Love Mercy
By Pastor Dan Chun
“He has shown all you people what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)
On Friday, March 19, during the HIM2021 conference, I will be interviewing Bryan Stevenson, the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative. It’s a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. He wrote one of my favorite books, Just Mercy. It was made into a movie also called Just Mercy starring Michael B. Jordan. You may have seen Stevenson’s incredibly popular TED Talk (more than 7.4 million views), his documentary on HBO, or his interviews on 60 Minutes.
He’s big stuff! He has argued and won multiple cases at the US Supreme Court. He has won reversals, relief or release from prison for more than 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row, and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or sentenced.
The world has seen him as a man of mercy. Stevenson has won more than 40 honorary doctoral degrees, including Ivy League universities and Oxford.
A graduate of Eastern University where Tony Campolo was on the faculty, Stevenson is a committed Christian. He sees a world having an absence of hope, and he wants to give people hope. He says we are called to build the Kingdom of God. He says, “We can’t celebrate it and talk about it and then protect our own comfort environment. I definitely wanted to be engaged in something that felt redemptive.”
I believe Bryan Stevenson embodies a life that acts justly and to love mercy and walks humbly with God.
What would it take for us to deeply live a life of mercy when we meet people who we feel should not be given any grace or second chance? Stevenson once said, “I’ve never met anybody about whom I could say, ‘This person is beyond redemption—his life has no value, no meaning, no purpose—and it is morally justifiable to kill him.’”
What about you? How are you on the mercy spectrum? In a scale of 1 to 10, and 10 being the highest, where do you think you are, and where do you want to be? What’s holding you back?
One thing that might help is if we really come to grips with the story of Jesus who died for the forgiveness of our sins, and then rose again from the dead on Easter. Could we not learn to be merciful to others as we have been saved and given a second chance?
Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, come. Help me live a life where I LOVE mercy. In Christ’s name, Amen.
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