Why Mercy Always Costs

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Alright, welcome back to another Proverbs, Proverbs chapter eleven, verse seventeen, which I'll title Mercy Always Costs the One Who Gives It And it's basically about the high cost and greater freedom of mercy. So welcome back. Last week we spent the whole episode inside Proverbs eleven verse sixteen, which was about honor versus riches, mercy versus cruelty. I told you about forgiving a tenant who stole a boat I was buying from him and stiffed me on the rip besides. I told you I forgave him and I meant it. But I've been chewing on verse seventeen all week, and something in me wasn't finished, so we're doing something a little different today. We're staying right here in this one verse, verse seventeen for another whole episode, because it brings a deeper lair of what went down. And here's the honest thing I want to open with. The thing I didn't say out loud last week, forgiving that man never fully took the sting out of it, but I did obey the Lord, and I meant it. But if it still ticks me off sometimes when I think about it, so if Proverbs eleven seventeen says the merciful man does himself good, and I'm still walking around a little annoyed years later, is the verse wrong? Or is there something about doing yourself good that I've been misunderstanding this whole time? I'm also going to tell you about a strange thought I had this week that stopped my thinking in its tracks. I thought about the cross that I wasn't totally sure was even okay to think about. And I'm going to tell you about a conversation with my wife that finally gave me words for something I've been trying to define my whole life, and that is what is love actually? So let's get into it.

When Forgiveness Still Stings

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The verse two words, two destinies. Proverbs eleven seventeen. The merciful man does himself good, but the cruel man does himself harm. The Hebrew word for merciful is chest. If you've been with me a while, you've heard me use this word before. Because it's a very rich word in the Old Testament, it doesn't just mean be nice. It means covenant loyalty, the kind of steady, committed kindness God shows his people over and over, even when they don't deserve it. Now the phrase for it does himself good is gomel naphthisho, literally something like that, which means he deals well with his own soul. The naphth part means your whole inner life, not just your feelings, your appetite, your will,

Proverbs 11:17 In Hebrew

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your very self. Now let's look at the other words. The word for cruel is Akazari, meaning fierce, merciless, someone with no restraint left in him. And here's something I only caught this week dig into the Hebrew. The word for harm is Ocaro Shiero. Ocaro means stir up to trouble, to muddy something that was clear. And the Shero part doesn't mean his own flesh in the generic sense. It's the same word used elsewhere for kin, blood relatives. Basically your whole family gets affected. So this verse isn't just saying the cruel man hurts himself, it's saying he stirs up trouble in his own bloodline. His cruelty doesn't stay contained to him, it muddies the water for the people closest to

Blessed Are The Merciful

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him. So the deeper principle blessed are the merciful. Jesus picks this exact principle up centuries later, almost like he's quoting Solomon directly, where he says Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. This is not a business transaction with God where you extend mercy so he'll owe you some back. It's a spiritual law, closer to sowing and reaping. More than that, more than just a handshake deal. You're to live with a soft, merciful posture toward people, and you stay soft and free on the inside. If you live cruelly, grabbing every debt owed to you, refusing to let anything go, and that hardness doesn't stay pointed outward, no, it works its way back into you. James says it even more bluntly, mercy triumphs over judgment. Judgment says collect what's owed. Mercy overrules that verdict, even when the verdict was accurate. I had every right to that boat and that rent, judgment was on my side. But mercy triumphed anyways, and I'm the one who ended up better for it, even with the sting still in me.

Forgiveness Event Healing Process

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And here's what I want to correct something I think a lot of us assume, myself included. We think forgiveness means the feeling goes away, that if you really forgave someone, you would feel nothing but peace when their name came up. That's not what Scripture promises, and it's not what happened to me with that tenet. I forgave the debt, I forgave him in my heart, standing in his driveway that day, after the Lord worked on me the whole drive over, and yet I still to this day feel a flash of something when I think about that event. Paul writes, Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. Notice what the verse does not say. It doesn't say and you will feel nothing about it anymore. It says leave room. Hand the account over to somebody else so you're not carrying it. I handed the man's debt to God years ago. That transaction was final. But the wound of being deceived by someone I trusted, that heals slower, the way wounds do. So you see, forgiveness is an event. Healing is a process. I obeyed in the event. I'm still walking through the process. Both of those things are true at the same time, and neither one cancels the other out.

