S01 Ep 04-WW

The Wisdom Workshop Podcast, Episode 4 by Stephanie Oliver focuses on the importance of showing mercy as a challenging but essential aspect of Christian faith. Through biblical references, personal experiences, and theological insights, Stephanie emphasizes the need for believers to exhibit mercy in the face of injustice and wrongs, reflecting the unconditional love and forgiveness of God. She shares a poignant story of forgiveness towards a business partner, highlighting how mercy triumphs over judgment and leads to spiritual growth and renewal. Stephanie stresses that showing mercy is a sign of strength, wisdom, and trust in God's ability to bring about justice. Wisdom Workshop Podcast, Episode 4 Hello, my name is Stephanie Oliver. I'm an author, speaker, life coach, pastoral counselor, and your host for the Wisdom Workshop Podcast. I'm so glad that you are joining me today. I want to start with a particular set of verses out of the book of James that highlight our topic for today. James 2.13 says, For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. James 3.17 says, But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy, and good fruits, impartial and sincere. James 5.11 says, Behold, we consider those blessed who remain steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful. Well, you may have already guessed it, but today I want to talk about mercy. I think it's one of the most difficult practices of our Christian faith is to show mercy in the face of injustice and wrong. You know, Psalm 103, Chapter 103, Psalm 103, verses 2 through 4 and verse 8 says, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy. The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. That passage reminds me that it is God's plan, purpose, and will for our lives for us to live with mercy, for us to live in relationship with others, according not only to his mercy towards us, but with the capacity to exercise it toward others. I have lately been in this space of just trying to take in and grow in my own acceptance of God's character in the midst of hard times. All right, I've lately been in this space of really trying to take in and grow in my acceptance of God's character in the midst of hard times. I'm trying to forge this new life after loss, and I'm really trying to help other people do the same, but in my effort to figure out how to stay in a place of hope and joy and not lose momentum and be resilient and get back up, I think one of the toughest lessons I've had to walk through, and I think I'm walking through it in many ways now, is to maintain a heart that is forgiving and merciful, to exercise the mercy of God toward people who honestly, I sometimes feel like just don't deserve it. So I realized that as soon as I started to focus on this in my own life, I also became painfully aware of how unmerciful all the other people around me can be. And so I thought, wow, we really have a struggle in the body of Christ with showing mercy, like the judgment is strong with Christians. So I thought, Lord, this is something we can really talk about and just learn to grow and become like you describe yourself to be in Psalm 103 and receive what it says you've given us with this crown of steadfast love and mercy. I think mercy is the thing that proves your love is steadfast when you can love people that aren't lovely. So let's keep going. I'm not saying that God's asking us to be doormats or have weak boundaries or let people walk all over us. I just think as believers, we're the image of Christ. We're his representation in the earth, and somewhere the mercy of God has to be seen in our life. And it's not just a thing like we receive the mercy of God. It's the fact that we're called to show that same mercy toward others. So here's the question of the day. Why is it so hard for people to be merciful? And if you. So here is the question of the day. Why is it so hard for people to be merciful? Well, one theologian said to be merciful is hard because it requires us to return true justice, not just petty retribution. And we do this by discerning how to call out the wrongs done in a respectful, compassionate way, but also to love the person in spite of the wrongdoings he or she did. That's an interesting take. Father Coy wrote that in an effort to expound on John 1928. But listen to what he's saying. He's saying mercy is hard because it requires us to put the petty pencil down. We cannot be petty and be Christlike. We cannot be concerned more with people getting what they deserve for the things they've done wrong than we are with for the love of more concern for the love of Christ. I hope I said that right. We have to be more attuned to the love of Christ at work in our heart and for others than we do the fact that we've been done wrong and the injury we've suffered. That's hard for us as humans. I think we need to understand the meaning of mercy. So mercy basically means compassion or forgiveness shown towards someone when who's actually within our power to punish or harm. And this is not in the Webster definition, but I think there's this element of they deserve the punishment or the harm. They did the crime. They deserve the punishment and the harm. But mercy is God's way of letting us know that love can be unconditional and that love can be something that's more powerful than even our wrongs. And so everybody likes being on the receiving end of mercy, but I just want to sit for a minute and consider what it might look like for us to be on the giving end. So I want to share this story. Several years ago, I was starting a new business and I started out with a business partner that I thought was going to be with me like long term and halfway through the first year. She decided that she wanted to do the same thing, but