How Can Jesus Give Me Soul Rest? – Part 2 – 3/23/25

Good morning, friends. The Bible tells us in every circumstance to give thanks. My thanker is a little weak this week for pollen. Having a hard time being thankful for pollen, and you, by the end of this, will probably have a hard being thankful for pollen as you listen to me sniff, snort, and sneeze for the next 30 or so minutes. But we’ll make it through.

The courtroom is full. The defendant stands behind the table, hands bound by cuffs. There’s no question of guilt. A sentence is coming. The only question is, what will the judge be like? The judge’s chamber door opens, and out he walks, black robes billowing behind him. You’ve never seen such a stern face. Granite rock would run away from this face.

Any hope of mercy the defendant possessed disappeared at the sight of the judge’s eyes. There was no mercy there. “Guilty” was pronounced without preamble, without conversation, with no discussion, just the crack of a gavel and the relishing of saying the word “guilty.”

Yes, there was guilt. Yes, there was debt. But before seeing the judge, there was at least a hope of mercy.

Authority without mercy is hopeless.

The courtroom is full. The defendant stands behind the table, hands bound by cuffs. There’s not a question of guilt. A sentence is coming.

The judge’s chamber door opens and out he walks, black robes billowing behind him. You’ve never seen such a carefree face. The face didn’t match the gravity of the situation. There was guilt here. There was debt here. Why was he smiling?

“Not guilty” was pronounced without preamble, no discussion, no consideration of the great loss of the crime, or the victim, or the victim’s family. With a flippant “not guilty,” the judge extended…mercy?

Mercy without authority is injustice.

In Matthew 11, Jesus has this moment where he laments and denounces cities where he spoke that ignored his miracles and message. He compares Jewish cities to some of the worst Gentile cities in history. Jesus is saying to the Jewish people, if what happened in front of you happened in places like Tyre and Sidon, they would have recognized my authority and received my mercy.

Jesus then makes this crazy claim. He tells them, I am the only way you can know God. I am the singular source for access to your covenant God, Yahweh. And if you come to me, if you follow me, I will give you soul rest. I’ll give you rest all the way down into who you really are. Matthew then tells a couple of stories in chapter 12 to illustrate how Jesus can fulfill that crazy claim.

Last week we discovered that Jesus claims divine authority. How can he give you soul rest? Because he has divine authority. Jesus claims to be better than the temple. He claims to be the Son of Man. And he calls himself the Lord of the Sabbath.

How can Jesus give us soul rest? Because he is divine and has the authority to say so. But Jesus’s authority is not stern-faced and rock hard. His authority is expressed in mercy.

Our three-week theme in Matthew 12 is this: Jesus, through divine authority, expresses divine mercy with humility to the needy.

Jesus through divine authority expresses divine mercy with humility to the needy.

Now last week, and even already today, I’ve talked a lot about mercy. And if you’ve been in church for a while, you know the word mercy, but you might not be able to say what it actually means, and that was my case.

I looked it up in a Bible dictionary and discovered mercy is “showing mercy or being merciful.” Distinctly unhelpful. So I did a little digging. Mercy is then described as a feeling. Mercy is pity or compassion for someone else’s difficulty.

And don’t get lost on that word pity. Pity isn’t always bad. Pity is a sense of understanding, of having a broken heart for someone else’s pain. So that’s a little bit more helpful. Mercy is compassion and kindness. But I still think it’s missing something. So here’s my attempt to define mercy.

Mercy is feelings with feet.

Mercy feels and then mercy moves. Mercy is compassion demonstrated through action. Not only do I feel for the person in difficulty, I move toward them in their difficulty. So let’s see how Jesus does this in Matthew 12.

First thing that happens, Jesus moves the scene.

“He went from there and entered their synagogue.”

Jesus entered their synagogue. He’s in the Pharisees’ place of power. He’s on their home turf. He is in their little kingdom under their little bit of authority.

And right away, as this story begins, we get a quick illustration of what authority without mercy looks like because Matthew mentions an important attendee.

“And a man was there with a withered hand.”

