Sunday Sermon: Go the Extra Mile (Matthew 5:38-42)

You are listening to the teaching ministry of Gabriel Hughes, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas.

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on this podcast we feature 20 minutes of Bible study through a

New Testament book. On Thursday is a study in the Old Testament and then we answer questions from the listeners on Friday.

Each Sunday we are pleased to share our sermon series. Here's Pastor Gabe. You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.

And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

Let us come to the Lord in prayer. Our heavenly Father, we thank you and praise you for your word.

And I pray that what we read and see today in these scriptures will be the justice of God, that you are a good and holy

God. You are just and all your ways are justice. And it's knowing that you are just that we may also see the mercy of God.

Though what we deserve for our sin against you was death and judgment.

You sent your son Jesus to die on a cross in our place as an atoning sacrifice, rising again from the dead, conquering death itself, so that whoever believes in Jesus would not perish but have everlasting life.

Jesus gave himself to be crucified for our sins. Though he was reviled, he did not revile in return.

And I pray that in Christ by faith we have received forgiveness of sins and we also look to Christ as our example as to how we are to live among one another in this world.

How we treat others, how we show mercy as God has also shown us mercy.

By your Holy Spirit this morning, open our eyes, open our ears that we may see and hear what the

Lord says to us through the scriptures. Through your spirit that you have poured into our hearts and it's in the name of our

Lord Jesus Christ that we pray and all God's people said, amen. So in this short passage here in Matthew chapter 5, you may have noticed two very common sayings.

Turn the other cheek and go the extra mile. I thought about titling the sermon today

Turn the Other Cheek, but that was before I recognized that Jesus is telling us here to do more than simply turn the other cheek.

He's telling us to go the extra mile. After all, you have sinned against God and he didn't merely turn the other cheek.

He gave his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. So let us worship

God and praise him all the more for the gospel of Christ as we consider his word this morning.

Here Jesus gives to us the fourth of five, you have heard that it was said statements.

The first was in verse 21, then verse 27. Last week we looked at verse 33, and the next week we're going to look at the last one, verse 43.

I was hoping that I could actually finish up Matthew chapter 5 today, but as I was manuscripting out this sermon, as I was typing it out,

I typed way more just on verses 38 through 42 than I was able to include the next section as well.

So we'll save that last, you have heard that it was said statement until next week.

But we look today at verse 38, you have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

But I say to you, Jesus says, do not resist the one who is evil.

But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, you turn to him the other also.

An eye for an eye is in the law of God, and it is a just law.

I want you to understand that because in no way is Jesus overthrowing an eye for an eye, or what we might also refer to as the law of just measures.

But many have assumed that's exactly what Jesus is doing here. There's a famous quote that's attributed to Gandhi, who said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

Now it turns out Gandhi did not say this, but his biographer Louis Fincher, but he believed from Gandhi's teaching that Jesus actually thought an eye for an eye was unjust.

That's not what Jesus is saying here at all. The purpose of the law here is very simple.

The punishment must fit the crime. The law of just or equal measures was to prevent excessive punishment or favoring one social class over another.

Jesus is not altering this law in any way. It is God's law. It is a good law intended for civic use to be imposed by civil authorities.

But that's not what the Pharisees were doing. The Pharisees were applying it to personal matters, and then of course all the

Jews along with them. That's what Jesus is rebuking here. Jesus was not overthrowing the death penalty.

He was not saying police officers cannot use force. He was not saying you cannot be a soldier, nor was he saying a nation should never go to war against another nation.

And these are all things that have been repudiated by those who twist and abuse the words of Christ here in Matthew 5, 38 through 42.

We are called to be a just people. As we read from the Psalm this morning, that we are to exercise justice.

Psalm 106, 3 says, Blessed are they who observe justice and do righteousness at all times.

And as a people who are to be just, doing justice means that we punish those who do evil.

Proverbs 28, 5 says, Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the

Lord understand it completely. Isaiah 1, 17 says,

Learn to do good. Seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause.

In verse 23, you see this is being spoken to a people who are not doing justice.

In fact, the Lord says through Isaiah, Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves.

The princes are the ones who are supposed to be exercising justice. Rather, they love a bribe and they run after gifts.

They do not bring justice to the fatherless and the widow's cause does not even come to them.

