Fountains of Mercy

" Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniguity and cleanse me from my sin." Psalm 51:1-2

"Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy."

Liturgical churches have repeated this refrain for centuries. Nonliturgical churches echo the thought in a number of popular praise choruses. As we pray this prayer, we join the psalmist King David who originally wrote it--probably after this sin of adultery, murder, and impenitence in the sordid ordeal with Bathsheba. (See 2 Samuel 11.)

Since the time of David, generation upon generation of believers have prayed this same prayer or one like it. We all are asking for the same thing: mercy.

We all ask for mercy, because we all need it. But what exactly is it?

The Old Testament faithful meant one thing when they prayed for mercy. Their prayer for mercy meant: "Lord, remember your covenant!" While they recognized how fully they deserved their King's displeasure and eternal punishment for their sins, they turned for comfort and consolation to his promised mercy, to his covenant promise of forgiveness in the coming Messiah.

Despite their faithlessness and rebellion, they stood blameless, accepted, welcomed in the court of heaven's High King. All on the basis of God's covenant promise.

Then one day of Calvary, the covenant promise was forever sealed, confirmed, fulfilled. In extreme mercy, our Lord Jesus--great David's greater Son, absorbed his people's judgment. He took into himself our guilt, our pain, our shame, our death. In icy silence the heavenly Father turned away from his Son, the one who at that moment had become sin for us, in our place (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus suffered my hell--and yours.

As Christ hung dying on Calvary's cross, the fountains of God's mercy burst open, and mercy flowed free, gushing up from an aquifer of love infinitely deep, indinately wide. That fountain has never stopped flowing.

Right now, it flows still for you and me.

Prayer starter:
When I was sinking down beneath God's righteous frown, Christ laid aside his crown for my soul, Christ laid aside his crown for my soul.....