipline, calls loudly for gratification.”
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The complacency is throwing me. Oh, okay. It means self-satisfaction.
What I get Waugh to be saying is, when we show mercy to others, we gain satisfaction because we are helping others.
That is fine. God wants us to be satisfied with our work for Him. He doesn’t want us to think it is substandard if it isn’t.
God’s doesn’t want us to be inordinately proud, either. We have to keep the focus on Him, not us.
We are blessed for our work for God when it stems from our relationship with Him, when we labor to expand His kingdom, and when we truly love those who are the object of our labors. When we do our best, we receive the best.
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Our labors are to include preaching the gospel and making disciples. God will bless our efforts.
The Disciple’s Job Description
Individual Description
Job Duty #4
Proclaim the Gospel (Mark 16: 15)
Job Duty #6
Make Disciples (Matthew 28: 19-20)
The Reward of Peace
“King Nebuchadnezzar, please accept my advice. Stop sinning and do what is right. Break from your wicked past and be merciful to the poor. Perhaps then you will continue to prosper” (Dan. 4: 27 NLT).
- God may bless us with peace and tranquility.
King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream. It was a scary dream.
Daniel was asked to interpret the dream. He had to have some consultation from Nebuchadnezzar before he would tell him what it meant.
The content of the dream isn’t the focus of this discussion. How Daniel approached Nebuchadnezzar is.
Daniel approached Nebuchadnezzar with concern. He told the king to stop sinning, which he had been doing. Sins are actions by humans that disobey God and break one of His reasonable, holy, and righteous laws and commandments, goes against a purpose He has for us, or follows Satan’s promptings.
Instead, Nebuchadnezzar was advised to do what was right and be merciful to the poor.
Blair called this blessing “The staving off of his trouble, and the lengthening of his tranquility.”
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I get a couple of things out of it. We have said before that peace was — and is — dependent on our knowing Him as our personal Savior
To read a related devotion, click on the appropriate button below.
Not knowing God as our Sovereign Lord and Jesus as our personal Savior is scary.
Yes, God gives us peace. We aren’t entitled to prosperity. Really, we aren’t entitled to anything. We are promised that God will provide what we need.
The Reward of Plenty
“Honor the LORD with your possessions and with the first produce of your entire harvest” (Prov. 3: 9 CSB)
God rewards us when we share our possessions.
Scriptures tell us that God will provide abundantly. “The LORD your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all the work of your hand, in the fruit of your womb and in the fruit of your cattle and in the fruit of your ground. For the LORD will again take delight in prospering you, as he took delight in your fathers” (Deut. 30: 9 ESV).
Thomas argued that receiving abundantly was conditional on giving abundantly. Our abundant receiving is contingent on our mercy.
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It is part of our being a living sacrifice to God. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12: 1 ESV).
Bridges reminded us that giving is a privilege. We give to others as if giving to God.
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Making the Connections
What God is rewarding is our successes in becoming more like Him. We are becoming godly. He is going to give us rewards along the way.
We don’t submit and become godly, then we don’t receive the blessings we could.
How Do We Apply This?
So, we want to be merciful in order to receive the blessings. The Homilist gave us a list of how to treat the poor.
- Respect them as members of the human race.
- Advocate for their rights as citizens.
- Ease their suffering.
- Acknowledge their contributions to society.
It is all based on our becoming godly. To do that we need to pray, confess our sins, and worship.
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We need to possess sympathy and empathy. We need to have God’s character.
Gracious Heavenly Father. We thank You that we can grow to be like You. We thank You that
What do you think?
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