When people read Matthew 5, 38 and they think that Jesus is overthrowing the law of God, they are not listening to the

God of justice. Rather, they are perverting justice. They make the same mistakes that the

Pharisees were making. And again, the Pharisees claimed that Jesus was speaking contrary to the law of God.

And when people think that Jesus is overthrowing an eye for an eye, they're doing the same thing.

They're saying that Jesus is speaking contrary to the law of God. The most common interpretation of Matthew 5, 38 is to say that Jesus is abolishing eye for an eye.

Desmond Tutu, a South African Anglican cleric, said, In the sentiment of Mahatma Gandhi, when we practice the law of an eye for an eye, we all end up blind.

Red Letter Christian author Shane Claiborne used this passage in favor of abolishing the death penalty.

You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, but I tell you there is another way.

This comes from Christians who claim that they love Jesus. They will even say they love the

Sermon on the Mount. How can someone who loves the Sermon on the Mount get this interpretation so very wrong?

It was this time a year ago that Rachel Held Evans passed away, May 4th of 2019.

Her death was very tragic. She got so sick that she had to be admitted to the hospital and she had an allergic reaction to the medication.

So she was placed into a medically induced coma from which she never woke up. She and I were about the same age.

She had a husband and two young children. But what was the most tragic about her death is that she died not knowing the

Lord. She was considered a respected teacher by many of a liberal theological persuasion.

But she did not truly know Jesus. In fact, she hated the Jesus of the Bible. She and I had similar backgrounds, but while I grew to love the

Word of God, she grew to hate it. Evans was an anti -fundamentalist, and that's really about the best way to contextualize her beliefs.

Her entire stick was to fight against the Christianity she believed had oppressed her in her youth.

She brought up her fundamentalist background all the time as the experience that validated every argument that she raised against Christianity.

If historic Orthodox Christianity was for it, she was against it. By the time she died, she was pro -gay, pro -letting little boys become little girls.

She would refer to God as a woman. She expressed doubt that He even existed at all. And she was against just about everything that the

Bible said was true. Yet Evans repeatedly said that she loved the

Sermon on the Mount. And I never could understand that. How could someone who hated the

Bible as much as she did love Jesus' most famous and hard -hitting sermon?

In one comment, she said, I love it when you go to the Sermon on the Mount to prove a point, and then

Jesus turns around and convicts the hell out of you. I assume pun implied there.

She also said, The minute I go to the Sermon on the Mount to mine it for proof texts,

I'm hit with a familiar wave of conviction. She said,

I think Jesus meant the stuff that He said in the Sermon on the Mount, and I hope to follow those teachings myself.

Finally, she said, I don't think I heard a single sermon on the Sermon on the Mount until I left evangelicalism in my early 30s.

It just wasn't talked about. Now, those last two comments are really the most damning.

She did not follow the teachings of Christ, even though she said that she wanted to.

And there are boatloads of sermons on the Sermon on the Mount. When we started our series,

I held up a book from Martin Lloyd -Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount. It's about that thick. Other theological giants like John Piper and John MacArthur, who were both preachers that Rachel Held Evans loathed, they've preached verse by verse through the

Sermon on the Mount. So has Albert Moeller and Sinclair Ferguson, all men whom I have referenced as I've been going through the

Sermon on the Mount. These guys have taught through Jesus' sermon. There's no excuse for saying, in an internet age,

I never heard a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount. It's not that Evans had never heard a sermon on this subject before.

It's that she just didn't want to. Yet she expressed such love for the

Sermon on the Mount. And many other creatures who hate the Bible will likewise express a sort of reverence for this sermon.

Why is that? I think there are two possible explanations for this, and one or both reasons may apply to a person.

The first reason is tokenism. Now, what do I mean by tokenism?

It's when you take a person, a way of thinking, or some kind of popular idea—in this case, it would be the

Sermon on the Mount— and you express admiration for it to impress people or gain credibility with people, qualify yourself, or give the appearance of even being virtuous.

If you wear a cross around your neck, and that's the most meaningful expression of your faith that you can make, that would be about the most literal example that I can think of of tokenism.

You can probably think of many other examples of this. People do this with Jesus all the time. Even pagans will say they love

Jesus, but they don't. They don't even believe that he's the Son of God.

