Good morning my friends and welcome back to the morning mindset. Are you ready

to get your mind right for the day? I mean let's not think too far in advance.

Let's not go to tomorrow or next week even though there may be

things coming up on the horizon that you're excited about. Let's not get too far ahead

because you and I need to live this day in a way that brings glory to our God and Savior Jesus Christ and brings good into the lives of those around us.

That's what we need. And getting our minds oriented in that direction here at

the start of the day is vital to seeing that happen. It's the way that we get ourselves on track to follow God's lead

all throughout the day. So we've been doing that most recently by looking at the

Beatitudes, the sayings that Jesus said in his sermon on the mount that

have become somewhat famous. They're the Blessed R statements. And today I wanted to look at verse number 7. It says

Bless are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Now it just begs the question, what is mercy?

Do we understand what mercy is? You see sometimes we get these ideas of grace and

mercy a little confused and I've found a way that works for me that I want to share

with you here for keeping those two separate in terms of their

meanings.

See, grace is when we are given something that we don't deserve.

Like God's favor, like God's love, like God's forgiveness, that is

grace. God gives to us something that we don't deserve and in those cases never could deserve.

He's just very gracious. Mercy seems to me comes before that. Mercy is not giving us something that we do deserve, like condemnation

and punishment and chastisement for being sinners.

You see God has every right to bring those things on us,

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