Today’s reflection is written as a letter for anyone who has been bracing for anger that has already turned into mercy. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
A question I keep coming back to: why is it so easy to believe God is merciful with everyone else, and so hard to believe it about ourselves?
We tell the grieving neighbour that God is kind. We tell the friend who relapsed that God has not written them off. Then we go home, shut the door, and quietly assume we are the exception.
Psalm 145:8 says the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. What most of us miss is that David is quoting. God first said those words about himself in Exodus 34, right after Israel melted their gold into a calf. Not after they proved themselves. In the wreckage.
Mercy Got There First
A letter to anyone quietly convinced that God has finally run out of patience with them
The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
Psalms 145 : 8
കർത്താവു കൃപാലുവും കരുണാമയനും ക്ഷമാശീലനും സ്നേഹസമ്പന്നനുമാണ്.
സങ്കീർത്തനങ്ങൾ 145 : 8
Meaning
This verse tells us what God is actually like, in four words that build on one another. He is gracious, giving favour that is never earned. He is merciful, moved with tenderness toward those who are weak. He is slow to anger, taking a long time to burn where we take seconds. And he abounds in steadfast love, a loyal covenant love that keeps its promise even when we break ours. The verse does not describe God on a good day; it describes his settled character.
Context
Psalm 145 is a psalm of David and the only psalm in the Bible explicitly titled “A Praise” (Hebrew: Tehillah)—the singular form of Tehillim (“Praises”), the Hebrew title of the Book of Psalms. It is an alphabetical acrostic, with each verse beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, symbolically praising God’s greatness from A to Z. (The traditional Hebrew text lacks the nun verse, though it is preserved in some ancient manuscripts.) In verse 8, David deliberately echoes God’s own self-revelation to Moses in Exodus 34:6, spoken on Mount Sinai as the covenant was renewed after Israel’s worship of the golden calf. He takes the covenant declaration God gave to a guilty nation and weaves it into a hymn of praise for every generation.
Dear friend,
Let me start with the most dangerous thing about this verse: it is not hard to believe. It is easy to believe, about other people.
We are fluent in the mercy of God when it is pointed somewhere else. We tell the grieving neighbour that God is kind. We tell the friend who relapsed that God has not written them off. We say it with real conviction, and we mean every word. Then we go home, shut the door, and quietly assume that we are the exception. That somewhere there is a ledger with our name at the top, and God has been keeping count, and the column is getting long, and the patience is wearing thin.
I am writing to tell you that the ledger you are afraid of does not exist. And I want to show you why from the verse itself, because I do not want you to take my word for it. I want you to take God’s.
Where this sentence actually comes from
Here is what changed the way I pray Psalm 145:8. David did not compose this line. He is quoting.
Centuries earlier, Moses stood in a cleft of rock on Mount Sinai and asked to see God’s glory. God passed by and announced his own name: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” That is Exodus 34:6. And the staggering thing is not the words. It is the timing. Israel had just melted their jewellery into a golden calf and thrown a party around it. That is the moment God chose to tell us his name. Not after they had proved themselves. In the wreckage.
David reaches back across the centuries, picks up that sentence, and sets it to music. Psalm 145 is an alphabet song of praise, each verse starting with the next Hebrew letter, as though David were spelling God’s goodness out from beginning to end. And when he gets to the letter that begins verse 8, he does not reach for something new. He reaches for the oldest thing he knows.
The Hebrew is worth slowing down for. “Slow to anger” is erek appayim, which literally means long of nostrils. The Hebrew picture of rage is a face flushing hot, nostrils flaring. To say God is long of nostrils is to say it takes a very long time for the heat to reach his face. And “steadfast love” is hesed, one of the great words of Scripture. It is not a mood. It is a covenant. It is loyalty that has signed something and will not un-sign it.
So the verse is not saying God happens to be in a good mood today. It is saying this is who he has always been, before you woke up, before you failed, before you ever thought to ask.
What I keep having to relearn
Slow is not the same as soft.
This is where many of us get it wrong in one direction or the other. Some of us hear “slow to anger” and quietly hear “does not care.” If God never gets exercised about anything, then nothing I do matters much either way. But the same Scripture that calls God slow to anger takes sin with deadly seriousness. The point is not that God has no fire. The point is that he does not reach for it first.
Paul puts it with beautiful bluntness: it is the kindness of God that leads you to repentance. Not the threat. The kindness. Peter says the same thing from another angle, that what looks to us like divine slowness is actually patience, because God is not willing that any should perish. God’s slowness is not indifference. It is runway. It is room given on purpose, so that you have time to turn around.
And here is the bold part, the part I want you to hear standing up: if God is still being patient with you, it is because he still intends something for you. Patience is not what God does with people he has given up on. Patience is what he does with people he is still working on.
