WORSHIP REFLECTIONS are weekly devotionals based on worship songs/hymns. Our hope is that this content encourages your love and adoration of Christ Jesus as you grow in closer communion with Him through personal worship.
Steven Brooks, Director of Worship Quest Ministries, presents this worship song devotional based on the Matt Boswell and Matt Papa song, "His Mercy Is More".
One of the great mysteries of the Christian faith is that we worship a God who is all-knowing and yet all-loving. We might wonder how that is possible? First, how is anyone all-knowing? Our finite minds have a hard time grasping that concept. The Bible tells us that he is the First and the Last (Is. 44:6). Hebrews 4:13 tells us that nothing is hidden from his sight. Jeremiah informs us that God searches the hearts and minds of all men. Secrets don’t exist with God. We can’t keep a secret from him. He knows what we are going to say before we say it. He knows our thoughts. His understanding is infinite (Psalm 147:4). He possesses complete knowledge of everything.
And if all of this is true and God truly is all-knowing, how can he be all-loving? If he really knows everything about me, and sees the kind of person I truly am, how can he still love me?
When the Psalmist exclaims in Psalm 103, that God casts our sin as far as the east is from the west and the prophet Micah assures us that God throws our iniquities into the deepest parts of the seas, we are dumbfounded.
Matt Boswell and Matt Papa’s modern hymn “His Mercy Is More” begins by asking,
What love could remember, no wrongs we have done
Omniscient, all-knowing, He counts not their sum
Thrown into a sea without bottom or shore
Our sins they are many, His mercy is more
This song was actually inspired by a John Newton sermon. Newton, who captured similar themes in his famous hymn, Amazing Grace, spoke these words in his sermon:
“Are not you amazed sometimes that you should have so much as a hope, that, poor and needy as you are, the Lord thinketh of you? But let not all you feel discourage you. For if our Physician is almighty, our disease cannot be desperate and if He casts none out that come to Him, why should you fear?
Our sins are many, but His mercies are more: our sins are great, but His righteousness is greater: we are weak, but He is power. Most of our complaints are owing to unbelief, and the remainder of a legal spirit. And these evils are not removed in a day.
Wait on the Lord, and He will enable you to see more and more of the power and grace of our High Priest.”
Like the Father in the story of the Prodigal Son, God waits for us as we roam and tenderly calls us home. He welcomes the weak, the vile, the poor. He lavishes his richest kindness upon us and pays for our debt with the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. A debt we could never pay ourselves. A debt of sins too many to count, too great to comprehend. His mercy is more.
No matter how bad we’ve been, no matter how far we’ve run from God, no matter how awful our sin, his mercy is more.
This is incredibly good news! What other response can we have than to praise the Lord for His glorious grace in Christ Jesus! To lift our voices and sing:
Praise the Lord — His mercy is more
Stronger than darkness, new every morn’
Our sins they are many, His mercy is more
— Steven Brooks, Director, Worship Quest Ministries