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Is this the world’s “life verse?” What is the context? Be prepared for a shocker!
Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. Mike Havendroth here. Sounds like I have a little cold.
It's just post cold.
Post nasal drip cold. You can write me, Mike, at nocompromiseradio .com. That's right, a couple announcements. Number one, the new little booklet on cancer should be out soon. I've taken the Cancer Is Not Your Shepherd book and condensed it to.
I can't remember how many words now. I forget. 8 ,000? 9 ,000? Put it in a little 6x9 book, booklet. Much cheaper. And then you can hand it out. You can buy dozens. If you're NAMM, you can buy a thousand.
How's that? And then I'm also sending off to the editor Law Gospel, a.
Primer. Not a primer,.
But a primer. Quick little one-page definitions of what's the first use of the law? What's the second use of the law? What happens if you blend Law Gospel? What is legalism? What is antinomianism? Alright.
Trying to think what else here is happening around.
This area.
No conferences anytime soon. By the time this plays, I'll probably be back from California for Thanksgiving. So that's going to be fun. Don't forget my son is I don't know what they call him, pastoral candidate, main preacher at Redemption Church, North County.
If you are in North County, North San Diego County, if you're Carlsbad, Oceanside, Vista, Encinitas, Acadia. If you're around there, Sunday's Redemption, you'll find a Law Gospel, Christ-centered, Abendroth preaching there.
I think he's in Ruth now. We'll see how that goes. Harder to preach narrative, but I'm glad they just finished Philippians and now.
Into Ruth. Alright, I think.
That's enough for announcements today. I'm just trying to boot up my iPad. I'd like to talk about mercy today. Oh, I was pulling up, thinking about mercy, songs about mercy. Mercy, Mercy, I think is the title of the Marvin Gaye song.
It's about environmentalism. We talk a lot about grace and that's good because grace.
Is directed.
Toward the unworthy as some have written. I've already forgotten who wrote that. Grace to the unworthy. Swinnick. Yep, Swinnick. And what goes towards the needy? The answer is mercy. So we talk a lot about grace, less about mercy.
And I think over the years,.
Hopefully.
My theology's gotten better, including my whole definition of mercy. For years, it was not getting what you deserved. And that's a part of it. But mercy is more than that. Mercy is seeing someone that's needy and you see they're in a situation that they deserve pity, that elicits pity.
They don't deserve pity, but I think that's a pitiable situation. And I better do something about it. And so if you think of Ephesians chapter 2, we're rich in sin, and what does Ephesians 2 4 say? But God, rich in.
Mercy.
Here I am hitting this table again. I figured out that I could put the cough button on when I start the show, so there's that, and end the show. I was trying to be quiet this whole time.
I didn't even need to do it.
Titus chapter 3,.
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God, our Savior, appeared, He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own, what?
1 Peter chapter 1, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to His great mercy.
He has.
Caused us to be born again. Psalm 57, Your mercy is great unto the heavens. Psalm 103, For as high as heaven is above the earth, so great is His mercy toward them that fear Him. Deuteronomy 4, For the Lord your God is a merciful God.
Of course, you remember when Jonah sinfully had that attitude, I knew you were going to save these people. He said to the Lord, O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful.
God.
Slow to anger, abounding in steadfast.
Love.
God is merciful. And I know you know that here on No Compromise Radio. So my question now is, since God is merciful, what's your response? And there might be a hundred responses, a hundred, but we're only going to have one today.
One response today? No, let's make it two. Come on, let's make it two. The first response to God's mercy, especially if you're a Christian, you should be thankful. Thankful for the mercies of God. O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endures forever.
Psalm 136. So we ought to be thankful. No matter what else is going on in the world, we can be thankful for God's mercy. We can sing about God's mercy. That's thanking Him, praising Him. 2 Corinthians chapter 1, verse 3.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of comfort. And since God is a God who is merciful to unbelievers, and I think one of the things that we have to remember, as theologians would remind us, that mercy presupposes sin, right?
We're not talking about having mercy about there's some dog and it's out there in the, what do they call it, hot car or something.
I was thinking about something else.
This is going nowhere. This is going nowhere fast. I'm opening up my perspiration book right now randomly and turning to the page. What page? I don't.
Know. Let's just read.
