January: New Beginnings
Day 3 — 3 January
What If Mercy Has Been There All Along?
Scripture: “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 (ESV)
Short Teaching
The most remarkable statement of hope in the entire Bible was not written from a place of triumph. It was written from a ruin.
That matters. It matters enormously, and here is why. Most people encounter Lamentations 3:22–23 on a greeting card or stitched into the chorus of a worship song, and when you meet it in that setting, it sounds like something a person says on a good day. Sun shining, bills paid, family healthy. “His mercies are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.” Lovely. The sort of thing you might cross-stitch onto a cushion and hang above the kettle.
But Jeremiah did not write these words on a good day. He wrote them while sitting in the wreckage of everything he had ever known. And if we skip past that fact, we lose the very thing that gives the passage its power.
Here is the scene. The book of Lamentations is exactly what its name suggests: a sustained cry of grief, raw and unfiltered. Jerusalem, the city of David, the place where the temple stood, had been razed to the ground by Babylon. The walls were rubble. The buildings were ash. Families who had not been killed were being marched into exile in chains. Mothers were watching their children starve. The streets that had once bustled with life were silent except for weeping.
And Jeremiah? Jeremiah had warned his people for decades. He had told them, again and again, that their persistent turning away from God would bring consequences. Not because God would change toward them, but because turning away from the Source of life inevitably produces the experience of death. That is simply how reality works. And now he was watching those consequences unfold in front of him, and the weight of it was almost more than he could bear.
Listen to what he says earlier in the same chapter: “He has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago” (3:6). “He has walled me about so that I cannot escape” (3:7). “He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes” (3:16). That is Jeremiah’s experience speaking. That is what devastation felt like from the inside. A man with grit between his teeth, dust in his lungs, and darkness pressing in from every direction.
And then, somehow, right in the middle of that devastation, he writes: “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
Wait. How? How does someone move from gravel in his teeth to “great is your faithfulness” in the span of a few verses? What did Jeremiah find in that rubble that could possibly sustain a statement like that?
The answer lies buried in one Hebrew word. And honestly, once you see it, you will never read this verse the same way again.
The Word Beneath the Word
The phrase the ESV translates as “steadfast love” is the Hebrew chesed (חֶסֶד, meaning “steadfast love,” “covenant loyalty,” “unfailing kindness,” or “lovingkindness”). If you have never come across this word before, stay with me, because it may be the most important word in the Old Testament that most people have never properly been introduced to.
Chesed is notoriously difficult to translate, not because scholars cannot agree on what it means, but because it is too full for any single English word to carry. It appears over 240 times in the Hebrew Bible, and translators have tried everything: “mercy,” “lovingkindness,” “steadfast love,” “loyal love,” “covenant faithfulness,” “goodness,” “kindness.” Every one of those catches something real. None of them catches all of it.
So what does chesed actually describe? Let me put it as plainly as I can. Chesed is the settled, enduring, faithful commitment that flows from God’s character toward anyone who stands in relationship with Him. Now, notice what I did not say. I did not say it is an emotion God sometimes feels when He is in a generous mood. I did not say it is a response He produces when people have been particularly well-behaved. Chesed is not a reaction. It is an overflow. It is what God’s unchanging nature looks like when it meets human need. It is what you experience when you turn your face toward the One who has never once turned His away.
Sit with that for a moment. Chesed is not something God decided to introduce at some point along the way. It is not a programme He devised after things went wrong in Genesis 3. It flows from who He is, and who He is has never shifted. Not once. Not slightly. He has always been faithful. He has always been committed. He has always been present, fully, everywhere, without interruption. Chesed is simply the word for what all of that constancy feels like from where you and I are standing.
And this is what Jeremiah stumbled upon in the wreckage of Jerusalem. Not that God had suddenly decided to be kind again after a season of harshness. Not that God had reconsidered His position and thought, “Perhaps I have been too severe; let me try mercy for a change.” Nothing of the sort. What Jeremiah discovered was that the chesed which had always been present, which had never paused, which had not taken a single day off during the siege or the burning or the exile, was still there. The walls fell. The temple burned. The city was unrecognisable. But chesed had not ceased. The rubble could not bury it. The fire could not touch it. It was still there, for the same reason it had always been there: God was still there. And God had not changed.
New Every Morning
Now we arrive at the phrase that gives this passage its sunrise quality, and if you only take one thing away from today’s reading, let it be this: “They are new every morning.”
We need to think carefully here, because it is easy to read this in a way that quietly contradicts everything we have just said. If God does not change, and if chesed is the constant overflow of His unchanging character, then what exactly is “new” about it each morning? Is the picture one of God producing a fresh supply of mercies every twenty-four hours, the way a baker slides a fresh tray of rolls out of the oven at dawn? Does He reset each night and start again?
No. Absolutely not. And seeing why “no” is the right answer unlocks the whole passage.
The Hebrew word is chadashim (חֲדָשִׁים, meaning “new,” “fresh,” or “renewed”), the plural of chadash. It describes something experienced as fresh, not something manufactured for the first time. There is a world of difference between those two ideas, and the difference changes everything.
