Catching onto the Mercy Rhythm
Note: this page assumes you already saw the "5G Flow" of the Mercy Rhythm
The rhythm of Mercy Season is the rhythm of a new era, the "Grace Period." When humans and their institutions killed Jesus the Messiah, the whole human race earned a death sentence. It would have been right for Jesus, as he went back from earth to heaven, to have caused earth to explode or to vanish without a trace. That is what we and our planet deserved.
But in his mercy, Jesus announced a "Grace Period," giving us a window of opportunity to escape the death sentence that still hangs over us all. Our only hope is a pardon, since we could never do enough good to get our sentence revoked. Community service never pays off the penalty for murder.
In God's mercy, a full pardon is available. That is the heart of the good news we have for the world. As "mercy agents," our job is to get people to aware of that pardon and the one condition for it--that they accept the pardon authentically.
We who have authentically accepted it catch onto the Mercy Rhythm. It is like a new sound deep in our souls, and we move in time with it. We are "in SYNC with Jesus." We become merciful toward others.
We can't thank God enough for the mercy he showed us. We feel we owe our lives to Jesus, and we honor him as our King by gladly participating in his mercy campaign. As campaign team members, we are his mercy agents, doing whatever he instructs us to do. And his first instruction is, "Show mercy."
Catching onto the Mercy Rhythm - getting the idea and the feel of it
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The Big Idea of the Mercy Rhythm for Mercy Season
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One story in the Bible that sets the Mercy Rhythm
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Seven "Mercy Verses" that give you a feel for the Mercy Rhythm
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Whole Bible - the Mercy Rhythm as the main thread of the whole biblical story
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Whole idea of SYNC - the Lord's Prayer
FAQs
Relief, joy, and Mercy Season (August 7 - September 27, 2020)
Like all the other SYNC seasons, Mercy Season links us back to something huge God has done. To "SYNC" with that God-thing means to align ourselves with God's intentions when he did it.
In this case the God-thing is the final Day of Atonement, the day when Jesus presented his own sacrificial blood on our behalf in the Temple in heaven. What were his intentions when he did that?
Jesus was undoing the damage that the human race did to our relationship to God when we rejected Jesus as the Messiah, the person God sent to spearhead the campaign to bring justice and peace to the world. God intended that Jesus would be honored as King. We killed him as a fraud. We humans set ourselves in direct opposition to God's campaign, and not in some small detail. We went for the very center, the Messiah, the Spearhead, and tried to stop him! Talk about a damaged relationship! What could ever undo all that damage? How could our guilt and the shame ever be taken away?
You won't believe how it happened. It's like a twist in the plot of a novel. God is writing the story of the world, and he is the most creative novelist ever. So right here, in the center of the plot, is the most amazing twist of all. God mercifully does not use the Messiah's blood as evidence to convict and condemn humanity. The risen Messiah takes his own blood and uses it as atoning blood to forgive our sin and undo the damage to our relationship with God!
How brilliant a strategy is that! It brings us floods of relief and joy, so much that we have the Messiah's death on our minds all the time. That also means we can never forget or excuse what we did to the Messiah, and yet we don't wallow in any guilt or remorse about it. We renounce our terrible mistake and we marvel at the mercy of God. Who but God would take the blood from our worst evil and turn it into the means of healing us from that evil?
That is our message as God's mercy agents. We are not "selling" anything. We are giving mercy away. And we are giving it to people who don't deserve it and could never afford it even if they wanted it. They are in exactly the same boat we were in before we received mercy. And they can switch boats just like we did by authentically accepting the pardon that is available because of the sacrifice of Jesus.
So the theme of Mercy Season is, "Jesus has made the final sacrifice. We can be pardoned for what we did to him. Find relief and joy in that, and help others find them too."
Mercy Season is the fifth of seven seasons in the SYNC annual cycle. In the third season, the Messiah was rejected and killed. In the fourth season, the risen Messiah put his power and his Spirit into his followers so they could show that his messianic mission had not been thwarted. Mercy Season continues that story. The followers act not just as walking evidence of his power but as mercy agents, telling the story of the final Day of Atonement and urging people to receive their pardon during the Grace Period.
There are more twists still coming in the story of the world. Spoiler alert: in the next season (Honor Season), the mercy agents are not welcomed and honored. They get treated like the scum of the earth.