Mercy: not getting something you do deserve.
Grace: getting something you don't deserve.
These are text book definitions for most Sunday schoolers. But, how often do you encounter these two qualities in people? How often do you express them towards people you love? How often do you express them towards people you don't love? Either in part or in combination. These qualities--two qualities that are not only imperative to a complete knowledge of crazy love, but also crucial to the foundation of my faith--are tremendously challenging to me. For whatever reason, the mantra of an "eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth" is far more easily ingrained in my mind and I can't figure out why. The more confusing thing is that I don't have a hard time extending grace and mercy towards other people. It's not that I'm perfect. Far from it. I just have an easily forgiving heart. I don't hold grudges. I tend to take the blame and bear the burdens of everyone else in addition to my own. Try as I might, though, I can't self-diagnose why I operate this way towards myself.
Maybe a good place to start is to try to explain why it's relatively easy for me to give grace and mercy to others. Simply, I have a heart for people that can only be explained through God. By any wordly standard, the fact that I am not only willing but able to experience discomfort or pain or to sacrifice my own desires to ensure another's needs are met above and before my own makes absolutely no sense at all. But the Lord calls us to it in so many passages in the Bible I could devote an entire series of blogs to writing about how we are called to be gracious and merciful towards one another. For the sake of brevity, however, I'll use two of my favorite passages:
"So speak and so act as ones who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgement is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgement." James 2:12-13
"Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Each of you should use whatever gift he has to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms." I Peter 4:9-10
Each of these models of human behavior run hard against the grain of conventional ways of thinking. However, the directives could not be more clear: mercy and grace towards others. Paul takes Mercy a step further. Calling us to extend it above judgement. The more I've thought about this, the more I've recognized that the times in my life or the moments when I want to pass judgement on someone about anything (whether it be the shirt they have on or how they choose to live their life) it's usually less to do with them and more to do with me. Me being either defensive or jealous or selfish. Judgement is a fantastic mechanism for shifting the focus (and often blame) away from ourselves and on to other things. But mercy is victorious above judgement in every situation--whether it be work, or play, or love. Mercy is a wonderfully freeing attitude, perhaps this is why Paul ties it to the law of liberty. As good as the "just desserts" approach can feel sometimes, I rarely find any lasting pleasure in dealing someone what I think they deserve if they mistreat me in some way or another. Yet, as often as I am able to rise above and extend mercy, my mind and heart are at ease.
Interestingly, in the second passage, Peter qualifies the grace. It's not human grace or your grace or any grace stemming out of your own ability or willpower. It's God's grace in it's many forms. What is God's grace? This is something I can tell you, but even after twenty years of being a Christian can't understand. God's grace is loving us more than we deserve. God's grace is giving us access to Himself--a perfect, holy, righteous being. God's grace is promising us eternal crowns of life should we choose to love him and walk in His ways. God's grace is doing what's best for us despite our failed attempts to do what we think is best for ourselves. The terms gracious and graceful are tossed around lightly, but what does it mean to be truly grace-filled I wonder. I think about this a lot when I walk by the same homeless men that stand near my office every morning. There is no limit to God's grace, how does this translate into my own life? It's easy to be grace-filled towards those people you love, but what about those people that you don't? What about towards people you don't even know? This is what we are called to as believers. Ongoing, constant, limitless grace not just towards our friends, but towards enemies and strangers.
Oddly enough, this tandem of mercy and grace, once you embrace it, offers a more complete and knowable joy than living life in the other direction, focused on revenge and selfishness. Letting go of judgement, letting go of anger, and hatred frees you from living life in a self-focused prison. Crazy love kind of ideas to anyone who hasn't experienced both of these qualities in full measure from the Lord through his son Jesus Christ. So this is where I'll run in the second part of this post. Experiencing mercy and grace in my own life, because, frankly, I'm not very good at it. But if I claim to be good at showing mercy and grace to others, I must first realize and understand both of these illogical, irrational, crazy love gifts from God in my own life...
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