The Cost of Mercy And The Price

I have a harder time finding books that address mercy than I do grace.

I feel privileged for a book written by my pastor, that I just finished, titled “The Mercy Prayer: The One Prayer Jesus Always Answers.”

Mercy is simple but tougher & harder to find than grace when you minister to the hardest of neighborhoods where there is no money to hide sin behind.

I find grace easily everyday.  It comes from God and his disciples serving here.  It’s free and costs us nothing to share.  Yet mercy asks the giver for a price and comes with a cost, I believe.

Mercy is forgiving the pain, suffering, and “just deserts” of someone that has created and earned the consequences.

It is ministering and loving the mother that abuses her child in lots of little ways. I do childcare for her son in the same room where she is studying for her GED so I can display the loving way to correct a 2 year old. I deepen my relationship with her to help her learn the right responses.

The cost is the realization that I have no moral high ground. I don’t abuse kids, yet I sin, even cause unintended pain to others, everyday, yet seek God’s mercy.

Then there are those where the sin debt is so vast. Like the alcoholic that stopped for a drink on the way home with his little girl. Locking her in the car safely on a cold day, intending to return shortly. But he found old friends and lots to drink, and he lost track of time. He returned to find the doors frozen shut. His little girl lost several fingers and toes to frostbite that day and will be deaf for the rest of her life.

For me it puts Matthew 18: 23– 35 in a whole new light.  With only God able to give real mercy, the alcoholic became a liar to himself and others, claiming to be a social drinker in rehab, forgetting the event in a haze of past drunkenness.

Yet, our God and rehab worked, and truth came to light.  He will always be an alcoholic, though in recovery, accepting his weakness and God’s mercy which is new each day.  Are any of our amends big enough?

The mercy he received and felt from Christ carved an easier path for mercy and grace to flow from his life to those he went on to serve.

The Lord’s Prayer reads, “forgive my trespasses, as I forgive those that have trespassed against me.”  The price to receive mercy is for us to show mercy as Christ would.  For me, it is not only for those who are broken and sinful around me, but also for those that, in sin, intentionally seek to do me wrong.