Mar 09 2022

The Lord is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy.

Psalms 140-144 are songs of prayer, and they are followed by six songs of praise, beginning with Psalm 145, from which we take today's verse. This structure shows us that after we have spent time in prayer, the natural response is to praise the Lord! Today's verse focuses on some of the reasons that we praise God. He is gracious, compassionate, not easily angered, and merciful. We'll think through those characteristics and how we should respond to them.

The Lord is gracious—full of grace. This means He is not looking for us to do something wrong or waiting for us to mess up. Instead, He sees the good and gives us grace for sin when we repent of it. The Lord does not hold our wrongdoings over our heads, but rather, forgives us once we recognize them. He does not want us to be afraid to come to Him. His throne is a throne of grace.

The Lord is full of compassion. Jesus knows exactly what it is like to live in a fallen world and to suffer under its cruelty. Jesus knows what it is like to be tempted and misunderstood. Think about the word compassion. It has two parts: co, which means "with" or "together," and passion, which means "emotion." Jesus feels with us. This means He will not respond harshly to our faults and failures, but instead, accepts us with compassion.

The Lord is slow to anger. While He is holy and we should fear Him because He is all-powerful and mighty, we can also take comfort in the fact that He is not waiting for an excuse to exercise that power against us. He uses wrath only to help us turn back to Him; He never becomes angry to alleviate Himself of stress as we humans do. When He finally displays His anger, He does it for our ultimate benefit.

Finally, the Lord is of great mercy. He knows that we are weak and living in a world that makes it very difficult to be holy and to serve Him well. He does not want us to walk around in fear, afraid to approach Him. He showed His mercy to us by sending Jesus to die on a cross for our sins. A God who does something like that is powerful and takes sin seriously, and this action shows that He also loves us immensely and is full of mercy. For this—and countless other reasons—He is worthy of our praise.

Dear Lord, thank you for all that you are. You are above and beyond anything that this world has to offer, and I praise you. Help me to adopt an attitude of praise that goes beyond my emotions and feelings, tapping instead into the core of who I am. I want to serve you and praise you for all of my days. In Jesus' name, amen.

Mar 08 2022

And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses. :

In this verse, Paul tells the Colossians that they are forgiven for all their sins. This is a powerful reminder to us that we also have been forgiven through grace. While we were once dead in sin, we now have eternal life in Jesus. Today, we will look at the different parts of this verse to understand it better.

Paul begins the verse by talking about their condition before they met Christ. The Colossians were dead in their sins and their flesh. They had no hope of getting out of sin or finding salvation. They could not save themselves—and they were in desperate need of a savior. We are in the same situation that the Colossians were in. Without someone intervening on our behalf, we would be living in sin. Before Christ came into our lives, we had no hope.

Now, because of Christ, we have eternal hope. Because of Jesus' death on the cross, we are able to stand before God as if we had never once sinned. We did nothing to deserve this clean slate; Jesus both initiated and finished our salvation. This is an enormous act of grace of which we will never be deserving. However, we do not have to be deserving. We only needed to be loved by a mighty Savior. God Himself supplied this love and gave His Son Jesus to make a way for us.

This verse gives us hope that one day sin will be defeated once and for all. While we might struggle with sin in our lives now, we know that the end of the story includes the termination of all sin. Because of this, we can approach God with confidence. We know that He sees us not as sinners but instead as His children whom He has decided to love. He has given us new life and we can walk in it today. He knows that one day all sin will finally be defeated, and He loves us as if it already has been.

Dear Lord, I am so grateful that you have forgiven all my sin. I no longer have to walk around in condemnation but instead can rest knowing that you love me. I am so grateful that I am your child. In Jesus' name, amen.


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