Think about it this way. You have seen the sunrise, yes? The sun does not reinvent itself overnight. It does not switch itself off at dusk, sit in a workshop through the small hours, and assemble a brand-new version of itself by morning. The sun is constant. It burns with the same fire today that it burned with yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before the day before that. It has not changed. And yet, when you step outside at first light after a long, miserable, sleepless night, and you feel that warmth on your face, the experience is genuinely, unmistakably fresh. It feels new. Not because the sun is different, but because you are encountering it again after a stretch of darkness.
That is precisely what Jeremiah is talking about.
God’s chesed did not restart on the morning he wrote these words. It had never stopped. It was present through every hour of the siege, through every night of weeping, through every moment when the smoke was so thick he could barely see the sky. But on that particular morning, Jeremiah lifted his face toward it again, and the encounter felt as fresh and startling as the first light of dawn.
This is how the mercies of God are “new every morning.” God does not manufacture a fresh batch. He does not need to. The person who turns toward Him each morning encounters His unchanging character with a freshness that simply does not go stale, because the God they are turning toward is inexhaustible. You cannot drain chesed. You cannot wear it thin. You cannot come back to it so many mornings in a row that it finally has nothing left for you. It is as full on the ten-thousandth morning as it was on the first, because its fullness does not depend on how often you draw from it. It depends on the character of the God from whom it flows. And that character has never once been diminished.
A Faithfulness That Does Not Depend on Yours
Jeremiah’s final line is the one people know best: “Great is your faithfulness.” The Hebrew is rabbah emunatheka (רַבָּה אֱמוּנָתֶךָ, meaning “great is your faithfulness” or “abundant is your trustworthiness”). The word emunah (אֱמוּנָה, meaning “faithfulness,” “steadfastness,” or “trustworthiness”) shares its root with a word you already know, even if you have never studied Hebrew: amen. When you say “amen,” whether in a church service, around a dinner table, or under your breath at the end of a prayer you were not sure anyone heard, you are saying, “This is firm. This is reliable. This stands.” And emunah is the word for a God whose nature is precisely that: firm, reliable, standing, when everything else has toppled.
Here is what gets me about Jeremiah’s confession. He does not say, “Great is my faithfulness.” He does not say, “Great is Israel’s faithfulness.” He had just spent two and a half chapters documenting in agonising detail how Israel’s faithfulness had utterly collapsed. Their loyalty to God had failed. Their obedience had failed. Their national life had crumbled into dust. Every single thing on the human side of the equation had come to ruin.
And what does Jeremiah do in the middle of that total human wreckage? He does not rummage through the debris looking for some scrap of his own strength to hold onto. He does not try to talk himself into optimism. He turns his gaze toward God and finds the one thing that has not fallen: emunah. God’s own trustworthiness. Uncracked. Unshaken. Still standing when absolutely nothing else was.
Can you feel the weight of that? Every human support had been demolished. Every institution Jeremiah had depended on had been flattened. His people had failed him. His city had failed him. His own heart had very nearly failed him. And yet, with tears cutting tracks through the dust on his face, he could still say, “Great is your faithfulness.” Not because things got better. Not because the rubble was cleared or the exiles came home. But because the God whose character had always been constant was still constant, still present, still unshakeably faithful, even in a burned-out city, even with grit between his teeth, even when every human reason for hope had been reduced to ash.
This matters for you today, on the third of January, perhaps more than you realise. You are probably not sitting in the ruins of a city. But you may well be sitting in the ruins of something. A relationship that fell apart. A year that broke its promises to you. A failure you cannot undo no matter how many times you replay it. A loss that still catches you off guard and squeezes the air out of your chest when you least expect it. And the question you may be carrying, even if you have never quite put it into words, is this: “Is anything still standing? Is there anything left that has not come down?”
Jeremiah’s answer, pulled from the deepest grief a human being can know, is yes. Not something within himself, because he had already admitted that his own strength had given out. Not something within his circumstances, because his circumstances were a smoking crater. Something within the character of the God who was present in that rubble, who had been present through every hour of the destruction, and whose chesed had not skipped a single heartbeat from beginning to end.
You do not need to generate your own fresh start this morning. You do not need to scrape together hope from whatever is left over from last year. You need only to turn, even now, even sitting where you are, toward the One whose steadfast love never ceased, whose mercies you have not yet come close to exhausting, and whose faithfulness does not rise or fall with yours.
The sun has not changed. But the night is over. And when you step outside, the warmth on your face will feel like the first time.
Declaration
I come to You this morning not because I have earned the right to stand here, but because Your steadfast love has never once required my earning. I come not because my faithfulness has been faultless, but because Yours has. Through every night I have endured, every failure I have dragged behind me, every ruin I have stared at with exhausted eyes, Your chesed was present, constant, undiminished, and I did not always see it. I was looking at the rubble when I should have been looking at You. But I see it now. I see it in the fact that I am still breathing, still searching, still turning my face toward the warmth I could never have generated on my own. Your mercies are not new because You changed overnight. They are new because I am encountering You again this morning, and You are as full right now as You were at the dawn of creation. I bring no credentials. I bring only an open hand and a heart that is learning, slowly, to stop gripping what has fallen and to receive what has not. And that, I am discovering, has always been enough.
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