Day 4: Blessed are the merciful
Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ (Matthew 18:33).
Oh Lord, You are merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy (Psalm 103:8 – NKJV). Your great mercy and love... are from of old (Psalm 25:6). And You have given us the command, Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful (Luke 6:36).
The Lord Jesus taught us, Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy (Matthew 5:7). You have called us to forgive others as we have been forgiven (Colossians 3:13). But we balk at this command and find every reason to refute it, qualify it, limit it. Even the disciples appealed to the Lord Jesus for boundaries on forgiveness (Matthew 18:21).
Our Lord replied with a parable that illustrates the magnitude of what we have been forgiven— relative to anything we will ever have occasion to forgive. For He knew that in order for us to understand the imperative to forgive, we must first grasp the vastness of the mercy we ourselves have received.
Yet, Father, we scarcely comprehend the measure of Your forgiveness. We know the "theological concept" that we are sinners. But we tend to think of sin as specific acts, particularly if they are socially or legally condemnable. And in this way, we "comfortably under-reckon" and compare, and excuse, and deny, and justify...
But the truth is, sin is present in each of us even before any action we ever take—we have inherited our fallen condition as part of our very humanity. We have inherited the death [that] came to all people, because all sinned (Romans 5:12).
Your mercy found us—while we were God's enemies—alienated from God... enemies in our mind..., and it was from this "helpless estate" that we were reconciled to [God] through the death of His Son (Romans 5:10, Colossians 1:20-21). The apostle Paul shares the jolting truth of this unmerited grace:
Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:7-8).
Father, help us to understand the depth of Your compassion, the breadth of Your grace, the height of Your love. Because of our natural sin-state we have broken every one of Your laws: For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. (James 2:10).
And the Lord has laid on [Jesus] the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6 - NKJV). Yet we, who have been forgiven a debt far greater than ten thousand bags of gold (Matthew 18:23-27), struggle constantly to release our chokehold on one hundred silver coins worth of transgressions against us (Matthew 18:28).
O Savior, open our eyes to see the wonder of Your love, Your grace, and Your forgiveness. Help us to remember that You bore the full weight of our own betrayal, faithlessness, unkindness, dishonesty, duplicity, disloyalty, treachery, hypocrisy—the sum total of our iniquity. Teach us to have mercy on our fellow servant just as You had mercy on us.
Comments