Our Struggle, God’s Love and Mercy Continue

"I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.   I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.   Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:   Because of the Lord ’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.   They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.   I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”  (Lamentations 3:19-24. NIV)

When our world is falling apart, it’s so easy to focus on the pain, the problems, the pressure, and the difficulties. It’s the natural response. But the biblical response is to turn our focus to God’s love.  Even though we’re mad at God, we need to remind ourself how much he loves us. Focus on his unconditional love. Remember that we can’t make God stop loving us. We can complain, yell at him, and scream at him, but he will still love us forever.  We can see this biblical approach in Jeremiah’s life in Lamentations 3:19-24. Jeremiah starts out focused on his pain: “The thought of my pain, my homelessness, is bitter poison. I think of it constantly, and my spirit is depressed” (GNT). Jeremiah was consumed by the devastation around him; it filled his thoughts and made him bitter and depressed. If we want to change our life, we have to change our thoughts. So that’s what Jeremiah did. We see the mental switch in the next verse: “Yet hope returns when I remember this one thing: The LORD’s unfailing love and mercy still continue, fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise. The LORD is all I have, and so in him I put my hope.”  God loves us. He is not the strict parent that we couldn’t please. He is not the imperfect parent with weaknesses and faults who messed up. He is God — the eternal, all knowing, infallible God who created us to love us and will never leave us.  So when we feel like we’ve lost everything, stop focusing on what’s lost and start focusing on what’s left: God and his love for us.  Bless the Lord, God bless