Do you feel God's mercy?

This past couple of weeks, I have had the privilege to share the Gospel or attempt to share it with quite a few people. It has been humbling most of the time, but it has led me to appreciate God's mercy anew in my own life.

Reading Pastor John Piper recently and trying to share that glorious Gospel, reminded me of various Scriptures regarding what I deserve as I am a "child of wrath like the rest of mankind"(Eph 2:3), "under sin...accountable to God" (Rom 3:19), "hostile to God" (Rom 8:7), "having no hope and without God in the world" (Eph 2:12), destined to be cast into outer darkness where there is "weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matt 8:12), and my future was the lake of fire where "the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest" (Rev 14:11).

Considering that Christ has rescued me from all of this because of His mercy, you'd think I'd be a little more joyful regardless of my circumstances which happen to be quite good these days. I was convicted even more when I read Jonathan Edwards saying this, "A man may meet with very great losses...his cattle may die...and all his goods consumed, and he may be brought from a comfortable living to a poor, low stricken state. This is very hard to bear, but alas, how little reason have such to complain if they do but consider how little this is, compared with that eternal destruction that we have been informed of."

Piper goes on to say this, "Ponder how you would react to things if you lived hour by hour in the heartfelt awareness that you are rescued from horrible death and eternal suffering, and that, in spite of deserving no help, you are lavished with mercy every day (even in the hard things) and willl be made perfectly and eternally happy in the age to come."

"Then add one more thing to your thinking. The one who rescued you had to die to do it, and he is the one Person in the universe who did NOT deserve to die...know your condition - the misery and the mercy. And let the horror from which you have been rescued, and the mercy in which you live, and the price that Christ paid, make you humble and thankful and patient and kind and forgiving. You have never been treated by God worse than you deserve. And in Christ you are treated ten million times better. Feel this. Live this."

Amen. If you need help feeling it, go to www.resolved.org and listen to CJ Mahaney's Resolved 2008 Session 11 on the bottom right of the page and listen to the scream of the damned. The misery is awful, but it makes the mercy all the more glorious.