THURSDAY 24th
Psalm 119:77 ‘Let your mercy come to me, that I may live; for your law is my delight.’
I want to take just those first few words today for our devotion, ‘Let your mercy come to me . . .’ God is a merciful God, and for this one fact alone we need to be grateful, for as I have already mentioned so many times we were deserving of all that we had coming to us because of our sinfulness, but God because of his great love for mankind and out of his great mercy has provided the means for us to have eternal redemption. In Ephesians 2:4 Paul penned these words, ‘But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved’,
I think at this moment of the words of the hymn, ‘Mercy there was great and grace was free, pardon there was multiplied to me, there my burdened soul found liberty, at Calvary’. A few devotions back I mentioned Psalm 103:8, ‘The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love’, and O how glad we are and should be, that he is merciful. I know what I deserved, you know what you deserved, but God was merciful towards us in sending his beloved Son to come and to provide such a wonderful salvation for us.
My appeal today is for any that may read this devotion and have not yet come to accept the wonderful redemption that God has provided for you, his mercy and his grace are still available to all who will come and call out to him, he loves you, and he wants you to come and to respond to his mercy and grace by surrendering your life to the Lord Jesus Christ. We need to accept that we are sinners and believe in our hearts that Jesus has done and makes available to us all that is needed to bring salvation, we accept him into our lives by faith, knowing that when we do, he brings forgiveness and reconciles us back to God.
When Jesus was hanging on the Cross, dying for the sins of the world, dying for you and for me, a criminal was hanging on another cross alongside him, he suddenly realised what his fate was going to be, he began to understand who Jesus was and he called out ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom’, to which Jesus replied, ‘Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’ (Luke 23) What happened? The criminal suddenly realised that he needed to cry out for the mercy of God, he knew that Jesus could change his future, his eternal destiny, and in his dying moments the mercy of God and the grace of God reached down and saved him. In the words of that song again, ‘Mercy there was great, and grace was free’ and pardon was granted to the criminal.
Make your prayer today the prayer that we find in our verse today, ‘‘Let your mercy come to me, that I may live. . .’