ephesians on Mercy

God's mercy to us is the motivation for showing mercy to others. Remember, you will never be asked to forgive someone else more than God has forgiven you.

If I withhold mercy, I have lost touch with the gospel. I have lost touch with God’s undeserved kindness and pardon.

By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am.

What can we say, O Lord, to justify ourselves? You shower us with grace upon grace. Your mercies are new every morning. And we find it hard to forgive others. Sometimes we are petty and hold grudges f...

Merciful God, you pardon all who truly repent and turn to you. We humbly confess our sins and ask your mercy. We have not loved you with a pure heart, nor have we loved our neighbor as ourselves. We h...

Gracious God, we are sorry for withholding good things. We have offered judgment and held back mercy. We have kept comfortable and withheld justice. We have ignored cries for help. God we cannot love ...

Gentled by grace.  That’s the incredible and inspiring story of Abba Moses the Black. He was a violent thief who became a humble and kind monk and one of the great Desert Fathers who served the Lord ...

Merciful God, we humble ourselves in your presence, confessing our unworthiness and our sinfulness in your sight. We have broken your holy law. We have not sought first your kingdom and righteousness....

Heavenly Father, we come before Your throne of grace to confess our sin. We have been selfish instead of generous; we have been proud instead of humble; we have held grudges instead of forgiving; we h...

Elizabeth Elliot's story of forgiveness started in 1956 on the banks of the Curaray River in Ecuador when her husband and four other young missionaries were attacked and killed by members of the H...

Holy Spirit, you have come to reconcile us to each other, but we resist your work to bind us together. We hold onto grudges. Even though we know God has forgiven us in Jesus Christ, we are slow to for...

LORD, too often we live for ourselves instead of how You have called us. Please forgive us for the times when we don’t strive to bring about Your kingdom here and now. Forgive us for the lack of imagi...

The forgiveness of Christ is the foundation of the Christian mission.

God has given us all a message of reconciliation-that God, in Christ, has reconciled the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:18-19). The first place we are invited to practice this reconciliation is wit...

Heavenly Father, forgive us when we become so consumed with the details of life that we do not see the opportunities that you have placed before us. Open our eyes to your call to extend love, by commu...

Every day God patiently bears with us, and every day we are tempted to become impatient with our friends, neighbors, and loved ones. And our faults and failures before God are so much more serious tha...

Pastor: We come before our heavenly Father in the name of the One who is King of kings, His Son, Jesus Christ. At His invitation we pray.  People: Your Kingdom come; Your will be done. P...

Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is th...

Many promising reconciliations have broken down because, while both parties came prepared to forgive, neither party came prepared to be forgiven.

In the second century, a priest from Antioch named Sulpicius had steadfastly refused to sacrifice to the gods, even under torture, and was being led away to be beheaded. As he walked, a Christian name...

Almighty God, we take pride in our self-sufficiency while we look down on the weak who cannot provide for themselves. We praise others for their efforts, yet we demand perfection from our own families...

There’s a story about a traveler making his way with a guide through the jungles of Burma. They came to a shallow but wide river and waded through it to the other side. When the traveler came out of t...

Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans and myself from the community of sinners.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.

Revenge and forgiveness are major themes of Michael Christopher’s play, The Black Angel. In it, Herman Engel is Nazi general responsible for killing over 200 French Jews. Convicted of his crimes by th...

Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.

To forgive oneself”? No, that doesn’t work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we ourselves can forgive.

Ernest Hemingway grasped some of the difficulty that characterizes relationships between fathers and sons in his short story, The Capital of the World . The story revolves around a father and his t...

When we are bitter, we delude ourselves into thinking that those who hurt us are more likely to be punished as long as we are set on revenge. We are afraid to let go of those feelings. After all, if w...