As some of you will know I tend to turn down the corner of the page of the book I am reading…

(sorry again to those of you who find this rough treatment of books painful – perhaps I should try to change my habit to mini post-it notes)

..if something particularly strikes me and gives me the urge to revisit it and savour it further another time. Today I am intending to take a trip around my corners.

Corner number one is all about mercy. I have mentioned the book of devotionals by Paul Tripp: New Morning Mercies. This morning he pointed us yet again to more refreshing truths about God’s generous mercy and the difference those truths could be making in our lives. I’ll let him speak for himself:

“We all forget. In the busyness and self-centredness of our live, we sadly forget how much our lives have been blessed by and radically redirected by mercy.”

If you are like me you may hear a note of rebuke here and not let the joy of that sentence soak in. If so we are forgetting God’s mercy even as we read about it! Something beautiful is being offered to us – experiencing God’s mercy to us in Jesus. If there is challenge to us there – it is the challenge not to rob ourselves of what is freely ours in Him.

“The reality that on every morning brand-new mercies greet us is not the thing that grips our minds as we frenetically prepare for our day. When we lay our exhausted bodies down at the end of the day for much-needed sleep, we often fail to look back on the many mercies that dripped from God’s hands onto our little lives.”

As for the difference this gripping the drip will make:

“Humility is the soil in which mercy for others grows. Gratitude for mercy given is what motivates mercy extended.”

Taken from the reading for March 1st – New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional, by Paul Tripp. 

 My merciful Father, please may I be daily gripped by your mercies! As I wake may I be strengthened by their greeting and as I end each day please prompt me to name the mercies that have dripped from your hands into my life. In your mercy Lord, help me to go to sleep under a blanket of today’s mercies and so to wake with an ear open to the greetings of your new mercies – mercies perfectly fitted for the day ahead. Mercies that will carry me through each and every ‘today’ until That Day. In the name of my saviour, the Lord Jesus, I ask this, Amen.