They just like their own version of Jesus. Gandhi said that he loved Jesus, but he didn't.

He just loved his own version of Jesus, not the Jesus of the Bible. In our own denomination, the

Southern Baptist Convention, the word gospel gets tokenized all the time, and I hate hearing the way the word gospel gets thrown around, even among our own convention, as if we can validate doing anything as long as the word gospel is thrown in there.

Our upcoming convention in June, which of course has been canceled, but it was going to be titled gospel.

That was the name of the convention. Yet there were all kinds of things that were going on leading up to that convention that were very anti -gospel, and I'm not going to go into all of that this morning.

I actually wrote a blog on it, so you can go online to my blog site and read about that if you want to.

So much false teaching makes its way into the church, manipulating and using tokenism.

If it's got a cross on it, then it must be good, right? And people also do this with the

Sermon on the Mount. To make themselves look like a genuine Jesus follower, they will express love for this sermon when they really probably couldn't quote you more than two or three verses from it.

The reality is they're more like Pharisees than they are like disciples of Jesus.

They're twisters of the word. They do not love the word, and they do not do the word.

So that's the first reason why someone may express a love and an appreciation for the

Sermon on the Mount who does not really know this sermon. A second reason that a person who hates the

Bible may express a love for Jesus' sermon is because they read the Sermon on the

Mount apart from the context of the Old Testament. For this person,

Matthew 5 is Genesis 1. They read the

Sermon on the Mount in a vacuum, as if nothing came before it and nothing comes after it.

And so it becomes a sermon full of philosophical sayings that they will use to qualify whatever worldview that they have.

I want you to be aware of this so that you will neither do this nor will you fall for this.

A teacher may say that they love Jesus or they love the Sermon on the Mount, but how do they treat the rest of the words of Jesus?

What do they think of the rest of the Bible? Does God's Word govern their ethics?

Is the Bible their first and foremost authority? Jesus said, you will know them by their fruit, which, by the way, where do we get that from?

That's in the Sermon on the Mount. When a person has ripped the Sermon on the

Mount out of the context of the rest of Scripture, they get to Matthew 5 .38 where Jesus says, you have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you.

And what they think Jesus is doing here is they think that Jesus is saying, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is bad.

They think that Jesus is saying, this is the wrong way of thinking. Or they might think he's saying, this is the old way of thinking, right?

I have a new way of thinking for you. That's what we want as Americans.

We want something new. That's the old way. That's old, fuddy -duddy, dead and gone. I don't want to do that anymore.

I want something new. So we'll take that same sort of hermeneutical approach to the way that we want all of our information and philosophy, and we will apply that to the text of Scripture, as though Jesus came to abolish the old and bring in the new.

But what did Jesus say back in verse 17? He said, do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.

When a person hears Jesus saying, an eye for an eye is vengeful and wrong, that's the way that they hear

Jesus saying that, then what a person is doing is they're abolishing the law and the prophets. Let the reader understand.

As Votie Bauckham has said, the God on the left side of the book is the same

God as the God on the right side of the book. At the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah, Jesus was not absent, nor was

He in disagreement. The same goes for the giving of the law at Mount Sinai.

In fact, when the Israelites were there at the base of Mount Sinai and they heard God giving them the commandments, the voice that they heard was specifically the

Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was speaking to them the law of God.

Jesus is not going to contradict Himself. In Exodus 21, just one chapter after the

Lord gave the Ten Commandments to Israel, we read the following in verses 22 -25. When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman's husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine.

But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, and stripe for stripe.

Is that not fascinating? That the very first time that we read eye for an eye mentioned in the law, it's in regards to the life of an unborn child.

If a conflict between men results in a woman being struck, even if it was just an accident, it doesn't even appear as if she was involved in the altercation.

She's struck and her children come out, but there is no harm. There's still going to be a fine.

There's going to be a penalty. There will be a consequence upon those who caused this serious incident.

But if her child comes out and dies, then capital punishment is to be exercised on the ones who caused this to happen, and they shall be put to death.

The Bible here places the life of an unborn child as equal to the value of an older man.

Let's say the premature birth causes the child to have broken legs and the child would be crippled for the rest of his or her life.

Then you shall take the legs of the offender and you shall cause him to be crippled who had caused this premature birth.

