-Transcript-
00:27 Amen, Welcome to the program. Welcome to the cafe. Today we are looking at God’s mercy. Amen. Amen. We’re looking in the Bible at God’s mercy.
00:37 You know, recently I just finished a series on God’s sovereignty and His power, and that is one trait of a living God, of the living God, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. He is all-powerful. He created all things.
00:53 Without Him, nothing was created. He’s in control of all things. You say, oh, He’s in control of people acting bad.
01:03 Well, He’s given people free will, but He’s in control of the world. I mean, certainly if He wants something to stop, He’ll have it stop. I’ll put it that way.
01:11 He’s in full control. He’s sovereign. And here today, we’re looking at His mercy.
01:18 That’s another incredible trait of God. God’s very merciful. Hebrews 4:16, “let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need”.
01:32 See, we’re told that we can go boldly to the throne of grace. Whose throne is that? That’s the Lord’s throne. We can enter the throne room because Jesus Christ paid our sin debt on the cross at Calvary.
01:44 And when we believe on Jesus Christ, we’re no longer under condemnation. We are no longer under any kind of enemy watch with God. We’re no longer an enemy of God.
01:59 Amen. We are now a friend to God. We now can go to Him.
02:04 In the Old Testament, how did they go to God? They had to go through the temple, and they had to go through the priests, and they had to go once a year. They go into the holy of holies, and they had to wear a certain outfit, and they had to do a certain thing, or else they could be struck dead. And there was all kinds of layers to get to God, Amen, who resided in this tabernacle, this temple.
02:23 Well, now in the New Testament age, in the age of grace, we simply accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. We get the Holy Spirit living within us. And then we can go to God anytime.
02:32 In fact, we can pray to God anytime through the Holy Spirit, through the Holy Spirit. The Bible tells us the Holy Spirit murmurs things that we can’t even describe to God when we pray, Amen. So we go to God through the Holy Spirit, through Jesus Christ, the mediator, to God, the Father.
02:49 That’s how we pray, amen. And the Bible tells us to pray without ceasing. We are to pray all the time, because we can.
02:56 And what do we get? We obtain that mercy from God, and that’s His grace to help us in our time of need. And we see God’s mercy throughout the Bible. It’s so rich with examples.
03:08 Surely there’s hundreds, if not thousands of examples of God’s mercy in the Bible. I’m just going to give you three here for time’s sake, Amen. God’s, God delivers the Israelites, Exodus 13:18, but God led the people about through the way of the wilderness of the Red Sea, and the children of Israel went up, harnessed out of the land of Egypt.
03:29 Oh, I love that word harnessed. What is a harness? That’s a protective device that is something that is encapsulating you and keeping you safe and guiding you. I think of a harness on like a zip line.
03:41 You’re on that line only by virtue of that harness are you protected from the elements of falling down and potentially dying. And what does God do? He takes the Red Sea, and He picks it up. Have you ever tried to pick up some water, amen? Hey, one, what is it, 16 ounces of liquid is a pound, Amen? Again, you take a five-gallon bucket, fill it up with water at the beach, and try to pick that up with one hand.
04:04 It’s pretty hard, amen. What did God do? He picked up all the water like it was nothing. He split that Red Sea in two like a zipper.
04:11 He just unzipped that zipper. He split that Red Sea in two, and the Israelites walked across the Red Sea on dry land. That’s God’s mercy.
04:19 We see God’s mercy on His people. He delivers them out of bondage from the Egyptians through His mercy, and it’s an example, of course, of how we’re delivered out of the bondage of sin when we believe on Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. So it’s one example of God’s mercy.
04:37 He delivers the Israelites. Another example, He saves Paul. Acts 9, 3-6, as he journeyed, this is Paul, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven.
04:52 And he fell to the earth, and he heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest. It is hard for thee to kick against the bricks. And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what will thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.
05:16 And so we see here in an act of mercy, God saves Paul. Who is Paul? Well, at the time he was Saul, Amen, and he was persecuting Christians. He was profiting off of the persecution of Christians.
