“Be encouraged with this verse. Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you.”
– Isaiah 30:18
Would you just let those words soak into your heart right now? The Lord, we’re talking about the God of the universe, the Sovereign King over all creation. He waits to be gracious to you. In other words, He wants to pour out his grace on you. He delights in pouring out his grace on you. He anticipates it, and he exalts himself to show mercy to you. God who is worthy of all glory in all the universe. Everything He does ultimately glorifies himself because he alone is worthy of all glory.
Isaiah 30:18 Reminds Us of God’s Mercy
God delights to pour out His grace on His people.
The beauty of Isaiah 30:18 is that God glorifies himself, he exalts himself by showing mercy to you. God glorifies himself by pouring out mercy on your life. I don’t know what’s going on in your life right now, but I hope that you will be encouraged, that right now the God of the universe waits to be gracious to you and desires to exalt himself by showing mercy to you today.
I just want you to think about your need for God’s mercy today. Think about your need for His grace in all kinds of areas in your life and realize that he is generous with grace. He is generous with mercy, and he wants to glorify himself today by giving you all the grace and mercy you need as you look to Him and His hand for it.
This Verse Leads Us To Thank God For His Mercy
So God, we together pray in gratitude for your grace and your mercy. We praise You for your mercy and your grace. God, We need your mercy and grace. We are so prone to sin. God, we are so weak in so many ways, and you glorify yourself by being strength in our weakness, by forgiving our sin, by helping us overcome sin. We praise You for your grace and your mercy. We praise You for choosing to exalt yourself by pouring out grace and mercy on us. So we pause right now in the middle of our day, beginning of our day, end of our day, wherever we are, we just pause, and we reflect on our need for Your mercy. We think about the specific ways we need Your grace right now.
Even as we’re praying I just would encourage you just confess, God I need your grace in this way or that way. I need Your grace to forgive me for this and to help me in this way. I need Your mercy in this or that situation.
Just think about your specific need for His mercy and his grace right now in prayer. In light of that need in each of our lives, God we look to you, and we praise you for your promise to show mercy to us, your promise to be gracious to us, and in your grace and your mercy we find ourselves in prayer right now giving you glory. In Jesus name, we pray. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
