Mercy

English: David's Love for God's House, as in 1 Chronicles 22:6-16, illustration from a Bible card published by the Providence Lithograph Company (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mercy

Let’s take a look at “Mercy” and what it means as an attitude.  The Bible often speaks of God’s care for the weak, poor, and needy, and on the blessing on those who share this concern.  God wants our generosity to reflect his own free giving.  As he has blessed us, we should bless others.  The physical world teaches Strength without feeling.  God’s love says since we are shown mercy, we, in our modeling of Jesus, should show mercy to others.

Just as children imitate their parents, we should imitate Jesus.  God’s great love for us led Him to sacrifice His son so that we might live with Him for eternity.  Our love for others should be the same kind – a love that gets beyond affection to self-sacrificing service.

Pride causes a person to despise others, and prevents him or her from learning anything from God’s training program.  We all need God’s mercy every day.  We should not let pride in our achievements cut us off from sharing love with God.

The acts of mercy (smiling, saying Thank You, etc.) we all can do every day are many if you work at it.  These acts do not depend on wealth, ability, or intelligence, they are simple acts freely given and freely received.  We have no excuse to neglect those who have deep needs, and we cannot hand over this responsibility to the church or government.  God – our lover demands our personal involvement in caring for others’ needs.

Mercy has been defined as “not giving a person what he or she deserves.”  This is exactly what God does for us.  Any of our disobedience (past, present, or future) demands penalties just as we learned in our living of life.  But God shows mercy towards us by providing an escape from the portion of the penalties that impact the sharing of love with Him, through Jesus, who pays that part of the penalty.  We still need to pay that part of the penalty that teaches us not to love our-self but God.  When we pray for forgiveness, we are asking for what we do not deserve.  Yet when we take this step and trust in Jesus’s saving work on our behalf, we can experience God’s forgiveness and love.  And we need to do the same to others.

What mercy on God’s part!  How many times has God shone His love this way.  He has held us back from doing something that would displease our lover.  We have no way of knowing – we just know that He can.  God works just as often in ways we can’t see as in ways we can.

As we can see, Mercy is an attitude that we need to work on to improve the quality of our life.  And one way we can do that is to work on an attitude of “Pure in heart” which we will cover in the next sharing.