Silas
Beloved of All
Your thanksgiving is beautiful and right, and we join you in giving thanks to God for bringing your dear brother home safely. To see a loved one return after years away, through hardships and missteps, and to recognize in that return the hand of God is a cause for great joy.
Scripture returns again and again to this truth that God's mercy endures forever. In Psalm 136 that phrase is repeated with every line, until the heart cannot miss it. In every season and under every circumstance His mercy remains. He delights to show mercy and looks for the repentant heart to forgive. As He declared to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. Mercy is not something we earn or deserve. It flows from His sovereign goodness, not from our worthiness, and that is why we can praise Him with confidence today.
The story of Joseph and his brothers gives us a picture of this mercy at work in a family. Those brothers knew they were guilty concerning their brother, having seen the anguish of his soul and not listened. Years later they stood at the mercy of the one they had wronged, certain that judgment would come. Yet Joseph did not repay them as they feared. He wept over his full brother whom he had not seen since he was a small child, he showed grace, and he said do not be grieved or angry with yourselves, for God sent me before you to preserve life. What they meant for harm, God in His mercy wove into a way of preservation and restoration.
Your brother's journey home echoes that same mercy. The hardships along the way and even the missteps did not cancel God's grace. The Lord is able to carry a person through a long and winding road and still bring him safely home, and to use even the painful parts of the journey to show His faithful love. The fact that he is home is not a small thing. It is a testimony that God watches over His own and that His desire is to restore and to heal.
Jesus taught that God desires mercy and not sacrifice, that He cares more for a merciful heart than for outward religious form. To thank Him as you have done, to name His mercy as joyous and gracious, is exactly the response He loves. Continue to give thanks, to pray for your brother as he settles back in, and to trust the One whose mercy brought him home to keep him in the days ahead.
We thank God with you and pray that He will strengthen your brother, deepen his walk with Jesus Christ, and let your family know ever more fully the mercy that endures forever.
Scripture returns again and again to this truth that God's mercy endures forever. In Psalm 136 that phrase is repeated with every line, until the heart cannot miss it. In every season and under every circumstance His mercy remains. He delights to show mercy and looks for the repentant heart to forgive. As He declared to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. Mercy is not something we earn or deserve. It flows from His sovereign goodness, not from our worthiness, and that is why we can praise Him with confidence today.
The story of Joseph and his brothers gives us a picture of this mercy at work in a family. Those brothers knew they were guilty concerning their brother, having seen the anguish of his soul and not listened. Years later they stood at the mercy of the one they had wronged, certain that judgment would come. Yet Joseph did not repay them as they feared. He wept over his full brother whom he had not seen since he was a small child, he showed grace, and he said do not be grieved or angry with yourselves, for God sent me before you to preserve life. What they meant for harm, God in His mercy wove into a way of preservation and restoration.
Your brother's journey home echoes that same mercy. The hardships along the way and even the missteps did not cancel God's grace. The Lord is able to carry a person through a long and winding road and still bring him safely home, and to use even the painful parts of the journey to show His faithful love. The fact that he is home is not a small thing. It is a testimony that God watches over His own and that His desire is to restore and to heal.
Jesus taught that God desires mercy and not sacrifice, that He cares more for a merciful heart than for outward religious form. To thank Him as you have done, to name His mercy as joyous and gracious, is exactly the response He loves. Continue to give thanks, to pray for your brother as he settles back in, and to trust the One whose mercy brought him home to keep him in the days ahead.
We thank God with you and pray that He will strengthen your brother, deepen his walk with Jesus Christ, and let your family know ever more fully the mercy that endures forever.
