(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.)

God's given us a law to follow, and it's not suggestions, they're commandments, and He says, this is what you need to follow. And if you don't, there's judgment and there's punishment. Yet because God is long-suffering and merciful, especially with His children, when we transgress God and we are repentant and we go to God and say, God, show mercy on me, God will do that because He has so much mercy and long-suffering. Now there's obviously a point to which God's going to say, no, I'm not going to extend my mercy to you anymore, or you're not going to receive it. But one of the things that you're going to notice as we go through this, or one of the things that I noticed when I was studying for the sermon, I really tried to look up a lot of passages that talk about God's mercy, His grace, and all these different attributes. One thing you'll find is that man is very often entreating God for mercy. The children of God are going to God and say, God, be merciful unto me, God, be merciful, God, please show me your mercy, God, extend your mercy unto us. And this is a heart and an attitude that we ought to entreat for because we're not perfect. And we ought to recognize our sin and recognize when we do wrong and seek and entreat the mercy of God, because God is merciful. My favorite illustration that we have in scripture and the relationship that we have with God is one of a father and a child. And you really understand this with your own children, or even just being a child yourself, where the parents will sow mercy on their children, even when they're deserving of a punishment or of some type of discipline, when the child shows that, hey, they understand they've done wrong, they're trying not to do it, it's not fake, they're not just saying what they think you want to hear, but they're really repentant, then oftentimes parents ought to show mercy. Now not all parents do, but most parents do, I think, and we ought to. We ought to be demonstrating the qualities that our Father in heaven shows upon us. I'm all for having good discipline in the house. I'm all for children showing respect unto their parents and that when they need the rod of correction and then they're given the rod of correction, but we have to balance that out with grace and mercy as well. I mean, you have to do that. You cannot just always be coming down so hard on your kids with every single slight infraction that they have that you're just coming down, coming down, coming down without showing them and exhibiting any level of grace and mercy and long suffering with them because that's going to destroy them. You know, we need to have that grace and mercy. We need to show them that, you know, the way that we behave really ought to be patterned off of God and He's given us a lot of mercy and grace and we ought to be able to extend that to our children. At the same time, the Bible says that the Lord chastens every son whom He receives. So I'm not saying everything is mercy. This is where you get into problems when you just take things too far to extreme. When people say, oh, God's just love and mercy and grace, and then they just throw out the law and just pretend like, well, we're free from the law, we're under grace, so we can do whatever we want and that's just fine. That's ridiculous. You can't do that. That's going to make God angry and you're going to incur God's anger and fury in your life if you just decide to say, well, that's the God's law because we're under grace. I mean, if my kids just said, well, because my dad loves me so much and he's just so merciful, then I'm just going to go and do whatever I want. No, you're not. Now when they do something wrong and I could tell they're sorry for it, you know what? Maybe I will take it easy on them and extend mercy and grace, but you have to have the proper balance and the Bible teaches us how to have that balance.