New Every Morning
A poet in a ruined city names what has been lost, and then remembers something.
On Sunday Rev Lisa Spencer from BaptistCare asked us what a good day looks like. The answer changes over a lifetime. Some of the changes we choose, and some we don't: handing over the car keys, needing help with things we once did without thinking, saying goodbye to people we love and sometimes to a home. These losses are real, and Scripture gives us words for them.
Lamentations was written after Jerusalem fell, and its poet takes his time. Chapter 3 begins, "I am one who has seen affliction under the rod of God's wrath" (v. 1), and stays with the grief for nearly twenty verses. "The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me" (vv. 19–20). Wormwood and gall are bitter, and the poet says so, to God, in a book of Scripture. Lament is a way of praying, and the Bible keeps a whole book of it.
Then: "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope" (v. 21). Nothing outside has changed. The city is still in ruins. What changes is what the poet remembers. "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (vv. 22–23). This hope sits in the middle chapter of the book, with grief on both sides of it. The lament still stands, and mercy comes in beside it, a fresh supply each morning.
That may be where a good day starts. "It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD" (v. 26). A good day might be smaller than it used to be: a walk to the letterbox, a phone call, a cup of tea in the spring sun. It still comes with that morning's mercy, measured out for that day.
- What has changed in my life that I haven't yet named honestly to God?
- What would a good day look like for me now, at this stage of life?
Night and Day
Two people who have waited a long time are the first to recognise who the baby is.
When Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the temple, the first people to recognise him are a man who has been waiting a long time and a very old widow. Neither of them is a priest. Simeon is "righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel" (v. 25). Anna is "of a great age", widowed after seven years of marriage and now eighty-four. "She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day" (vv. 36–37).
Luke tells us almost nothing else about her. She had decades of days with nothing to show for them, and from the outside those years of prayer might have looked idle. They weren't. They were what prepared her to know the child when he was carried into the temple courts. Prayer is ministry, and some of the church's most faithful praying is done from armchairs and hospital beds.
Both of them also have something to give the young parents. "Simeon took him in his arms and praised God" (v. 28), then blessed Mary and Joseph and spoke honestly to Mary about the sorrow ahead (vv. 34–35). Anna "began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem" (v. 38). At eighty-four she takes on a new work and becomes one of the first to tell people about Jesus. Years of waiting had given these two patience, wisdom and something to pass on, and they gave it to the next generation.
Simeon's prayer is quiet and unafraid: "Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation" (vv. 29–30). He has waited a long time, and he can let go because he has seen what he was waiting for. Later life can be a season like that: less hurried, more attentive, and free to pray and to bless.
- What has the last ten years of my life given me that I didn't have when I was younger?
- Who are the Simeons and Annas in my church? Have I ever asked them what they have seen of God?
When You Grow Old
Beside a charcoal fire, Jesus asks Peter three questions, and tells him what growing old will bring.
Looking back over a life brings up the good and the regret together. Peter had one memory he couldn't get past. On the night Jesus was arrested he stood by a charcoal fire, warming himself, and three times denied knowing him (John 18:18, 25–27). Now, after the resurrection, Jesus is cooking breakfast on the shore, and John notes "a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread" (21:9). The Greek word for a charcoal fire appears in only these two places in the New Testament.
Three times Jesus asks, "Simon son of John, do you love me?" The third time, "Peter felt hurt" (v. 17). The questions take him back through the worst night of his life. Jesus doesn't step around the memory. He walks Peter through it, and meets each answer with work to do: "Feed my lambs ... Feed my sheep" (vv. 15, 17). Here grace looks at the failure in the open, with Jesus beside it, and then gives Peter a future.
Then Jesus talks about old age. "Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go" (v. 18). John explains that it pointed to the way Peter would die (v. 19). It also describes what many feel as independence goes: being dressed by someone else, being taken where we wouldn't have chosen to go.
Jesus' next words are "Follow me" (v. 19), the same call he gave Peter at the very beginning. It still holds when someone else is fastening the belt. Through Isaiah, God told his people in exile that the gods of Babylon had to be loaded onto weary animals and carted away (Isaiah 46:1–2). Their God was different: "even when you turn gray I will carry you" (46:4). The one who calls us to follow is the one who carries us.
- When I look back, which memory still sits by a charcoal fire, waiting to be brought to Jesus?
- Where am I being asked to let someone else "fasten the belt", and what might following Jesus look like there?
Your Grandmother Lois
Paul remembers the faith of a grandmother and a mother, and of a young man he calls his child.
Second Timothy shows Paul in prison, near the end of his life (1:8; 4:6–8). He begins by remembering. "To Timothy, my beloved child" (v. 2). "Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy" (v. 4).
"I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you" (v. 5). That is all the Bible tells us about Lois. She is named once, for a faith that lived in her and then lived on in her grandson. No sermons or projects of hers are recorded. What she left was a faith that a boy could see up close and catch. Most of what we leave behind passes on the same way, in ordinary time together: meals, stories, bedtime prayers, being listened to.
