Mercy

This prayer from John Piper's book "Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ" hit home today...

O Father, how we need mercy. We sin every day. We fall short of your command to love you with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. We are lukewarm in our affections. All our motives, even at their best, are mixed. We are anxious about tomorrow. We get angry too quickly. We desire what ought not to be desired. We get irritated at the very attitudes of others that we ourselves displayed five minutes before. If you do not show mercy to us, we are undone.
O God, let us see the mercy of Christ and savor it for what it is. Grant us power to comprehend his love. Incline us to read and ponder the stories and mercy of Jesus in the Gospels. Let us so admire what we he did that we imitate him. But let it be much more than external imitation. Let it come from the heart where we have been broken for our sin and where we have come to cherish mercy and live by mercy and hope in mercy and long for mercy. Make the mercy of Jesus the greatest beauty of the Savior in our eyes. Let us behold, and beholding, become like him. And bend this taste for mercy outward so that we show it. Make it so much a part of us that it is who we are. In Jesus name we pray, amen.