Thought of the Day February 21, 2019 Jesus shows us mercy
What Jesus expressed in parable about the mercy of our
heavenly Father, he lived in his own life.
The greatest demonstration of mercy in action is seen in the event of
Jesus= death and
resurrection. Though innocent and
without sin and deserving of love, he received cruel injustice at the hands of
man and seeming abandonment by God. In
the words of Paul to the Corinthians: AFor
our sake God made him who did not know sin to be sin.@(2 Cor 5:21). Out of love
for us the Father asked the Son to take on all of the sins of the world and destroy
sin and death through the free gifts of his life for our life. What an exchange: Sin for grace in mercy,
death for life and freedom! Not receiving any justice, Jesus showed us Mercy.
Each person is a child of God with dignity and worth
that is only God-given. Sometimes, that dignity is tarnished through personal
sin or because of the sins of others inflicted on us. In any case, shame and
guilt makes it hard to see our true worth. In our misery we need mercy, which
begins with an awareness of God’s forgiveness.
We don’t deserve mercy nor can we merit mercy. It is a gratuitous gift
from God, who gives us not what we deserve but what we are in desperation for
to truly survive.
Paul states it beautifully in his Letter to the
Ephesians: “You were dead in your
transgressions and sins in which you
once lived following the age of this world, following
the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the
disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the desires of
our flesh, following the wishes of the flesh and the impulses, and we were by
nature children of wrath, like the rest. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he
had for us, even
when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavens in
Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the
immeasurable riches of his grace in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:1-7) (To be continued)
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