James 2:13

New American Standard Version

For judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.

Pastor’s Paraphrase

          People who live judging others without mercy and compassion have no reason to expect anything for themselves except judgment without mercy! Those of us who have been shown God’s mercy should understand best of all that mercy is always victorious over judgment.

 “How does this help me become more like Him?”

          Our salvation is not merely an event.  Evangelical Christianity has been guilty at times of oversimplifying the transforming work of the Holy Spirit in the life of a sinner who turns to Christ in repentance of sin and faith.  We have come to equate salvation with saying a prayer of acceptance, publicly professing our faith by coming before the church, or certainly following Christ in Believer’s Baptism.  These elements of our salvation should never be minimized but we should remember that this is only a part of our salvation – the beginning.

          If this beginning was genuine, a second dimension of our salvation will follow after it – a process of being slowly but progressively and continually shaped into the image of the One to whom we have surrendered our hearts, minds, and wills – the Lord Jesus.  This process will continue in the believer’s life until we meet Him face to face through death or He returns to this earth.  It is during this time of prolonged transformation that we should be continually becoming more like Him.

          If we are to become more like Him, we must understand those things about Him that are in stark contrast to the natural tendencies of our human, sinful natures.  Of the many things that define the heart and mind of the Master but are foreign to the ways in which we naturally think and act, mercy is one of the greatest.  Our carnal natures implore us to give back to those who do us wrong in some way or perhaps just annoy us, what they deserve for their actions or even worse.  Our minds even rationalize that to do so would be for their own good because it would help to correct the error of their ways.

          Whether it is to honk at another driver for their erroneous maneuver that caused us momentary anxiety, to give a coworker “a piece of our mind” for their thoughtless actions, or to let our spouse know how they need to “get their act together” - we can dispense judgment on others as if we have been given some kind of divine authority to right the wrongs in other people’s lives because we have none in our own.  How foolish and arrogant we can become!  What complete forgetfulness of the mercy of God to our undeserving souls we can demonstrate!

          To become more like Him, we must abandon judgment for mercy and grant grace rather than retaliation.  We must relinquish the supposed right to rebuke others and replace it with patience and compassion.  We must believe with all of our being that if judgment is needed, only the Righteous Judge has the right to dispense it and that He will do what is always just.  We must abandon our obsession to straighten out the world and remember how crooked we were before His mercy and grace came into our lives.  We must stop to think where we would be if no mercy had been shown to us.

“How should I pray for Him to change my life?”

Thank the Lord for His mercy in your life today.  Ask Him to exterminate from your heart the tendency to judge others.  Pray that you would be able to release to Him the right to judge and that He would fill you with His spirit of mercy, compassion, and grace.

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