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Kindle Notes & Highlights
What makes mercy merciful is a heartfelt compassion that results in some kind of action toward the other person. Mercy is not just something you feel; mercy is something you do.
His compassion causes his justice to wait and his mercy to act.
Mercy means you expect suffering in your relationships and are willing to endure it It includes a willingness to have your life distressed by the weakness and distress of others.
Keep in mind that poverty is not always economic. A person can be difficult to live with because he is spiritually or socially poor. The point is, when you are in a relationship with someone, his “poverty” will become your firsthand experience. This is when a commitment to mercy will expose your faulty thinking.
Mercy is willing to forsake comfort to bring God’s comfort to someone else.
I cannot look back on those tough days and think only of her. Usually, my mind goes to me and my Lord. In calling me to mercy, God was actually extending mercy to me.
Paul is saying that we haven’t really started loving others with our money until we start giving it away to help them!
Did you know that ninety-five percent of your life is lived in the mundane? For example, suppose a husband and wife are upset with each other. Will they turn toward each other or will they remain angry? This is a mammoth redemptive moment—huge!
We are called to love God and use his blessings to love others. But sadly, we often use other people to get the things we love.
Kara, who was so self-confident, was admitting that she needed help was a wonderful mark of God’s grace in her life. But because of what she did not see, Kara was stuck. She was panicky and despairing because God was the last person she thought about. Kara lacked hope and encouragement because her perspective lacked the God who was already acting on her behalf and on behalf of Brian and their family.
Imagination is not the ability to dream up things that aren’t real; it is the ability to see what is real but often unseen. As Eugene Peterson says in Subversive Spirituality, for a Christian whose hope is in an invisible God, seeing the unseen is essential.
Imagination takes us to the mountaintop of God’s grace so we can see our struggles and challenges from the vantage point of his relentless love for us.
The Scriptures increase our awareness of a God who is near, willing, and able to save.
We either want to fix the wrong things or fix the right things in the wrong way.
When the gospel is given robust and healthy expression, the two work in graceful synchronicity. Explanation pins things down so that we can handle and use them—obey and teach, help and guide. Imagination opens things up so that we can grow into maturity—worship and adore, exclaim and honor, follow and trust. Explanation restricts and defines and holds down; imagination expands and lets loose. Explanation keeps our feet on the ground; imagination lifts our heads into the clouds. Explanation puts us in harness; imagination catapults us into mystery. Explanation reduces life to what can be used;
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Whenever God’s grace changes your heart and life, you are experiencing the kingdom coming to earth as it already is in heaven. And when you experience this kingdom power in your life, you want others to experience it too.
If you are experiencing humility, forgiveness, patience, or godly conflict, you are experiencing the work of the King as he builds his kingdom. This means that your relationships are a place where the kingdom has come, and they are intended to attract others to the King.
The image of salt challenges isolationism because salt is only effective as a retardant to decay when it is in close contact with the decaying substance. This is an uncomfortable call because it pulls us away from the comfort of relationships already transformed by the King. Yet we are most true to our identity and calling when we live in the midst of broken people. The call of the kingdom is a call into the world, never away from it.
Great quote on relationally being the salt of the earth.
If, by God’s grace, you are truly “salty,” God intends you to apply that salt to decayed relationships where it is most needed.
God will use the messiness you encounter in others to spur your own growth in the gospel.
Thankfulness for Christ’s willingness to enter our messy world will make us willing to enter someone else’s.
