The Mercy of God

As odd as it may sound, my favorite part of the liturgy is the Confession. To stand before the Father—along with my brothers and sisters—​and confess my weakness, my fallibility, my utter and complete helplessness without Him, my inability to live and love in healthy and redemptive ways if it were not for His Spirit’s graceful and patient guidance, to place again all my hope in Christ’s righteousness rather than my own, this is the summation of my faith.

I am a beggar before God. No matter how many years pass, no matter how much I grow in faithfulness, I will never move beyond the position of a man with his hands held out in need of the grace of God.

And praise God that, in His mercy, He is a God for beggars.

Quite possibly the best indicator of the upside-down nature of the way of Christ is that many of those who we consider giants of the faith saw themselves as beggars.

In his dying moments, Martin Luther was asked by a friend, “Do you want to die standing firm on Christ and the doctrine you have taught?” Luther responded, “Yes!” He then muttered his last words: “We are beggars. This is true.”

According to Charles Spurgeon, to share the Good News is just “one beggar telling another beggar where to get bread.”

Taking his cue from Spurgeon, Brennan Manning wrote, “The Good News of the gospel of grace cries out: We are all, equally, privileged but unentitled beggars at the door of God’s mercy!”

We live in a time of much division and talk of identity; we can distinguish ourselves from one another in any number of ways: man/woman, black/white, progressive/conservative, rich/poor. But at the end of the day none of those things lies deepest at the core of who we are. In fact, the truest thing that could be said about any one of us is just that which Martin Luther confessed with his final breath: we are beggars.

That is why I love the time of Confession. It is the ultimate reminder of who I am and who God is.

In response to the nagging question of identity, theologian Gordon Lathrop encourages, “Reoriented by the gospel, by the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ held out in Word and Sacrament, the answer can be, I am a woman, I am a man, who stands before God’s mercy with all the other beggars.”

I say again, praise God who in His mercy is a God for beggars, a God whose provision always and eternally exceeds our request, a God whose eagerness to give always and eternally outweighs our willingness to ask.

In Matthew 7, Jesus likens this idea to an earthly father responding kindly to his son’s request for bread. If we know how to give good gifts to our children, Jesus says, “how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

Therefore, fellow beggars and children of God, let us stand up together again and again to confess and to ask of our Father, and then to receive a thousand-fold the mercy of God.

Credits

Words & Music: Bill Wolf