Scripture: LAMENTATIONS 3:22-26 (NIV)
22 Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. 23 They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. 24 I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” 25 The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; 26 it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
Transcript
I want to start this morning by asking a simple question. Does anyone here play video games? I see some nodding. Well, every gaming console needs a controller. That’s how you move, jump, and attack. It’s how you play the game. This is an Xbox controller, but it doesn’t matter if it’s Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, or something else. There’s one thing they all have in common. There’s always one button that lets you continue.
Growing up, I had a friend who lived just down the road from me. We had a tradition. Every couple of weekends, we took turns spending the night at each other’s house. We would pool every bit of change we had between us, and walk down to the convenience store. Back then, you could rent a gaming console and games right at the convenience store. I realize that might sound a little strange to some of you, but there were actually video rental stores back then. Does anyone remember Blockbuster? We would grab a couple of games, load up on chips and whatever else we could afford, and that was our whole weekend. We would play for hours, staying up until we couldn’t keep our eyes open, then wake up the next morning and play again. And if we didn’t finish the game by Sunday, we would just rent it again the next weekend, and keep going.
The game never said: you have tried this too many times, maybe it’s time to give up. It just waited for us. Same screen. Same offer. Every time. I remember one time riding home on my bike with my pillow tucked under my arm. There were road workers out paving the street, and one of them was on a break, sitting in the ditch by the side of the road. He looked up, saw my pillow, and said, “Hey kid, you should give me that pillow.” I just laughed and kept riding. You know how kids are. A stranger says something unexpected and it just makes your whole day. Those were the good weekends. That continue screen isn’t something I thought about back then, but I’ve thought a lot about it since.
Can I ask you something honestly this morning? Have you ever driven to church and sat in the parking lot for a few minutes before coming in? Just sitting there. Engine off. Hand on the door. Not quite ready to go in. Maybe that was this morning. Or maybe you used to come, and one day you just stopped. Maybe life just got loud, and Sunday got quiet. Or the gap between who you were in here and who you were out there got a little too wide to ignore. And you thought, “I’ll come back when things settle down.” But things never quite settled. One Sunday became a few. A few became a season. And a season became something you stopped counting.
The longer it goes, the harder it feels to walk back through that door. Because something happens the longer you stay away. You start doing the math on yourself. Maybe I’ve used up my chances. Maybe there’s a version of me that God has just moved on from. Maybe everybody else in that room has something I don’t have anymore. So you stay in the parking lot a little longer, or you stop driving by altogether. Well, if that’s you, I want you to know something this morning. That math is wrong.
I want to show you a man whose math looked a whole lot worse than yours. He wasn’t staring at a church door. He was staring at a city in ruins. Everything he had given his life to, gone. But what he found in that rubble is exactly why we’re here this morning. No matter how far you have fallen, God’s mercy hits reset every morning. Let’s say it together. No matter how far you have fallen, God’s mercy hits reset every morning.
I want to take you to a book called Lamentations, right in the middle of your Old Testament. But before I do, I want you to picture something for a second. Rubble. Burned out buildings. A city that used to be full of life, reduced to nothing. Now I want you to think about what you’ve seen on the news lately. Russia, Ukraine, Lebanon, Gaza, and now Iran. Conflict after conflict. City after city, turned to dust. I want you to close your eyes for a second. Imagine you’re standing in the middle of one of those places. Buildings collapsed around you. Smoke in the air. People you love, gone. Everything you built, everything you believed in, everything you thought was permanent, destroyed. You’re standing in the middle of it, looking around, and thinking: this is the end. Now open your eyes. That’s exactly the view that Jeremiah was experiencing. He wasn’t watching it on a TV screen. He wasn’t reading about it the next morning.
I know that’s a heavy image, but I think Jeremiah would want us to sit with this for a second. Because that’s exactly where he was writing from. He was sitting in the rubble of Jerusalem, the city he’d given his whole life trying to save. Jeremiah kept warning that if Jerusalem kept turning away from God, there would be consequences. And then it happened. The Babylonian army came, and Jerusalem was destroyed. The temple, the place where God was understood to dwell among his people, was gone. The people Jeremiah loved were dragged into exile in a foreign country. And Jeremiah was left sitting in the ruins of the city he’d given everything trying to save. He’s not writing this from a safe distance, or looking back on something that happened long ago. Jeremiah is writing from the middle of the wreckage.
