Hello and welcome. May I ask you an extremely important question? Have you begged God for mercy as yet?
You might wonder why you should beg God for mercy. The answer is that the Bible teaches us that every human being, every person, is a sinner. Because of our sin, we are under God’s wrath and subject to eternal destruction. We will die, “For the wages of sin is death,” and time for reconciliation with God has grown extremely short; we have very little time left.
Some people might answer and say, “Yes, I have prayed. I have gone to God and I have even asked Him to have mercy on me and to save me. I pray this fairly often. I say ‘O Lord, have mercy. Amen.’”
Well, this is a correct idea to have and the words are even correct, but someone who is going to God and even daily bringing such a statement to the Lord, “Have mercy,” and quickly closing their prayer with, “Amen,” is likely an individual who has a lackadaisical attitude towards approaching the Lord for mercy. In other words, such a casual prayer to God for mercy may be an indicator that this person has not seen as yet the tremendous danger that they are in.
Let me give you an example. You have just fallen off of a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It is at night and extremely dark. The ship is continuing on without you. The personnel of the ship are unaware that you have fallen into the water.
How long do you think it would take you to recognize the great danger that you are in, being in the middle of the water, at night, with no boat, no life preserver, and no one even knowing that you are there? Would you not cry out desperately, “Help! Help me!”? And would you not repeatedly do this until you could cry no more? Even if the ship had continued into the night and you could no longer see the ship, you would still cry for assistance, for help, because you would know that your life was in danger.
Well, the Lord is giving us information at this time from the Bible that is letting each one of us know that our lives are in danger, that we have a short while until May 21 in 2011. As a result, if we understand this, if we truly see this from the Bible, we will be looking at our life and examining ourselves to see whether or not we are really a true child of God. If we are doing this, then we are a person who recognizes this great spiritual danger as well as the great physical danger; because on that day, God is going to bring judgment on the world for five months. After this five-month period, He will utterly destroy this world and this universe and all of unsaved mankind.
Knowing this, why would you not go to God for mercy and say more than, “O Lord, have mercy; amen,” and then just go about your daily business?
Think of the Ninevites in the book of Jonah. Jonah entered into the city and proclaimed, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” After the people had heard that they had only forty days before Nineveh was to be destroyed and this word had come unto the king, we read in Jonah 3:6-9:
For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water: But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?
You see, we find here that the information that Jonah brought to the city contained two elements. Jonah spoke one sentence that we have recorded:
…Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
Within this sentence, there was time: forty days; and judgment: at the end of forty days, God’s wrath would fall. And the Ninevites were brought to the point of action, from the king on down.
What action were they brought to? They turned from their sin and beseeched God and cried mightily unto Him.
So you see, this is the point of our question today. Have you begged God for mercy?
You know, there is begging and then there is BEGGING! We can see the difference when someone says, “Friend, do you have a quarter to spare?,” and you either give it to them or you go on. But then, someone comes up to you and says, “Oh please, sir, please. I desperately need a quarter. Will you not give me a quarter?,” and they continue asking and begging. Maybe they even fall down in front of you because they need this money so badly. Now, that is BEGGING!
God gives us many examples of this in the Bible. Another one is found in the account of a beggar, a blind man by the name of Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus. We find this in Mark 10:46-47:
And they came to Jericho: and as he went out of Jericho with his disciples and a great number of people, blind Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, sat by the highway side begging. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, and say, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.
Here is an example of beseeching God; but this man had lived his life as a beggar asking people for money, and so this was nothing that was really different or new to him. Some people would give him money and some would not. He was blind. There was nothing else he could do in that day but beg. Yet as he begged, we find in Mark 10:48, after crying to the Lord for mercy:
And many charged him that he should hold his peace…
That is, they were telling him to be quiet, to not cry out so. But it goes on to say:
…but he cried the more a great deal, Thou son of David, have mercy on me.
You see, God is letting us know, in no uncertain terms, that the end is here, the end of the world, the end of your life and of man’s life in this world, and that there is the possibility of forgiveness with God; there is the potential of having all sins forgiven and of living with Him in Heaven, in “the new heavens and the new earth,” forevermore; there is eternal life to those whom God saves.
Since we are in such danger and since our lives will surely come to an end if we do not find salvation, then will you not go to God and beg Him and beg Him, as though you really understand and as though you really see these things and as though you really believe these things?
Yes, we can do this. We can go to God and we can say, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief,” but we need to go beseeching Him, “Thou Son of David,” because He is the Messiah, He is the anointed one, the Christ. So we beseech Him, “Thou son of David, have mercy on me.”
May each one of us cry mightily to God, but let us not do this to make a show for others. Let us do this in private, in our “closet.” Let us go to the Lord and cry, “Please save me. I know that there is no reason that You should. There is definitely nothing that I have ever done that should cause You to bring grace and mercy to me. All of my actions have only brought about my condemnation and show my guilt. Forgive for Christ’s sake, Thou Son of David. Lord, You came to save; have mercy.”