The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

The Lord is good to all. And his mercy is over all that he has made.

Welcome back to the morning mindset, my friends. Carrie Green here.

I wanted to start with that passage. I wanted it to be the very first

thing you heard of the morning mindset today because it is such a majestic few

verses from Psalm chapter 145. It puts our focus exactly where it should be

on our God first thing in the morning today.

Now there are some words used in those two verses that we in the church hear quite often

words like gracious and merciful and steadfast love and I think it's good for us to be reminded

what those words mean on a very very basic level so let's dive in.

Verse number 8 says,

the Lord is gracious and merciful.

So it's using two words together

that are often kind of confused with each other at least in my

experience has been this way to see that people confuse these gracious means that

God helps us essentially when we're undeserving of help. His grace is to extend

something to us that we did not work for. We did not deserve and yet he's doing it for us for

our benefit. That's what gracious is. So when the Lord is gracious he's giving us help that's really the most

simple way I've come to think about it so he's done this in so many ways and

most of all he's done this through sending Jesus Christ to die for our sin.

That is the demonstration of his graciousness to us.

But it also says the Lord is merciful.

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