Blessed are the merciful—it sounds really good when we are the ones receiving mercy. That call suddenly sounds a lot worse when we’re the ones called to _show_ mercy. Jesus calls us to that mercy, against our natural inclination for payback.
Grace saves us—we don’t deserve it, can’t earn it, and have no grounds to boast about it, as Paul makes plain in Ephesians 2:8–9—so what does it look like when a community of undeserving people actually lives that out together as the church God is building?
Sometimes we become so fixed on where we want to go that we cannot see how we are defeating ourselves. Jonah runs in the opposite direction when God sends him to Nineveh, raising questions we often avoid: Do we understand who God is, who we are, and how He sees the people we would rather leave behind?
We like life easy, so when following Jesus brings bumps instead of the smoother path we expected, we wonder what went wrong. Luke 9 reminds us that Jesus never promised following him would meet that expectation.
When commitment costs more than you have to give, and there’s a way out, the practical thing to do would be to take it. But, Ruth chooses to stay, speaking words we associate with weddings in the cold shadow of funerals. God calls us to be willing to hold fast in our darkest places, too.
In the Book of Ruth, Boaz finds a vulnerable widow gleaning in his field and he has to decide if he’ll do more than what the law requires. We, like Boaz have to answer the question Will love dictate we give more than the bare minimum? That’s much easier to tell others to do than for us to do ourselves.
God had just routed the mightiest army of the ancient world on Hezekiah’s behalf, then healed him from a terminal illness—and somehow, facing the next threat, Hezekiah forgot both and went looking for an ally he could hold onto. Isaiah 39 traces how that forgetfulness works in a believing heart, and why it’s the sneakiest danger of all.
We live in an information age, bombarded with worldly wisdom, theological wisdom, biblical wisdom, and endless “pratical” wisdom for Christian living—and much of it may actually be wise. Yet Paul’s words encourage us to ask: “Does all this knowledge lead us to know God, or have we mistaken knowing things about Him for knowing Him?”
