Having mercy available and reaching out to accept it are
two different things. Salvation is here for us to take, but
we can reject it all day long if we want to. If we do that,
the mercy of God will not make any difference in our lives.

It doesn’t matter what you have done. Jesus Christ came to
save sinners. He did not come for the righteous. There
weren’t any. The Bible says Jesus died for the ungodly.
It is up to you to receive the mercy of God.

Paul wanted to encourage us to take hold of mercy. He was
writing to tell us that the great things he experienced did
not happen to him because he was an apostle. They
occurred because he was a believer. He said, “Howbeit for
this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ
might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them
which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting”
(1 Timothy 1:16). Paul became a pattern of the mercy of
God for us to follow. Most of us came to the Lord Jesus
Christ either directly or indirectly through His ministry
because he wrote two-thirds of the New Testament.

The Apostle Peter, like Paul, wanted to direct attention
away from himself and the fact that he had walked and
talked with Jesus for three and a half years. He wanted
people to realize the true basis for his ability to receive
mercy and the power to do miracles. When he healed a
lame man, he said to the people who were around, “Why
look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power
or holiness we had made this man to walk” (Acts 3:12). In
other words, he was saying, “It was neither our holiness
nor our calling, but faith in the Name of Jesus that made
this man strong.”

I once knew a quiet, elderly man who was head usher
in a church. His name was Brother Steel. One day he was
a few minutes late coming to church. I found out he had
been fishing that afternoon and had been bitten by a
water moccasin. He pulled up his pant leg and showed me
where the snake had bitten him. I asked him what he did.
He said, “I reached down there and got him and said, ‘I’ll
tell you one thing old boy, in the Name of Jesus the Bible
said if a snake bites you, he ain’t going to hurt you. There
ain’t no way you’re going to hurt me.’ And I just throwed
him away.” He said, “I didn’t feel too good. That’s kind of
the reason I was late to church.”

This man just believed the Bible. Like Paul, he obtained
mercy because without the mercy of God there is not
anyone who can reach down and get a cottonmouth water
moccasin by the hand, curse it in the Name of Jesus and
throw it away. This man did what the Bible commands us
to do, and that is to have faith in the Name of Jesus.

We must first obtain mercy before we can pattern ourselves
after Paul. When Paul was born again, the mercy of
God got down on the inside of him and brought forth a
revelation that I could see. His testimony is a witness to
God’s mercy. In the Bible, we see him first as a killer. Then
we see him as a preacher of the gospel. As a preacher, he
was beaten with rods, lashed with 40 stripes three times,
thrown into dungeons and shipwrecked twice. He experienced
perils from countrymen and fought wild beasts—all
to get the Word of God to people and set them free.

Gloria Copeland