New Morning Mercies

The Possibility of Faith

Paul Tripp guides our thinking regarding faith…

God hasn’t just forgiven you—praise him that he has—but he has also called you to a brand-new way of living. He has called you to live by faith. Now, here’s the rub. Faith is not normal for us. Faith is frankly a counterintuitive way for us to live. Doubt is quite natural for us. Wondering what God is doing is natural. It’s normal to think your life is harder than that of others. Envying the life of someone else is natural. Wishing life were easier and that you had more control is natural. It’s typical for you and me to try to figure out the future. Worry is natural. Fear is natural. Wanting to give up is natural. It’s natural to wonder if all of your good habits make a difference in the end. It’s normal to be occasionally haunted by the question of whether what you have staked your life on is really true. But faith isn’t natural.

This means that faith isn’t something you can work up inside yourself. Faith comes to you as God’s gift of grace: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). Not only is your salvation a gift of God, but the faith to embrace it is his gift as well. But here is what you need to understand: God not only gives you the grace to believe for your salvation, but he also works to enable you to live by faith. If you are living by faith, you know that you have been visited by powerful transforming grace, because that way of living just isn’t normal for you and me. If your way of living is no longer based on what your eyes can see and your mind can understand, but on God’s presence, promises, principles, and provisions, it is because God has crafted faith in you.

Could it be that all of those things that come your way that confuse you and that you never would’ve chosen for yourself are God’s tools to build your faith? By progressive transforming grace, he is enabling you to live the brand-new life he calls all of his children to live—the Godward life for which you were created. You don’t have to hide in guilt when weak faith gets you off the path, because your hope in life isn’t your faithfulness, but his. You can run in weakness and once again seek his strength. And you can know that in zealous grace he will not leave his craftwork until faith fully rules your heart unchallenged. He always gives freely what we need in order to do what he has called us to do.

Paul David Tripp, New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 53.

Hope for Today and Tomorrow

From Paul Tripp’s daily devotional book, New Morning Mercies, some words of encouragement for those struggling with the past:

Quit being paralyzed by your past. Grace offers you life in the present and a guarantee of a future. It is a simple fact of nature that once the leaves are off the tree, you cannot put them back again. Once you have uttered words, you cannot rip them out of another’s hearing. Once you have acted on a choice, you cannot relive that moment again. Once you have behaved in a certain way at a certain time, you cannot ask for a redo. You and I just don’t have the option of reliving our past to try to do better any more than we have the power to glue the leaves back on the tree and make them live once again. What’s done is done and cannot be redone.

But we all wish we could live certain moments and certain decisions over again. If you’re at all humble and able to look back on your past with a degree of accuracy, you experience regret. None of us has always desired the right thing. None of us has always made the best decision. None of us has always been humble, kind, and loving. We haven’t always jumped to serve and forgive. None of us has always spoken the truth. None of us has been free of anger, envy, or vengeance. None of us has walked through life with unblemished nobility. None of us. So all of us have reason for remorse and regret. All of us are left with the sadness of what has been done and can’t be undone.

That’s why all of us should daily celebrate the grace that frees us from the regret of the past. This freedom is not the freedom of retraction or denial. It’s not the freedom of rewriting our history. No, it’s the freedom of forgiving and transforming grace. This grace welcomes me to live with hope in the present because it frees me to leave my past behind. All of what I look back on and would like to redo has been fully covered by the blood of Jesus. I no longer need to carry the burden of the past on my shoulders, so I am free to fully give myself to what God has called me to in the here and now. “But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13–14).

Are you paralyzed by your past? Are you living under the dark shroud of the “if-onlys”? Does your past influence your present more than God’s past, present, and future grace? Have you received and are you living out of the forgiveness that is yours because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus? For further study and encouragement: Jeremiah 29:1–14

Paul David Tripp, New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 49.

Mercy

From this morning’s reading of New Morning Mercies by Paul Tripp:

“Mercy for others will reveal your ongoing need for mercy, driving you to the end of yourself and into the arms of your merciful Savior.
It’s simply not natural for us. It’s natural to make sure all your needs are met. It’s natural to hoard what you have in the fear that at some point you won’t have enough. It’s natural to carry around with you a long catalog of things you want for yourself. It’s natural to be more in tune with your feelings than with the feelings of others. It’s natural to want mercy for yourself but justice for others. It’s natural to be very aware of the sin of others, yet blind to your own. If we are ever going to be people of mercy, we need bountiful mercy ourselves, because what stands in the way of our being a community of mercy is us!

It’s impossible for me to think about God’s call to us to be his instruments of mercy and not reflect on Jesus’s powerful parable in Matthew 18:21–35. Please stop and read it right now. Christ had two reasons for telling this story. The first was to reveal the heart behind Peter’s question: “All right, Lord, how many times do I have to forgive?” This question evidenced a heart that lacked mercy. Christ’s second reason for telling this story was to reveal our hearts. You see, we’re all the unjust servant. We celebrate God’s mercy but scream at our children when they mess up. We sing of amazing grace but punish our spouses with silence when they offend us. We praise God for his love but forsake a friendship because someone has been momentarily disloyal. We are thankful that we’ve been forgiven but say that a person who is suffering the result of his decisions is getting what he deserves. We bask in God’s grace but throw the law at others. We’re simply not that good at mercy because we tend to see ourselves as more deserving than the poor and needy.

But when God’s call of mercy collides with your lack of mercy, you begin to see yourself with accuracy. You begin to confess that you don’t have inside you what God requires. You begin to admit to yourself and others that you cannot live up to God’s standard, so you begin to cry out for the very thing that you have refused to give to others. And as you begin to remember that God’s mercy is your only hope and you meditate on the grandeur of the mercy that has been showered on you, you begin to want to help others experience that same mercy. You see, to the degree that you forget the mercy you’ve been given, it is easier for you to not give mercy to others. I daily need God’s work of mercy in order to do his work of mercy.”