How to Cultivate a Merciful Heart

This summary, optimized for Google’s SEO standards, is based on Dr. Adrian Rogers’ sermon addressing the Fifth Beatitude from Matthew 5:7: “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy”. Rogers establishes that mercy is a God-like characteristic that is evidence of being born again. True mercy is not mere feeling but “compassion in action”.

Rogers challenges the listener to identify their spiritual role in the world—categorizing people as “beater-uppers, the passer-uppers, and the picker-uppers”—and argues that those who have received God’s profound mercy are morally obligated to be the latter.

I. Defining Mercy: Compassion in Action

Mercy is often confused with softness or sentiment, but Rogers distinguishes true mercy through three key clarifications:

1. Mercy is Not Softness or Sentiment

Mercy is not merely softness. A person can be so soft that they “wouldn’t hurt a fly,” but this is not necessarily mercy. Rogers tells an anecdote of a preacher who saw a derelict lying passed out in a doorway, yet continued to dinner without stopping, illustrating that sentiment (shedding “crocodile tears”) is not mercy. The preacher had soft feelings but lacked mercy.

Mercy moves beyond feeling; it is “compassion in action”.

2. Mercy is a God-like Trait

The quality of mercy is one of the most beautiful characteristics of God. When a believer is merciful, they are “acting like God”. The Bible instructs believers to be “imitators of God”.

God’s mercy is linked directly to His compassion:

• Preventing Consumption: It is “of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed”.
• Failing Not: God’s compassions “fail not”.
• Daily Renewal: God’s mercies are “new every morning”.
• Divine Riches: God counts His riches not in silver or gold, but “in His mercies”.

Therefore, to be unmerciful is “not to be like God”.

II. The Basis of Mercy: Truth and Justice

Mercy is not a sentimental minimization of sin; it is deeply rooted in truth and justice.

1. Mercy Requires Truth and Judgment

Rogers stresses the critical link: “There can be no mercy without truth”. All real mercy is rooted in truth.

• Withholding Judgment: To show mercy is to “withhold judgment”. This implies that judgment is truly needed and expected.
• Mercy and Truth Conjoined: Psalm 85:10 states that “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other”. God repeatedly conjoins mercy and truth in the Bible.

2. God is Just and Merciful, Not “Fair”

Rogers makes a provocative distinction: “God is not fair. Don’t ever expect God to be fair”.

• Fairness Implies Desert: When a person expects fairness, they are demanding what they believe they deserve.
• Mercy Implies Undeserved Favor: God does not deal with humanity on the basis of fairness, but on the basis of mercy. Humanity does not deserve anything.
• Justice Precedes Mercy: The justice of God dictates that sin must be punished (which is truth). Only once this truth is recognized can a person “cry out for mercy”.

3. The Danger of Rejecting Christ’s Blood

God is not a sentimentalist who minimizes sin. If an individual refuses the shed blood of Jesus Christ, “there’s no hope for you”.

• Sorer Punishment: The Bible warns that anyone who “hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant… an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of Grace” will face “sorer punishment” than those who merely despised the Law of Moses.
• Under or Over the Blood: Every person will eventually walk out of this life either “under the blood or over the blood”.
• Unthinkable Refusal: Rogers offers a powerful analogy of a doctor who bankrupted himself and sacrificed his own son’s life to obtain a saving medicine, only for the patient to throw the medicine on the floor and demand mercy. It is equally “unthinkable” for a person to refuse Christ’s sacrifice and then expect mercy at the Final Judgment.

III. The Path to Mercy: The Order of the Beatitudes

The ability to show mercy is a consequence of having received mercy. It arises from a specific spiritual progression detailed in the Beatitudes.

1. Poor in Spirit: First, the individual must recognize their spiritual condition—that they are bankrupt and paupers in the sight of a righteous God. The word “poor” means being “without anything”.
2. Mourning: Next, they must mourn or be “broken over our bankruptcy”. This is genuine, godly sorrow that leads to repentance.
3. Meekness: After repentance, the individual yields their strength and self-will to God’s control and submits to His will.
4. Hunger and Thirst: This leads to a hunger and thirst for the righteousness that comes by faith in Jesus Christ, not self-righteousness.
5. Born Again: When a person completes this progression (sees themselves as a lost sinner, repents, yields, and hungers for Jesus), they are born again.
6. Mercy Shown: Only after receiving God’s mercy in salvation will they “act like a born again person” by having a heart full of mercy.

The more mercy a believer shows, the more mercy they obtain, creating a cycle. Conversely, “He shall have judgment without mercy for those who showed no mercy” (James 2:13).