Lord Have Mercy

Psalm 123, the forth of the Songs of Ascents, defines our position in relation to the God who calls us to worship: we are his servants. In heeding the call to worship we lift our eyes to God who dwells in the heavens as “the eyes of servants look to the hand of their masters” and “as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress.” The call to worship puts us in a position of dependence upon God. We are those who “wait upon,” or “attend to,” God and His Word. And the psalmist states three times what wait for: mercy. The psalmist says they look to God “until He has mercy us,” and then cries, “Have mercy on us, O LORD, have mercy on us!” The church calls this the Kyrie eleison, which is the Latin form of the petition, “Lord have mercy.” And it has been a fixed part of the Church’s liturgy since the beginning. The Kyrie expresses the basis of our relationship to God: His mercy. When we come before God’s throne of grace, our greatest need is to obtain mercy. But isn’t it so often the case that we don’t want to acknowledge our need. We don’t come before God with the expectancy of the psalmist because we don’t share the psalmist’s assessment of our need. We try to patch our lives together, shake the dust of our Bibles, and make our ascent to God’s house. Well, that’s not going to cut it! In heeding the call to worship, you must confess your utter dependence upon God’s mercy. He doesn’t want to patch you up. He wants to cut you up by the sharp two-edged sword of his Word to remake you into a holy priesthood. So as his servants let us now acknowledge our dependence upon him in the confession of our sins. And let your confession be marked by that same air of expectation seen in the psalm, “Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us!”