He starts chapter 3 with some of the most raw and honest language in all of scripture. In Lamentations 3 verse 1 he says, “I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord’s wrath. He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light.” He goes on like this for twenty verses, and it’s one of the most unflinching descriptions of suffering anywhere in the Bible. Notice he doesn’t say we have seen affliction. He says I. He’s taking the weight of an entire nation’s collapse, and he’s carrying it personally. That’s what grief does to a person. He’s not pretending, and he’s not performing to get sympathy. He’s just telling the truth about where he is.
And then, right in the middle of the chapter, something shifts. He doesn’t explain it, and he doesn’t say the suffering has ended. He does something that looks a lot like pressing pause. He stops. He sits with it. And he chooses to remember something. And what he remembers turns out to be enough to keep going.
In verse 22 he writes, “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.” The first thing he remembers is this: we are not consumed. He is saying that given everything that has happened, and given how completely things have fallen apart, this should have been the end. But it wasn’t. Not because he held on tightly enough. Not because he was strong enough to survive it. Because of the Lord’s great love. Then he says something that matters even more: his compassions never fail. That word fail in the original Hebrew means to come to an end, to run out, to be completely exhausted. Jeremiah is saying that God’s compassion simply doesn’t have a bottom to it. It can’t be used up. It can’t be depleted. And it doesn’t run dry no matter how much you draw from it. There’s no version of your story where you reach the last drop.
Think about that continue screen for a moment. The game never made you feel like you had run out of chances, and it never counted how many times you had failed the same level. It just put the screen up every single time, with the same offer waiting for you. And some of you may know that in the original Mario Brothers there’s a trick. If you find the right spot, you can rack up extra lives, all the way up to ninety-nine, which is the most the game will count. My friend and I found that trick, and it made us feel unstoppable. Honestly, it felt a little like cheating. But nobody told us that, and we weren’t about to stop. The point, though, is that God’s mercy isn’t capped at ninety-nine. There’s no counter running in the background. No ceiling you can bump up against. No trick you need to unlock it. It’s just there, all the time, without limit.
Look, we are very used to mercy that comes with conditions attached to it. We are used to relationships where patience eventually runs thin. Where forgiveness gets offered once or twice, and then the other person stops picking up. We have all experienced that, and so it’s natural to assume that God works the same way. We assume there’s a number somewhere, a point at which even God says, “I’ve done what I can for this one.” But Jeremiah is looking at the ruins of Jerusalem, a city that had turned away from God over and over again across generations. And he writes: his compassions never fail. Even here. Even after all of this. Even now, sitting in the rubble. God’s mercy never runs out.
Jeremiah keeps going, and the very next thing he writes takes this even further. Lamentations 3 verse 23 says, “They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” New every morning. That’s the word I want you to sit with for a moment. Not continued from yesterday. Not the leftover mercy that didn’t get used up. New. Every single morning, God’s mercies arrive fresh. Yesterday’s failures are not sitting in a ledger that God reviews before deciding how much grace to extend to you today. The slate isn’t just wiped clean. It’s replaced entirely. And Jeremiah connects this directly to faithfulness. Great is your faithfulness, because this isn’t random or inconsistent. God doesn’t have good days and bad days where the mercy runs stronger or weaker depending on his mood. Every morning, without exception, his mercies are new.
Notice what Jeremiah does right before he gets to this moment of hope. He doesn’t skip ahead to the good part. He doesn’t pretend the rubble isn’t sitting right there around him. He presses pause. He sits with it long enough to be completely honest about where he’s at. In verse 20 he says, “I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.” He isn’t rushing past the pain. He is naming it clearly and sitting in it. Then three words in verse 21 turn the whole chapter in a new direction. “Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.” He didn’t arrive at verse 22 easily. Twenty verses of raw grief came before it. The hope isn’t cheap. It cost him something to get there.