on her own. And I was like blown away. I was upset. I was angry. I felt betrayed. I was like, this lady sat with me and took every good idea I had and then decided to try and build a competitive business like a competitor on my own. And I've worked in leadership in a lot of contexts. I've started other businesses. I have a nonprofit that I run. You know, this is not my first rodeo and I consider myself to be a fairly decent judge of like people's capacity and character. I didn't see this Judas coming. This lady took these ideas, went on and started the same thing not too far up the road. You can only imagine how I felt. I started praying like Davidic prayers, like Lord Smider, fix it. And the Holy Spirit got ahold of me one night in prayer and said, listen, you have to be merciful. You have to understand there are things at work beyond just her connection with you. And I see all of it. And I thought, yeah, well, you see it and you got to do something about it. But the reality is around that same time, I remember hearing about a sermon about how Jesus washed Judas feet just like he did Peter and John. And that thought hit hard. I mean, I literally could feel the lump rising in my throat. And I remember some time like for a few weeks after that, just crying before the Lord, pouring out the negative. I feel like emotion of wanting to get even and not wanting them to succeed and releasing that to the Lord and laying before him with it until he took all the hurt that was in me. And one day I went down to pray and I had nothing but compassion for this person. It was like the Holy Spirit began to give me a glimpse of what it was like to be that person. And I remember this anger that I felt before it started to be eclipsed by the Lord's instruction to be merciful. Over the course of the next several months, the Lord walked me through a number of serving opportunities where I had to help this lady and I had to help her. I had to, you know, coach her a little on how to do better at what she was doing. And believe you me, I couldn't believe that I was sitting across that time from her giving her tips on how to do this business better. But the thing is that the Lord understood that it was his mercy demonstrated through my life that was going to give her an opportunity to reconnect with him and his plan for her. She's not in that business today. The Lord moved her on to different and better things, and we actually have a decent relationship. Imagine if I had sat in pettiness. Imagine if I had just decided, Nope, I'm going to keep tabs. I'm never going to forget. I'm going to forgive her, but I'm just never going to act like this is okay. I would have missed out on the blessing of knowing God's heart for her. The blessing of being renewed in my own spirit and becoming more like Christ. Here's what I learned. Mercy triumphing over judgment requires supernatural help from a supernatural God. It requires extra doses of the fruit of the Holy Spirit. And by allowing the fruit of the Spirit to be my standard of operandus, like my modus operandus, I was able to practice the kind of mercy toward somebody else that God had given to me. And that not only brought me to freedom and healing, it did the same for that person. And so you might be wondering, like, exactly, like, really, how did you do that? And what did that look like? Well, I want to talk more about it, but let's pause for a minute for our wisdom win and get together about it on the other side. All right, we're back. We're back on the wonderful subject of mercy. So I want to tell you, mercy in the life of a believer is a big deal. Being merciful, it's really a mark of our faith and trust that God's bigger than we are and better able to balance the scales of justice than we ever could. I think so many times we get stuck when God calls us to be merciful because we feel like I can do a better job of making this right than you are doing, Lord. And so we have to step back and remember, he's bigger and he's better, and he's going to do a better job of balancing things than we are. You know, mercy, showing mercy is not weakness. Remember, James tells us it's the wisdom of God at work in us. Mercy is strength that restores. It's love that confronts without crushing. And it's grace that tells the truth, but it keeps the door open. So it's truth with love, right? So I have a little acronym for mercy or a little, I guess, five points about mercy that's tied to the word mercy that I want to share. Mercy is going to be something that's initiated by God. I just don't think humans in all of our iniquitous capacity will choose to be merciful. We want justice. That's just how we are. And the narrative I think about that matches with that is I think about Hosea and Gomer. Honestly, I always, always consider Hosea's situation. And I wonder if I would have just disobeyed and died. His situation was ruthless. Gomer was a hot mess. God keeps telling Hosea, go again, go again. Love this woman. Love when you feel like it's foolish. Love when it costs you everything. Go get her. Keep redeeming her. Mercy pursues her. The mercy of God at work in Hosea's heart pursued this wild woman. And the funny thing about it is the whole purpose of the narrative and the whole purpose of God using his life in this way was to demonstrate that it didn't matter what Israel did. It doesn't matter what we do. God's love for us is always moving toward us. And he is always prepared to make the first move if we give him our attention. You know what else I realize? Even when trust is broken, mercy makes repair possible. Without the mercy of God, somebody has to be merciful. Without the mercy of God, broken trust, broken relationships, they just can't be repaired. Look at Hosea 3.1. He says, go