FBC Daily Devotional – November 17, 2020

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Tuesday to you, and we are working our way through the month of November, heading next week to Thanksgiving celebration.

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I wonder what that's going to look like this year for your family. Is it going to be different?

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We're being advised by the health authorities, don't gather your families together for the holidays.

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Families are the big spreaders of COVID and so on and so forth. Well, I don't know, are you going to go by that, are you going to just cast it all to the wind?

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How are you going to handle it? How are you going to handle it? I've heard that advice and then I heard other advice that said, look, because of the uncertainty of life and COVID and everything else, this may be the last holiday you have with some of your family members.

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So don't let fear drive you from it. So I don't know. We each have to make our own decision in those things,

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I guess, and move forward with it. But anyway, I hope you're looking forward to a good

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Thanksgiving holiday. And I hope that this month of thanks of November is a month where you're finding many reasons to give thanks.

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But maybe as we saw yesterday from the book of Lamentations, maybe the circumstances of life have left you feeling maybe not so thankful, maybe a little bit of a little sense of hopelessness about your life.

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It's very possible. And I think this particular year with the challenges that it has brought our way, there may be a lot of people feeling that way right now.

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Well, if that's you, I want us to continue in the book of Lamentations in chapter three, just following right on the heels of what

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Jeremiah said yesterday. And remember what he said yesterday. We read it yesterday.

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He said, My endurance has perished, so has my hope from the Lord. Not feeling very hopeful, is he?

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He says, Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall. He says, Gall. He says,

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My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. It doesn't sound like one who's filled with a great deal of giddy joy and happiness and thankfulness and hopefulness, does it?

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How does he get out of that funk? How does he get out of it? Well, that's what we want to look at today.

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Because he goes on to say in the very next verse, after he says, My soul is bowed down within me.

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He then goes on to say, But this I call to mind, and therefore

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I have hope. Hey, that's what we want to know, right? What did he bring to his mind that gave him hope, that brought him out of this feeling of this taste of wormwood and gall, that powdered alum and the castor oil?

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What did he do? What did he bring to his mind? Well, in the rest of this chapter three, most of the rest of this chapter three, we find out.

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One of the things he did was he chose to focus on the truth. To focus on the truth.

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He says, This I call to mind. This is a conscious effort on his part to turn away from focusing on all of the negative that he's gone through and to focus on the truth.

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To focus on the truth. And then what he does is he affirms the truth that he focuses on.

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And the next several verses show several of the truths that become important for him to remind himself on, to remember.

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He says, This I call to mind. These are the truths that I call to mind that give me hope. And the first truth is this, in verse 22.

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The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. Remember what that steadfast love is?

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His loyalty to his covenant. So what he's saying is, even though I'm going through terrible affliction and I'm feeling miserable,

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I'm eating powdered alum and I'm drinking castor oil, what

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I'm going to affirm is that God is loyal to his covenant.

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The Lord is loyal to his covenant. That never ceases, no matter what I'm going through. He is true to his word.

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And then he secondly goes on to say, His mercies never come to an end.

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They are new every morning. His mercies, his expressions of compassion and pity and kindness toward his people.

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Those mercies never come to an end. The Lord is compassionate toward his people.

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And then he says, Great is your faithfulness. This is the basis of that great hymn of the faith that I enjoy singing at Thanksgiving praise service.

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Great is thy faithfulness. Just like the sun and the moon, the winter and the spring, the springtime and harvest and so forth.

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Come and go faithfully. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is faithful.

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And then he affirms the truth that the Lord is my God. The Lord is my

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God. He says in verse 24, The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore

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I will hope in him. Now be careful. Is the

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Lord your God? Have you come to faith in Jesus Christ as your personal savior?

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Have you called upon him turning from your sin and your selfishness and your self -effort to get to heaven and all that?

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Have you turned from all of that and turned to Christ and called upon him to save you because you know he's the only hope?

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If you have, if you are Christ, if he in his grace has saved your soul, then you can say with Jeremiah, the

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Lord is my portion, therefore I will hope in him.

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The God of the book is your God. You can hope in him. And then he says in verse 25, another truth that he affirms is that the

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Lord is good. But look at what he says. The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.

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So if you're going to affirm this truth, continue on in the affirmation, okay? Affirm that the

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Lord is good, but then that implies that you're going to commit yourself to waiting for him to express that goodness.

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It's going to involve committing yourself to seeking him, finding out what he's like.

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What is God like? What does he like? And then adapt, change, live accordingly.

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The Lord is good to those who wait for him and to the soul who seeks him.

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So he deliberately focuses on and affirms biblical truth. And he says by this focus and by this affirmation,

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I have hope. But then we get out of that funk also by consciously accepting the conclusions that that biblical truth demands.

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And so in the next several verses, verses 26 to 33, we see some of those conclusions.

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One of them is that it is good to hope and wait for the Lord. The Lord is good to those who hope and wait for him and seek after him.

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But then verse 26 tells us, it is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the

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Lord. To wait quietly for the salvation of the

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Lord. That's not always easy, is it? When we're tasting the wormwood and the gall, it's not easy to wait quietly for the salvation of the

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Lord. But it is good to do so. The truths that we just affirmed lead to that conclusion.

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Those are the impact. That's an impact of those truths. It's good to wait for him. And then another truth is that it is good to endure the will of the

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Lord. It's another conclusion based upon those biblical truths. It's good to endure the will of the

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Lord. He expresses it this way. It's good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.

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Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him. Let him put his mouth in the dust.

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There yet may be hope. Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes and let him be filled with insults.

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Now what he's saying here is that we, and he's speaking of his people,

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Jeremiah, Jerusalem has been destroyed, the people of Judah are in great misery and affliction, and they are as a consequence and as chastening for years and years of rebellion and sin.

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And it is good for us to go through these consequences that we might learn what we need to learn from this.

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This is the will of God for us right now, to endure this difficulty that we might learn what we need to learn through it all.

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And then his last conclusion is that it's good to trust in the

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Lord in verses 31 -33. He says, For the Lord will not cast off forever, but though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love.

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There's that phrase, that term again. For he does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men.

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Do you get the significance of that? What Jeremiah is saying is that what you're going through right now that is leaving you with such a sense of hopelessness and really not feeling like you want to celebrate

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Thanksgiving, this is not permanent. The Lord does not chasten forever.

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The Lord doesn't lead us into these things to last forever. He has his purposes in his time, but they're temporary.

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The Lord is abundant in steadfast love, and he will bring you out in his good time and by his grace.

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And the Lord is abundantly good to his children, to his own.

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Listen again to what it says. Though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the steadfast of his love.

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He will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love.

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It is not in his heart to grieve you. It is in his heart to grow you.

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So with these thoughts in mind, maybe you're struggling right now with thankfulness, with hopefulness.

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Go back to Lamentations 3. Meditate on this chapter. Pull it all together and follow

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Jeremiah's pattern of even though he's in a period of lamentation and hopelessness, he finds hope in his

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God. Our Father and our God, may we as well. May we find hope in you.

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May we rejoice in your steadfast love and exercise faith in, confidence in that steadfast love.

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And this we pray in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen. Well have a good rest of your

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Tuesday and I hope God will bless you richly in it. Have a good day.