Mercy Absorbs The Loss

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Mercy is always going to cost the giver. And this is a deeper insight. Mercy still costs something even after you release it. Justice says you owe me. Mercy says I'll absorb the lost myself. This is not a small trade. This is you eating a cost that was never supposed to be yours to eat. Now let's look at what happened on the cross that through that lens. Jesus didn't pretend sin didn't matter. Sin matters so much it required his life. Justice was fully satisfied, but he absorbed the cost himself instead of making us spare it. When I forgave that tenant, I want to be careful here because I wasn't paying for his sins. Jesus already did that completely on the cross, but I was absorbing him a small personal loss instead of demanding repayment from him. That's what mercy always does. It costs the giver. That's exactly why, excuse me, Proverbs 17 says mercy does good to your soul, and not simply to your bank account. The cost is real. The boat was real money. The rent owed me was real money, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you mercy made me richer that year, but it made me freer. Those are two different kinds of good. Paul lands on the same principle from a completely different angle. He says be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also forgave you. Notice the standard he set, not forgive because it's easy or be or forgive because they earned it. No, forgive at the same cost God forgave you, which, if you think about it for more than a second, was not cheap at all.

What Mercy Proves About The Cross

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Now here's a strange thought I had that crossed my mind. I was sitting with this verse all week thinking about Jesus burying my sin on the cross, and I had this thought, could showing mercy to somebody in some small, mysterious way I didn't really understand be like relieving a little bit of the weight that he had to carry. Now I know that's how that sounds, I want to be careful here because scripture is clear that the cross was finished. Jesus said it himself, it is finished. His sacrifice wasn't almost enough waiting on my good deeds to help him out, it was complete. But I don't think the impulse behind that thought was wrong because my mind cross-referenced it to what Jesus said, where he says, Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me. When I showed mercy to that tenant, Jesus counts that as something done directly to him. So here's what I've landed on after much prayer and insight and cross referencing scriptures, that my mercy didn't lessen the weight of the cross, no, the cross was already sufficient. What my mercy did was prove that the cross worked, that the blood he shed actually produced something in me. It let his suffering bear fruit in my life, instead of that fruit saying stuck on a shelf somewhere. That's not the same as helping Jesus carry a heavier load. It's letting him see that the load he already carried actually changed something down here on earth inside of me. I think that's actually a better result than the one I started with in my mind. I didn't need to imagine myself easing Christ's suffering to feel connected to the cross. I just needed to see that showing up in that driveway, forgiving a debt I was owed, was him working through me in real time on an ordinary Tuesday, and that's not a small thing. That's the gospel reaching all the way down into somebody's heart, showing forgiveness towards another

Love Looks Like Obedience

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person. This ties into a conversation I had with my wife a while back that had her looking a little funny at me. I asked her out of nowhere, what is love actually? Not that the not the version where you meet somebody and your stomach does flip flops. I mean what is it really? In a way you can point to and say that's love right there. And I kept coming back to something Jesus said. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. That verse rearranged something in me years ago and it rearranged it again this week. Love isn't primarily a feeling you locate inside yourself. It's a commitment you can see from the outside, and what a person actually does with obedience costs them something. Here's what hit me the hardest. Forgiving that tenant wasn't really at the deepest level about him. It was a way of saying to Jesus without using any words at all, I love you more than I love getting even. Every act of mercy is a declaration like that. Not because the anger disappeared, not because the wound wasn't real, but because obedience won out over revenge. That is a completely different definition of love than the one most of us grew up with. It's not chemistry, it's allegiance, proven in the moment it's inconvenient for you.

Mercy With Wisdom Not Enabling

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Look, mercy needs a voice. It's not just a feeling. Now I have to add a little guardrail here because I don't want you listening to this and walk away and think the lesson is let everybody take advantage of you forever. That is not what happened with me and that tenant. And it's not what scripture teaches. Jesus said Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be shrewd as serpents and is innocent as dove. Harmless as a dove, but not naive as one, wise enough to see clearly what's actually happening. Mercy without wisdom can quietly turn into enabling, and enabling isn't bit isn't a biblical at all about mercy. Proverbs itself holds both sides. It tells you to be generous. It warns you against reckless surety, cosigning debts you have no business carrying. It tells you to forgive, but it never tells you to ignore consequences or pretend sin doesn't have weight. That's why the question was never simply should I be merciful? The better question every single time is Lord, what does mercy look like in this situation? With that tenet, I didn't wake up one morning and decide as a policy to forgive every debt everybody ever owes me. Jesus himself didn't operate off a blanket rule. He healed some, he walked away from others, he gave freely, and other times he said no. He confronted sin plainly, and he extended mercy just as plainly. Every response was different because every response was directed by the Father, not by a formula. So here's how I'd put it for you today. Mercy isn't doing whatever feels generous in the moment. Mercy is responding to the people the way God specifically tells you to respond. Love obeys. Wisdom listens. Mercy follows God's direction, not just your own soft heart or your own hard rule book. Again, here we are, back to you personally must hear from God yourself. And as a moment, this is a chance. If you have a God, God, why won't you talk to me? It'll help you hear his voice. It really will.

