As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain
your mercy from me. (Psalm 40:11)
Were we to run with the first half of David’s thought, turning humbly to God and beginning honestly to tell him, “As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain . . . ” how would we finish? What do we believe that our God will never deny us — always provide us? If we named the waterfall we stand beneath, the one from which we daily drink, what would we call it?
Would we call it “mercy”?
Merciful to the Core
Other answers may feel more natural. Maybe, as you survey the cracked landscape of your life, you want to blurt out, “Pain. What God will not restrain from me is pain.” Another, soul-deep in the same struggle from five years ago, may say, “This temptation. The sun never sets on this temptation.” Still others might answer with “anxiety” or “waiting,” “strife” or “shame.” When it comes to finishing David’s sentence — to naming the constant theme of our lives — perhaps many of us are a far cry from singing heavenward, “Your mercy.”
Yet it is precisely his mercy that God swears to lavish on his people. When God’s glory sweeps past Moses on Mount Sinai, what are the first traits “I Am” tethers to his name (Exodus 34:6)? “Merciful and gracious.” After Israel backslides time and time again, on what grounds does God pardon them? Nehemiah tells us, “You are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful” (Nehemiah 9:17). And as we ourselves can turn neither east nor west without looking on evil, enemies, or valleys of death, what is God doing amid — more than that, through — it all? Sovereign and all-wise needle in hand, he hems his sons and his daughters in on every side with “goodness and mercy” (Psalm 23:6). As a loving mother would never deny warmth to her naked, cold, and crying newborn, so our Father never denies mercy to us. When God told Moses his name, he did not lie.
But do you believe him? And if you don’t, where can you go to start?
Measurements Matter
For mercy-doubters to become mercy-declarers, we must let Scripture be our measure. Skeptical hearts use the barometer of life’s ups and downs to take a read of God’s mercy. When the job lands, the house sells, or the tumor shrinks, and life’s current forecast looks favorable, God’s mercy appears bright as a July daybreak. But as November’s billows return and begin to thicken — as they always will in a sin-tossed, seasonal world — God’s mercy seems to dim. Perhaps it disappears altogether.
Reenter Psalm 40. Rather than letting current circumstances play the measuring tape on God’s mercy, here we learn to experience it through biblical realities. Why is David confident that God “will not restrain” his mercy from him (verse 11)? Because he is confident in what the eyes of his heart, not the eyes in his head, can see. And the eyes of any regenerate heart — the eyes of faith — cannot but behold God as merciful.
For faith knows that God hears our cries regardless of whether we live or die (verses 1, 6). Faith knows that whatever may befall us, it is a blood-bought miracle that our feet no longer slip toward the pit (verse 2). Faith knows that true blessing and joy are a matter of having God, no matter what we lose or what else we possess (verses 4, 16). Faith knows that every seashore on earth has less sand than God has wondrous deeds and thoughts toward us (verses 5, 17). In a word, faith knows God to be who he says he is: endlessly, infinitely, unimaginably merciful.
Now, how should we respond?
Tell and Tell Some More
David makes the Christian response crystal clear. Awestruck by the mercy pouring upon him from heaven, he just can’t shut up about it on earth:
I have told the glad news of deliverance
in the great congregation;
behold, I have not restrained my lips,
as you know, O Lord.
I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart;
I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness
from the great congregation. (Psalm 40:9–10)
“I have told . . . I have not restrained my lips . . . I have not hidden . . . I have spoken . . . I have not concealed” — what else is left for David to say about how often and how affectionately he speaks of God? It is only right. “His mercies never come to an end” (Lamentations 3:22). Neither should our thanks and praise.
This morning, you rolled out of bed, and your feet fell upon a universe overflowing with the mercy of God toward you (Psalm 145:9). So, tell someone about it. Tell your Father in prayer. Tell your church in song. Tell your family over lunch. Whatever God brings today, tomorrow, or ten years from now, he will not restrain his mercy from you. If your heart stands in awe — and I pray that it does! — let your lips loose in response. Tell the glad news of your deliverance every day, until the day you see your Deliverer face to face.
Desiring God