As far as we know, Paul had no children of his own, yet he calls Timothy "my beloved child". Passing on faith is not only for families. A neighbour's children, a young person at church, or someone a few years behind you in following Jesus can all receive what you have learned. Paul reminds Timothy "to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands" (v. 6). One generation lays its hands on the next.
Then he says what he most wants Timothy to keep: "for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline" (v. 7). Family history, photos and heirlooms are precious. What people remember longest is how we lived, what we trusted and how we loved. That kind of legacy can be started at any age, this week included.
- Whose faith "lived first" in someone else before it reached me? Have I thanked God for them, or thanked them?
- What do I hope the people who come after me will remember about how I lived and what I trusted?
Now My Eye Sees You
After all his arguing, Job meets a God bigger than the one he started with.
Many of us start out with a fairly simple picture of God: live well, and life will go well. Job's friends held that picture firmly. "Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?" (4:7). If Job was suffering, they reasoned, he must have deserved it.
Job's life had broken that picture, and for most of the book he argues, protests and demands an answer. Later life can do something similar. Health fails, people we love die, prayers seem to go unanswered, and the God we grew up with seems too small for what we are living through. It can feel like losing faith. Sometimes it is faith being remade.
When God finally speaks out of the whirlwind (chapters 38–41), God never explains Job's suffering. He shows Job himself, and Job answers: "I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me that I did not know" (42:3). And then: "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you" (v. 5). Job's knowledge of God had been second-hand, the picture he had been handed. Now it is his own.
The last verse of the reading is a surprise. God says to Eliphaz, "you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has" (v. 7). The friends had the tidy answers. Job had the anger and the questions, and he had taken them to God, and God says Job spoke rightly. If your faith is in a season of wrestling, you have not necessarily lost your way. The struggle may be the road by which you come to know God for yourself.
- How has my picture of God changed over my life? What was too small in the God I first believed in?
- What questions am I carrying that I have been afraid to bring to God?
A House Not Made with Hands
Paul looks at a body wearing out and sees something being made new.
Paul is honest about bodies. "Our outer nature is wasting away" (v. 16). He had been beaten, shipwrecked and worn down (11:23–27). A few verses earlier he calls us clay jars holding a treasure, "so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us" (4:7). Clay chips and cracks. The treasure stays whole.
Yet he writes, "So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day" (v. 16). Two things are happening at once. Letting go of strength, independence and the roles we used to fill can feel like losing ourselves. Paul suggests it can also be where the self God knows comes into view. "For what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal" (v. 18). That is a word for visitors as well. When we sit with someone whose body has grown frail, the person God is renewing is still there.
Then Paul talks about moving house. "For we know that, if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" (5:1). Many people in later life say goodbye to a home of decades, and that is a real grief. Paul calls the body we live in now a tent, something built to be temporary. The last move is into a house God himself has built.
Death is hard to talk about, and church should be a place where we can. Paul calls death an enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26), and yet he faces it without panic, because the God who said "Light will shine out of darkness" has shone "in our hearts" (4:6). John's Gospel puts it in one line: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it" (John 1:5).
- What am I being asked to let go of at the moment, and where might God be renewing me in it?
- Is there someone I need to talk with about death, mine or theirs, while there is still time?
A Wise Heart
An old man's prayer asks God to teach us to count our days.
Psalm 90 is headed "A Prayer of Moses, the man of God." Whoever prayed it had lived long enough to see how short a life is. "The days of our life are seventy years or perhaps eighty, if we are strong" (v. 10). Over against our short years stands God: "Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations ... from everlasting to everlasting you are God" (vv. 1–2). Our homes change over a lifetime. This dwelling place doesn't.
The psalm is honest about how quickly life passes. We are like grass that flourishes in the morning and by evening "fades and withers" (vv. 5–6). It even cries out like a lament: "Turn, O LORD! How long?" (v. 13). At its centre is a request: "So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart" (v. 12). In this psalm, counting our days leads somewhere. Knowing that life is a gift with limits sends us to God to ask what to do with it.
Earlier this week we thought about wisdom as one of the gifts of later life. Psalm 90 adds that wisdom is something God teaches. It doesn't arrive automatically with the years, which is why it is open to every age. This morning, as our series Is Anybody Listening? picks up again, we hear about a young king at the start of his reign who called himself "only a little child" (1 Kings 3:7) and asked God for wisdom. Old or young, we come to God the same way, by asking.
The psalm ends with two requests that fit this whole week. "Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days" (v. 14). That is Monday's "new every morning" again, and a fair description of a good day at any age. And "prosper for us the work of our hands" (v. 17): may what we have done, and what we leave, last.
- If I counted my days honestly, what would I want to give more of them to?
- Where do I most need wisdom this coming week, and have I asked God for it?