again. Love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Who chooses that? But that's the mercy of God. That's the demonstration that mercy triumphs no matter what. I think some of us feel unworthy of God's love and God's pursuit of us. And we need to realize that God's the one who initiates this pursuit. He loves you and his love is proactive, not reactive. He's not reacting to all of your sin and all of your wrongs. He's really responding to this overwhelming love he has for you, the one he created. Let me look at the second letter of mercy. It's E. And it really is where we're able to expose wrongdoing without abandoning the person. You know, I think about John 8 where Jesus had the woman caught in adultery. He was with the woman caught in adultery and she was publicly exposed. She was vulnerable. I mean, the accusation wasn't wrong. But Jesus, he doesn't deny the truth of her situation. He's like, yeah, okay, so she's an adulteress. But he refuses to let the exposure become destruction. Now listen to me specifically, specifically about this narrative. He does not condemn her in his exposure. I remember this trend was going around socials for a while. It was like everybody's like expose them, expose them. And the funny thing about it is in all of this exposure, there was nothing but judgment. There was no opportunity for healing and restoration. There was nothing but condemnation. And it was like we wanted to see these people suffer and die. And I recognize that's a response of our pain. That is not the love of God. The love of God is to see people healed and changed. And yes, I understand some people will never change. And there are consequences for that. I recognize hell is real and people have the capacity to choose it. But God's love is greater than all of that. And if we choose to allow it in and accept it, even if he exposes what we've done wrong, we're never abandoned in that process. So mercy triumphs because God sees the truth. But even in the midst of that, he stays. I used to tell people he knows me and he loves me anyway. And I think we need to learn to sit in that. God knows me and he loves me anyway. So let's move on to the R. R is to be restored with dignity. So we think about these two stories that I've been sitting in that speak of mercy. It's Jose and Gomer, Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. Gomer is brought back. She's not thrown away. She's restored. And the woman is spoken to, not spoken about. Mercy restores identity and dignity, not just change their behavior. We're not exercising mercy because we want to see these people do different. Yes, we want to see the people live differently. We want to see them make better choices. We want them to bring repair and healing and apologize and act like they're supposed to act. But we're not showing mercy to get that outcome. We're showing mercy because it's who God's created us to be. We understand that restoration replaces shame with belonging and mercy is the way God does that. When people do wrong things, yes, shame is often attached to it. But the mercy of God through another person can remove that from them. So let God continue to use you in mercy, especially in those people where you're like, yeah, if they change, I'll be merciful. Don't get stuck there. The C deals with correction without condemnation. So remember, he told the woman, I don't condemn you. And neither do they. If they don't condemn you, they can't condemn you. And neither do I. Go and sin no more. So here's the thing. When we show mercy to somebody, we're not excusing their sin, but we're also not going to weaponize it against them. Who wants to have their mistakes brought up as a weapon against them every time somebody gets mad at them? No one. So remember that your ability to show mercy means that you can correct people without condemning them and you can provide safety for them that removes their shame. Doesn't mean that you're advocating for their sin. It doesn't mean that you're telling them, well, good job when they've done something terrible. It just means they're going to know the truth and they're also going to know the grace and the love of Christ in the midst of it. And then the wives, the last part of the acronym, it's remembering that you are not your worst chapter. If you think of your life like a book, each season is just a chapter and all of us have some chapters we hope that nobody else reads. But just like Jose and Gomer, just like Jesus and this woman, they could have been permanently canceled, permanently deleted because of their failure. But they're literally in the Bible. They're read thousands. Their stories are read thousands and thousands of times because God is redemptive and he rewrote their stories and he used his mercy through someone else to do it. God's mercy creates a future, a future that the past cannot cancel. I'm going to say that again. The mercy of God, it creates a future for you that your past cannot cancel. He is a redemptive God. He lives in the redemptive power. He lives in our agreement. We see his manifested power in our life where we agree with the redemption that we have through Christ. I think the enemy's tool against us in that area is regret. He wants us to sit in regret. He wants us to be, you know, shameful and cower away from the things of God because of things we've done in our past. But remember, God offers redemption, not regret, and it's his mercy that accomplishes that for us. I want you to really remember this today. Mercy is an important part of our relationship with God and it's an important part of our relationship with others. It's not weakness. It really is the wisdom of God at work. Just remember that and his wisdom wins every time. I hope you are blessed by our conversation today. We'll see you in the next episode.