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The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
His mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is Your faithfulness.
Lamentations 3:22-23
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I took this photograph on the morning of January 23, 2024. Many mornings I am treated to wonderfully colorful and brilliant sunrises as I leave for work. Most of the year, I'm already driving and having to look at the sunrise through windshield and/or rear-view mirror. During the shortened days of winter like this one pictured, I am able to enjoy them while I sit in my car letting the engine warm up before driving to work while I look eastward over my neighbor's house and through the trees.
I am not a morning person, but brilliant sunsets are special. Long ago when I was steadily working midnights shifts, I would stay up all night on my nights off to maintain my routine. I would watch the sunrise on those mornings from my porch in hopes of colorful displays, and once the sun had risen, I would go to bed.
Consider the verse above for a moment. In a book of utter sorrow, the prophet Jeremiah laments of how the Israelites in Judah had turned from following God and was destined to suffer His wrathful punishment. Having themselves turned away from God, the northern kingdom of Israel had been conquered and dispersed by the Assyrians more than 130 years earlier in 722 BC, and now in 586 BC, Babylon was to conquer the southern kingdom of Judah.
The author of Hebrews writes that God disciplines those He loves as a father does a child [1]. And right there in the middle of the sorrowful Lamentations is nestled an unfailing certainty: God's love is endless, and His mercies are endless.
Have you ever gotten so tired of someone's failings that you eventually just give up on them? I'm not talking about people that intentionally and willfully oppose and revile you; God eventually gives up on people like that too allowing them to have the desires of their heart [2].
Perhaps you have someone that keeps borrowing money, that never fully repays what they owe, then they desperately need another loan, and the cycle goes on and on. Maybe they're someone that you trust and count on for help or try to just get together, and they repeatedly fail to follow through or even show up. Maybe they're a loved one with habit or an addiction that keeps falling back into its trap. Maybe you have a coworker that keeps showing up late or regularly under performs so that you are continually picking up the slack.
You keep giving these people opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to fulfill obligations and relational acts, and they repeatedly let you down until you just can't take it any more. The relationship becomes affected or you might even give up on them entirely.
So, how did you mess up yesterday? I'd list my failures from yesterday, but I'm trying to keep this post relatively short. Regardless of how we as followers of Christ mess up, we are told:
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
(1 John 1:9)
We may fail and we may fall, as the saying goes, but His love doesn't end, His mercy doesn't end, and they are new every morning like a fresh sunrise bringing the promise of a new day with new opportunities to strive onward and upward in our walk with God through Jesus Christ.
Great is His faithfulness! Even when ours fails.
[1] - Hebrews 12:4-11
[2] - Romans 1:24
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