He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8 (NIV)
PART 2 – Love Mercy
Go to PART 1
During a season of hardship, I went to the mall to buy a new hairdryer. The woman at the register questioned whether or not my credit card belonged to me. And I let her have it. I unleashed all my hurt that had nothing to with her onto her. And she snapped back. She didn’t know what I was going through, and I have no idea what she was going through.
Mercy looks beyond actions and peers behind the scenes. It sees the state of an individual, and rather than passing by them, it urges us to extend our hands of kindness to them. During hard times, my family, friends and strangers have often looked past my terrible behaviour and shown me kindness. Knowing that my behaviour was the result of brokenness within that could only be healed by mercy. When you’ve experienced the power of forgiveness and kindness, especially from Christ, it compels you to show it to others.
Mercy is an extension of God’s justice. It’s not about DOING good things, but about VALUING all. To love God is to love others and to care about the state of their lives. You don’t leave something of value in the gutter.
Jesus says in Matthew 25,
“I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was homeless and you gave me a room,
I was shivering and you gave me clothes,
I was sick and you stopped to visit,
I was in prison and you came to me… I’m telling the solemn truth: Whenever you did one of these things to someone overlooked or ignored, that was me—you did it to me.”
God wanted the Israelites to realise that by loving others and showing kindness and mercy to those around them, they would be participating in his justice.
Frederick Buechner says,
“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too…”
I love mercy because, with mercy, God loved me.
Go to PART 3 “Walk Humbly”
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