If anyone ever says to you, abortion is not mentioned in the Bible, take them to Exodus 20 .13.

You shall not murder. Then turn the page over to Exodus 21 .22 -25 where it says that if an unborn child dies, if someone caused the unborn child's death, then they shall be put to death.

Isn't it fascinating what you discover when you read the law of God?

The law that we want to ignore, we don't want to say is there. We want to believe that Jesus came to bring us a new way of thinking so we don't have to think about the law anymore.

But what we find here in the law of God is not something bad. We find something actually very good.

This is an expression of value. God places just as much value on an unborn child as He places on a full -grown man.

Now you might say, well then isn't the death penalty a contradiction here? You're taking another person's life.

Then someone has to take your life and then someone has to take the life of your executioner.

It's a never -ending cycle. Nonsense. We're talking here about justice.

If a person is killed unjustly, what is their life worth?

God says justice is that the person who killed unjustly must pay the price with their life.

A life for a life. Justice has been served. What you will never find in the law of God, you might find this interesting as well, you will never find in God's law a sentence of imprisonment.

That's not justice. When a man murders another man and receives a life sentence, a life sentence in prison, society is saying the life that was lost is not worth as much as the criminal's life.

A guilty criminal is worth more than an innocent victim. That's unjust.

Proverbs 18 .5 says, it is not good to be partial to the wicked or to deprive the righteous of justice.

I've spoken in favor of the death penalty before and I've had someone tell me, hey, this guy is locked away.

He can't hurt anyone else. Oh yes he can.

You haven't heard stories or read stories of prison guards who've been killed in prison? I've personally spoken face to face with a man in prison, nothing but a plate of glass between us, who had received a second life sentence because he killed another man in prison.

It did not matter to him. He was already in prison for life.

Therefore, there could be no further penalty if he killed again. He would still be in the exact same place with absolutely zero consequences.

What difference does a second life sentence make? A couple of weeks ago, there was a story about a man in Florida named

Joseph Edward Williams. He was released from jail on March 19th as a preventative measure against the spread of coronavirus.

You've heard about this, right? States that are releasing prisoners as a preventative measure so that COVID -19 will not spread.

Instead, if somebody gets caught down at the beach, they get arrested and they get thrown in jail. Do you know what

Williams was in jail for? Murder. Guess what he did when he got out?

He went and murdered. He was arrested again on April 13th having killed a man in Tampa.

If our culture had placed more value on life than it does, then

Williams would have received a death sentence. That sentence would have been carried out swiftly and the man he killed in Tampa would still be alive.

That's if our society valued life more than they do.

We have this wrong way of thinking that the death penalty is a devaluing of life.

No, it is a value of life. You desire to protect life and uphold it.

In Leviticus 24, 17, we read, whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death.

Yes, my friends, capital punishment is biblical. A life for a life.

Verse 18 says, whoever takes an animal's life shall make it good. Life for life.

So if someone killed his neighbor's mule, he had to pay his neighbor to buy another mule.

The life of an animal is not equal to the life of a man, but it's still worth something.

Verses 19 through 20 say, if anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done, it shall be done to him.

Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him.

Again, we're talking about civil or civic laws here, and this is the law of just measures. One of the functions of the law was so that the offender would not be excessively punished for an offense.

This law protects offenders as much as it also protects the righteous. Say a man gets in a fight with his neighbor and he punches him in the eye, and the punch causes his neighbor to lose his eye.

The man is not to lose his life over that punch, but he should receive a just punishment.

An equal and just punishment would be for him to also lose his eye. He costs someone else their eye, he must lose his eye.

But just so you do not miss the point, the Lord repeats Himself in verse 21, whoever kills an animal shall make it good, and whoever kills a person shall be put to death.

Now you might say, well, that just applied to Israel. Look at verse 22. You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the

Lord your God. So it wasn't just for Israel. It didn't matter whether they were an

Israelite or a Gentile. The justice of God applies to all people because, as it says in Romans 3 .29,

God is the God of Gentiles also. Now you might say to yourself, why are you even telling us all of this?

Because we just read in Matthew 5 .39, Jesus said, do not resist the one who is evil, but if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Well, as I said to you in the beginning, Jesus is not saying here to overthrow the law and that there should never be any civil justice done for any crimes.

Because of such common wrong teaching on Matthew 5 .38, I want you to understand this point.

