Trinity 4

Luke 6:36-42 - Trinity IV - June 23, 2013 

Be Ye Merciful

Almighty God, merciful Father.  That’s what we call God when we bow down to confess our sins.  We don’t appeal to justice.  We appeal to His boundless mercy.  We ask that He would mercifully spare us from our punishment, which His Son endured in our place, and that He would graciously give us that good, which Jesus has earned in our place.  Grace and mercy go hand in hand. But we see here in the relationship between the two that there is also a distinction worth noting. 

When we say that God is gracious, we are saying that He gives us what we don’t deserve to have.  Take, for instance, everything that we need to support our body and life.  All this God gives to us by grace alone without any merit or worthiness in us.  We don’t deserve what good things we have.  What do we deserve?  Well, this is where mercy comes in.  We deserve God’s temporal and eternal punishment for how we have lived.  We have treated our bodies as though we own them, and everything God gives us as though it were here to serve our own desires.   We act as though we deserved the things God so graciously bestows.  But we don’t.  We deserve wrath.  And yet it is in mercy that God declines to be wrathful.  In mercy, God chooses not to condemn us, but to forgive and acquit us.