How do we receive or appropriate God's mercy if He is sovereign?
God's mercy is received by His unmerited favor, that is, by grace. Though He is sovereign and acts as the potter with full control of the clay, believers appropriate His mercy through grace, not by struggling against His sovereign choices. We accept how He made us, our gifts, and circumstances as His purpose.
Les explains that the struggle over God's sovereignty and mercy is resolved by seeing that all we are dealing with is a sovereign God, but a sovereign God who deals in mercy. We appropriate that mercy by His unmerited favor, His grace. So we do not have to struggle and ask, as Paul did, why God made us the way we are. Because He is sovereign, He made us as we are for His purpose. Les teaches that we should not complain to God about how we look or how we are physically put together; that is not our prerogative. We are to accept what we are as we are. The same applies to gifts and talents: it is not for us to complain that God did not give us a certain gift or let us sing like someone else. God is sovereign in wealth and all these other things too. It is not necessarily His will that we have wealth. He is the potter, and He has control of the clay.