Now, he was probably there for the Torah reading on Sabbath. We don’t know anything else about this man except his infirmity. The man’s hand, and probably at least a portion of his arm, was paralyzed. That word “withered” means dried up. So imagine an arm where the muscle, having not been used, shrinks, and then the skin shrinks over that muscle and it looks dried up. The man had a withered arm.

Now I think it’s important that Matthew tells us about him before he starts telling us what the Pharisees say. Matthew wants us to know this guy was here the whole time.

So remember back out in the wheat field, Jesus had already given the Pharisees a mercy lesson. The Pharisees apparently are mercy-ignorant. Jesus said to them,

“If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.”

Jesus is paraphrasing right there from the book of Micah in the Old Testament, a prophet. Micah is verbally processing how do I come before God? How do I worship before God? So let’s listen to Micah talk about mercy real fast. Micah says this:

“With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? [How do I worship?] Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

Did you see the increase there? From one lamb to 10,000 lambs, to the unthinkable, giving your own offspring in worship? Then Micah steps in and says,

“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you”

You already know the answer to this question. How do we come before the Lord? O man, what is good? What does the Lord require of you?

“but to do justice, [to do mercy] and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

According to Micah, and now Jesus, the Pharisees should have known from the Law itself that they were supposed to express mercy. God isn’t a God who keeps his expectations to himself. He has consistently told his people what it looks like to follow him. Show mercy. This is not a new command. This is old news. Show mercy, love well, walk humbly with your God.

Jesus informs the Pharisees, if you understood Micah, that you’ve read so many times, if you understood the law that you’ve read so many times, you would understand mercy, because God desires mercy. But the Pharisees once again miss it. They missed it out in the wheat field and they missed it again in the synagogue.

The Pharisees miss mercy, and they challenge Jesus instead.

“And a man was there with a withered hand. And they [the Pharisees] asked [Jesus], ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?’”

The Pharisees challenged Jesus to yet another Sabbath debate. What are we allowed to do on this day? And they challenged Jesus at the expense of the man with a withered hand.

Think about it, this is a public gathering. The synagogue is the religious and social center for the Jewish people. The guy is sitting right here. He’s waiting to hear the Torah, and one of the Pharisees stands there on behalf of them all and looks at Jesus and says, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?”

When did they decide to do this? Did they think about it on the way from the wheat field into the synagogue? How can we trap him again? How can we get him? Oh, there’s that one guy in our church who has that problem with his arm. Let’s ask Jesus if he would heal him.

It’s like purposely talking about a beautiful sunset in front of someone who’s blind to remind them of their blindness. There’s cruelty in the question itself. There’s no mercy, there’s no compassion. The man is a pawn in a game of chess that the Pharisees want to play with Jesus about how to keep the Sabbath.

What’s worse is more than likely, this man has already experienced another type of judgment. Because in the Jewish world, there was a belief that disability was judgment for wrong. We see this in John 9:2.

“And [Jesus’s] disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’”

Your condition was connected to parental or personal sin. In John, Jesus goes on to correct that wrong belief very strongly, but the man with the withered hand more than likely experienced that as well. I’m in this condition because of what I’ve done or what my parents have done.

Could you imagine being in a gathering where the leader of a church calls out someone’s disability to provoke a theological debate? That’s where we’re at. That is why Jesus’s response is so important. The Pharisees don’t have the beginnings of mercy. They don’t have the feeling. The Pharisee’s mercy is more withered than the man’s arm. You can’t express mercy you don’t actually feel.

The Pharisees miss mercy and they challenge Jesus again.

“Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? —so that they might accuse him.”

Same argument, new topic. Out in the fields, Sabbath, are they allowed to pluck the grain? Can they harvest? Can they reap it and eat it? Here it’s about healing. This question is sketchy.

I had a friend years ago use the phrase “an intellectually dishonest question.” It’s a question that you ask not to gain information. It’s a question you ask so that you can give your prepared answer or so that you can judge what somebody else’s says. That’s what the Pharisees are doing. It’s an intellectually dishonest question. They’re not really wanting to learn and have dialog. They’re going to try to accuse him. There’s a hook on the inside of their question.

