Grace and Mercy

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. (v. 8)

Merciful God, thank you for the grace given us in Christ.

Is there a difference between grace and mercy? Here’s one attributed to the “philosopher” and Hall of Fame baseball manager Sparky Anderson. Grace, he said, is getting something good we don’t deserve, and mercy is not getting something bad we do deserve. Psalm 130 asks, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” (v. 3).

Have you ever thought seriously about getting what you truly deserve? In human relationships, we tend to find whatever wiggle room we can to avoid the consequences of our actions. We have a limitless capacity for rationalization, so we’re likely to go easy on ourselves in assessing our level of blame. But even at that, we cannot escape our guilt. We know in our hearts “we have done those things we ought not to have done, and left undone those things we ought to have done,” as the Book of Common Prayer has it.

When it comes to God’s absolute standard of purity, holiness, and obedience, there can be only one verdict: guilty. Thankfully, when we are united to Christ through faith God sees not our sin and guilt but his atoning and redemptive love. Taken by itself, reliance on God’s mercy is a source of unspeakable comfort. When combined with gratitude for his grace, it becomes a source of inexhaustible praise.

Blessing God

Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. (v. 1 KJV)

We praise you, O Lord, for your goodness and mercy.

Shortly after 9/11, amid the proliferation of “God Bless America” signs, one would occasionally see the odd bumper sticker or sign that said, “Bless God, America.”

What does it mean, I wonder, to “bless God”? Fortunately, we do not have to look far to find the answer. A unique feature of Hebrew poetry is parallelism—repeating the same thing using different words. For example, Psalm 145:1-2 says, “I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever.” So to bless God simply means to extol or praise him. But why should this be necessary? Is he so vain or insecure that he needs to be told how great he is? Of course not!

But why then should we praise him? Here’s why: we do it for ourselves, not for him. We cannot add anything to his glory, but our praises are the appropriate expression of our worship of God. More than that, they are the necessary completion of our enjoyment of God. As C. S. Lewis points out in Reflections on the Psalms, we see this principle at work everywhere. We delight to praise what we enjoy (“Wow! Did you see that catch?”) because praise not merely expresses but completes our enjoyment. Blessing God fulfills our joy in him, and our lives would be impoverished without it.

Trusting God

Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (vv. 3-4)

Lord, so confirm your grace in our hearts that we may trust you this day and every day.

Ronald Reagan was well known for his quips and one-liners. One of my favorites is, “Sometimes in this administration, it seems like the right hand doesn’t know what the far right hand is doing.” He also had a famous political maxim: “Trust, but verify.” Its primary application was to arms limitation treaties, but it is also sound wisdom in dealing with other people. “Yes,” we say, “I will trust you, but I’ll also be checking up on you to make sure you keep your word.”

But what about in our relationship with God? Should we trust him only when we can verify that he will indeed give us the desires of our heart? Here is the crucial difference between trusting God and trusting other people. With God it’s not “Trust but verify,” but rather, “Trust to verify.” The wonderful promises in Psalm 37 add up to this: God will always give us our heart’s desire. Sometimes that promise will come literally true for us in earthly terms. At other times it will seem like it doesn’t. But all of us who “take delight in the Lord” will discover that one day our deepest desires will be satisfied, even if we didn’t truly know what they were. The lesson for us is that it is the very act of trusting God that provides indisputable (and indescribable) verification of his promises in our hearts.

Waiting on the Lord

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord. (v. 14)

I wait for you, Lord, and in your word I hope.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis on April 9, 1945, at the Flossenberg concentration camp, just days before it was liberated by the Allies. At his memorial service in London later that year the sermon was based on the text, “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (2 Chron. 20:12). This verse was chosen because Bonhoeffer himself had preached a sermon on it in London in 1933 in the early days of the Nazis’ rise to power, before the full extent of the darkness and horror that would engulf Europe was known.

We often come to times in our lives when we don’t know what to do. One thing we can do then is to keep our eyes upon the Lord and trust him. Throughout the Psalms we are admonished to wait patiently for the Lord. The New Testament also insists on the importance of the spiritual discipline of faithful waiting. Paul’s prayer for the Corinthians is that they not be lacking in any spiritual gift as they “wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1:7). In a society of instant communication and instant gratification waiting may not come easily to us. But here is the promise from God’s word: “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” (Isa. 40:31).

Knowledge Too Wonderful

You knitted me together in my mother’s womb . . . in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me. (vv. 13, 16)

Lord, help me trust you for all the details of this day.

One of the most staggering claims in the Bible is that the God who created the universe knows and cares for each of us individually. How can this be? Billions of people, past and present; all the good, all the evil; all the suffering, all the happiness—the imagination reels at the thought that the infinite, eternal, omnipotent God could know us by name and plan out every day of our lives.

Our experience sometimes makes it seem as if God is indifferent to us and to our prayers. We do our best to trust in him, determined to believe and persevere. We summon all our faith and still suffer disappointment and loss. To paraphrase the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins, we wonder how things would be any worse if God were our enemy instead of our friend.

As Christians we should be cautious about resorting to pious platitudes about the will of God too quickly. Too often we are like students who get the right answer to the problem, but only by looking it up in the back of the book without working it out for themselves. Jesus assured us that God does know and care for us personally, that in fact the very hairs of our head are numbered. Perhaps because such knowledge is “too wonderful for us” (v. 6), one of the ways we learn it is by patient endurance when prayers are not answered and by trusting God when he seems absent.