At the end of a very full week, I need to hear again that God’s rich mercy is for me. Perhaps you do as well. These words are worth pondering. Listen to this reminder of the precious mercy of God.
… every human being who longs to know God lives with the tension between grace and works. On one hand, we long to believe that God comes to us as we are, utterly unimpressed by the tricks we do for love. On the other hand, we live in a world where those tricks often work really well, so that it is next to impossible to give up believing in them too. Follow us around for a day or two and you may discover what we believe most by how we act.
… I may believe that my life depends on God’s grace but I act like it depends on me and how many good deeds I can perform, as if every day were a talent show and God had nothing better to do than keep up with my score.
Do you know what I mean? Human beings have a perverse way of turning Jesus’ easy yoke back into a hard one again, by driving ourselves to do, do, do more and whipping ourselves to be, be, be more when all God has ever asked is that we belong to him. That comes first; everything else follows that, but we so often get the order reversed …. We are still loaded down, not only by our jobs and our families and all our other responsibilities but by something deeper down in us, something that keeps telling us we must do more, be better, try harder, prove ourselves worthy or we will never earn God’s love. It is the most tiring work in the world and it is never done.
(Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven, pp. 19-20)