New Every Morning Is Not a Slogan on a Mug

The bench at that stop has one slat missing and everybody sits to the left of the gap and there is a worn patch to prove it.

Twenty past five. Still dark, going navy at the edges. A flask, two other women, and the particular fellowship of people who catch the first bus and have caught it together for years without ever having each other's phone numbers.

They are talking about somebody's knee.

And she is looking down the road for the lights, and something drifts across her mind. It is a verse. It is the verse.

His mercies are new every morning.

She has known that since she was a girl. It is on a mug in her own kitchen. It has been read out at every service she has ever been to that was trying to be encouraging. Somebody said it to her at her mother's funeral.

And it does nothing. That is the honest report. It arrives, she recognizes it, and it goes past her like the number 12 going the other way.

And she has begun to think the deadness must be in her, because that verse is true, and if a true thing lands on nothing then the problem is the ground.

Sister, budge up on the left of the gap. Because I want to tell you where that sentence actually lives, and I do not think anybody ever has.

It sits in the middle of a book of ruins

Lamentations is five chapters of a man looking at a destroyed city. It is the darkest book in the Bible. There is no rescue in it. It is written by somebody sitting in the ashes of everything he knew, and it does not end well, and it was never meant to.

And in the middle of chapter three, in the middle of that, he writes this.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22

Now hold that beside a mug.

That sentence was not written by a person having a nice morning. It was written by a man in a ruined city who has just spent two and a half chapters describing what he has seen, and it is not a decoration on his situation, it is the one load bearing thing he has left.

It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed. That is not sentiment. That is a man saying: the reason there is anybody left at all is mercy.

You are holding a sentence that was written in ruins by a man with nothing else left, and it was never decoration on anybody's morning. That is not a way of making an old verse sound impressive; Lamentations 3:22 sits in the middle of the darkest book there is, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line out of a ruined city and stands it up at a bus stop at twenty past five with a flask on the bench. It has been going past you because it was handed to you as a decoration, and it never was one.

Now the deadness, and let me answer it directly.

You concluded that the ground must be the problem. That is a reasonable inference and it is also the wrong one, and I want to show you why.

A verse can go dead on a person for a very ordinary reason, which is over familiarity. The mind stops arriving at what it fully predicts. That happens to musicians with music they love and to readers with books they love and it happens to believers with verses, and it is a fact about attention rather than about faith.

What you have is not a dead heart. It is a worn groove.

You are experiencing something ordinary about familiarity rather than something serious about your heart, and a worn groove is not a hard one. Psalm 119:18 has a man who knew the text asking God to open his eyes to see what was already in it, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that opening over pages a person already knows by heart.

What new every morning actually claims

One more thing, because it is the part that might reach you on this bus.

Read it again: they are new every morning. Not renewed. Not still available. New.

Which means the mercy that is on you this morning has never been used. It is not left over from Sunday. It is not the remains of a good stretch. It was made for a Tuesday in the dark at a bus stop and it has never been anywhere else.

And it is on you at twenty past five whether or not you can feel a thing about a verse.

You are standing in a mercy that has never been used before this morning, and its arrival did not consult your feelings about it. Lamentations 3:23 says new every morning and puts the faithfulness in the same clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an unfelt mercy just as real as a felt one, because the delivery does not run on the recipient's mood.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works at a bus stop in the dark.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how much a familiar verse moves you today. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.