Great Is Thy Faithfulness

There is a book in our Bibles we rarely turn to. It sits right after Jeremiah, and it is exactly what its name says — a lament. Jerusalem has been burned to the ground. The temple is in ruins. The people Jeremiah spent his entire ministry pleading with are now in Babylonian captivity. And yet, in the middle of all that grief, Jeremiah writes some of the most hope-filled lines in all of scripture.

God's Faithfulness Does Not Fail

After verse after verse of sorrow and ruin, Jeremiah pulls himself up short. "This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. Through the Lord's mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness. 'The Lord is my portion,' says my soul. 'Therefore I hope in Him!'" (Lam 3:21-24)

Notice what changed his outlook — not his circumstances, which were still terrible. What changed was what he chose to think about. He recalled his God. He thought about who God is and what God had promised. And that was enough to turn lament into hope. God had not failed. God had warned them, pleaded with them, sent prophet after prophet. They would not listen. The calamity was their own doing — and even then, His compassions had not run out.

Wait on the Lord

One of the hardest lessons in the middle of hardship is simply this: wait. "The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord." (Lam 3:25-26)

Israel at the Red Sea was told to stand still and see the salvation of the Lord — and He parted the waters. The apostles were told to wait in Jerusalem until they were endowed with power from on high — and on Pentecost, the Spirit came. In both cases, the waiting was not wasted time. It was the time between the promise and its fulfillment. God's timetable is not always ours, but His timetable is always right. King Saul could not wait for Samuel and it cost him the kingdom. We do well to learn from his mistake.

God Is Always Good

We are quick to post "God is good!" when the news comes back the way we hoped. But Jeremiah is writing from the smoldering rubble of everything he loved, and he still says the Lord will not cast off forever. "Though He causes grief, yet He will show compassion according to the multitude of His mercies. For He does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men." (Lam 3:32-33)

God's goodness is not tied to our circumstances. It is tied to His character. He is good the way He is holy, the way He is light, the way He is love. That does not change when the diagnosis is bad or when life falls apart. The Lord never promised to take us around the valley of the shadow of death — He promised to bring us through it. And He will, because great is His faithfulness.

In Closing

Whatever this week holds — a funeral, a hard diagnosis, a season of waiting with no end in sight — Jeremiah's word still stands: His mercies are new every morning. Call on Him from the lowest pit, and He will draw near. That is who our God is, and He has never stopped being exactly that.