Mercy, Generosity, and the Kingdom of God | Matthew 6:1-4
Brian Hedges | March 1, 2026
Let’s turn to Matthew 6.
Just a couple of preliminary things before we start looking into God’s word. First of all, I just want to say how much I was blessed by the worship this morning. Were you blessed by the time of worship this morning? So thankful for our worship team and the A/V team and the hard work they do in leading us into the presence of the Lord. It was refreshing to me and I’m grateful for them.
Then, I want to let you know I’m preaching about giving today, but the primary focus and the primary application is not to give to Redeemer Church. I am thankful for all who give faithfully, and of course that’s a responsibility we have as members of the church. But the focus today is actually on our giving to help specifically those who are in need. It’s giving to minister to the poor. It’s what we might think of as our charitable giving above and beyond our responsibility to give to support the work of the church.
C.S. Lewis, writing about that in his book Mere Christianity, asked how much should we give? He refused to put a number on it. He said, “I’m afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.” And he went on to say that if our giving doesn’t pinch us, if we don’t feel it, then it’s probably too small. It’s a searching statement, because it suggests that one of the clearest measures of whether grace has reached our hearts is whether it loosens our grip on money, so that we begin to give sacrificially to meet the needs of others.
Now last week we turned a corner in the Sermon on the Mount. We have spent a number of weeks in Matthew 5, and then last week we did kind of a broad overview of the first 18 verses of Matthew 6. And we see how Jesus begins to talk about embodied practical righteousness, righteousness that is seen in our giving and our praying and in our fasting—righteousness that is not just about having the correct beliefs, not just about having the correct doctrine, but about how we live our lives.
The very first practice that Jesus focuses on is giving, giving to the poor. We see this in Matthew 6:1-4. I want to look at this passage again this morning under this title: “Mercy, Generosity, and the Kingdom of God.” Let’s look at what Jesus says.
“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.
“Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
This is God’s Word.
Jesus in this passage teaches that true mercy flows from a transformed heart that seeks the pleasure of the Father, not the praise of men. And I think we could break this down into three points:
1. The Virtue of Mercy
2. The Practice of Generosity
3. The Promise of the Kingdom
1. The Virtue of Mercy
Let’s consider for a moment the virtue of mercy. When Jesus says in verse 2, “When you give to the needy,” this translates a single verb in Greek that is closely related to the word “mercy.” And we’ve already seen the word “mercy” earlier in the Sermon on the Mount in the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:7: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” And when Jesus says, “When you give to the needy,” it’s tying right back into that theme of mercy.
I’ve pointed this out before, but mercy is a running theme that runs through the Gospel of Matthew. We see it multiple times in Jesus’ teaching. Matthew 9:13—he says, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” quoting the prophet Hosea. In Matthew 23:23 he says, “You have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness.”
So once again, we are confronted by Jesus with this truth that it is possible to be religious, it is possible to even be orthodox, in a sense, in our theology, and to have a certain kind of veneer of discipline and religiosity in our lives, and yet lack what he calls the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness. There is a call for us to be people who are characterized by mercy, and this is a virtue. This is a feature of our character as followers of Jesus Christ that God wants to form in us.
I’ve been helped by the ministry of Tim Keller, and the very first book that Tim Keller wrote was actually not his famous book, The Reason for God, that kind of put him on the world stage. It was a book he wrote much earlier called The Ministries of Mercy, and it was really a book on this issue, about caring for the poor and building out in the church ministries of mercy, diaconal care, and benevolence to the poor in the community.
Keller in that book says,
“Mercy to the full range of human needs is such an essential mark of being a Christian that it can be used as a test of true faith. Mercy is not optional or in addition to being a Christian; rather, a life poured out in deeds of mercy is an inevitable sign of true faith.”
Now, that’s convicting, isn’t it? Those are convicting words. “Mercy poured out in deeds of [love and kindness and] mercy [to others] is an inevitable sign of true faith.” In other words, mercy is not just a personality type. It’s not just one spiritual gift among many. It’s not just an advanced elective for the especially advanced, compassionate Christians. Mercy is an evidence of grace.
One of the best examples of mercy in action is found in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. I don’t need to read it again; we’re all familiar with this story. But in Luke 10, we know that Jesus tells this surprising story about the outsider who shows mercy on this man who has been robbed and is left on the side of the road, hurting and bleeding and destitute. It’s the Samaritan, it’s the outsider, it’s the outcast, that shows mercy to him; and he does it by meeting multiple layers of his need. He goes to him. He kneels down in the dirt with him. He tends to his wounds. He pays for his expenses.
Jesus asks then, “Who was the neighbor to this man?” And the clear answer was the one who showed him mercy.
It’s showing us what this virtue of mercy looks like in action. It is embodied love and compassion. It’s not just an emotion; it is actually getting down in the dirt with the needy person, getting down into the mess, and in costly self-sacrifice meeting the needs of others.
I think there are a couple of ways that we can go wrong with this. First of all, sometimes we just lack it. We lack mercy because we are self-protective, we are guarded in our hearts and in our lives and in our finances, we prioritize security over mercy and compassion. So we just lack it.
Or sometimes we simulate mercy; we pretend to have it. We have it in just certain measure, but we are doing exactly what Jesus condemns in this passage; we are giving for the sake of appearance, but not really from the right heart.
Keller in his book goes deep in the analysis of what goes wrong in our hearts and why mercy is needed in the world and why it’s needed in our lives. He shows that at the heart of all the suffering in the world is the problem of sin as alienation from God. Sin is what separates us from God, it’s what separates us from one another. And he shows that all the social problems of the world are not merely political problems, but they are the fruit of this disintegrating effect of sin in our lives, and it’s mercy—the mercy of God—that reaches people in that brokenness.
But he says that if we don’t understand our own alienation from God, if we don’t understand our own brokenness, our own sin, then our tendency will be either to blame everything on the systems of the world or to blame everything on personal failure, but we’ll fail to go deep enough and recognize how the gospel gives a comprehensive solution to the problems of sin and suffering in the world. It’s only when we recognize that we were alienated from God, that we were spiritually poor, that we were broken, and that we were objects of mercy, that we begin to cultivate the virtue of mercy in our lives.
So the clear application for this first point is just this: we cultivate mercy not by trying harder to be merciful people, but first of all by being humbled by the mercy of God towards us. A merciful heart flows from knowing that we were shown mercy when we were undeserving. And to whatever degree we lack mercy and compassion in our lives, to that degree, we still need to be humbled by the gospel and our own need for mercy.
I’ve been slowly reading for some time now a book called Transformation in Christ by the German Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand. This was a man who actively resisted Hitler and the Nazis, left Germany, then had to leave Austria, immigrated to the United States in, I guess, the 1930s, and then became a professor at Fordham University. He wrote this magnificent book, Transformation in Christ. In his chapter on “Holy Mercy,” this is what von Hildebrand said.
“The way to attain the virtue of mercy lies in our constant awareness of being encompassed by mercy, of the fact that mercy is the air we children of God are breathing. May the mercy of God, of whom the church says, ‘With eternal love did the Lord love us, wherefore he drew us, raised us from the earth to his heart in commiseration,’ may this mercy of God pierce and transform our hearts. May it draw us into the orbit of its all-conquering, liberating, suave power, before which all worldly standards collapse.”
Now, there’s the secret. You become a merciful person when you recognize that mercy is the air you breathe. We live in an atmosphere of mercy, mercy given to us in Christ, in our own sin, in our own suffering. And only when we have begun to grasp that is the virtue of mercy formed in our hearts.
But listen, when that virtue begins to take root, it does not remain inside; it begins to express itself in very practical ways in generosity to others.
2. The Practice of Generosity
That leads us to the practice of generosity, point two—the practice of generosity. Once again, Jesus here is talking about embodied practices of the faith. In verse 1 he speaks of practicing your righteousness, and then he gives an example, “When you give.”
As I pointed out last week, there is no category in the teaching of Jesus for a disembodied faith, a discipleship that does not involve practices. There’s no category in Jesus’ thinking for that. He just assumes that we are going to give. It’s one of the cornerstones of religious practice in Judaism and also in Christianity—really in all the great religions of the world. So, this has to have a practical edge.
So, the practice of generosity is the way in which mercy is expressed so as to meet the real and felt needs of people through our giving and through our service and our deeds.
Jesus uses this exact same word in Luke 12:33, where he says, “Sell your possessions and give to the needy.” That gives an example of the kind of sacrifice that maybe is involved. Jesus says, “Sell something in order to give to the needy.” In other words, give up something that you have in order to meet someone else’s need.
