For mercy-doubters to become mercy-declarers, we must let Scripture be our measure. Skeptical hearts use the barometer of life’s ups and downs to take a read of God’s mercy. When the job lands, the house sells, or the tumor shrinks, and life’s current forecast looks favorable, God’s mercy appears bright as a July daybreak. But as November’s billows return and begin to thicken — as they always will in a sin-tossed, seasonal world — God’s mercy seems to dim. Perhaps it disappears altogether.

 

As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain

     your mercy from me. (Psalm 40:11)

Were we to run with the first half of David’s thought, turning humbly to God and beginning honestly to tell him, “As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain . . . ” how would we finish? What do we believe that our God will never deny us — always provide us? If we named the waterfall we stand beneath, the one from which we daily drink, what would we call it?

Would we call it “mercy”?

Merciful to the Core

Other answers may feel more natural. Maybe, as you survey the cracked landscape of your life, you want to blurt out, “Pain. What God will not restrain from me is pain.” Another, soul-deep in the same struggle from five years ago, may say, “This temptation. The sun never sets on this temptation.” Still others might answer with “anxiety” or “waiting,” “strife” or “shame.” When it comes to finishing David’s sentence — to naming the constant theme of our lives — perhaps many of us are a far cry from singing heavenward, “Your mercy.”

Yet it is precisely his mercy that God swears to lavish on his people. When God’s glory sweeps past Moses on Mount Sinai, what are the first traits “I Am” tethers to his name (Exodus 34:6)? “Merciful and gracious.” After Israel backslides time and time again, on what grounds does God pardon them? Nehemiah tells us, “You are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful” (Nehemiah 9:17). And as we ourselves can turn neither east nor west without looking on evil, enemies, or valleys of death, what is God doing amid — more than that, through — it all? Sovereign and all-wise needle in hand, he hems his sons and his daughters in on every side with “goodness and mercy” (Psalm 23:6). As a loving mother would never deny warmth to her naked, cold, and crying newborn, so our Father never denies mercy to us. When God told Moses his name, he did not lie.

Read More