LOVE MERCY | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 7, 1900

“LOVE MERCY.”

To love mercy is what God requires of man. He is not merely to exercise mercy; he is to love it so that he can not help exercising it.

The meaning of “mercy” is that quality of disposition which would lead one to treat an offender better than he deserves; it includes tenderness, kindness, gentleness, beneficence.

It is not natural for sinful man to have a merciful disposition. There are those who, moving along the lines of least resistance, are kind, tender, gentle, having no particular enmity toward any one. We sometimes hear these spoken of as “natural Christians.” There are no such. To be Christ’s one must be “born again,” “born from above.”

Quality, good or ill, is developed by trial. Of many self-righteous, world-exalted souls it could be truly said, adapting the language of Andrew Rykeman’s prayer—

“Frailest when they seem the best; Only strong for lack of test.”

We only know that we possess mercy when we have been tested and mercy has not been found wanting. And the real test comes when some one has really, or in our imagination, without provocation cruelly wronged us. He may have wounded our reputation, cheated us in deal, taken advantage of our ignorance, humiliated us in the presence of prized friends, stolen our goods, or injured our person. Under any or all these trials have we the disposition to love to treat those who did the wrongs better than they deserve? If we have not, we do not love mercy.

But carnal, unregenerate man can not forgive and forget. The wrong, imaginary or real, dwells in his heart continually. It may seem to die, but let some similar wrong refresh the mind, and he finds the old evil rankling there as before.

How may such an one be merciful? Nay, more, how may he love mercy? There are those who “work themselves up” through fear to that place where they can say they forgive. They read: “Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven;” “if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses;” “ye shall have judgment without mercy that hath showed no mercy;” and so, for fear they themselves will not be forgiven, they grudgingly forgive—or think they do.

God requires more than this, even to love mercy, to be ready to forgive before the offender asks it; nay, to have forgiven him already when he asks; for thus saith the Lord, “Whensoever ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any;” and we are to “pray without ceasing.” How may we thus forgive? The secret is expressed in the beautiful verse:—

“But hearken, my tongue shall the riddle unseal, And mind shall be partner with heart, If but to thyself thou let conscience reveal, And show thee how evil thou art; Remember thy follies, thy sins, and thy crimes. How vast is that infinite debt: Yet Mercy hath seven by seventy times Been swift to forgive and forget.”

“God is your Creator and Redeemer. Every good thing you have ever seen or will see, known or will know, is from Him. But how have you abused them all! You have carelessly, wilfully broken His commandments; you have trampled underneath your feet His blessings; you have used the riches of His grace to consume upon your lusts; His very air you breathe you have employed to blaspheme His name or blacken the reputation of His children; you have slighted His mercies; you have broken your promises to Him, times without number; and you deserve to die.” So Infinite Justice could truly speak to us; and we would stand silent, with no excuse.

But, while we are told this, it is not that we may be condemned or discouraged. God wishes to have mercy upon us. He condemns us by His law, that He may in mercy justify us by His grace. He reveals the wounds of sin, that He may heal us. He has counted us in unbelief, that He might have mercy upon us. He “is merciful [full of mercy] and gracious.” “As the heaven is high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward them that fear Him.” “He delighteth in mercy.” He has purchased it for us, “with all spiritual blessings,” in Christ Jesus; and upon every sinner who will turn to Him, He will have mercy, “and abundantly pardon.” Such is our God. So is His mercy toward us—infinite, full, free. Read Eph. 2: 1–5; Titus 3: 1–6. All through the precious Word run God’s golden threads of mercy, intertwined about the eternal throne, and strong enough to save the greatest sinner who grasps them.

O, that we might conceive of that mercy, and so appreciate it! Only so will it flow through us to others.

At one time Jesus said: “Take heed to yourselves; if thy brother sin, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him. And if he sin against thee seven times in the day, and seven times turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him.”

Peter thought that this was the limit of human forgiveness as regards time (many are not so generous as Peter); for on another occasion he said: “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? until seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times; but, Until seventy times seven”—an unlimited number of times. And then Jesus illustrates the forgiveness which God exercises, and which His children ought to exercise, with human conception and practice. A certain lord’s servant owed him twelve million dollars, could not pay it; and, therefore, plead for mercy, and his lord freely forgave him. This forgiven servant goes out, meets a fellow-servant who owes him seventeen dollars, takes him by the throat, and demands payment. The debtor acknowledges the debt, and asks for mercy in the same words his creditor used to his lord; but the ungrateful man, forgetting his own sin, refuses forgiveness, and delivers his fellow-servant to prison. He can not forgive less than one seventy-thousandth part of what he had been forgiven. “And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due. So shall also,” says our Lord, “My heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not every one his brother from your heart.”

Forgiving from the heart is loving mercy and delighting in it.

There is a divine and blessed philosophy in it all which can be known only by practising the forgiveness. Exercising mercy opens our heart to the divine Guest, and we are blessed more than he upon whom we bestowed it. We are to do it in love to Him who bestowed on us His infinite mercy. We are to see in the soul who has wronged us, a brother lost as we were, one needing forgiveness as we did, and one before whom opens, perhaps in the very mercy we extend, eternal possibilities, even as before us. How can we, in view of these things, withhold mercy?

Neither can we retain God’s mercy and refuse to forgive. God’s mercy is not in segments or fragments, broken from their Source. It is a stream full and free from the Eternal Fount. It must flow on through the receiver to others, in kindness to all, in forgiveness to offenders; and he who refuses to permit it to bless others through him, closes his heart against it and poisons that which he has received. God forbid that one who has tasted of God’s mercy in Christ should do this.

Do you have no love for mercy, yet desire it? Confess your sins, seek God with all your heart for His Spirit; and the love of God will be shed abroad in your heart by that Spirit; and you, like God, will delight in mercy, because you love it.