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The Father's Business Podcast
The Father's Business Podcast
He is: The Character of God-He is Grace and Truth
What if justice could heal instead of harden? We explore how God’s justice and grace are not competing forces but a unified power revealed in Jesus—where sin is taken seriously, paid in full, and people are invited into real change. Drawing from John 1, Micah 6:8, Psalm 89:14, Romans 3, and Ephesians 2, we define grace, mercy, truth, and justice in simple, grounded language and show how they work together rather than cancel each other out.
As agents of reconciliation, we can offer holiness without a harsh tone, justice without cruelty, truth without coldness, and mercy without weakness. Grace invites people close; truth keeps them grounded; together they set us free. If your feed is full of outrage and your relationships feel brittle, this conversation offers a better way—one shaped by the cross, where justice and mercy meet and where love gains its depth from holiness.
If this resonates, share it with a friend, subscribe for more, and leave a review with one way you’re choosing grace and truth this week. Your stories help others find hope.
The Father's Business was founded by Sylvia Gunter to encourage people to a deeper relationship with God. I'm Elizabeth Gunter Powell. And I am Kimberly Roddy.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to the Father's Business Podcast. We are so glad that you've joined us.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome everybody to this week's podcast. We're continuing in our series, He Is, which is a study of the characteristics of God. And today we want to talk about God is a God of justice and also a God of grace. And some would think that those two would be in conflict with one another, but that is not the case as we see through scripture. And as we think about justice and grace, the other way you can think about it is mercy and truth. So you're going to hear us talking about grace, but also talking about mercy, because that is a part of what grace is. And on the side of justice, there is often truth that needs to be shared in a way to call forth obedience. And so there's so much scripture that intertwines the concepts of grace and truth, justice and mercy. So we want to start having a conversation about what does that look like from God's perspective? Because I think sometimes that's where the problem comes in, is we try to have our definitions of grace and mercy and justice and truth and also strong opinions about who deserves it. And, you know, Kimberly, I think right now in our world, especially online and comments that are made on social media and other places, we're swinging between extremes. Some are saying we should have mercy on everyone without truth. Others are truth without mercy. But in Jesus, we see that they dwell together perfectly. He is the embodiment of both. So we want to unpack today a little bit about what does it look like to love and serve a God of justice who also has given us amazing grace and amazing mercy. So how do we wrestle with this concept of mercy and truth?
SPEAKER_01:I think we have to start by looking at John 1 in verses 14 through 17. He says, The word, John says, the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. For the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. And grace means unmerited favor, it's divine enablement. Mercy means tender compassion, deep affection. Truth means reality as God defines it. Justice means righteousness or right order. And so, yeah, how do you, in in a human sense, how do you have tender compassion and righteous order? You know? Um, and yet, like you said, it's not a 50-50 balance. It's not, I'm gonna have 50% grace and 50% truth. It's a hundred percent grace and a hundred percent truth united in in one person. As God has a hundred percent of all those, he has that a hundred percent grace. That it's it's God's power to love us, forgive us, transform us, to offer us grace, not because we earned it, but because he delights in giving it. And at the same time, he 100% has truth, the reality as he defines it, that divine reliability, the unshakable foundation of who his character is. So in Christ, grace and truth are never at odds. Grace invites us to be close to him, and truth keeps us grounded. So grace says, you're loved. Truth says, here's what the love looks like. So together, the power that they have together in crisis, they actually set us free.