He makes a choice. Not a feeling that washed over him, but a deliberate decision to stop and remember something. He pressed pause. Looked back. And what he found there was mercy. Morning after morning. Faithful and new. Every single time. There’s something built into the rhythm of morning itself that feels like a reset. You go to sleep in the middle of a hard season, and in the morning, something has shifted, even if the problem is still there. It doesn’t have quite the same weight it had at midnight. Jeremiah knew that feeling. And he knew exactly where it came from. It came from a God who makes his mercies new before you even open your eyes.
Whatever happened yesterday, and whatever you’re carrying in from last week, or last year, or much longer ago than that, this isn’t the first thing God looks at when you wake up in the morning. His mercy got there first. God’s mercy resets every morning.
And then Jeremiah gets to something that I think some of you need to hear today. Lamentations 3 verses 25 and 26 say, “The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him. I want you to notice what the condition actually is here, and what isn’t. It’s not: the Lord is good to those who have their act together. It’s not those who show up with everything figured out. It’s those whose hope is in him. That’s the whole thing.
The continue screen doesn’t send you back to World 1-1 to start the whole game over from scratch. That’s what I always loved about it. It picks you up right at the last checkpoint, right where the story already is. You don’t have to redo everything you have already been through. You just press the button, and you’re back in the game. God’s mercy works exactly the same way. He doesn’t ask you to go back to the beginning of your life and get everything cleaned up before he will meet you. He meets you at the checkpoint. Right here. Right now. In whatever chapter of the story you’re currently in.
Jesus told a story about this that some of you will know well. We call it the prodigal son. A young man takes his inheritance early, walks away from his family, and wastes everything he has. When he finally comes to his senses and heads for home, he is already rehearsing his apology, already trying to figure out what he will say at the door. But his father doesn’t wait for him to reach the door. He sees his son while he’s still a long way off, and he runs to him. He doesn’t hand him a checklist. He doesn’t ask him to explain himself before he will be glad to see him. He just goes to him. Right where he’s at. Mid-mess. No cleanup required. That’s the same God Jeremiah is describing in Lamentations 3.
Jeremiah found this in the worst season of his life. Not after things got better, and not on the other side of the pain. He found it right in the middle of the rubble, while it was still all around him. And what he found was enough. Not enough to make the pain disappear. Not enough to answer every question he had. But enough to keep going. Enough to take the next step. Enough to know he wasn’t alone in it. Sometimes that’s exactly what we need. Not resolution. Just the knowledge that somebody is still pressing continue on us. God’s mercy meets you right where you are.
So let me ask you something before we close. What did you walk in here carrying today? You don’t have to name it out loud. God already knows what it is. What is the thing that makes you quietly wonder whether God is still in your corner? Because here’s what Lamentations 3 is saying to you directly. That thing, whatever it is, hasn’t used up your last chance. God’s mercy reset this morning before you even opened your eyes. And it’s meeting you right here in this room, exactly where you’re sitting. You don’t have to fix it first. You don’t have to explain yourself. The condition Jeremiah gives isn’t a cleaned-up life. It’s hope. Just hope. Turning toward Jesus with whatever you have right now. That’s all Jeremiah did. He was sitting in the rubble of everything he loved. He stopped. He remembered. And he turned. And what met him in the rubble was enough to keep going. And it’s enough for you too.
Every person in this room has a controller in their hand today, even if it doesn’t look like one. The button looks different for each of us, but the offer is the same for everyone. There will be a moment in your life, maybe it’s right now, or maybe it’s still ahead of you, where you feel like Jeremiah at verse 1. Not the Jeremiah at verse 22 with the hopeful words, but the one staring at the rubble, wondering if any of this can be put back together. And everything in you will want to give up and call it done. When that moment comes, I want you to do what Jeremiah did. Press pause. And remember. His mercy never runs out. It resets every morning. Jesus meets you right where you are. The screen is still up, and God is the one holding the controller. God always presses continue. Will you? Amen.