Back To The Driveway Story

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So let me bring you back into that driveway one more time because I don't think I told you the whole thing about it. I was driving over there angry, genuinely angry. Not the boat itself so much. It was an old fiberglass boat, twenty three feet, nothing fancy, but it was being lied to. Being told his wife destroyed it with an axe in a fit of rage, when the far more likely story was that he sold it out from under me and needed a cover. I had already decided before I got into the truck that I was going to settle up in a victim. He was behind on rent on top of everything else, I had every right, and I knew it. But the Lord rode me the whole way there, not gently either. It felt more like an argument. I remember thinking, you've got to be kidding me, and him reminding me how much I had been forgiven, which was true, and which I hated hearing at that particular moment, because I was the righteous one here. I did nothing wrong. Well, by the time I pulled into that driveway, I had submitted. I forgave him the debt in my heart before I even said a word to him out loud. And here's the piece I want to add now, the piece from this week's study. I used to think the good to my soul in verse 17 meant I'd walk away from that driveway feeling light and resolved. I didn't. I walked away obedient and still frustrated, and honestly a little proud of myself for doing the hard thing, which is its own kind of temptation to manage. But what I understand now, years later is that the good wasn't a feeling I was owed on delivery. The good was that I never let that debt take a permanent residence in me. I didn't spend the next five years replaying it, feeling a case against him in my head, letting it letting it curdle into something worse, talking about it to everybody I ran into. I handed it to God in that dry way, and mostly I left it there. That's that Gomel Nafshu, a Hebrew word for dealing well with my own soul. Not a warm feeling, a weight I didn't have to keep carrying. He passed away not long after that. I still think about whether he understood in whatever conversation we had that day, that the mercy wasn't really coming from me. I hope some of what he felt that day pointed him toward the Lord before his time ran out. That matters more to me than the rent I never collected. And this

Marriage Mercy Without Keeping Score

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week, working through this with my wife, who is naturally the merciful one between the two of us, always has been. I finally had language for what or for why her and I do the hard, obedient things even when our flesh is arguing the whole way there. It's not because forgiveness comes naturally for me. No, it's because somewhere in us, underneath the irritation, there's a decision that we love God more than we love being right. That conversation went further than I expected to. I asked her what love looks like practically, day to day between a husband and a wife. And I got a little tangled trying to answer my own question. I know the passage, husband love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave him hisself up for her. I've read it a hundred times. But watching her live it out in front of me, quietly absorbing frustrations instead of keeping score, doing the harder, kind hearted thing instead of the easier sharp thing, made it click in a way reading it never had. See, that's not a husband barking orders and a wife falling in line, that's two people each asking in their own way, what does obedience to Christ cost me today? And paying it. My wife has been doing that with me for over three decades, a lot more gracefully than I've done for her. Watching her mercy toward me honestly has taught me more about Proverbs eleven seventeen than any commentary I could pull up. So let's bring verse seventeen all the way home.

Two Questions And A Closing Charge

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The merciful man does himself good, not because the ache disappears on command, but because he refuses to let cruelty and a grudge set up a permanent residence in his own soul and in his own household after him. The cruel man does himself harm, and Solomon is specific about it. That harm doesn't stay contained, it troubles his own flesh and blood. And mercy costs the giver every time, the way it costs Christ everything on the cross. But that same mercy is also how you tell him without a single word, that you love him more than you love getting even. Here are a couple questions I want to leave with you today. First, Lord, is there a debt I said I'd forgive, but I'm still quietly collecting on in my heart? And second, Lord, is there a place where I'm being asked for mercy right now, and I need to hear from you specifically before I know what that mercy should look like? And here's the sentence I want to leave ringing in your ears from this whole episode. Every act of mercy is going to cost you something. It costs Christ everything. And when you feel the pain of giving mercy, it deepens your appreciation of what God did for us. He literally felt the pain of forgiving you and I. Well, we'll pick up right here next week, and I promise you we are eventually going to make it to verse 18. Until then, stay in the word, guard what you carry, and let mercy do the good work in you it was always meant to do. God bless.