The balance between justice and mercy

God's call to the Church in the 21st century is: to be a Church of balance, a Church that can address the needs of this culture so complex and so skeptical about the Church of Jesus Christ and Christians, and so suspicious of our motivations and sincerity in a way that is understandable, gracious, engaging, and leads them to consider the promises and claims of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And we have said that one of the qualities that this Church must have is the ability to mix mercy with holiness, grace with truth. It is about an ability to maintain what I call a bipolar mentality, which on the one hand emphasizes holiness and the call to integrity and behavior in accordance with the Gospel, but on the other hand is also capable of understanding that the Christian walk, the believer's journey is a journey of continuous and gradual sanctification, a continual drawing closer to the image of Jesus Christ.

And that churches and leaders are needed, and laity, and Pastors who have a pastoral heart and who are very aware of that day of struggle, zigzagging, getting up and falling and getting back up, always falling short at the end of the day and of having to come again to the feet of the Lord, and ask for mercy and grace.

And to be able to live in a position of, on the one hand, having a great appetite for holiness and an awareness that we serve a holy God who requires of us a behavior that is at the height of His Glory and His Holiness, but that on the other hand another part is also a God of goodness and mercy, a loving Father; As we said before, he remembers that we are dust. He knows our condition and pities us as the father pities the son.

And then as you can see, there will always be a tension between those two positions, we will never have a perfect balance. Sometimes it will seem that we will go one way, at other times it will seem that we will go the other.

There are two texts in Scripture that I was thinking about just now that help us see this combination. I see that in the Scriptures the Word always calls us to see our God as a God who mixes those two qualities that I am talking about, justice and mercy, it is a strong and hard and demanding part, and another tender, merciful part and compassionate and that we have to imitate Him in that double stance to be churches that truly reflect God's balance.

In Psalm 85 there is a verse that tells us, verse 10 of Psalm 85: "Mercy and truth meet, justice and peace have kissed." It is a very poetic and very beautiful image, right? What he is saying here is that in the Kingdom of God and in the system of the Kingdom of God these two qualities meet and he says here that they kiss, in the sense that they come together in a very deep way, and that we have to do that yourself.

Our churches and if we are parents, for example our paternal, maternal style should reflect that. If we are friends and brothers in Christ, our way of treating one another has to reflect that twofold way of mixing mercy with truth.

So when the Bible says that mercy and truth met, it is saying that, the way to treat the sinner, the way to treat our brothers when they offend us, when they are wrong and the way to treat ourselves when we violate ourselves. God's law is mixing the two.

Sometimes we think that in order to tolerate ourselves and love ourselves we have to hide the truth, we have to hide our flaws or blame others, or pretend that we did not make a mistake because we think that if we admit the truth then we we are going to condemn ourselves and we are going to suffer, and it doesn't have to be that way.

I believe that we can be honest with ourselves, honest in seeing the defects of the people we love but also at the same time we can be merciful to ourselves and know that we are in process, that we are going to fall and that is the human condition. , we are going to offend the Lord, we are going to fall short and that we have a God full of mercy who is always willing to forgive us and tell us: Hey, go ahead, I know that you are doing the best you can, take me by the Hand again and let's continue because I am with you, right?

We have to be people where justice and peace kiss within us and the same in our churches, and in our ministries, and in our fatherhood, our motherhood. People that people know that we are people of integrity, of holiness but that we are also people of mercy and goodness.

There is another passage that talks about the character of Jesus Christ in John chapter 1 verse 14 where it says that: "That Word, Jesus, was made flesh and dwelt among us full of Grace and Truth." Again the same thing, that balance. In the character of Jesus grace and truth were united and that is what we see continually, what we have already seen on previous occasions; that perfect combination of Christ, of a man and God of integrity, of holiness but also of extreme mercy and we have to do the same in our lives.

The Lord bless you and we will continue later.