05:27 He was a Pharisee of the Pharisee, Amen. He was the old guard, and he was a zealous person in the old guard. And God takes that individual who literally was an enemy to God, who was hurting those that loved the Lord, Amen.
05:47 And God says, I’m gonna save that person, I’m gonna change that person’s life, and I’m gonna poetically and beautifully make them the apostle to the Gentiles, so that when the Gentiles meet this apostle, whether it be in person or for us through his holy word in the Bible, Paul’s epistles or Paul’s letters, they will be saved knowing this one has been delivered from the law unto grace. So all our great doctrine that we get from the Bible from Paul is God’s mercy that He saved Saul, who would become Paul in such a miraculous way. Only God could do it, and takes him in the wilderness and teaches him directly.
06:27 Paul says in the Bible he didn’t receive his doctrine from man, but from God Himself, from Jesus Christ. Third example of God’s mercy in the Bible is Jesus Christ. This is the greatest example of God’s mercy in the Bible, to atone for our sins.
06:41 Genesis 22:13, here’s a picture of Jesus. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.
06:57 And so Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac. The father is about to sacrifice his beloved son, the son he’d waited nearly, what, 90 plus years, almost 100 years to have. He is going to sacrifice that son on an altar because God called him to do it.
07:14 But at the last minute, God says, don’t do it, Abraham. What I will do is I’ll provide a ram. What is a ram? It’s a boy sheep.
07:22 It’s the lamb, Amen? So it’s a picture literally of Jesus Christ. And you see that Jesus Christ is our propitiation, is our payment for our sins, is our atonement, is our substitution, so that we wouldn’t have to do something like that. God says, you won’t be able to do what I want you to do.
07:39 Remember the pagan gods were the ones, Molech and all were the ones that were asking those people in the Old Testament to sacrifice their kids unto them. And God’s saying, no, no, no, you’re not going to have to sacrifice your kids. I’m going to give my only beloved, my Jesus Christ, God in the flesh.
07:55 He will come. He will come and atone for the world’s sins. He will do it on the cross at Calvary.
08:00 And all we have to do, what do we have to do? Simply have faith. We simply need to believe. That’s it.
08:07 Just simply have faith. Amen. That’s all you have to do is believe.
08:09 All we do is believe. So I started thinking, okay, I went through these somewhat quickly. I probably should have spent a little more time on them, but hey, we only got 15 minutes.
08:19 I’m trying to buy up the time, redeem the time if you would. And I gave you these three Bible examples. And again, each example could be its own sermon, could be its own series of sermons.
08:27 Amen. Could be, could be preached on for years if we’re honest. But for time’s sake, I gave you those three examples.
08:35 And now let me give you three examples of God’s mercy in my life. And what I want to do is try to take this from a Bible account to a personal account, and then finally challenge you to think about God’s mercy in your life. Amen.
08:48 All this in just under five minutes or whatever it is. I’m doing my best here today, folks. A safe place to call home.
08:56 That is God’s mercy in my life. How I thought, the first thing I thought of when I started thinking on God’s mercy in my life, which by the way is a great exercise. Think about God’s mercy in your life.
09:07 Think of the themes here, deliverance, peace, and love. We see these themes over and over again in the biblical examples I gave. And I thought of my home.
09:15 You know, I’ve got a nice home. We built a house some years ago when we started. We had a couple of kids.
09:21 Amen. We already had one and we had a couple more and when the room was getting tight and we were in an older house, I had real bad allergies and this was before COVID and everything was crazy. And we, you know, we were able to sell our home, put our pennies together and kind of by the skin of our teeth, build a house.
09:37 We went for something that had plenty of space, Amen, on some land here and we’ve been blessed with that. Amen. It’s certainly not the fanciest house.
09:46 I don’t know that we’ll be here forever, Amen, but we’re here right now and God is really blessed. And the physical house is nice, but what I mean by a safe place to call home is not so much, oh robbers don’t come here or something, but there’s peace in this house. And I grew up in a very, very chaotic environment, a very disruptive environment, a very turbulent environment.
