Mercy renewed every morning

The National Weekender

FAITH

By Pastor ISAAC JAMES
AS we progress into the new year, may we be reminded and be thankful for the mercies, compassion and faithfulness of God our Father and Creator who has enabled us to see and enter into the year 2022.
“Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassion fails not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.” (Lamentation 3:22-23).
It is not by mistake that you and I are alive today because God has a wonderful plan and purpose for each one of us. Life should therefore not be taken for granted as it is the most precious gift that we possess.
Mercy
One of the attributes of God is that He is merciful to the extent that His mercy endures forever. Synonyms of mercy include: sympathy, pity, forgiveness, kindness, understanding and empathy.
God sees and knows all our pain and difficult situations we go through in life and His supernatural interventions has always been at work towards us even without our slightest notice or realisation.
God’s mercy is unconditionally extended to everyone regardless of one’s race, ethnic group, gender, age or status in the society. God’s mercy does not discriminate between the rich and poor, black or white, male or female, young or old, educated or uneducated, sick or healthy, sinner or righteous.
The evidences of God’s mercies are numerous which includes the air we breathe, food we eat, water we drink, the sunshine and the rainfall. God’s character was clearly reflected through His Son Jesus Christ who demonstrated the mercies of God wherever He went from one place to another during His life and ministry on earth.
When blind Bartimaeus cried out with all his heart to Jesus for mercy, Jesus responded and opened his eyes (Mark 10:46-52). When a desperate man knelt at Jesus’ feet and pleaded for mercy to heal his son from epilepsy, Jesus responded promptly and cured him (Matt 17:14-18).
The Bible cannot be exhausted of the numerous acts of God’s mercies towards mankind. Jesus Christ is our perfect role-model who came to teach and show us how to live.
As we are made in the image and likeness of God who is merciful, let us also express and extend His mercy to everyone who lone for mercy. The law of reciprocity states that what you do to others will also be done to you.
Jesus established this truth when He declared: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matt 5:7). Blessed means that you are empowered or favoured to succeed in every endeavour of life. When we show mercy to others in their time of need, we will also receive mercy from others in your own time of need.
Compassion
Compassion is another characteristic of God which according to wikidiff.com is like mercy but differs in the sense that it is deeper, finer, and richer than mercy.
Mercy is somewhat outward, but compassion is inward which stems from the deep awareness of the suffering of another, coupled with the wish to relieve it. Jesus was moved with compassion and reached out to heal the sick, opened the eyes of the blind, fed the multitudes and performed countless acts of kindness and miracles. The Bible also records that Jesus was moved with compassion when He saw the multitudes because they were weary and scattered like sheep having no shepherd (Matt 9:36).
Jesus identifies the multitudes who were lost not as sinners but people who were tired and scattered without a shepherd.  In Jesus’ perspective, sin is not the problem because He has redeemed mankind through His blood upon the cross at Calvary.
The solution to the problem of the tired and scattered multitudes in our generation today is to have shepherds who are moved with compassion to instruct and guide them in the right and acceptable way of life.
Faithfulness
Great is God’s faithfulness which is one of His manifold attributes and defined as the act of being true to His word or promise. God is always faithful which means that He will surely do what He says or promises according to His written or spoken word. “For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen, to the glory of God through us” (2 Cor 1:20).
The faithfulness of God reassures us that despite the pain and hardships we experience in life, God will surely show up when we call unto Him. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalms 30:5b). You cannot continue to cry all your life because morning is dawning with much joy attached to it.
You don’t have to let worry cripple your hope for a brighter and better future. God sees and hears your plight for freedom because He is near to the brokenhearted and is ready to save those who are crushed in spirit (Psalms 34:18).
Testimony
Let me share a testimony of God’s mercy, compassion and faithfulness in my family. Thirteen years ago, in the early hours on Monday, Jan5, 2009, my wife experienced birth pains so we had to rush her from Yanga village to the labour ward at Lae’s Angau Memorial hospital.
Upon arrival, the duty midwife and a doctor discovered through their stethoscope that there was no pulse (heart-beat) emanating from our unborn twins so they urgently requested consent from me as the husband for my wife to go through C-section in the operating theatre. It was a life-and-death situation for our unborn twins as well as a risk for possible complication for their mother. As the operating theatre attendant was on standby to wheel my wife in for the operation, I opted not to give consent but to believe God for His divine intervention because I believed that our unborn twins were His gift and He could easily correct anything that was not right.
After a short faith-filled prayer with a missionary couple, God miraculously intervened and the intended operation had to be cancelled because they could now hear the heartbeats from the womb and my wife gave birth to our identical twin sons Jioji who weighed 3.4kg and Semi who recorded 2.7kg.
Both Jioji and Semi who celebrated their 13th birthday, earlier this month and will be doing Grade 7 at Kaugere Junior High School this year.
May this New Year, 2022, be the year we not only appreciate God’s goodness in our lives but also extend His mercy, compassion and faithfulness to others.