Mercy and Grace

The apostle Paul is writing to the church, to Christians, to us this morning to share this important truth. First of all, that when it comes to the Lord’s judgment, we are all on equal ground. God sees all of us as equals.

Now unfortunately, that is not necessarily in a good way, for the Bible says in Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” None of us are perfect, and we talk about the judgement. The Bible says we shall all stand before God and give an account of ourselves to God. I’m not going to give an account for you, you’re not going to give an account for me, but all of us are going to stand before God.
All of us, whether you may believe this or not, will one day bow our knees and profess that he is Lord for the Glory of God. And so when it comes to God’s judgment towards us, he sees us all equally.

But Paul doesn’t stop there. In this text, he moves on to the way we might judge others. And he tells us that we should not judge each other, number one because we are all in the same boat. We are all in this together, we are all on equal ground. But we do have a tendency to judge and often our judgment comes quickly; and it is easy for us to believe the worst about people, about circumstances.

It is easy for us to doubt, to condemn, and to form an opinion about things that honestly we don’t have enough insight to be forming an opinion of. And the thing about it is, that when we are in those situations and when we consider the way people look at us, we want mercy and grace. I want to be looked at with mercy and grace. I want to be given the benefit of the doubt.

I want to be given compassion; I want to be given some room here.

And often, though we want those things for ourselves, we fail to give those things to others. The Bible says in Zechariah 7:9 “Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts saying execute true judgment and show mercy and compassion, everyone to his brother.”

It is easy to judge others, though we may not know the full extent of the circumstances` or what that person is going through or facing in their lives, what battle through which they are fighting, it is so easy to condemn

But the Bible tells us that in order to execute true judgment and to be the people that God desires us to be, number one we need to remember we are all in the same boat, but we should learn to give the same mercy and grace to others that we ourselves want to be given to us. That we are not to condemn or criticize, but to help. To show mercy and compassion, to show encouragement, to help one another in our day to day needs. And to be there to lift one another up, to help each other. Because none of us are making it out of this place alive. The best thing we can do is help each other along the way.