That's why I bring that up to you. It would be unjust for us to overthrow what

God has said is lawful and just. But here's what

Jesus is saying to you. He's not addressing civil magistrates.

He's addressing you in telling you, don't make a federal case out of everything with regards to personal offenses.

Be merciful. If someone smacked you, do you have just cause to smack them back?

Sure you do. Should you? No. You should be merciful.

And you, as the merciful one, will prevent this situation from escalating even further than it's already escalated.

Furthermore, you have that opportunity there in that moment to serve as an example of Christ.

As Jesus said in Matthew 5 .7, blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

And in Luke 6 .36, be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

Consider the example that Christ has set for us and be imitators of Jesus. Here's what we read in 1

Peter 2, verses 19 -25. For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly.

Again, this is a gracious thing. For what credit is it if when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure?

But when you do good and suffer for it, if you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.

For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you might follow in His steps.

Jesus committed no sin. Neither was deceit found in His mouth.

When He was reviled, He did not revile in return. When He suffered,

He did not threaten, but He continued entrusting Himself to Him who judges justly.

He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.

By His wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but you have now returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls.

And of course, this word from the apostle Peter is addressing Christians in particular.

People are going to treat you unjustly. They will revile you.

They will slander you. They will speak all kinds of malicious falsities about you.

They will make fun of you. They will put you down. They will make examples of you.

They will be unfair to you. They will walk all over you. And they will even take advantage of you because you're merciful and they're not.

They will do this just because you love the righteousness of God.

How are you to respond? As Jesus did here according to the apostle

Peter in 1 Peter 2, you must entrust yourself to Him who judges justly.

Consider what Jesus has already said in the Sermon on the Mount thus far. Looking back at verses 10 and 11,

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely.

On my account, rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.

For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. Here Jesus says more than just turn the other cheek.

Rather, He says, go the extra mile. This is where that expression comes from.

He says, do not resist the one who is evil, but if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

If anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If he's going to take your undergarment, you just give him the one that's right on top of it.

If anyone forces you to go one mile, you go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

I know of a man, a Christian author, who was betrayed by some very close friends, a couple who had fallen into serious sin, and that sin led to financial difficulty.

But rather than repent of their sin and ask for their church's help, they came to this author and demanded that he pay up on a sizable debt that they believed he owed to them.

They showed him the paperwork, a financial oversight that was several years old, and he asked for some time to investigate the matter.

They gave him one week. He did his due diligence and took up the discrepancy with his bank.

It just so happened that he banked at the same bank as this couple banked, and so the clerk was able to look at both accounts.

He couldn't see both accounts, but the clerk could look at them, and she assured the author that when he paid the money the first time, it was paid to this couple.

And he did not owe them the money. It cleared when he paid it at first.

So he went home and prayed about the matter with his wife, and he was reminded that Jesus said, let every charge be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

That's Matthew 18 -16. So a couple of days later he returned to the bank, and he spoke with a different financial examiner.

This clerk reviewed the matter with fresh eyes and got the same result.

She also assured the author he did not owe this couple the money. If they had any further questions, they could come into the bank.

And the author shared that with the couple, and he even offered to go to the bank with them. But they remained indignant.

They demanded that he pay up. In frustration, the author replied that he had investigated the matter thoroughly and he was not going to pay what they demanded that he pay.

Later that evening, his conscience began to weigh on him. He was reading his

Bible, and he was reminded of another word from Jesus. And this one in Matthew 5, verses 40 -41.

If anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.

And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.

In 1 Corinthians 6, 1 -8, the Apostle Paul rebuked the

Corinthian Christians for taking one another to court. He said, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you.

Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud even your own brothers.

And Paul said, this is already a shame for you. Would this couple try to sue the

Christian author? He didn't know. Already he had been astonished how quickly they'd been turned by their sin.

But he wondered if going ahead and paying them the money would defuse any further escalation.

It was a lot of money. But was it worth the legal battle that might happen if he did not pay?

Would they be dragging mutual friends into this? Forcing people to choose sides, and then a

Christian body would be divided over this? And as an author, somebody who had a bit of a public platform, what was the possibility that this would become a bigger deal over just a few dollars?

