Monday, May 17, 2010

The Mercy Spiller

I found this post about mercy on Buzzard Blog. Praise God that he does not withhold mercy from us!

Once in a while a sentence of Scripture stabs your heart and wakes you up to realities you hadn’t quite felt before.

This morning I sat on my porch reading and praying through a few psalms. Eventually I came to a sentence, Psalm 40:11. I’m sure I’ve read this sentence many times. This time the sentence read me.

As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain
your mercy from me;

Seriously?

I restrain mercy. I hold back mercy, grace, and love from other people, even the people I say I love the most. My mercy-giving has a limit.

And, other people restrain mercy. Other people have restrained mercy from me. Instead of receiving mercy, I’ve received judgment, punishment, and shunning. My mercy-receiving also has a limit.

But a relationship with the Lord has an entirely different operating system.

His mercy-giving has no limit. He doesn’t restrain his mercy from his children. He never runs out of mercy! There’s an eternal supply! He doesn’t hold back and conserve his mercy, the Lord spills his mercy all over me.

This means my mercy-receiving has no limit. Because the Father spilled all his wrath on Jesus, he can spill mercy all over me every single day of my life, even on my days of greatest failure. So far, today has been a big day of failure for me.

Guess what? News Flash. This just in: At approximately 9am this morning in the San Francisco Bay Area, there was an oil spill of God’s mercy, poured out all over Justin. You should see the spill. It’s beautiful.

God isn’t in the mercy-restraining business, he’s in the mercy-spilling business.

This is so, so hard for me to believe. I’m so used to a life of limiting the mercy I give to others and rationing the mercy others give to me. I’ve been so afraid of running out of mercy. I’ve been a Mercy Miser.

I don’t want to be a Mercy Miser.

Miser

Function: noun. Etymology: Latin miser miserable

a mean grasping person; especially : one who is extremely stingy
I want to be a Mercy Spiller.

Read more on Buzzard Blog

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