Random passage. The anvil is struck by the hammer and the anvil never strikes in return. Yet the anvil wears the hammer out. Patience baffles fury and vanquishes malice. The non-resistance principle involves a resistance which is irresistible.
I'm not going to do that again.
Oh, that doesn't.
Really work, does it?
That's bad. That's bad radio.
Knowing God's merciful, we should be thankful and praise him. And then secondly, number two, are you ready? This is where I'm going today. This is where I'm.
Headed.
We should be.
Merciful.
Knowing God is merciful, knowing God has been and is merciful to you, how do you respond? Well, number one, you say, thank you, Lord, and praise him. And then the second response is to be merciful to other people.
And there's a lot of people out there you can be merciful to. The world, so many people in the world are in pain and trouble and trials, and they need a lot of things, including.
So, how can you be more merciful? And I'm going to call this show Mercyology. My sister's named Marcy, but this is not mercyology. This is mercy-ology, a word about mercy. I can give you the Greek word, but we're just going to use mercy-ology.
And it's not going to surprise you to know that this is coming from the Lord Jesus. Mercy. God has been.
Merciful to you. You ought.
To be merciful to other people. Now, one of the things we have here in Bible translation.
Is.
Kind of a mental note that not every word is translated from the original language. Let's use the New Testament this morning for an illustration. Not every Greek word is translated into an English word because it's just, you can't do one to one.
You can try to be as faithful as possible in a literal type of translation, instead of being a paraphrase or trying to have an equivalent dynamically. But it's hard to have every word translated. But sometimes they just do things that make me really bugged.
And here's one of those that really bugs me. Luke chapter 6. As you know, Jesus is talking about being merciful. And He says, Love your enemies, Luke 6 .35, do good, lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great.
And you will be, or show yourself manifest, as the sons of the Most High. For He is kind to the ungrateful and evil. Be merciful, even as your Father.
Is merciful.
Then there's a hard break, a paragraph.
Break. And.
Then it says, Judge not, and you will not be judged. Condemn not, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven, given it will be given to you. Et cetera. So, we see Jesus, okay, He gives the Beatitudes, He gives the woes, He talks about loving your enemy, and now He's going to talk about judging.
And as you remember, this.
Is all.
Part of His message that He gives to a variety of different people. Sometimes people have described it as concentric circles of an audience. The twelve other disciples, other people that aren't His disciples, maybe there's some false teachers there, maybe there's some just looky-loos there.
Why do people call them looky-loos? I don't know. They're looking and they're named Lou. Have you ever met a man named Lou?
I have met men named Lou. Good.
Men, by the way. Louis. So, He says, Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. And when I was reading my Greek text, my Nestle Aland 27, I believe. Which one do I have? That's UBS? Is that UBS? No, it's Nestle Aland 27.
UBS 4 or 5 or something.
But I was reading.
The Nestle Aland and it showed the Judge Not passage in the same paragraph as the Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. I thought, isn't that interesting? Why don't they have a hard paragraph break like the ESV does?
What in the world is going on here? So, when you see things like that, then you dig. And you can take a look at things. Matter of fact, one of the things you could do, and one of the things that I did, not right away, but I did do this, and you can do this one right away, go to Bible Hub, type in Luke 6 37, and you're going to see all the translations.
And you're going to see different things from the ESV and the NES, NES 95, NES 2017, or 2011, whatever it is, NIV 84, NIV 2011. And you're going to see different words and you're going to go, oh, so why did they translate it differently?
That should help me with my motivation to dig in a little bit more. So, all that to say, here's the point. Here's the Greek translated into English. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful, and judge not, and you will not be judged.
There's an and in there. There's a chi in the Greek. K-A-I. And, judge not. No wonder the NAS, excuse me, the Nestle Alon, has it in there. The NAS 77 has and.
The Legacy.
Has and. ESV and the newer NAS doesn't have and. But and is in there. And judge not. So, you want to know what mercy's like? God says, the Son says, be merciful, even as your Heavenly Father is merciful.
He starts giving you a bunch of reasons.
On how to be.
Merciful, starting in verse 37. And the first one is, don't judge. The context here is persecution, right? Chapter 6, verse 22.
You are.
Excluded, you're hated, reviled, and people spurn your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. And, that's why he says in verse 27, but I say to you who hear, love your enemies. You're going to go out there, and you're going to preach, and there's going to be enemies, and how do you deal with enemies?