What I had to admit while writing this
I have to be honest with you, because a letter is no place to posture.
I am quick exactly where God is slow. I am slow to anger in the pew and quick to anger in the kitchen. I can preach patience on a Sunday and lose it in traffic on the way home. I extend to strangers a grace I withhold from the people who share my surname. And I have discovered something uncomfortable about myself: I do keep a ledger. Not the one I fear God keeps. The one I keep on other people.
There is a moment in the book of Jonah that has never let me go. Jonah is furious that Nineveh has been spared, and he tells God exactly why he ran in the first place: “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” He quotes our verse. Word for word. As a complaint.
That is a mirror, and I do not always like what I see in it. It is possible to know this verse perfectly, to be able to recite it in two languages, and still resent it when it lands on someone we had already sentenced. The test of whether you believe Psalm 145:8 is not whether you can quote it. It is whether you can watch God be kind to someone you think does not deserve it, and rejoice.
Five things I am asking you to try this week
Not advice from a distance. These are the ones I am working on too.
One. Pray the verse in the first person every morning. “Lord, you are gracious to me. You are merciful to me. You are slow to anger with me. You abound in steadfast love toward me.” Say it out loud. Something happens when your own ears hear it.
Two. Take the sixty-second gap. The next time heat rises in you, do not answer immediately. Count sixty seconds. You are not suppressing anything. You are practising the character of God in miniature.
Three. Tear up one ledger. Name the person you have been keeping score on. Write the account down if you need to, then destroy the paper and tell God you are closing the file. Hesed is not a feeling you wait for; it is a decision you make.
Four. Give one unearned kindness today. Grace by definition goes to someone who has not qualified. Find the person who has not qualified and go there first.
Five. Read Exodus 34:6 tonight before you sleep, with the golden calf in mind. Let it settle in you that God introduced himself to a people at their absolute worst, and the introduction was mercy.
The same sentence, echoing through Scripture
Watch how this one line travels. It is the thread that stitches the Bible together.
Exodus 34:6 is where God first speaks it over a guilty nation. Numbers 14:18 is Moses praying it back to God in the wilderness. Nehemiah 9:17 is a returning remnant remembering it after exile. Joel 2:13 turns it into a summons: return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful. Jonah 4:2 is a prophet arguing with it. Psalm 103:8 sings it again. Lamentations 3:22 and 23 insists that his mercies are new every morning even as the city lies in ruins. And Luke 15:20 puts skin on it, when a father sees his ruined son still a long way off and runs. That is erek appayim with sandals on.
Add to those Romans 2:4 on the kindness that leads to repentance, Ephesians 2:4 and 5 on the God who is rich in mercy, and 2 Peter 3:9 on the patience behind the waiting. One sentence, one character, from Sinai to the cross.
Three things to sit with
Where in your life are you still living as though God keeps a ledger on you, and what would change today if you truly believed he does not?
Who is the person you find it hardest to be slow to anger with, and what would it cost you to give them the sixty seconds God gives you every day?
Is there someone whose blessing would make you feel like Jonah rather than glad, and what does that reveal about how deeply you have let this verse into your own heart?
A prayer I will pray with you
Lord, you are gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. Forgive me for believing that about you in general and doubting it about myself in particular. Thank you that you told us your name in the shadow of a golden calf, so that none of us could ever say we were too far gone. Teach me the long patience of your face. Make me slow where I have been fast, and generous where I have been careful. Where I have kept accounts on people you have already forgiven, help me close the books today. And let your kindness do in me what fear never could: turn me all the way around. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Before I close
If you have read this far carrying something heavy, hear me clearly. The reason you have not been consumed is not that God has not noticed. It is that he is slow to anger. And that slowness is not a delay before the verdict. It is an open door, and it is open right now, today, this morning.
You are not on probation. You are not being tolerated. You are held by a love that signed a covenant and has never once considered breaking it. Stop bracing for the anger. Start walking into the mercy. It got there before you did.
Rise, and be inspired.
Your brother on the road,
Johnbritto Kurusumuthu
One line to carry: God is never in a hurry to condemn you, and never slow to love you.
👉 Stop believing that God is keeping a record to condemn you; instead, trust His revealed character of gracious, patient, and steadfast love, and let that mercy transform how you live and treat others.
Watch and reflect
This is the 210th reflection of 2026 on the Rise & Inspire blog, under the Wake-up Calls category.
This is the 1106th post in the streak.
Today’s reflection is written by Johnbritto Kurusumuthu, inspired by the verse shared this morning, 03 August 2026, by His Excellency, the Rt. Rev. Dr Selvister Ponnumuthan, a cherished practice he has faithfully continued for over three years.
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