Mercy

With the right mindset, you really can learn to thrive in difficulty—and avoid doubt and shame along the way.

It’s encouraging to see that even in the midst of natural disasters, God is always merciful and loving.

At one point in our study of the four Gospels, we had been thinking about Jesus’s 40-day trial in the Judean wilderness. In only two verses, Mark tells us about those days (Mark 1:12–13). Matthew and Luke, on the other hand, make use of a time-honored literary structure to tell us of the tests put to Jesus as He prepared to begin His messianic responsibilities. All three accounts express Jesus’s perfect discipline in response to evil enticements that offended the laws of God. Matthew and Luke may clothe the testing in the elegance of traditional poetic forms, but the themes in all three accounts of Jesus’s experiences in the wilderness remain the same. Whether the accounts are cryptic or complicated, it became clear to us that the devil perverted what Alma described as the relationship between the principle of justice, our ethical responsibility to love God and each other, and the merciful application of His laws in an individual’s life.

Many may recognize that the first part of this article’s title is a line from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. We were recently reminded of it and its connection to the Sermon on the Mount when, as part of our pilgrimage to the Rome Temple open house in 2019, we also traveled to Venice.

We know that no unclean thing can enter in God's presence. We also know that no one is perfect. This may cause some to wonder: Is God a God of justice or mercy? How can we enter into His presences if we are not perfect?

Conference Talk: