HAVE MERCY ON ME

Mk.10:47 – And when he heard that it was Jesus the Nazarene, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

This may not be the most popular message that you have heard lately but it may just prove to be the most important. This is where our old life finishes and our new life begins. You may be thinking “but I am already a Christian. I go to church, and I prayed the prayer; I’m good”. Really? Is that all there is to it or maybe you have missed something? Its’s right here in today’s verse but most people pass right over it and never catch the full force of what was happening to Bartimaeus. Of course he received his eyesight but something much more than that was at stake. Bartimaeus needed the mercy of God. That is what was nagging at his soul that day. Here is how MacLaren describes this.

“Dear friends, I pray you, whether you begin with looking into your own hearts and recognizing the crawling evils that have made their home there, and thence pass to the thought of the sort of Redeemer that you need and find in Christ—or whether you begin at the other side, and, looking upon the revealed Christ in all the fulness in which He is represented to us in the Gospels, from thence go back to ask yourselves the question, ‘What sort of man must I be, if that is the kind of Savior that I need?’—I pray you ever to blend these two things together, the consciousness of your own need of redemption in His blood and the assurance that by His death we are redeemed, and then to cry, ‘Lord! have mercy upon me,’ and claim your individual share in the wide-flowing blessing.“

So this is where everything really starts, coming to grip with our own personal sinfulness. I know that is not a popular message and it makes people uncomfortable but this is where everything starts. Without mercy there is no life change. There would have been no healing from blindness or following Jesus down the road without mercy. So maybe we need to join Bartimaeus in his crying out to the Lord. He needed healing but when he got close to Jesus he realized what his real problem was. Bartimaeus needed a Savior as well as a Healer.