Sounding very similar themes, the New Testament consistently holds out before us these kinds of practices. Think about Paul and his efforts to raise money for the poor in 2 Corinthians. Think of James, who tells us that faith without works is dead, and the works he has in mind are these kinds of works, deeds of mercy and compassion. Or John, the apostle of love, who says, “If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:17-18).
If I see a need, a real need, and I have the ability to help and I close myself off from that need, what does that say about my heart? Mercy should move us into generosity.
One of the great historical examples of this was Charles Spurgeon. Spurgeon, in an 1862 sermon, put it this way, and he shows us here that this actually serves our proclamation of the gospel. It’s part of the mission, okay? Brad highlighted this: mission is sharing Jesus in word and in deed. Those two things aren’t in tension. They go together. The words and the deeds go together. Spurgeon understood that. Listen to what he said.
“Go to the poor man and tell him of the bread of heaven, but first give him the bread of earth, for how shall he hear you with a starving body? Talk to him of the robe of Jesus’ righteousness, but you’ll do it all the better when you’ve provided a garment with which he may cover his nakedness.”
It’s just stunning, when you look at the life in the ministry of Spurgeon, how he put this into practice. There’s a fairly new book on Spurgeon and the poor that just surveys this aspect of Spurgeon’s life and how he started an orphanage and how he started all these funds and these ministries to give to people in need.
Some of the scholars have estimated that Spurgeon, in the course of his life, through his preaching and his publishing ministry, earned something like 25 million dollars. He had unbelievable wealth coming in to him, and yet when he died, he only left about two thousand pounds to his family, because he gave most of it away. He gave most of it away.
Most of us won’t have those kinds of resources available to us, but we’re called to the same kind of heart and to proportionate practices of generosity in our lives.
So, here is the application. It’s just a question for us. If someone audited my life—not just my theology or my social media, but they audited my life; my actual spending, my calendar, my habits—would they see kingdom generosity? Do I give until it hurts? Do I structure my life to make mercy possible? Do I budget in such a way that there are actually funds available to respond to needs when they arise? Do I see the needy as interruptions or as assignments from the king? Or have I structured and designed my life that I’ve walled myself off from human need, and I just don’t even see, I’m just not even aware? It is possible for us to design a life that makes mercy nearly impossible for us, because we close ourselves off from those needs and because we so overextend ourselves financially that we don’t have anything to give anyway.
Jesus’ teaching and the consistent teaching of the New Testament calls us to align our lives more and more under the reign of God so that the virtue of mercy and the practice of generosity will flourish more and more in our hearts and lives.
3. The Promise of the Kingdom
That leads us to the final point, the promise of the kingdom. The Sermon on the Mount is the kingdom manifesto of Jesus. It is the most basic teaching about what it means to be a disciple that we find anywhere in the teaching of Jesus, and he assumes the practice of generosity, but he situates that practice within the framework of his proclamation of the kingdom of God and God’s fatherly care for the citizens of the kingdom.
When we look at Jesus’ teaching here, it gives both a warning and a promise. The warning we looked at last week, but let’s just notice it again briefly. You see it in verse 1: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them.”
Jesus here is addressing the issue of audience and motivation. Why do you give? As we saw last week, this goes back to Matthew 5:20: “Unless your righteousness is greater than the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The way we give is a part of that greater righteousness.
In verse 2, Jesus says, “Sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do.” Now, we don’t know if there were literal trumpets that were blown or if Jesus is speaking somewhat metaphorically here; but evidently it was a problem in the day, that people would give in such a public way that the publicity distorted the giving. It became image management. It was theatrical, performative religion. People were giving so that people would think that they were merciful, not because they were motivated by a heart of mercy. Jesus says, “They have received their reward.”
Frederick Bruner in his commentary says that this phrase, “They have received the reward,” is a commercial term. And he says it was actually a term that would be stamped on receipts and business transactions, and it means “paid in full.” They’ve received their reward. It’s paid in full.
If you’re giving, in other words, just to be seen of men, you get your reward, and then that’s it. That is the reward. If admiration is all you want, admiration is all you’ll get. Jesus warns about such a heart.
Then he says in verse 3, “When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Again, he’s speaking in hyperbole, but it means give so freely, so quietly, so sincerely, that you’re not even narrating it to yourself.
Again, Bruner puts it memorably. He says, “Not only should there be no external trumpets, there should not even be internal music suggesting, ‘I am, after all, a pretty good fellow.’”
