One of the most loved lines in the Bible was written in a burned city by someone who was still grieving. That is exactly why it can hold you.
When Lamentations 3:22 to 23 says God's mercies are new every morning, it means His loyal love and compassion never run out, and they arrive fresh each day for that day's need.
The line was written in the ruins of Jerusalem while the grief was still open, which makes it a promise for people who are still in the middle of it.
It is not a sunrise slogan about everything getting better by breakfast. It is a statement about who God is when things have not gotten better yet.
Lamentations comes out of the worst year in Israel's memory. In 586 BC (some historians date it a year earlier), the Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar broke through the walls of Jerusalem after a long siege, burned the temple Solomon had built, and carried a large part of the population into exile. Second Kings 25 and Jeremiah 52 tell the story as history. Lamentations tells it as grief.
Babylon surrounds the city and settles in to starve it out (2 Kings 25:1).
Famine wins before the soldiers do. The wall is broken through, and the king runs for it at night and is caught on the plains of Jericho (2 Kings 25:2 to 7).
The house where Israel believed God had put His name is set on fire, along with the palace and the great houses of the city (2 Kings 25:8 to 9).
Many are marched to Babylon. The ones left behind sit in what remains. This is the place the poems are spoken from.
“How deserted lies the city, once so full of people! How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations!”
Lamentations 1:1Tradition credits the book to Jeremiah, who lived through the fall, though the book itself never signs its name. For a walk through the whole book, see what Lamentations is about, and for the prophet usually tied to it, who Jeremiah was.
Lamentations is five poems, and four of them are acrostics. Each verse, or set of verses, begins with the next letter of the twenty-two letter Hebrew alphabet. The shape is part of the message.
One verse for each letter, aleph to tav. Jerusalem pictured as a widow with no one to comfort her.
Another full alphabet. The siege and its horror, described without softening anything.
The alphabet tripled, three verses for every letter. The most personal poem, and the one where hope breaks in.
A full alphabet again, with shorter lines, setting what Zion was beside what it became.
The length of an alphabet but no acrostic. A community prayer that ends with a question still hanging.
It says the grief is total, A to Z, and that it can still be given order. Pain is allowed to be complete without being chaos.
Now notice where our verse sits. Chapter 3 is the middle poem of the five, and verses 22 to 24 sit close to its center. All three of those verses begin with the same Hebrew letter, heth, the first letter of the words for loyal love, for new, and for portion. The hope is placed in the middle of the book, with grief on both sides of it.
The book does not end on the hope, either. Its last lines pray, “Restore us to yourself, Lord, that we may return; renew our days as of old,” and then add, “unless you have utterly rejected us and are angry with us beyond measure” (5:21 to 22). The poet does not tie a bow on it. Hope is spoken inside the ruins, not after they have been cleared away.
The most famous hope in Lamentations has grief on every side of it. It was never the end of the pain. It is what the poet held onto during it.
“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.”
Lamentations 3:21 to 23 (NIV)Look at the verb in verse 21. The poet calls something to mind. Nothing outside him has changed between verse 20 and verse 21. What changes is what he chooses to remember.
The plural of hesed, God's covenant loyalty, the love that keeps its promises. Verse 22 speaks of the LORD's loyal loves, many acts of faithfulness rather than one general feeling.
Also plural. It comes from the same root as the word for womb, so it carries the tenderness of a mother toward the child she carried.
“New in the mornings,” with mornings in the plural. Each morning gets its own supply.
Firmness, steadiness, reliability. “Great is your faithfulness” is the poet turning from talking about God to talking to Him.
The Hebrew of verse 22 reads “we are not consumed.” Some ancient translations, like the Syriac, read it as the mercies themselves having no end. Either way, the love has not run out.
For the wider picture of the word, we walk through the biblical definition of mercy and the difference between grace and mercy in their own posts.
What do the Hebrew words for “love” and “compassions” in Lamentations 3:22 have in common?
Hesed and rachamim both appear in the plural here. The poet is describing loyal love that keeps showing up, over and over, which is exactly why it can be new every morning.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
This verse lives on mugs, wall signs and morning devotionals, and there is nothing wrong with a verse on a mug. The trouble starts when the line gets cut away from the ruins it came from.
New morning, fresh start, good vibes. If you still feel crushed at 7 a.m., you must not be receiving it right.
The city is still burned and the poet is still grieving, and he says God's loyal love has not quit. The mercy is new while the ruins are still standing.
Here is our position at Sound of Heaven. God's mercies being new every morning does not mean your feelings will be new every morning, and it does not mean the loss is undone. It means the character of God is not used up by yesterday. Whatever you spent, failed at or lost, His loyal love was not drawn down by it.
We also refuse the opposite mistake, the one that treats honesty about pain as a lack of faith. God put five chapters of grief into Scripture and left the final question in. Weeping is not unbelief.
