Continuing Michael message on God's mercy, he writes that prisoners understand that they have lost everything ... their possessions, their families, their loved ones. However, as Mother Theresa said, “God works best with nothing.” You can never understand that God is all we need until He’s all we have. In Luke 15:11-32, the prodigal son’s point of repentance was when he had lost everything, having squandered away his father’s inheritance with reckless and riotous living. Then he got the only job he could find, tending the pigs for a heathen pig farmer. He sank so low that he “gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate” In other words, he craved pig slop. As a Hebrew, this is as far as a good Jewish boy could sink. To a good Jew, if you associate with pigs, then you are numbered as one of these accursed animals. The point of repentance is when he “came to himself” and realized that he was not a pig ... he was still his father’s son.
In Matthew 12:13, Jesus said, God requires mercy, not the sacrifice of bulls and goats. He said, Go learn the meaning of mercy. Then when you learn by experience God’s divine forbearance, then go tell others about God’s loving kindness and tender mercy. Go demonstrate God’s mercy as God’s living epistles known and read of all men. Living in God’s mercy means to present yourselves a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God which is our reasonable act of worship. And be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
What brings us together within the church the body of Christ? We’re here because we share in God’s loving kindness and tender mercy. God gave His righteous laws so that His people would understand how to “walk circumspectly” inside the canopy of God’s protection. Laws are to define the bounds of God’s righteous standards. His laws define our freedom within the framework of His blessings. However, when we trespass in sin and exceed the bounds of His protection, because of God’s mercy and grace, 1 Corinthians 10:13 says, “There is no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that you are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that you may be able to bear it.”
Why is God merciful? It’s because love and mercy are the loving nature of God himself. How can you describe the bounds of the love of God? In these immortal words of Rabbi Meir Ben Isaac Nehori : “Could we with ink the oceans fill, and were the sky of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above would drain the oceans dry, nor could the scroll contain the whole though stretched from sky to sky.”
Because of God’s indescribable love, what dos the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God that we may ever live to the praise of the glory of His grace!
Your brother in Christ, Michael
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