SPEAKER_00:We see this theme throughout scripture. I'm thinking of one of my favorite verses in the Old Testament, Micah 6, 8. I even have it hanging up on a wall of my house. He has shown you, O man, what is good and what is required of you to do justice, to love mercy and walk humbly with your God. And again, you see that we're supposed to do justice, but we're also supposed to love mercy. Uh, Zechariah 7.9 says, render true judgment, show kindness and mercy to one another. And those feel like they're in conflict when I think about it from my perspective, because doing justice and rendering true judgment doesn't feel like kindness and mercy and grace. It feels rather harsh, like the law. I'm gonna, I'm gonna uphold the law and I'm gonna apply the law. But God's justice flows from his love, not in contrast to it. And justice without love just becomes tyranny, it becomes a dictatorship, and love without justice just becomes this sentimentality, this it's okay, God loves you just the way you are, and you don't have to do anything to try to reach his holy standard through sanctification. So we we're seeing so much of this in our conversation today, and people are wrestling with what does this look like to have justice and mercy intertwine? That's a great question. You know, Psalm 8914 declares righteousness and justice are the foundations of your throne, talking about God's throne, love and faithfulness go before you. So again, there's always this back and forth and this tension between the justice side and the grace side. Now, we being believers, having seen what happened at the cross, can somewhat understand what they were all referring to and pointing towards in the Old Testament, because the cross is where we do see justice and mercy, justice and grace combined. Because there was a payment that had to be made for our sins, and yet we did not bear that payment. Jesus did. And so justice and grace are at the center of the cross. And so I think really the deeper question for us is we know God is justice and we know God is grace. How does that get unpacked in how I interact with the people around me? And not just thinking about the greater world, but my own family, where it's real easy for me to want to dole out justice when I feel that justice is required, but then ask for grace for myself because, well, you should have understood my intentions, right? You see this a lot in your in your conflict mediation where I want to make the other person pay, but they need to understand the deeper intentions of why I acted the way I did.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's that's the human condition, right? We judge our own intentions and we judge other people's actions. And we ask you to not judge our actions, but to see our intentions. And the gospel covers that when it comes to Jesus. And I think that's what's so wonderful because Romans 3 says, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And usually that's what we know, that's what we hear, that's that's where it ends. But you got to keep reading because then it has a comma and it says, and and we are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. So so the truth is that we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And in that, we are justified freely by his grace. That's the gospel in one sentence. Just read the whole thing, right? Right. Um, and then in Ephesians, we see that it's it is by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not from yourselves, it is a gift of God. So grace doesn't ignore the sin, it pays for it in full. Grace doesn't lower the standard, it actually fulfills it in Christ. And that's where great, like you were saying, grace and justice meet at the cross. And so in our human relationships and in the world where we interact with other people, we we don't know how to intertwine these two concepts very well. We are each individuals that have gifts. We have personalities and we have gifts, right? And so in our personalities and in our stories, in the human sense and in the nurture sense, we tend to respond to things in ways that have felt good to us or comfortable to us or that reflect our values for the world. And in the spiritual sense, we we have spiritual gifts that that lean us towards completing the body of Christ. If you listen to our free to be you series, we um or have that resource, we talk about the gifts of the spirit. And so on one end, we have people who have the gift of profit, and on the other end, we have people who have the gift of mercy. And the truth is that that God has equipped his people and given his people these gifts to represent him in the body. And we have to work together. And and part of that, where that helps me and my human mind is that helps me go. I can't just see the world through my own lens. I mean, I can, because that's all I have, but I have to think bigger. And not only do I have to think bigger, I have to actually allow God's spirit to fill me up because he is all of the gifts. He can empower me if I have a gift that leans more towards mercy or justice, one side or the other, then he can empower me to respond out of both of those because he has both of those. He is both of those. He is grace and truth, he is mercy and justice. Uh, I think the easier thing to do is when you hear someone respond that, well, God is love, then then there's this like other side of you that wants to come up and say, well, no, he's also truth. He also has a standard. And we want to make sure that people don't fall into these pitfalls. We don't we want to make sure that people don't fall into these ditches of one side or the other. By not wanting to land in one ditch or the other, we try to push against that. And yet the truth is we just don't know how to do it. We we don't know how to not be in conflict even internally, much less in our human relationships with how we view those things.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and it's it's hard to live in the tension of the the two, because I mean, yeah, if if I am only going to dole out justice, I can do that all day long. I'm very I'm a very good lawyer and judge and jury all at the same time. And I can make judgments about myself, other people, situations, like that. That comes easy if I only stay on that one in that one lane or that one ditch, as you called it. There are other people that just ooze love and mercy and kindness and don't ever want to say a negative thing about anybody and always want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt. And it, as you're saying, it's easy for them to stay over there. What's difficult is to bring the two together to get to a place where justice isn't just about laying down the law and declaring what is right, what is black and what is white, but having a justice that is redemptive, that calls people into a deeper place in the heart of God. And it's also about on the love or the grace or the mercy side of things, is loving them enough to call them out when it needs to be called out. And I think we see the beautiful examples of that uh in Jesus. I mean, he there are several times. He, I'm thinking of two in particular two stories in particular. One is when the the rich young ruler comes to him and he's trying to ask, you know, how do I get into the kingdom of heaven? And he's like, well, it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. That sounded very harsh. And he went away sad. Like the guy went away sad. But that is because in that moment, this man needed to be called away from all the things that he was trying to find his identity and security in so that he could be filled with who Jesus was, much like we talked about last week in our podcast about needing to let go of the other things so that we can be filled with his presence. It did not feel like a loving response to him. And yet you see other times in scripture, especially when Jesus is speaking to either the woman at the well or the woman caught in adultery, those are places where judgment was probably would have been the acceptable thing to do in that moment. She had the both of those women were caught in sin, and Jesus didn't ignore their sin, but he brought about a type of justice and love to them that called them forth to a more deeper and redeemed place with him.
