When God looked down from heaven, He saw not only the guilt of our sins, but also the weaknesses with which we struggled because of which we could in no way make our own way back to Him. When Jesus came here to open our way back to God, He learnt what it meant to be tempted like us (He.4:15). Now He tells us that He understands our struggles and sympathises with us. He stands ready to help us now by giving us forgiveness when we fall and help to overcome (v.16). As God and Man, we know that Jesus understands us completely and that we can always find comfort and encouragement from Him.
As human beings it is not easy for us to balance the ideas of God's holiness and justice that demand our punishment when we fail, and His mercy and patience waiting for us. If we think about the first we tend to feel condemned and discouraged, but if we think of the second we stand in danger of taking it for granted and taking sin lightly. But as we learn to hold both together, our excursions to both sides become less and we learn to find stability of heart, trusting in the love of God and hating sin more.
When it comes to being sympathetic to the weaknesses of others, it becomes very difficult for us. One reason is that God knows everything about us and so He really understands the struggles we go through, but we don't have that kind of understanding concerning the others. We either become too hard on them or too lenient with them. But here is where the Holy Spirit helps us to remember from where God has lifted us up, what it cost Him to pay for our sins and how we are far from being perfect even now. This brings us to the place where we can show mercy to the others, just as God has done for us.
It helps us when we realise that we can never fully understand others or sympathise with them because we are very limited in our ability to know them. We don't know the struggles they have had in growing up, what experiences of pain and suffering they have gone through, their different limitations regarding their intelligence, personality, knowledge, parental upbringing, etc. We may be aware to some extent about how we are working with a lot of baggage from our past, but we don't even know that much about others.
"Bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so must you do also" (Co.3:13). 'Just as the Lord forgave us' is what gives us power to forgive others. If we feel someone does not deserve mercy, we only have to look at how God has forgiven us. When we find it difficult to continuously bear with someone, we only have to think of how our God has to bear with all our imperfections even years after He gave us a new birth.
Receiving freely from God on one side, and giving freely to the others – we need to grow in maturity in both directions. One cannot be sustained without balance from the other. Exercising one side also helps us to strengthen the other.