In other words, our giving is not motivated by any kind of self-aggrandizement. Instead, our orientation must be to the Father alone. Verse 4—here’s the promise—Jesus says, “Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
If our eyes are off the crowds and off of ourselves but oriented instead to the Father, it frees us for a kind of quiet generosity. This is what Jesus calls us to. This is the application: a quiet generosity, where I can give without announcing it, where I can serve without posting it, where I can see a need and meet that need and no one needs to know about it.
But there is a reward, and the reward is the blessing, the reward, the gaze of our heavenly Father, who cares for us and who provides for us.
There’s a parallel passage in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus makes this reward front and center. Listen to what Jesus says. This is Luke 12:32-34. He says,
“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. [There it is, the promise of the kingdom!] Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
You may recognize some of that language from later in Matthew 6 in the Sermon on the Mount. But here’s the basic issue, isn’t it? The issue is if we really trust the promise of the Father. “It’s your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” It frees you from fear. “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” Therefore, sell and give, because we are oriented to the Father and to his kingdom. That’s the call.
This is simple. This is really simple. The issue for us is just application and motivation.
Now, let me end in this way. If all we hear this morning is, “Be more merciful, be more generous,” we will probably just feel defeated or defensive. But Jesus did not simply come to give us an example; he came to give us himself, and Jesus himself is the ultimate model of mercy.
So here’s the conclusion: the mercy of Jesus. When Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, he described a man who was beaten and stripped, half dead, lying helpless in the ditch. And you remember that religion passed by—the Levite, the priests, the respectable people passed by. This man could not rescue himself. It took an outsider coming into his world and getting his hands dirty in order to rescue the man.
Jesus’ story at a deeper level is something like a parable of our own lives, isn’t it? Because the gospel tells us that we were the man in the ditch. We were the ones that were beaten and broken and alienated and unable to save ourselves, and Jesus could be understood as the true and the better Samaritan, the one who came from outside our world, got his hands dirty, in order to lift us up.
This is the great theme of the gospel. The Word became flesh. The Son became a servant. The one who was rich became poor so that we through his poverty could be made rich. The sinless one became the sinbearer. He stepped into our mess. He did not avoid our brokenness and our shame. He didn’t outsource the compassion to someone else. He moved toward us, he bound our wounds, he paid our debts, he poured out mercy; and that is the great motivation for living a life of mercy.
Keller puts it this way: “The only true and enduring motivation for the ministry of mercy is an experience and a grasp of the grace of God in the gospel.”
You see, when a Christian looks at someone in desperate need—the poor, the addict, the prisoner, the refugee, the immigrant, the struggling single parent, the lonely and impoverished elderly neighbor—the Christian does not look at such people from a position of superiority. Instead, we recognize that we were orphans in need of a father. We were outsiders in need of welcome. We were poor, in need of assistance. We were broken and alienated, and we became the objects of God’s mercy.
Listen, when Jesus died on the cross, there was no trumpet. There was no applause. It was not performative religion; but oh, the generosity! oh, the mercy! Friends, you and I breathe that mercy every day. We are the great beneficiaries of the great mercy and compassion of Jesus in the gospel. If we breathe that mercy, if mercy is the atmosphere in which we live, how can we not seek to live lives of mercy and generosity towards others? Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we confess this morning that we have often closed ourselves off from the needs of others, that we have failed to love our neighbors in the way Jesus taught neighbor love, by showing mercy to those in need, and that we have so much work to do in our own discipleship to become people who are characterized by the virtue of mercy, the practices of generosity. So, Lord, we speak today from a place of conviction, and we ask for your forgiveness. We ask for your transforming grace. We ask, Lord, that you would change our hearts in such a way that mercy would be the overflow of what we ourselves have experienced in our grasp of the mercy given to us in the gospel.
So, Lord, would you show us this morning our own need? Remind us once again of how we were the people in the ditch, in need of rescue, and of how Christ came to rescue us. And, Lord, would you overwhelm our hearts with that to such a degree that it would loosen our grip on financial security and would give us a heart for the poor, the downtrodden, and the needy of the world?
We ask you, Lord, to use the table today, alongside the word; use the table as a sign, a seal of the gospel, that shows us the brokenness of Christ, his life poured out for us in the sacred emblems of the bread and the juice. As we receive those elements this morning, may we once again be assured of your mercy and your grace, given to us in Christ, and may that assurance lead to change in our hearts. So draw near to us, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