SPEAKER_01:Can we pause for that just a second? Yeah. I I I want to connect something that I just thought about that that may be helpful to processing this a little bit. You just said those two those two women in particular were caught in sin. And and I think that is something in a human realm, when we catch someone in sin, we want to typically we fall in one of the ditches, right? We typically want to go, oh, let me let me love you and connect with you and um it's gonna be okay. Or we want to go, look, God's word says this and this and this, and you need to stop.
SPEAKER_00:Yep.
SPEAKER_01:The woman at the well, I think it might help us to think. She wasn't caught in sin. Jesus encountered her. I think it's a different I mean, tell me if I'm wrong here, Elizabeth, it's a different way of looking at it. She she was caught up in her sin. She was living in sin, but she was hiding from people. She went to the well at the particular time of day she went to not encounter other people.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Because she knew she had sin and she didn't want judgment.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:And when Jesus encountered her, that that's exactly what I was thinking about earlier before you even brought up that analogy. That to me is the perfect there are many perfect pictures all throughout the New Testament where he he encounters people. This particular one, I think, as we're talking about it, it is one of the perfect peop places to see his grace and his truth. Because he didn't catch her in sin. I think our human nature sometimes wants to catch people doing wrong. When we scroll on social media, I am drawn to comments and things that I disagree with and I want to fuel the fire. That's not what this is.
SPEAKER_00:No.
SPEAKER_01:Jesus He went to the well to meet her. He didn't have to go to the well. He went to the well to talk to her, to meet her, to see her, to love her, and call her to accountability. And not just accountability, to call her to him.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And he also didn't look over what I mean, he flat out said to her, and you know, you've had five husbands, and the man you're with is you're not married to him. He didn't shy away from calling out exactly what she had done wrong. Yeah. And I think some people would find that being harsh and critical, or what why didn't you just love her and tell her, you know, my love for you is so much greater than any any other love you could ever have and move on from that. We need both. And I that's where Jesus is this beautiful example. And the and the other example of the woman who is caught in adultery and they're about to stone her, um, you know, she is definitely being on public display that, you know, you are wrong. Here is judgment, here is judgment with no grace, no mercy, no understanding. Yeah, you're this is it. And I mean, I I have often questioned it, does not say it in scripture. I'm wondering how they knew. Were they just taking the man's word for it? Or had they really caught caught her? Or like, I mean, there's so much that we don't know about that story. And in both cases, Jesus walks in and he doesn't ignore the sin of what's going on, but at the same time, he he offers so much grace and so much mercy. And and in that example in John 8, he says, you know, where are all the people that were condemning you? And then he says, Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more. And I love that he doesn't just say, Neither do I condemn you. He also adds in there, go and sit. He there's always, whenever someone encountered Jesus, and when we encounter Jesus, there is a grace that, hey, it's okay, you blew it, you're human, I understand. But all the same, at the same time, there's a calling forth, there's so much more for you.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_00:There's there's a better way for you, there's more for you. And so Jesus is calling forth and calling up both of these people, even the rich young ruler who sadly walked away from the invitation. Jesus was calling him, he's like, There's something more for you. If you would let go of the security of this world, I have something so much bigger for you. And so I that is where I see that beautiful interplay of God's justice being redemptive in those places rather than being condemning. And I agree with you, Kimberly, what we what we thrive on. I mean, I I love a good conflict online. And you know, there's times when you see a post, and what's more fun is to read all the comments underneath the post, right? And and what you hear on there a lot of times is not grace and compassion, but it is attacking condemnation. And it's not a place where people are being called up to a better place. We're almost digressing into the worst parts of ourselves because we're behind a screen and it's not a real relationship. And I can say whatever I want to say about this other person because I don't know them. And there is that there is an addictive part to that, and that's part of the reason why those things are fed to us through social media so much, is because it does grab our attention.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and when you're talking about all of these stories in the New Testament where Jesus perfectly shows us his 100% grace and his 100% truth and justice, that again takes us back to the gospel and our own story because by God, by Jesus, we're always caught in sin because he always sees us. And I think that's the connection I was trying to make is that that we, like you said, it's easy for us to be judge and jury and lawyer and every piece of it, right? Like, yeah. Um, and we want to catch other people, we want to find them out, we want to, you know, we kind of have that dramatic tendency in our flesh. And yet Jesus knew that we fell short of the glory of God. He knew that we were sinners, and yet in his grace, he offers us forgiveness, but the forgiveness came with the price of justice. And so I think that's where we have to remember this as believers, you have experienced 100% of his grace and 100% of his justice.