How are your strength levels today? Has life thrown a few curve balls and unexpected challenges your way lately? Has that dream God placed in your spirit become buried under the silt of care and confusion? Then this is for you! Still your heart and quiet your spirit as you read this today and receive the Power of His Word!
“So now we come freely and boldly to where love is enthroned, to receive mercy’s kiss and discover the grace we urgently need to strengthen us in our time of weakness.” Hebrews 4:16 TPT
“Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” HEBREWS 4:16 NASB
How are your strength levels today? Has life thrown a few curve balls and unexpected challenges your way lately? Has that dream God placed in your spirit become buried under the silt of care and confusion? Then this is for you! Still your heart and quiet your spirit as you read this today and receive the power of His Word.
Draw near to the the place where grace is enthroned. This throne belongs to grace. It’s the throne OF grace. This grace is embodied in a person. John writes about this person when he speaks of Jesus and refers to Him as full of grace and truth. “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
John 1:14 NASB. God’s glory is the display of His nature or characteristics…the thing we base someone’s reputation on.
The Passion Translation adds a beautiful genre to this throne of grace by calling it the place ‘where love is enthroned’. God is love. Isn’t this beautiful?
We desperately need this grace. We sometimes confuse the grace and mercy of God. Grace is not the forgiving side of God, that’s mercy. It’s rather the empowering, enabling, or ‘gracing’ of our humanity by the almighty God. 1 Corinthians 12 lists some of these ‘gracings’ we call gifts – and they are gifts in a sense because we don’t earn or pay for them. I’ll write on this in more detail soon. We don’t hear much about the gifts of the Spirit these days and when we do they are referred to as kind of intrinsic qualities we have and need to develop.
We need this grace for our weakness and times of need, both common and constant to us humans, but we can’t lay hold of it and use it until we obtain mercy. So what is this mercy? It’s based on the covenant God has made with us through the seed of Abraham…through Jesus Christ. It’s covenant-loyalty, covenant-love” it stems from the OT, where “mercy” is defined by loyalty to God’s covenant. Jesus keptHis side of the covenant on the cross for us and by us being in Him we become partners and partakers in the mercy of God. We receive this mercy through the finished work of Christ on the cross. That’s why we can come boldly and confidently to this throne. To the one who has already dispensed His mercy and forgiveness over us, and then find the empowering enabling grace of God to HELP us and strengthen us in our time of weakness and need.
Love you, Lindsay