The question is loaded too, because the Pharisees, throughout time, developed a lot of rules as to what it looked like to keep the Sabbath. They’re actually collected into a book called “The Mishnah.” There were 39 categories of prohibited work, all of which had explanations for specific moments. Here’s an English translation of one section of “The Mishnah” about healing.

Mishnah 14:3, “Our Mishnah discusses taking medicine or performing acts of healing on Shabbat [or Sabbath]. If there is any danger to a person’s life, even a potential danger, all medicines and acts of healing are permitted. Indeed they are mandated. However, the sages [the earlier writers of this code] forbade the use of medicines which are for aches, pains, etc. that are not life-threatening. According to most commentators the reason for this prohibition is that most drugs were made by grinding roots or other parts of plants. Grinding roots is prohibited as a derivative of grinding wheat.”

They had rules so specific as to whether or not you could take a mud bath to feel better for an ache. So when they ask the question, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” they have a whole lot more behind that question, a whole code of how you’re supposed to act on this day.

And they already knew from their view they had Jesus trapped because this man’s life was not threatened. He was a man. He was fine in the sense that his life wasn’t threatened in this immediate moment, so you couldn’t do anything.

And second, they had Jesus trapped because they knew Jesus’s reputation. Does Jesus like to heal people? Yep, it’s kind of one of his things. And they knew they had him. They were just waiting for him to say yes, so they could accuse him.

And that word accuse, it is a little heavier than it reads. They were gathering evidence. They were getting ready for a formal indictment. They had other people in mind that they were going to tell about what Jesus did.

Jesus exposes the Pharisees missing mercy.

“Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out?”

Which one if you on Sabbath, if your animal falls into a pit, won’t work? In the Mishnah, there were instructions about this. There were some who believed you could kind of passively throw sticks in to help the animal get out on its own and that didn’t count. Some believed you could actually get down and get the animal and help it. After all, this animal has value. It’s food and/or wealth.

So the Pharisees weren’t completely merciless on Sabbath. They just reserved their mercy for livestock and ignored the man who was sitting there with the withered arm.

Unlike the Pharisees, completely polar to the Pharisees, doing a 180, Jesus possesses and expresses divine mercy. Jesus has feelings with feet. Jesus has mercy that is expressed in action. And Jesus is the master of showing mercy. Does Jesus have the feeling? Let’s see in the text. Jesus says next,

“Of how much more value is a man than sheep?”

I think Jesus is talking to more than one person right there. I think he is talking the Pharisees, but he’s talking to the man with the withered arm. How must that guy have felt? Jesus exposes their inconsistency, the way they’re going to live out their rules, and at the same time declares this man’s value and dignity.

Certainly this guy felt seen, and loved, and valued, and if he had only ever been led by those Pharisees, more than likely this was the first time ever that someone declared his dignity in a social religious gathering. He was of value prior to being healed.

I love the feeling of when people step up on behalf of someone else. In a way, there’s a part of me that’s a little addicted to it. I used to watch sections of this TV program called, “What Would You Do?” and they would set up these fake scenarios with cameras where people are treating other people poorly to see if anybody would help. I loved those.

But my favorite story of someone stepping up is actually a story about my 18-year-old daughter. And this story happened a long time ago. Petra was in third grade. She knows I’m telling this story, by the way, and how I tell it. She was over there in first service. One thing you have to know about Petra for this story to make any sense is Petra isn’t tall. Petra is short for her age and has always been short for age.

So in third grade, Petra always has had a heart for people. That heart. And what she did is she became a walker in third grade where she would walk kids with special needs from drop-off to their classroom. And she got to know all of these kids and would walk them and help them.