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And so to go off and to be only grace or to go off and be only justice is not an accurate depiction of walking out, be holy as I am holy.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Follow me. Right. It's it's not a depiction of that because we are not called to be one or the other. We are we're called to be like Christ.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:And that's who Christ was. And so we we have to push ourselves back to that that balance of the scales, um, which is incredibly hard, which means taking the alternative path sometimes to the comments that we see on social media, right? Right. It means having the conversations that where Jesus says, Hey, put put down your stones, wear those that accuse you, neither do I condemn you, but also go and sin no more. Where he says to the woman at the well, not just come and fill yourself up with me, but you've here's what you've got going on. You've got other men in your life, and you're hiding and you're lying and you're sinning, you know. And so over and over, he called people to encounter him while he spoke truth, his truth, which is reality as God defines it, you know, and while he extended justice. Um, we we have to push ourselves back and forth to balancing those scales. That's I'll be the first to say it's not easy. I want to offer love to who I want to offer love and compassion and grace to, and I want to offer justice to who I want to offer justice to. I I don't like living in the middle.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I think it's easy to talk about in the the social media world or the greater culture, but bring it down to your own family system, your own relationships. I want to offer you love when you behave in a way that I like. I want to issue out justice when I don't like what how you're how how you're behaving. And I mean, that that that is what we want to do. It's almost as if we want to reward what we want to reward and we want to punish what we want to punish. But that's not that's not the model that Jesus is asking us. He's asking asking us to show grace and truth to the world around us and to speak and lead and love, to give room for people to change rather than condemning them. But also to be willing to have the hard conversation and to speak truth, to say, okay, in this relationship, when there's a relationship conflict, I mean, Kimberly, you're the you're the expert on this more than I am, but there are times when truth has to be spoken that this was not okay, or this is where I need to see growth from you. And then it's the other partner giving time and space and grace for that transformation to happen and not constantly, I think a lot of times in relationships, in our closest relationships, we have almost like a little mental notebook going in our mind where once we've been offended away, we start recording every time that offense keeps happening. Well, what if God did that with me? Because I mean, have I failed him? Yes, I failed him a lot. And I failed him the same way multiple times. And yes, it grieves his heart, but I'm always met with grace and a calling forth to find more of yourself and me. Stop running to that same broken cistern that you run to over and over and over again because I have something better for you. It's never from a place of condemnation, it's from a deep place of mercy and grace that wants me to have more of him. So easy to talk about, so much harder for us to live. And so, how do we live from justice? But understanding that that justice first flows from mercy, because justice would have been as soon as the fall happened, we're done, we're toast. I gave you a shot and y'all, y'all screwed up. But even before Jesus comes, even before we know a Messiah is coming to fix all of that. I love that in the garden, as soon as they have fallen and they are in shame, the first thing God does is give them something to wear so they so they can be covered up. There is compassion even in that moment with them when he should have been so angry. Because I I would be. I'm like, I gave you one job. Because your one job was to just, I gave you so much. Look at all this other abundance, this amazing paradise I gave you. And I said, just don't do this one thing and you did it. And you knew he knew they did it before he even came looking for them. So one, just like you were talking about Jesus with the woman at the well, God came looking for Adam and Eve and calling out to them, where are you? God knew where they were, but he but in relationship with them, he was calling them forth. And when they felt they were that they were in shame, he found he created ways to cover them. And there's just such compassion wrapped up in the justice of God. And I, and that that is the the tension that we've got to learn to live in.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I liked how you said it earlier. It's not can he's not condemning in in all of his justice and truth, he's redeeming.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And and to remember that he is the covenant-keeping God. We've talked about that in the series, that he his goal was not not to condemn, it was always to redeem and restore. And I think if we can hang on to that, maybe take that on as a goal, we don't have the power to redeem other people. We have the power to restore other people. No, we don't have the power to redeem them through salvation, but we have the power to restore other people, to repair things, to to bring things back into wholeness that have been fractured on this earth. We're called to be agents of reconciliation and change um through God's power. And so we can offer there's a couple of contrasts here that that we can offer because of Christ in us. And that is, we can offer holiness without a harsh tone. We can offer justice without cruelty.