Well, instead of asking God to kill them, you remember how God acts. He's kind, and He is merciful to people that are evil and ungrateful. And if that's the way He is to unbelievers, you ought to be the same.
You ought to love your enemies, and do good to them, and to bless them, and to pray for them, and not have some reciprocal relationship, because you're different. God has made you a new creature in Christ Jesus, and you're born again, and you should do things differently.
The opposite of what you really want to do in the flesh, because the opposite of the fleshly desire is the spiritual desire, and so, walk by the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the deeds of the flesh.
So, when you're merciful, what does that look like? The first thing Jesus says is, judge not, and you will not be.
Judged. Now,.
When we think about this verse, we don't really think about it in that regard. We begin to think to ourselves, you know, Christian judgment, or, you know, when I hear this a lot, I probably hear this from unbelievers more than I hear it from believers.
And in Christianity, we have our own little lingo, right? Every group, the math club at school has certain kind of language that they use. Well, Christian language and lingo is sometimes biblical, and sometimes it's just cultural.
One of those cultural things is a life verse. Do you have a life verse? Mike, what's your life verse? Well, I don't really have a life verse. I didn't know I was supposed to have a life verse. When anyone asks me to sign a book, I just write something, and then I sign my name, and then I usually write Colossians 1 .28.
That's what we have here at church on our bulletin. Is that the church's life verse? Oh, I don't know, but it talks about proclaiming Christ, and we want to be known for that. That's what I want to talk about at the show here, always.
That's why you tune in to listen, is to hear me talk about that. I mean, once in a while, maybe you'll tune in to listen because, you know, you're Mike Lund or Christian Harris or one of these old geezers, and you want to just hear some pop culture references that you can understand.
I know, I know that when they listen, they're happy. I have to send them money when I mention their names. But a life verse? I looked up how many verses are in the Bible, and the answer is 10 ,000, 20 ,000, or 30 ,000, roughly speaking.
You are correct. 31 ,102 verses in the Bible. About 8 ,000 verses in the New Testament, about 23 ,000 in the.
Old.
This is the world's life verse. This is an unbeliever's life verse. Judge not,.
Lest you be.
Judged.
Jesus calls you to be merciful, dear Christian, especially to unbelievers, and now he wants you not to be judgy,.
If we want to put it that way.
Can you discern? Yes, there are Bible verses that say you should be discerning.
Should you be.
Examining scriptures? Yes, there are Bible verses that not just command to be discerning, but commend it with the Berean church. There are times where you have to look at situations, whether it's dealing with church discipline in 1 Corinthians 5 and Matthew 18, or just dealing with false doctrine, that you have to judge.
But this is a sinful judgmentalism. That's probably the best way to put it. And it is in the context here. Matthew 7 might be different. We'll talk about that maybe another day. But Luke 6, for sure, he's talking about being judgmental and condemning people here that are unbelievers.
Isn't.
That interesting?
That.
When you're preaching the gospel to people, you should be holding off on judgment.
Judgment.
Is God's prerogative alone. God is the judge, and we realize.
He's the judge.
We don't have to be the judge. That takes a lot off our plate and off our shoulders. And then we can be merciful to other people and gentle to them and kind. It is certainly true that Jesus said in John 5, For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father.
Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from.
Death to.
Life.
What's my point? My point is God is going to judge, so you don't have to worry about it. Now, you can say if they keep acting the way they're doing that they're going to go straight to perdition, so I better evangelize them.
There's nothing wrong with.
But a desire that the unbelievers who have hurt you, you want God to get them and judge them? Well, that's not merciful. That's not mercy at all.
We.
Need to think to ourselves, there's a different kind of attitude we need to have.
Critical? No.
And we don't even know what's going on inside of the men that we're preaching to. And the trials that they have and difficulties and everything else, we just realize they're after us when we're evangelizing them.
And if we're not careful, we want to respond in the flesh, and we ought not.
To do that.
Jesus is not saying you can't use discernment. We make decisions all day, every day. He's saying in the context of evangelism and people hate you and they exclude you and they revile you and they spurn your name as evil, all because of the account of man.
You ought to be merciful because God is merciful, and part of that mercy is not being judgmental. You don't have to be. Jesus said in John 8, you judge according to the flesh. I judge no one, yet even if I do judge, my judgment is true, for it is not I alone who judge, but I and the Father who sent me.
