E&W 5-19-13

Sacred Story

Encouragements & Wisdom: May 19, 2013
Pentecost Sunday

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Encouragements and Wisdom: May 19, 2013 (PDF).

E & W reflections are additional helps for your Sacred Story prayer journey. Reflect on them at the beginning of the week or outside of your fifteen-minute prayer windows.

Mercy

Last week, we reflected on Mercy as a quality of God’s love that encompasses compassion, tenderness and patience. Our second reflection invites us to consider this unique quality of love in light of our failings and sin. God created human persons as sinless, perfect beings. Our rejection of God, and the sin and death that resulted, inspired God’s Mercy to help humanity regain what was lost. God’s mercy goes beyond merely tolerating my sinful identity—an identity which results from sin’s evolution in my history. God’s Mercy, through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, has destroyed sin and death. In this Mercy, I have the courage to reject my sinful identity, no matter how I have defined it, and by the Spirit’s power, find forgiveness of my sins, becoming a new creation in Christ.

Jesus does not merely tolerate the woman caught in adultery, but by showing Mercy, gives her the strength to “go…and not sin anymore.” Jn 8: 11. It is God’s Mercy in Jesus that gives us the courage to change long-standing patterns of sin that have marred our human nature. And it is the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection that wipes away the effects of that sinful identity and transforms us, redeeming our fallen human nature.

Oh God, you are merciful and compassionate. Send us your Spirit and inspire us to turn to you at all times. Give us a personal knowledge of your Merciful love in light of our need to be forgiven and transformed into a new creation. Help us to not lose hope due to our broken human nature, but to trust in your forgiveness to be transformed into a new creation. Help us, so that all our thoughts, words and deeds are shaped by Your Creation, Presence, Memory, Mercy and Eternity.

If you take away their breath, they perish
and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth.
Lord, send out your Spirit, and
Renew the face of the earth.

(Psalm 104: 31, 34)

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