SPEAKER_00:That's a big one.
SPEAKER_01:I think we can offer love without an over-indulgence, we can offer mercy without weakness. Mercy is not weak. And we can offer power to others, and we can offer a godly sense of power without a sense of pride and arrogance. And and here's another one besides that justice without cruelty, I think we can also offer truth without coldness. He wasn't cold. Jesus was not cold when he offered truth, he was compassionate. And we can also offer grace without compromise and not just use that phrase, but truly recognize I'm offering you grace and truth. And and and it's it's hard to do those things and live those ways, but but again, if the goal is to be an agent of change, an agent of reconciliation that that that Christ has given me during this time that I have in this life that He has redeemed of my own, and that I can live in a world and offer that that sense of Jesus, that's powerful. Um, because we are called to mirror his grace and truth in the world around us. And and I think the grace will offer them the opportunity or the room to grow and change. The truth will actually point them toward the way, toward toward him. He is the way that leads to life. And and so I think it's a beautiful, like you said, they're not in conflict with one another. They actually work beautifully together and they were designed to work beautifully together. We have to stay connected to Christ in order to work them together. We have to be connected to his spirit to really know what it looks like.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So I think that would be our prayer for all of us is that we would lean more into him. I think as we enjoy his presence, going back to the podcast we did last week, it the more we behold him, the more we bask in who he is, the more we fill ourselves up with him, the easier it is to live this. It will never be easy, but it is easier if I am filled with all of who God is and I'm reflecting on all that God has done for me, it is easier for me to administer true justice, show mercy and compassion to one another. And our world is craving this. I'm craving this. As if I'm looking at things on social media or I'm hearing news stories, the one I'm drawn to are the ones where there's just some good news, where that random act of kindness gets celebrated. Those are the stories I long for. I could just feel everything within me just wanting to hear some good news because times are hard. It is, it is, it is not an easy time that we are living in on the big scale and also in some of our own personal stories. And so we all are hungering to taste and see that the Lord is good. And so we get to be a part of that. We get to be the mirror of Jesus' justice and his grace intertwined with one another. And I'll never do it like Jesus. I won't be able to have that profound of a conversation with a woman sitting at a well and know exactly what to say in that moment because I'm not him. But how can I be a part of showing that God's justice flows from his mercy to the world around me?
SPEAKER_01:As you seek to live this out, here's a final closing thought for you. In Psalm 85, 10, the psalmist says, Steadfast love and faithfulness meet. Righteousness and peace kiss each other. So that righteousness, that truth, that justice side of things and peace, or the love, the mercy, the grace side of things, they kiss each other. It's the idea that that his holiness is actually what makes his love meaningful. It's his justice that makes his mercy powerful. It's his truth that makes his grace trustworthy. His glory makes his goodness visible. His faithfulness binds all these things together forever. He's not grace or truth, he's grace and truth. And so if you can go and you can be holy as he is holy, you can be just as he is just, you can live out truth as he is truth, you can reflect his glory as you see it, then your love to others will also be meaningful. Your mercy that you offer to others will also be powerful. The grace that you extend to others will be trustworthy. And the goodness that you offer others because of God's goodness and God's righteousness and seeing his glory is. And being faithful to all of that will be what's powerful because that is us reflecting to a very broken world, including ourselves, who God is, all of who God is. So we bless you this week as you seek to behold him and see him and his grace and truth and his justice and mercy, and as you seek to live that out in our broken world. I want to thank you for listening to the Father's Business Podcast.
SPEAKER_00:This podcast is made possible through donations by people like you. To donate, go to www.thefathersbusiness.com. Be sure to follow us at thefathersbiz on Instagram and Facebook.