And so one day she came home from school and said, “Dad, something really bad happened today at recess.” And I was like, “What is it, kiddo?” And she said, “A fifth grade boy” — Petra  vs. fifth grade boy — “a fifth grade boy was making fun of one of the kids that I walk in.” And I said, “What did you do?” She goes, “I got so angry,” she said, so I walked right up to that boy, and I said, “You stop it.” And I was like, “Yes! You go kiddo.” I was, like, well, what did he do? And she said, “Well he stopped it.” A lot of power in that kid-tiny but mighty.

Mercy is feelings with feet.

That’s not right. I hurt for that person. Move. Mercy recognizes value. Do you know Jesus loves this theme of human value and dignity? He literally loves it. Matthew 10:29-31,

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered.”

So sparrows – cheap, hair of your head – God knows it.

“Fear not, therefore; you are of”

What? Give it to me again.

“You are of more value than many sparrows.”

Matthew 6:26, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, [they don’t work for anything] and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of [what?] more value than they?

Matthew 6:28-30, “And why are you anxious about clothing [people]? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?”

Sheep, sparrows, birds, lilies, are you not of more value? Can there be anything greater than sitting in front of Jesus Christ and having him declare your value and dignity?

After expressing his value for the man, Jesus directly answers the Pharisees’ questions. Remember, they were trying to hook him. “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” What are your thoughts on that, Rabbi Jesus? What should we do? Jesus responds,

“So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”

That is a radical response for a couple of reasons. One, Jesus is taking up his mantle as Lord of the Sabbath and declaring what it’s like to practice Sabbath. I will tell you what Sabbath means. It’s lawful to do good on the Sabbath. That is wide open for interpretation in the best way possible.

Think about it. The Pharisees had a code that was primarily what we don’t do. We don’t do this on Sabbath, we don’t this, we don’t do this, we don’t this. And Jesus’s answer is no, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. If it aligns with the moral value of who God is, on the Sabbath, go for it. Completely takes over Sabbath and presents it to God’s people as a gift to enjoy on a day to do good.

Sabbath is a great day for showing mercy. Any act, like healing that matches up with God’s character, that’s good, Jesus says, that’s what you should do. So when it comes to healing, should healing happen? Yes. Does healing matter to God? Of course it does. That’s why the Messiah was sent.

John the Baptist, in a moment when he was really struggling — he was in prison, wondering if Jesus really was who Jesus claimed to be — sent messengers and asked the question, “Who are you?” Jesus took those messengers and sent them back with this message.

“Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.”

In Jesus’s kingdom, actions like this aren’t relegated to a certain day according to a certain human tradition. The Sabbath is a great day to heal because it’s a great day to do good. So Jesus has the feeling of mercy. This man’s hurting and he has value and Jesus gives his feelings feet.

“Then [Jesus] said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other.”

Jesus asks the impossible right there. “Stretch out your hand.”

When I was a kid, I broke my arm. When my son was a kid, he broke his arm. And when you take the cast off, the arm’s all small and weird looking. And until you break an arm, you don’t know that the first time you start to try to move it, it really is sore and hurts, because it’s been stuck. So in a weird way, if Jesus came up to Max and I, after our arms were broken and the cast was off and said, stretch out your arm, we could do it, but it would hurt.

When Jesus looks at this guy, he has no capacity whatsoever to do what Jesus just told him to do. It’s paralyzed.

“Stretch out your hand.”

And yet he received it, divine mercy. He stretched out his hand.

“And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other.”

Which I think is a great little phrase. Did the guy in the moment actually go, “They all work!” Jesus heals instantaneously and completely. Jesus shows mercy within the scope of his power.

If Jesus has a never-ending well of power because of his divine authority, Jesus has never-ending well of mercy. So the mercy that Jesus can show us is mercy big enough to give us soul rest. It’s mercy that’s even bigger than healing an arm, as great as that is. Jesus is saying, my mercy is so big, I can heal your soul.

Now you guys know this — if you’ve been around here for a little bit — about me. I love story. I love narrative. And as I read this, this is the moment where I want the Pharisees, if I could write the story, this is where they go … they’re just mind boggled. A guy’s arm just moved and was restored right in front of their faces. And I just want them dropping to the ground, or screaming, or throwing a party. This guy’s up, they’re throwing him up in the air, and everybody’s so excited. That’s what should happen in the story, right? That’s the good ending. But it’s not it. The Pharisees, they escalate their plans. They push back hard.

