David exhorts the Saints to bless the Lord for His mercy. The Lord is merciful unto those who keep His commandments.
2 Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits:3 Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases;4 Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies . . .8 The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.9 He will not always chide: neither will he keep his anger for ever.10 He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.11 For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. . . .17 But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children’s children;18 To such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember his commandments to do them.
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland said:
“To those who may feel they have somehow forfeited their place at the table of the Lord, we say again with the Prophet Joseph Smith that God has ‘a forgiving disposition’ [Lectures on Faith (1985), 42], that Christ is ‘merciful and gracious, slow to anger, [is] long-suffering and full of goodness’ (Lectures on Faith, 42). I have always loved that when Matthew records Jesus’s great injunction, ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48), Luke adds the Savior’s additional commentary: ‘Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful’ (Luke 6:36)—as if to suggest that mercy is at least a beginning synonym for the perfection God has and for which all of us must strive. Mercy, with its sister virtue forgiveness, is at the very heart of the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the eternal plan of salvation. Everything in the gospel teaches us that we can change if we need to, that we can be helped if we truly want it, that we can be made whole, whatever the problems of the past.”
(“He Hath Filled the Hungry with Good Things,” Ensign, Nov. 1997, 65–66.)
