“Pastor, I’ve been praying to God to have mercy on me and advance my destiny, but He seems not to be responding. What do I do?”
I’ve said this before, God’s mercy is not for advancement, it’s for compassion. God may have compassion on you and deliver you from a challenge, but He certainly won’t advance you beyond that level because He knows you couldn’t excel beyond that level.
If you want to advance your life as a Christian, then the condition is to live by faith, not by mercy. This was mentioned in three different books of the Bible; Hebrews, Galations, and Romans, “the just shall live by faith”. Trying to live your Christian life through any other means may frustrate you.
The dictionary defines mercy as the compassionate treatment of those in distress, especially when it is within one’s power to punish or harm them. The word “mercy” is derived from the medieval Latin words “Merced” or “merces”, which means “price paid”. It has the connotation of forgiveness, benevolence and kindness.
Asides the dictionary, if you read the bible, you’d realize that mercy is often used whenever issues like weakness, forgiveness and destruction are discussed. But when it comes to faith, the discussions or records are always progressive in nature.
As a Christian, you’re not living life until you begin to live by faith. Unfortunately, many Christians are living on mercy. During Jesus’s earthly ministry, people mostly sought for his mercy anytime they reached out to him for help, and many of those times, he had a way of introducing faith to the situation. For instance, in Matthew chapter 9, when two blind men cried to him for mercy, he quickly asked them if they believed he could heal them. The moment they believed, he touched their eyes and said, “Be it unto you according to their faith”. The next thing we read was that those blind men were healed, in other words, their faith worked.
Could it be that you’ve been living your life on mercy and expecting God to advance your life? We need to understand that we are in a fight with the powers of darkness, and the only way we can excel is if we fight the good fight of faith. At the end of your life, the records that would be written about you would not be how you lived on mercy, but the things you achieved through faith.
Read your Bible, I’m not sure you’d find any record of people who rose to greatness by mercy alone, yet, you’d find records of heroes of faith.
What is faith? It is simply acting on God’s word till it begins to work in you, through you, and around you. So when you find sickness in your body, don’t be too quick to pray for mercy, search the scriptures and act on the revelations you catch until your healing is established. That way, you’d never be scared of falling sick, because you’d know exactly what to do to be healed. Instead of crying for mercy for God to advance your destiny, go and start something, no matter how little. While you’re at it, act on God’s word every step of the way.
Don’t get me wrong, mercy is very powerful. It’s God’s fail-safe system for our faith. This means that when our faith fails, mercy will sustain us so that we would not be consumed. Now you’d understand Lamentations 3:22, it says “it is of the Lord’s mercy that we are not consumed”. Mercy will keep you from being consumed. Let me show you a scripture;
Romans 11:
29 For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.
30 For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief:
31 Even so have these also now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy.
32 For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all.
Did you see that? They obtained mercy through their unbelief. Which means mercy is automatically activated when unbelief is present in our lives. So all those days you couldn’t stand up in faith to pray, mercy covered you. All those days you decided to put your trust in man over something that God can do, mercy covered you. Mercy covered you every time you came short on faith.
Let me conclude with this, any Christian that is not living in faith and has not been consumed is only enjoying God’s mercy. The danger of living on mercy alone is that he may not maximize is full Christian potentials. Our potentials as Christians can only be maximized when we live by faith. So, start living by faith.
I hope this has brought enlightenment to someone.
Remain ever blessed, in Jesus precious name!
#EmekaAnslem
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