Church Words: Mercy and Grace

I am going to try to start writing (blogging) more, and one of my thoughts on how to do some short but meaningful posts is to pause every now and then and define some "church words" that are used often in church but whose meaning is not often clear.

Suggestions of "church words" you would like to see defined are welcome.

We are going to start with "mercy" and "grace" together, because they are often used interchangeably but actually have different meanings.

Mercy

Mercy is when God withholds something negative that we deserve. 

It is an act of God's mercy that the sentence for our sin (death and hell) is not immediately carried out against us.  Unrepentant sinners are always drawing their breath by God's mercy, and believers are recipients of God's mercy in countless ways every day.  One way to draw near to God is to reflect on his mercy toward you.  Ask him to recall in your mind a period of time (yesterday, this year, your life) and to show you the times when you could have received terrible and deserved consequences for your sin or stupidity, and you were spared.  Praise God for his wonderful mercy!

Grace

Grace is when we receive something good from God that is undeserved. 

Really, I could have ended the previous sentence after "God," because we don't deserve anything good from God.  We live by God's grace just as we are sustained in his mercy.  God's grace is our identity as believers.  We deserve to be cast out as worthless, unworthy, and insubordinate servants, but instead he has adopted us as his children who stand to inherit the "glorious riches" of Christ.  But as believers, we also must recognize that anything good we will receive or do in the future is by his grace.  By our own power, we can do nothing, so we must go to God in prayer to receive the grace we need (our "daily bread") to do and to be who Jesus has called us to be.  So we thank God for his grace and cry out boldly for ever-increasing measures of his grace in order to live.

Next church word: Righteousness