I mean, our judgment isn't even.
Perfect.
God's going to judge them. We ought not to judge. We want to judge them immediately when the judgment of God is not going to be immediate. We have human judgment and standards, and we only partially know what's going on, yet God judges perfectly and he knows everything that's going on.
So let's leave the judging.
To God.
One writer said, an unwillingness to be judgmental is almost a requirement for those who face persecution. Without it, lines of battle would become hardened and the ability to love the enemy would be destroyed.
God is interested not in polemics but in the offering of hope, in offering the hope of restored relationship to the lost. So when it comes to being merciful, in the context of evangelism, you ought not to be judgmental.
Not only that, and he just amplifies this a little bit,.
Jesus.
Said in Luke 6 .37, Condemn not, and you will not be condemned. Pretty close, parallel. They say most writers that this is synonymous parallelism. Condemn, judge, it's the same thing but repeated for emphasis.
To condemn.
We're going to.
Condemn people. Well, God's going to have the last word. It's not merciful to condemn. Finding little faults with all the details about it. They act like unbelievers, remember? Unbelievers.
Act like.
Unbelievers. Our instinct might be to get these people that are getting us. We have to remember that it's God who's merciful and we ought to be merciful. John 3 .17, For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. So the program for sending the Son into the world was not to condemn, but to rescue.
So, what is our reason to go out there and preach the gospel? To harden hearts? Well, maybe that's true, but our desire and the tenor of our hearts.
Should be,.
Jesus went on a rescue mission. I'd like to do the same thing. Mercy leaves the condemning to God. Well, not only that, how do you treat your enemies and people that persecute you, exclude you, revile you, hate you, and spurn your name as evil?
Well, how does mercy work? Be merciful even as your Father in heaven is merciful, and judge not, lest you be judged, condemn not, and you will not be condemned, forgive, and it will be forgiven you, and you will be forgiven.
Mercy forgives. Mercy is going to be the one, personified, personified, it's going to be a forgiver. Mercy forgives.
We talked.
About this in the past, Jesus is on the cross, Father, forgive them, they do not know what they're doing. That's called mercy. It's called loving your enemies, you pray for them. They stone Stephen, he's calling out on God, Lord, receive my spirit.
And he says, don't charge them, Lord, with this sin.
He's forgiving.
And if you want to know what the opposite of condemnation is, it's forgiven. Forgiveness. Ephesians chapter five, verse one and two, therefore be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice.
You, dear Christian, have been forgiven for all your sins, all your transgressions, all your trespasses, all your false steps,.
All your.
Deviations from the right path. You have been forgiven. I, too, have been forgiven. We have a standard from God to keep, and we have violated it, and we have been forgiven. Our guilt is released. Right?
Our guilt is released. We are forgiven. We are acquitted. It cost us nothing, but it cost the Father, the Son, and the Spirit a lot. And our sins now are cast in the depth of the sea. Our iniquities are tread underfoot.
Our sins remembered no more. He's removed our transgressions as far as the east is from the west. All our sins cast behind his back. And the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us that was hostile to us, he's taken out of the way.
And since you are blessed by being forgiven, remember David in Psalm 32, how blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. In Psalm 130, if you, Lord, should mark iniquities, who could stand?
But with you there is what? Forgiveness that you may be feared. Since God has forgiven us all of our transgressions, ignorant, high-handed, original, actual, past, present, future, thought, word, deed, omission, commission, we deserved hell, God's wrath, and now we're forgiven.
If God is merciful to people, and he forgives, and he's forgiven us, we should be forgivers as well when it comes to enemies. Does that make sense? What's mercy look like? Mercy, mercy me? Well, Mercy, Mercy Me is that song that I was telling you about when it comes to Marvin Gaye, that it's just I just could not believe that it was an environmental song.
I mean, was he before his time or whatever when it comes to woke stuff? I mean, that's pretty amazing, isn't it? Well, my name is Mike Abendroth. This is No Compromise Radio Ministry. You can write me, mike at nocompromiseradio .com and I guess here we go.
Whoa!
This is it.
Oh, but it's fun radio. Thanks for tuning in. My name's Mike Abendroth. Don't forget the Law Gospel Primer not primer. I'm not talking about paint here. I'm not talking about shooting an old musket. The Primer should be out soon.
Tell your friends. Tell your enemies.