God’s Hope for Your Heart from Psalm 40
GOD THINKS OF YOU WITH MERCY
As for You, O Lord, You will not restrain Your mercy from me; Your steadfast love and Your faithfulness will ever preserve me! … As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me. (Psalm 40:11, 17a)
David was a man who knew his need. He was a man who felt the weight of his failure and sin. David was a man who was well aware of just how far short he fell of God’s perfect standards.
How about you?
Do you know the depth of your need and feel the weight of your sin? Do you recognize just how great a gap there is between your performance and God’s perfection?
David did, but David also knew something else that made all the difference in his life.
He knew that because he was a member of God’s covenant people, the default position of God’s heart towards him wasn’t punishment, but mercy. David knew that God thought about him all the time, and when He did, God’s thoughts weren’t filled with anger and judgment, but with grace and love.
How about you?
If you are a member of God’s covenant people through faith in Christ, it doesn’t matter what you have done or failed to do. It doesn’t matter how far short you’ve fallen of God’s perfect standards. It doesn’t matter what sins you’ve committed or how wrong your life has been, because if you’re in Christ, God looks at you through the lenses of His perfection.
That means that God thinks of you regularly, and when He does, it’s not with anger or disappointment, and it’s not to figure out ways to make you pay for what you’ve done.
Jesus paid it all for you, and that means that even when you feel the most undeserving, you can have hope in this soul-freeing truth: God thinks of you with mercy.
-Pastor Phillip
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