The Merciful Heart of God

This being a week of Thanksgiving, I’d like to propose that Christians give thanks that God has allowed us to participate in supernatural work He is doing in this world. There is great privilege and honor in being called to do His work.

When I was a kid, we had a 1949 John Deere Model A. I was pretty young when I was taught to drive it. That was a great feeling. Being a little, skinny kid, there were things too big for me to lift, and I had to leave that to dad until I grew. But I could drive the tractor.

Jesus said in Matthew 5:7, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” Showing mercy that pleases God is huge, supernatural work entrusted to us who are too small to do the heavy lifting that God does (like removing hard hearts and replacing them with moldable ones or removing guilt and shame from a repentant person, etc.).

Don’t unbelievers show mercy also? Yes, but they do not make as much out of spiritual need, and therefore they do not point people to Jesus as the ultimate mercy. When I went to school in the South, a preacher there used to say that in light of eternity, the most loving thing you can do is speak the Gospel to a person. He wasn’t downgrading caring for physical needs, but in light of eternity, if our love stops short of telling the truth about Jesus, we have only made a person more comfortable on the way to permanent ruin.

Second Corinthians 1:3 speaks of God the Father as the Father of mercies. If there is true mercy to be found, mercy that is perfectly holy, and mercy that leads to life that lasts forever, it originated with Him. If He uses you in the process of extending mercy to people around you (or people on the other side of the world), that is a huge honor!

The greatest expression of divine mercy is the incarnation (this refers to the eternal Son of God taking to Himself our human nature) and suffering and death of Jesus in the place of sinners who did not deserve such help and kindness and rescue. He saw us who had earned for ourselves eternal misery because by our sinfulness we divorced ourselves from Him who is life. He noted how helplessly blind we were to the beauty of His glory and how our affections were twisted and polluted so that we would spend an entire life loving idols that will leave the soul empty for eternity. He recognized that we were deceived by Satan. He understood we could not free ourselves from this predicament.

Give thanks if you have received this mercy, for God has favored you to now deal mercifully with others so that they may come to know Jesus as you have. Receiving mercy from Christ may not change your standard of living, but it ought to change your standard of giving.