And the gospel would be mocked by unbelievers observing the behavior of these

Christians. It didn't matter to them who was right and who was wrong. How silly it is that these

Christians would treat each other this way. And then the gospel would be reviled. So the author and his wife made a decision.

They were going to pay the money. The author contacted the couple and personally apologized.

He expressed his embarrassment for the mistake. He wrote the check himself, and his wife was the one who delivered it.

When he was asked later by a member of his church why he did it, even after two witnesses at the bank told him that he did not owe the money, he said,

I'd never been faced with such a situation before, but here I had a real opportunity to live out the words of Jesus.

If anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.

And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. So I paid the money to the glory of God.

My only regret is that I did not do it sooner, and I did not pay them more.

My brothers and sisters in the Lord, do you understand what you deserve for your sin?

And do you understand what you've been given instead?

You have betrayed God, and you have gone after your sin, and that sin begat sin, and that begat more sin.

What you deserve for this treason against God is death, and more than death, but eternal punishment at the hand of God, who is eternally just.

But what you received by faith in our Lord Jesus Christ is life, and more than life, but eternal life, and more than eternal life, but life with Him as a fellow heir of His eternal kingdom.

Romans 6 .23 says, The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our

Lord. We know God is merciful when we know

God is just. If you do not know the God of justice, then my friends, you do not know the

God of mercy. Isaiah 30 verse 18 says, Therefore the

Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore He exalts

Himself to show mercy to you, for the Lord is a God of justice.

Blessed are those who wait for Him. If you are listening to this sermon today, or maybe you're reading it online, and you don't know

Jesus, then I admonish you to repent of your sin and follow Him. God is just.

He will punish the wicked. And Romans chapter 3 is clear. You are wicked, and you will perish under the judgment of God.

But Jesus paid for the sins of His people with His death on the cross. He rose again from the grave that all who believe in Him will not perish, but will be saved unto everlasting life.

Romans 3 25 through 26 says, That God put forward His Son as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith.

This was to show God's righteousness, because in His divine forbearance

He had passed over former sins. It was to show His righteousness at the present time, so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

My friends, you know the mercy of God that has been shown to you through His Son Jesus Christ.

So my exhortation to you this morning would be, go and do likewise.

If you have been shown mercy, then show mercy to others.

And as Jesus had said to hear describing His followers in the Beatitudes at the beginning of the

Sermon on the Mount, Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Let us come before the Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank You for this word.

And I pray that this has been convicting to us. That we recognize and we understand those ways in which

God has shown us mercy. And we see among the relationships that we have and the people that we encounter, all the different ways in which we may show mercy to one another.

And let the mercy that we show not just be an empty gesture, but may it be in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ that we have heard, that by belief in the gospel, it has saved us.

And we might even see an opportunity to show mercy to another as an open door to share the gospel with them.

God has shown me mercy. Let me introduce you to the

God who is merciful. Let me lead you to a relationship with His Son, Jesus Christ.

By faith in Him, we are forgiven our sins. We have everlasting life with God.

We are reminded in Colossians 3 to forgive one another as God has forgiven us.

So teach us to be merciful. Even within our minds, within our thinking, we don't hold grudges.

We don't think bitterly about one another. We're merciful.

Another person may totally deserve the retaliation that we could show them or the bitterness that we have in our hearts toward them.

And no one would ever blame us for reacting to that person that way. But that's not the way we're supposed to be.

Let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts. May the mercy of God be demonstrated in our actions.

As we have received mercy, let us show mercy and walk in the way of Christ, who did not revile when

He was reviled, but He entrusted Himself to him who judges justly. We ask these things in the name of Christ, in submission to His Word, as lovers of His Word who desire to keep it.

And all God's people said, Amen. Please stand together as we sing our closing hymn, which is?

154, hymn number 154. Jesus knows our every weakness.

Take it to the Lord. Are we weak and heavy laden?

Come, Savior, still our refuge.

Take it to the Lord in prayer. Do thy friends despise forsaking?

Take it to the Lord in His arms.

He'll take and shield thee. Thou wilt find us all this day.

Thank you for listening to our weekly sermon presented by First Southern Baptist Church of Junction City, Kansas.

For more information about our church, visit fsbcjc .org.

On behalf of our church family, my name is Becky, inviting you to join us again this week, Growing Together in Christ, when we understand the text.