10:09 My mom was very ill, mentally ill. My dad was never around. My grandma was very old in age.
10:16 We lived with my grandma. Eventually I had to live with foster parents. I went through a lot of hard times and I was the prototypical kid that was going through hard times.
10:27 If you ask a teacher about young people that act up in class, oftentimes they’ll say it’s a mirror of what’s going on at home. Well, I must have been a massive mirror of what’s going on at home because I was as bad as they get. Amen.
10:39 I was the chiefest of sinners. As Paul would say, I got into all kinds of any kind of problem you could think of. I pretty much got into it at a very young age because things were so bad at home.
10:53 They’re so bad at home. I would try to go to school at five in the morning. I’d walk to school five or six in the morning just to get out of my house.
10:57 Back then, this is before Columbine even, this is in the 90s, back then the door was just open. I’d go in there with the janitors and just sit down and do my homework or just be away from the chaos at home and the problems at home. Growing up in a broken home, I see God’s mercy in the home I have now where there is peace here.
11:14 Where nine, 10 o’clock, this house is quiet and we can expect it to remain quiet. That mom and dad are home, that we’re in our right minds, that we aren’t freaking out about things or the police aren’t coming or we don’t know, all those things. There’s peace here.
11:32 And I realized how precious that is. And I realized that for those first about 20 some odd years, there was no peace. And I know the difference here between those years and these years is Jesus Christ, is God himself.
11:47 He gets the glory. He delivered the peace here. And that is his mercy in my life.
11:53 Delivered from turmoil and despair. It’s not perfect. We have our problems.
11:59 I have my problems daily. Amen. Bible says the evil, the evil of the day is sufficient thereof.
12:03 Okay. I got it every day. Amen.
12:05 But all in all, very peaceful, very blessed for that. Secondly, so not only God’s mercy in a safe place to call home here, but God’s mercy in a safe place to call home there. So I’ve been delivered from the fear of death and the terror of hell.
12:20 I have peace. I know that, hey, if I go to bed, even my kids being young and all, I have peace that I know where I’m going and they know where I’m going and then I’ll be with the Lord in heaven forever. And then it’ll be greater there than it is here.
12:31 Amen. In all kinds of ways. And so I have peace there.
12:34 And finally, God’s mercy in my life is an opportunity to serve in the ministry. I have purpose in my life. And I could talk about this idea of being, having my name written, my name written down in Lamb’s book of life, being eternally grateful to the Lord for what He did to give me eternity.
12:49 Amen. And I could talk about the idea of him giving me the opportunity to serve in the ministry on and on forever because it gives me a purpose. I had no purpose before.
12:57 I have a true purpose. Most people don’t have that purpose. My purpose is to serve the Lord and to win souls and to edify the saints.
13:04 I know my purpose. I could give it to you in one sentence. That is something that’s precious.
13:09 And that’s God’s mercy. It’s his mercy. He has provided these things out of His grace.
13:13 Nothing that I could merit from it. No, like, oh, I did something good. No, nothing.
13:20 All I did was believe. So for you, where do you see God’s mercy in your life? Think of these themes, deliverance and peace and love. Where do you see God’s mercy in your life? What hinders you from seeing God’s mercy in your life? What hinders you from seeing it? And what will you do once you identify those mercies in your life? Remember the Israelites, all they had to do was believe and they didn’t want to believe.
13:41 All you have to do is have faith. Let God’s mercies in your life, let the testimonies of your life, build your faith up and thank Him and thank Him and thank Him and praise Him and live for Him, right? Live for Him because He’s been so good to you and He has blessed you. Even if things are all wrong, it’s good.
14:02 Something’s going to work out for the right. God has a plan. Amen.
14:05 And there’s a testimony in the making, but it all starts with identifying God’s mercies in your life. Identify them today, think on them and please go to the Lord and Savior and give Him thanks and praise. He is due all honor and praise for the great mercy, none more so than Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior and what He did on the cross.
14:25 Thank you so much for listening. Praise God today. Take care.God bless and Amen.