Day 19: The Wideness of His Mercy

To torment constantly about your sins, your failings, and your weaknesses is a sign of a lack of faith in God’s mercy.  It comes from a lack of faith in the power of the Cross.  It is akin to being like the ungrateful lepers in Luke, who did not come back to thank Jesus for healing them.  It is like saying: Well, God, I know you’ve healed me of this, but there’s still this, and this, and this. . .

I do not mean that we should not be cognizant of our sins.  But our awareness of our sins should not lead to a self-absorption that is the flipside of vanity.  Awareness of our sins is beneficial only insofar as it opens our eyes to God’s mercy, calls us to cast our sins on Christ.  This, after all, is why He came.  It's why He died.

Of course the more we know God's mercy the more we will know our sinfulness.  But this should be a cause for joy, not despair.  For the more our sins are revealed to us, the more we can offer them to God to be cleansed. 

Mercy means undeserved forgiveness.  If we wait until we are worthy of God’s forgiveness we’ll never present ourselves to receive it.  We must entrust ourselves to God’s mercy. 

To dwell too much on past sins is a distraction from the future.  Did St. Paul agonize over his past persecution of Christians?  Did St. Peter dwell on his unworthiness after he denied Christ?  The one who agonized over his past sins was Judas, and this dwelling in the past led to his self-destruction.  Paul and Peter trusted in God’s mercy – and were able to look forward, not to the sins they committed in the past, but to the good they were going to do in the future.

Thinking in this way leads to confidence.  We know we are going to fail, we know we are going to fall.  But trusting in God’s mercy means knowing that, even when we fail and fall, God knows the depths of our will.  He knows how much we long to do good.  Despite our failures and fallings, we get up and try again, because we commit our thoughts, our actions, our being to God’s mercy.

Don’t wait to repent and to act until you feel you know the depth of your sin.  You never will.  Your mind and heart are torturous mazes.  As Jeremiah says: “More tortuous than all else is the human heart, beyond remedy: who can understand it?” (17)  God does not expect you to understand yourself fully.  Only He can achieve this: “I, the LORD, alone probe the mind and test the heart.”  When you feel yourself overwhelmed by your sinfulness, throw yourself on God’s mercy.  Allow Him to probe your mind and test your heart.  He will understand you far better than you can understand yourself.

It’s God’s job to overturn the tables of idolatry in your heart.  Your job is simply to let Him in.  Let His word in.  In John we learn that Jesus is with those who have let His word into their hearts.  His word calls them out of the sinfulness of the world.  Let His word enter you.  Let His word engender in you a desire to do good and a deep faith in His mercy.  This desire and this faith does not mean you will never sin again.  God does not expect that of you.  He only expects you to be confident that His goodness is greater than your sin, and that, if you will it, His goodness will move in you.