One more thing needs saying plainly. The poet read the catastrophe as God's judgment on a people who had broken covenant, and in the prophetic frame of his day that is how the fall of Jerusalem was understood. It is an honest record of his experience. It is not a template for your hospital room or your divorce. Jesus refused to read suffering as a verdict on the sufferer (Luke 13:1 to 5, John 9:2 to 3), and He is the clearest picture of God we have. When tragedy lands on you, it is not God settling an account.
Even the poet senses where this is heading. A few verses later he writes that God “does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone” (3:33). That line leans straight toward Jesus.
The mercy is new because God is faithful, not because the morning is pleasant. That is good news for people whose mornings are not pleasant.
Many people first met this verse through a hymn. Thomas Chisholm wrote the words to “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” William Runyan wrote the music, and it was published in 1923. The refrain lifts straight from Lamentations: “Morning by morning new mercies I see.” Its line “There is no shadow of turning with thee” borrows the King James wording of James 1:17.
What surprises people is where the hymn came from. It was not written after one dramatic rescue. Hymnary.org notes that Chisholm did not write it during a season of intense grief, and it quotes him describing a modest life:
“My income has not been large at any time due to impaired health in the earlier years which has followed me on until now. Although I must not fail to record here the unfailing faithfulness of a covenant-keeping God and that He has given me many wonderful displays of His providing care, for which I am filled with astonishing gratefulness.”
Thomas Chisholm, quoted at Hymnary.orgSo the verse was born in catastrophe and the hymn in ordinary days, and both say the same thing. God's faithfulness is the floor under ordinary days, and it is still the floor when everything above it has fallen in.
If you are reading this in the middle of a loss, you do not have to feel hopeful to be held. The poet spent twenty verses on his pain before he reached verse 21, and the book keeps grieving after it. Nobody is rushing you.
Tell God the truth, even the angry parts. Let someone sit with you. And if the weight is too much to carry alone, you can ask us to pray with you, and a real person at Sound of Heaven will.
Verses 1 to 20 come before verse 21. Lament is not a detour from faith. It is how faith talks when it hurts.
The poet does not manufacture a feeling. He remembers a fact about God. On a bad morning, one true sentence is enough.
Verse 24: “The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” When much has been taken, He is the share nobody can take.
Verses 25 and 26 say it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD. We unpack that in what it means to wait on the Lord.
Jesus Himself grieved over this same city. Luke 19:41 says that as He approached Jerusalem and saw it, “he wept over it,” knowing a second destruction was coming within that generation, which it did in AD 70. At a friend's tomb He wept too, which is why the shortest verse in the Bible matters so much. God in the flesh did not skip grief to get to hope. He carried both.
Lamentations says God's compassions never fail. In Jesus we get to watch them walk around. Matthew 9:36 says that when He saw the crowds, “he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless.” Paul calls God “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3). The compassion of Lamentations 3 has a face and a name.
That is why this is not wishful thinking. The same Jesus is present now by His Spirit, and His kingdom is not waiting for better days to begin. Every morning you wake up inside it, with a fresh supply of the loyal love that yesterday did not use up. You do not have to earn today's portion, and you cannot exhaust it.
And when the morning looks like more rubble, the verse still stands. It was written for mornings like that.
For related reading, see faithfulness in the Bible, the biblical meaning of hope, Babylon in the Bible, hope deferred and these morning prayers to start the day with.
Written in the ashes of Jerusalem, Lamentations 3:22 to 23 says God's loyal love and tender compassion never run out and meet us fresh each morning, not because the ruins are gone but because He is faithful, and in Jesus that faithfulness has a face.
Whatever you are grieving, you do not have to carry it alone. Send a prayer request and someone at Sound of Heaven will pray with you.
It comes from Lamentations 3:22 to 23, which says that because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail, and they are new every morning. It means God's loyal love and tender compassion never run out and meet each day's need fresh. It was written after Jerusalem fell to Babylon in 586 BC, so it is a promise spoken in the middle of grief, not a guarantee that every morning will feel good.
Lamentations 3:22 to 23. The NIV reads, “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.” The verses sit near the center of the third poem in Lamentations, a book of grief over the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. Verse 21 introduces them: “Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope.”
The book does not name its author. Jewish and Christian tradition has long credited it to the prophet Jeremiah, who lived through the fall of Jerusalem and grieved over the city. Whoever held the pen wrote as an eyewitness to the siege and the burning of the temple. That setting matters, because the famous line about new mercies was written by someone who was still grieving, not someone looking back from safety.
Thomas Chisholm wrote the words and William Runyan wrote the music, and the hymn was published in 1923. Its refrain, “Morning by morning new mercies I see,” comes straight from Lamentations 3:22 to 23. Chisholm did not write it after one dramatic crisis. He wrote out of a modest life with long stretches of poor health, in which he kept seeing God's faithfulness day after day.
Because God does not change, His mercy does not get used up. The newness is not in God's character but in the supply. Yesterday's failures and losses do not draw down today's portion. Each morning brings fresh acts of the same loyal love, fitted to that day's need. The Hebrew words for love and compassion in the verse are both plural, which fits the picture of many acts of faithfulness from a God who stays the same.