Trust The Mercy

“But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me.” (Ps 13:5-6 AV)

 

What a verse!  To the self-destructive, this is hard to accept.  But accepted it must be!  What we want to really chew on is the connection between trust in God’s mercy and rejoicing in salvation.  The two go hand in hand.  One cannot dwell without the other.  There can be no joy in salvation if we do not trust in the mercy of God to forgive.  There can be no trust in the mercy to forgive if we do not realize the joy of salvation.  The two cannot be separated.  To trust that our sins are forgiven and paid for is the very foundation of joy in salvation.  To realize there is nothing we can do to earn God’s mercy requires humility and repentance.  Trusting in the mercy of God means we stop trusting in ourselves.  If we do, we will fail.  Every time!  Our beloved psalmist knows more than anyone what mercy means.  With his failures ranging from the death of all the priests as Nob to adultery and murder, then ending in tens of thousands of citizens dead because he numbered Israel, David knows a thing or two about mercy.  He needed a boatload of it.

I have had to stand before a judge twice in my life.  Both times, it was for traffic violations.  Failure to completely stop at a stop sign was one of them.  The other was rear-ending someone who had entered an intersection and then slammed on the breaks.  It is the second event that might highlight the above truth.  In the state of Illinois, when one is ticketed, they surrender their license on the spot, and the driver now ‘drives on that ticket.’  In other words, the police take your license and you drive around with that ticket on your person.  This is meant to ensure you show up to your court date.  Not having a license would hinder your ability to get one transferred to another state as well.  Needless to say, when driving on a ticket, one is extra careful to follow the law.  When my court date arrived, the LORD put me through the wringer.  He knew I needed to learn an important lesson in all of this.  I showed up at the required time.  Nine o’clock.  I sat there all morning.  I came back at One o’clock.  Sat there all afternoon.  I was the last case called.  Apparently, the judge was holding off calling my case until the ticket issuing police officer arrived.  I was the last one in the courtroom.  I didn’t know why at the time.  Had I known, I wouldn’t have sweated bullets that whole time.  When my case was called, the judge entered a not-guilty plea on my behalf and dismissed the case because there was no witness to my ‘crime’.  Not even the driver of the other vehicle showed up.  He gave me my license back and I was out the door!  Mercy rained down.  Being the overly sensitive type, in the back of my mind, I thought perhaps there was something a bit more nefarious going on.  So, from that day for a very long time, I was the state’s safest driver.  Every time I saw a police car, I thought they were looking for me because I had gotten off without any consequences.  Only until I came to grips with the truth that the court had no interest in my past, was I totally free.

The same is true of God’s mercy.  Not that we want to take advantage of it or think there are no consequences for our actions, but we have to live in the reality of God’s forgiveness.  We try so hard to make it up, thinking if we do, then God will be pleased again.  That is pagan thinking.  That is the thinking that causes some cultures to exercise extreme acts to appease an angry God.  From throwing their children to the crocodiles to self-mutilation, this idea of an angry God who is constantly tormenting us because we are not worthy is not the God of the Bible!  Our God had infinite mercy.  If we have no joy in our salvation, chances are, we are still tormented over our sin.  We have not accepted the reality of God’s mercy.  We are driving around looking for the next ‘cop’ who will drag us off to jail because we deserve it.  We are looking over our shoulders because we cannot surrender a guilty conscience to a merciful God.  We have little joy because we believe in little mercy.  The more we trust the mercy of God, the greater our joy in salvation.  It is that simple