Mercy Makes You Beautiful

Isn't it remarkable how a lack of mercy is often defended from Scripture? We can cultivate such a hard attitude against someone else, writing them off because we have chosen to think only the worst about them. People love to go to churches where they can feel better about doing their religious duty, but not to churches where the word of God begins to mess with their lives. It is a hard command; to be merciful. Consider even the way a husband can fail to show mercy to his wife when she fails him; the very woman he has vowed to love and cherish until death. To see the speck of sawdust in someone else's eye, while the lumber in your own eye remains invisible, comes naturally. The longer we remain unmerciful, the longer it will take for us to see other people in a loving way. A lack of mercy makes us useless in other people's lives, in the same way that an optition with a log protruding from his eye will have a hard time evaluating the speck in the eye of his patient. Mercy doesn't merely drive us to love those who love us back, but also to those who don't. The merciful person is the one who understands how merciful God has been to him. Mercy makes God beautiful, therefore, mercy makes God's people beautiful.