“But the Pharisees went out…”

Every word matters. They left. These are their people! That’s their guy! And because it didn’t happen their way, what’s their response? They left. They “went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.” They plotted. They’re going to take hold, exploit, and cause Jesus to experience destruction. And that word destroy is rough.

Last week, I called Matthew 12 a powder keg. Everything changes after this. Jesus knows what’s happening right here. It’s a big shift. Listen to some other places where that word destroy is used.

Early in Matthew, an angel warns Joseph, Jesus’s dad, to take Jesus and his family and go to Egypt because Herod wants to destroy Jesus. To accomplish that goal, this King Herod will order the murder of children. Destroying is killing.

In Mark 9:22 a demon-possessed man throws himself into the fire to try to hurt the man. Destroying is cruel.

In Luke 17:27 that word destroy is used to describe the effect of Noah’s flood on the earth. It destroyed everything. Destroying is cataclysmic.

The Pharisees weren’t playing.

Have you ever wanted to destroy somebody? Now the way I described it, my assumption is, everybody in this room desperately in their mind is going, “No.” And maybe to this degree, you haven’t.

But have you ever wanted to take steps that are … wrong? Something happened to you and so in response, you’re going to take steps that you normally wouldn’t do or that are way further than anybody would normally do. I have. I’ve wanted to destroy.

Now to date this, my kids were all in car seats. That’s important because I’ve grown in that time. I was driving my family to Josh and Dara Greeley’s house for dinner. I was heading down 291 where the Home Depot is over there. We were in the middle lane, coming out of the Home Depot, a car went across all three lanes right in front of us to the point where I had to fly over into the median.

That car then stopped in front us in the median, did an immediate U-turn to go back the other way on 291. I then looked in my mirror and they turned right into the fabricated home dealership. My temper went from zero to 1032, like that.

And after traffic passed, I did my own little U-turn. Went back, turned right into the fabricated home dealership. That car had turned around and was coming back as if it was going to just come back out and turn right. And I said, not on my watch.

So I pulled my car right in front of them at an angle, so I stopped that car from moving, and so I could interact with the driver. And so, I said to the driver, and I’m not going to edit here because this is important, I said to him, “Excuse me sir, are you aware of your less-than-wise driving?” I said that, and I’m sorry for that harsh language.

He then replied to me, “If we have a problem, I can get out of the car.” Well, I have a bonus temper bump. We went up to 1580, and I looked at him and I said, “I would love for you to get out your car.”

I believe I communicated my intent clearly to him. And Rebecca’s hand on my arm while saying, “We have kids,” brought me back to my senses, and we all left with nobody exiting their vehicle.

What happened? I mean, obviously, there’s a little room for spiritual growth there, some anger management, understanding transference, and stuff like that. But how? That’s not me. How?

Well, there was a value. For me, it was Rebecca, Max, Kezziah, and Petra. My value was threatened. And that threat was a real, true idiot driver. I have a real responsibility that I’m feeling in that moment. I am supposed to keep my family safe. That’s one of my jobs. But because I’m me, there’s also a self-appointed responsibility that I’m the source of all justice in this world. My response was a willingness and a desire to get out of that car and solve the issue.

Threatened values + real/self-appointed responsibility = willingness to destroy.

When what I value is threatened, and there’s some sense of real and fake self-appointed responsibility at high enough stakes, I am willing to destroy.

Think of that equation in light of the Pharisees. The Pharisees valued their version of the Law and their way of obeying the Law. They viewed Jesus, his actions, and teaching as a threat to that. They possessed a real responsibility to obey the Law.

They also possessed a self-appointed responsibility to make sure that everybody obeyed the Law their way. They were blinded by their self-appointed authority. They were deceived by their misplaced loves of money and status. They were threatened by the crowds that were following Jesus. And the Pharisees miss the miracle of Jesus with the man with the withered hand. And so because of all of that threat, they do not repent. They start plotting. They’re going to take him out now. It escalates so far that they are actually violating the Law they themselves know.

