Prayer - The Miraculous Ministry of Mercy

I have enjoyed reading back through the Torah lately.  What a great, and unchanging God we serve!  How precious it is to follow Jesus’ footsteps on each page of this ancient text.  

One of the many devotional thoughts that jumped out at me this time was the way God used the prayers of imperfect fallen individuals.  Think of Moses.  You know that God demonstrated His power in a unique way by plundering Egypt with the ten plagues.  But what jumped out at me this time was not the frogs, but how God used imperfect Moses, multiple times to pray for God to stay His hand.  God wanted Moses to pray in order to placate His plans for destruction in at least four out of the ten plagues.  Read the locust incident. 

“Then Pharaoh hurriedly called for Moses and Aaron, and he said, ‘I have sinned against the LORD your God and against you.  Now therefore, please forgive my sin only this once, and make supplication to the LORD your God, that He would only remove this death from me.’  He went out from Pharaoh and made supplication to the LORD.  So the LORD shifted the wind to a very strong west wind which took up the locusts and drove them into the Red Sea; not one locust was left in all the territory of Egypt (Exodus 10:16-19; see also frogs, 8:8-13; insects, 8:30-31; hail storm 9:27-29)

This activity called prayer is a mystery, and yet what a powerful mystery!  A powerful mystery that taps into God’s mercy.  Pray for mercy.  “The Lord delights in mercy” (Micah 7:18).  Mercy is when we are not given the punishment or outcome you deserve.  It is when God relents to unleash the wrath deserved.  And so God calls us to this ministry of mercy that Moses so faithfully carried out.  Perhaps there are people the Lord would love to show mercy toward in your life and He is waiting for you to pray.  Let’s consider three areas we could pray for mercy:

1.    Pray for God's mercy of regeneration.  Regeneration is a term that refers to being born again (re – born; generation – come to life).  Praying for regeneration is praying that people would know the freeing relationship of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.  Pray that the mercy of the cross would be known by your friends and neighbors and that they would call out for that mercy.  Jesus took what we deserved so that the justice of God could be dealt out by punishing our sin in His Son.  But God so delights in mercy that He lets Himself take our punishment.  The cross is great mercy.

Perhaps the Lord has placed you in someone’s life to beg Him for mercy for their soul.  You may be the instrument for leading that person to Christ, or perhaps you are just the minister of mercy who pleads with God to save them.

2.    Pray for God's mercy of deliverance from sin.  Humans often get caught up in sins that begin to dominate their lives.  These sins are so difficult.  They are chains.  And yet, if we are honest, these are sins that we choose to give our lives to.  And so the chains are deserved.  The grip of bitterness, the powerful draw of withdraw from addiction, the power-hungry appetite at work that is never satisfied, the tangled, iron web of the lie are but a few of the powerful, life-dominating sins that distort our view of life and steal our delight in God. 

Perhaps the Lord is placing someone’s soul in your mind now who you know is gripped with one of these sins.  You know it is hindering them spiritually.  Commit to crying out to God for mercy.  They don’t deserve release, but God is able to release them. 

God used Moses’s intersession to save Israel from God’s chastening hand on several occasions.  When Moses came down from receiving the Law, Israel had already broken the Ten Commandments in an extreme way – fashioning a false god, and worshiping that god as Jehovah.  And God wanted to destroy them.  But He had mercy upon them because Moses prayed. 

"I fell down before the LORD, as at the first, forty days and nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all your sin which you had committed in doing what was evil in the sight of the LORD to provoke Him to anger.  For I was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure with which the LORD was wrathful against you in order to destroy you, but the LORD listened to me that time also” (Deuteronomy 9:18-19).

This happened at least two other times as well.  In Numbers 11:2, and in Numbers 21:7, Israel was trapped in sin and Moses had to intercede for them for God’s mercy to be shown to them. 

“The LORD sent fiery serpents among the people and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.  So the people came to Moses and said, 'We have sinned, because we have spoken against the LORD and you; intercede with the LORD, that He may remove the serpents from us.'  And Moses interceded for the people” (Numbers 21:6-7).

3.    Pray for God's mercy of patience with our culture.  Cultures go as cultures go.  And most cultures go the way humanity has gone since the fall in the Garden of Eden-from lawlessness to greater lawlessness.  Throughout the pages of Scripture, we read of God’s continual judgment on cultures that drift from the rules that He has set up as our Creator.  We live in such a culture.  I live in such a community.  We could decry this, or we could cry out to God for mercy.  Let’s choose the latter.  Pray for God to show mercy on our communities to awaken them to His Gospel through His Word. 

Let’s take our responsibility to pray for mercy seriously.  “The Lord did according to the word of Moses.”  And He might show the same type of mercy as we pray.  This is the ministry of mercy - people who have been shown great mercy, asking for great mercy on others who are in need of the same mercy.