One nice thing about being a researcher is that God's given me hours upon hours each week to meditate on sermons and music from great pastors, speakers and artists while I'm on the clock. So this week I was listening to some great audio from the "Marriage and the Mercy of God" conference (audio is in the link).
I am not married, but I think that the teaching was super helpful in thinking about what does it look like to be impacted by the mercy of God to me in all of my everyday relationships. (For which it doesn't matter if you're married or not)
But in Dr. Tripp's message he gave the analogy that we are soaked in God's grace. It's almost like we are soaked to the point of wearing a sweaty, soggy sweatshirt soaked in God's grace and we just need to look around and see how to get other people "wet."
Now apart from the great humor of that image (like me running around my lab here in a sweaty sweatshirt trying to get my coworkers wet), it's a good image. There really is no "trick" to us "doing" mercy to others. God has supremely showered us and shown us mercy in Christ. Being merciful is just showering people with what we've already been showered with.
That's really helpful especially to me as I struggle with how to share the Gospel with my coworkers (and some of us have worked together for a few years now!) I can blame it on the language and cultural barriers, but in the end am I really loving and showing mercy to my coworkers? Would sharing the Gospel with them be more beneficial using mercy shown to them as a starting point?
Just some of my thoughts while I'm on break. I'd also encourage you listening to the messages too (single or married) as the underlying teaching on mercy would edify us all. Plus since I didn't have a transcript and was going off of memory of Dr. Tripp's analogy too I probably butchered it so go and listen to it there for the full analogy!
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