Leviticus 19:17-18, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”

Right here in Matthew 12, the Pharisees openly reject the divine authority and divine mercy of Jesus. And it is perhaps the saddest of moments because we can’t miss that in all of these exchanges, Jesus wants them to believe.

Jesus isn’t there to just argue with them. Jesus wants them to receive divine mercy. Jesus will die for the Pharisees. Not because of them, though he will, not just by them, though he will, he is dying for them and they reject him.

Jesus, through divine authority, expresses divine mercy with humility to the needy.

Let’s draw a couple of conclusions.

Miracles are not enough to make someone receive mercy.

Miracles aren’t enough to make someone receive mercy. I actually think this is really important for our modern audience of people who follow Jesus, who want to tell other people about Jesus, because there’s this idea of, well, if this is all true, if Jesus would just show up at night at the end of my bed, I’d believe. If Jesus would do just this, if your God could just … And I could see it. I would believe.

That’s not true. Even educated people in the Bible who saw the miracle didn’t believe. Miracles aren’t enough to receive mercy. Why didn’t they receive it? Because mercy demands need.

The wheat field and the synagogue are not the first time that Jesus has given the Pharisees a mercy lesson. He did it one other time, and this time it was at a dinner party in Matthew 9.

“And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples.”

Remember Jesus is always with the wrong people.

“And when the Pharisee saw this, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ But when [Jesus] heard it, he said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’

There’s that phrase again, Micah.

“For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Jesus didn’t come to express divine mercy to people who are already righteous. Jesus came to extend mercy to sinners and broken people who need their deepest need met in reconciliation to God and forgiveness so they can have soul rest.

The Pharisees couldn’t receive it because they had no need. You will ignore mercy if you reject being needy and trusting your own authority. You’ll ignore mercy, no matter what it looks like, if you reject being needy and trust in your own authority. To trust, follow, believe, and obey Jesus, you have to believe that you have a need that only he can meet.

Another conclusion. Divine mercy results in someone being able to do what they have no capacity to do on their own.

The man with the withered arm, he stretched it out. That was beyond his capacity to do on his own. Jesus offers you soul rest. He is offering something you have no capacity to get on your own. You have to have something operate on you to be able to get soul rest. Just like Jesus expressed mercy to the man with the withered arm, so God expresses mercy to us at our deepest need. Paul writes this in Ephesians 2:

“But God, being rich in mercy,”

Remember, if Jesus has divine authority, that’s forever authority, he has divine mercy, a never-ending well of mercy, God is rich in it. He is wealthy in mercy.

“because of the great love with which he loved us,”

Value and dignity.

“even when we were dead in our trespasses,”

When did God love you? When did God send mercy to you? Was it once you got everything figured out and looked good? Nope!

“even when you were dead in trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved …”

You’ve been given soul rest by this favor of God that we don’t deserve. For by grace you have been saved through faith. It’s not of your own doing, it’s not of works so that no one will boast. Divine mercy results in someone being able to do what they can’t do on their own. Admit my need and believe in Jesus.

Finally, mercy is mandatory.

Mercy is mandatory for us. You can’t look at the way Jesus teaches about mercy and kind of give it a shrug and go, well, when we can. We’ll throw in mercy when we can. Mercy has nothing to do with personality. If we’ve experienced the divine mercy of Jesus that lets us do something we can’t do on our own, like receive soul rest, coming out of that soul rest is mercy towards people that are around us. We get to mimic and live like Jesus when it comes to mercy.

Jesus, through divine authority, expresses divine mercy with humility to the needy.

Let’s pray. Father, I ask you to take these words and through the power of the Spirit use them to magnify the mercy of Jesus in the minds of these people.

If there are people here who have never recognized their need and received the divine mercy of Jesus to be forgiven and given soul rest, would you let that happen today before the service is over? And would you empower those of us who love you, follow you, and obey you to live out lives of mercy? In your name, amen.