Love = Mercy

Andrew Carnegie once said, "No man can become rich without himself enriching others." This was a philosophy which brought him and others much success. At one point Carnegie had 43 millionaires working for him. A newspaper reporter asked him what he did to develop men to the potential of being this valuable to his company. Carnegie responded. "You develop people in the same way you mine for gold. When you mine for gold you have to remove tons of dirt just to find an ounce of gold, and when you do this your not looking for the dirt, your looking for the gold." And with this in mind, Carnegie developed many millionaires.

This is a great principle, and predictably… God thought of it first. For God doesn't see us as we are, but as what we can be through the power of His Holy Spirit living and breathing through us! He sees beyond our inadequacies to our sufficiency in Christ. And just as God never walked away from Adam and Eve when they "blew it," God doesn't walk away from us!.

Robert Louis Stevenson once said these very wise words: "There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it hardly becomes any of us to talk about the rest of us!" So like the good book says, we need to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, and love one another as Jesus loves us. We truly begin to understand God's forgiveness when we forgive others. And we truly begin to understand the bounty of God's unconditional love toward us when we love unconditionally.

3ABN Family News, March, 2003