When Extending Mercy Is Hard to Do

August 4, 2025/Le Ann Trees/
Photo Credit: Kobus Louw / iStock.com

Photo Credit: Kobus Louw / iStock.com

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning Beautiful Christian Life LLC may get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through its links, at no cost to you.

“Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” (Luke 6:36)

While it can be easy to meld the act of mercy with the act of grace, grace doesn’t always include mercy. We might not deserve an amazing blessing, such as a wonderful spouse or an extraordinary job opportunity, but God gives them to us anyway. Yet, when it comes to our state before God outside of Christ, we need the grace that includes God’s mercy. Similarly, it is often the case that we need to extend grace that encompasses mercy to other people in our lives, and hope they do the same for us.

God’s mercy is essential for our salvation.

We are all guilty in Adam. Why is this so? The answer is that Adam represented all humanity in the garden of Eden, and what Adam earned—either life or death—would also be received by everyone who came after him.

Because of Adam’s disobedience and fall, all people bear Adam’s guilt, because Adam represented all humanity. Furthermore, Adam’s sin caused the corruption of his nature, and all his posterity—including you and me—would now bear that same sinful nature.

The term original sin describes this present state of humanity’s guilt because of Adam’s sin. The corrupt nature we inherited from Adam also causes us to heap even more condemnation on ourselves due to the sins we each commit from birth until death.

Thus, God’s grace in saving us by the finished work of Christ on our behalf must encompass his mercy. We not only need Christ’s righteousness counted to us, but we also need Christ’s perfect once-for-all sacrifice for sin counted to us. Why? Because in extending his mercy to us, God still needs to uphold his attributes of righteousness and justice. Jesus mercifully took our punishment upon himself so that we would be redeemed from the just penalty for our guilt and sin.

In daily life we have many opportunities to extend mercy to others.

When we feel wronged by someone, our sinful, self-centered human natures gravitate to making a courtroom of sorts in our minds and hearts. We make a judgment of what the person has done, or not done, and then we proceed to give a “suitable” sentence, some kind of “punishment” according to our own sense of justice. Perhaps we decide not to speak to the person for a while, exclude them from certain aspects of our life, or even to cut off the friendship altogether. Sometimes people seek “online justice,” sharing the offenses of the person or company publicly in order to derive some kind of justice and/or accountability by at least exposing their supposed wrongs against us. We may even decide to initiate legal proceedings to achieve the justice we believe the offense deserves.

While there are times when it is entirely appropriate and necessary to pursue legal recourse or bring the truth to light online, neither course of action should be taken lightly or rashly. We must search our hearts and consider whether we are in a situation where God wants us to extend mercy as we have been extended mercy by him. We need to consider our own sinful acts in which God and other people showed mercy to us and determine the wisest course going forward according to Scripture and godly counsel.

The cross helps us to keep our suffering in perspective so we can extend mercy with grateful hearts.

We don’t want to be like the man in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, who was forgiven an unrepayable debt by his master and then refused to forgive someone who owed him a small amount and threw him into a debtor’s prison (Matt. 18:21-35). When our feelings of being wronged overwhelm us and begin to harden our hearts, we need to look to the cross and remember how much God the Son suffered so that we would be forgiven. The suffering we often bear in terms of our pride being wounded or our hearts being broken cannot compare to the suffering our Lord experienced—even to the point of being forsaken by the Father on the cross—and all that suffering was for us so that we could receive God’s mercy in Christ our Savior.

Someone once told me that we don’t really know what is going on in the private lives of others. We don’t know their thoughts, what personal battles they are fighting, and the particular circumstances that influence the way they think and act. It’s good to see people in their best light as much as possible, while at the same time exercising wisdom in our assessment of any given relationship or situation. Often, it is the wisest course to withhold our judgment for the time being, remove ourselves from being “judge, jury, and executioner” in our minds, and instead begin with looking to Christ and all he has done for us.

May we keep the gospel at the center of our thoughts and actions and continually strive to show mercy to others in light of God’s mercy shown to us in Christ Jesus.

This article was originally published under the title “Extending Mercy with Grateful Hearts” in Beautiful Christian Life’s November 2024 monthly newsletter, “Mercy.”

Putting Amazing Back into Grace: Embracing the Heart of the Gospel by Michael Horton