God's Wonderful Mercy

As I look back over my life, I can see so many times that God had to rescue me because I had gotten away from Him and done the wrong thing. Sometimes, I just did something stupid. At other times, I did things that I knew were wrong. However, in any case when I called out to God and returned to Him, He had mercy upon me and received me back into a close relationship with Him. Oh, where would I be without the wonderful mercy of God?

As we read through the Old Testament and now the book of Nehemiah, we see this truth over and over again with God's people. (Nehemiah 9:28) As soon as they were at peace, they would return to committing evil in God's sight, and He would allow their enemies to conquer them. Then, whenever they turned back to God for help, He listened from heaven, and in His wonderful mercy, He rescued them. He did this many times. I pray we can see a pattern here and learn how to stay faithful to God.

When times are good, we tend to relax spiritually, We do not pray as fervently and as often as we should. We slack off on reading God's Word. We even stop going to church and having fellowship with other believers in Bible study and worship the way we should. All of this and other things that creep into our lives, make us weak spiritually. Satan, the world, and the flesh take over, and we end up in sin. Our sin makes God sad, but He doesn't abandon us.

God knows we are just dust that He put together to form our bodies and that we are very frail when left on our own. He allows the trials to come and our enemies to defeat us, so we will see our sins and turn to Him, admitting we can't live without Him. Then, He is so merciful that even after He has done this a thousand times, He does it again. However, each time He hopes we will learn our lesson and stay close to Him each day, never forsaking His Word, prayer, and the church. Then, we can live in victory every day, which is much better than relying on God's mercy all of the time.

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Tomorrow, I intend to read Nehemiah 11-13 and Esther 1-2.