Subscribe 
Is your best never good enough? We can pray for you.
Join us for our Daily Devotional Chat today in our Women’s Chatroom at 10:30 am EDT.
“He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).
The second step in Micah’s description of a seeker of God is that he or she loves mercy. Mercy is both the granting of forgiveness and the refraining of giving deserved punishment. We don’t naturally love mercy; we love justice, thinking that everyone should get what they deserve.
Sometimes, we even resist mercy for ourselves. We don’t want God to just forgive us; somehow we want to pay Him for His great sacrifice. “Give us a penance,” we plead. “Demand a sacrifice, require something in exchange for salvation,” our hearts whisper.
That subtle lie is the root of legalism and contrary to what God says in both the Old and New Testaments:
- “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, an acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offering” (Hosea 6:6).
- “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:13).
Therefore, to love mercy begins with embracing the truth that there is nothing I did or could ever do to deserve salvation.
Once we truly understand the great mercy we have received from God, it will well up inside us overflowing to those we know, to those we love and even further, to those we don’t know and to those who are our enemies. Like Jesus, we will not want anyone to perish or be eternally separated from God. We will want everyone to receive God’s mercy.
To love mercy means we love when God has mercy on us. We love when God has mercy on our enemies. We love the idea of mercy and we love the action of mercy.
Oh Merciful God, help me to understand the amazing mercy You have shown me. Make Your mercy overflow in me, so that I will love mercy. Amen.
Questions: Why is it hard to love mercy? How will our actions and attitudes change when we love mercy?
About the Author Suzanne Benner
Talk to a Mentor
Need Prayer?
Join Chat
Life Lessons
1-800-247-3180 | 604-514-2135
What a great devo for me today! i’m trying so hard to get the knots out of myself and after meditating on this word Mercy, i come to realize i never had any. i was accused of not having compassion yet i now believe it was mercy i didn’t have b/c i never really understood it even though i sang about it and read about it for the last 29 yrs of being born again My reactions to people hurting me was to, like you say, to get “justice” by hurting them back in worse ways then they did to me like…”Oh yeah…take THAT!” i always felt people were ‘owed’ their punishment and i would be happy when they got it! After reading your devo, i can feel some kind of freedom from that bondage by ‘seeing’ things differently than i have all my life. Thankyou so much for sharing about Mercy.
thank you