The book of Lamentations is not a comfortable read. It opens with a city in ruins. A people in exile. A poet sitting in the rubble of everything that once stood. Jeremiah isn't writing from a mountaintop. He's writing from the ash heap. And somehow, from that exact place, he arrives at one of the most quietly powerful declarations in all of Scripture. "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." — Lamentations 3:22-23 That's not denial. That's not toxic positivity dressed in religious language. That is a man who has seen the worst and still found something standing. The Context Makes This Stronger You cannot fully appreciate verse 22 without verse 19. Just a few lines earlier, Jeremiah writes: "Remember my affliction and roaming, the wormwood and the gall." He is naming real pain. Bitterness. Wandering. The kind of suffering that leaves a taste i...
Most of us are looking for strength in the wrong places. We look for it in a good night's sleep. In a motivational quote. In the right circumstances finally falling into place. And when those things fail us, which they often do, we wonder why we feel so empty. But Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3:16 points us somewhere else entirely. "That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man." Read that slowly. There is a lot packed into one sentence. God Gives According to His Riches, Not Your Need Notice what Paul doesn't say. He doesn't say God gives out of His riches. He says God gives according to His riches. That's a meaningful distinction. When someone gives out of their wealth, they calculate what they can spare. They budget. They measure what leaving might cost them. But when someone gives according to their wealth, the measure of the gift is the size of their fortune, not the size...