God's mercy, grace and love are new every morning

 

It’s morning. A fresh beginning.

God's word says that God's mercy is new every morning. That means we can start the day with a fresh slate, it’s been wiped clean of the past. Everything that happened previously to today doesn’t count in God's book. We are made clean. God's forgiveness is absolute and there are no strings attached to it. No toxic guilt from the past. As long as we have come to God and confessed, God doesn’t remember those sins at all.

Mercy is linked to grace and that grace is unmerited favor. So the good news is, if we are in relationship with God, and we’ve confessed our sins, we’re forgiven. If we aren’t in relationship, it only takes acknowledgement and receiving God (repentance) and then we’re forgiven as well.

Pretty good news, overall, wouldn’t you say? That simple sentence that people greet each other with at the start of each day: Good morning. It really, truly is!

God is always at work in the lives of everyone on earth. God's not limited by religion, dogma, philosophy, experience, geography, governments or economics. God can go straight to the heart. That’s what God's aiming for. Relationship. Intimacy.

Paul once wrote, “who can separate us from the love of Christ?” (Romans 8.35 NLT) He said, "Does it mean God no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted or hungry or destitute?"

Of course all of these things had happened to Paul in his own life so he was speaking out of his own personal experience. He was not offering a 'pie in the sky, someday' sort of portrait of life. And he wasn't denying that there is suffering and pain in life.

But, he went on to say, "No power in the sky above or in the earth below - indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God..."

Too often there is a tendency to ignore the strength of God's love and in our minds we disable the powerful truth of it by believing that there are things that are stronger than God. So Paul's statement gets altered to read: Who can separate us from the love of Christ?... Poverty, political oppression, gender inequality, social structure…”

But when we speak out those things we are giving the things of this earth way more power than they actually have. We are, in essence, saying that Paul got it wrong. That God has it wrong. That evil triumphs over good. That hate trumps love.

But that has never been the case.
 

The fact is that God is at work in the earth. God is at work in each of us. God is at work in the lives of the very people that we so often count as lost. In God there is always hope. In God there is always salvation. In God there is always the promise of intimacy.

God's love is simply that strong!

photo credit: www.godisreal.today