This is one of those very bright thoughts which lie across this dark book like an April ray upon a retiring cloud. There is no book in the Bible which is more characterised by the illuminations of sorrow.
I. We are come, by God's grace, to a new year. We may be very thankful that there are these periods and epochs in life these foldings down of pages we have read and openings of the new leaves of another chapter. They equip us, they give point and definiteness to new intention, they offer fresh feelings, they take us out of grooves, they stir up in us our immortality.
II. But there are things newer than the year. They were before the year; they were before all years; they will outlive the year. The year will grow stale, but these will always sustain their vigour and elasticity. When we think of the future we always see it in a mass; but it will not come in a mass, but in multitudes of little bits. We see a mountain, it will come in grains of sand. Each day will have a duty, a trial, a temptation, a strength, a joy. And every morning, as we arise, we shall wake to meet new mercies, newer than the dawn. They will be new as God makes new the old renovated; the happy associations of an old thing combined with the spring-like delight of a new thing. They are new: (1) because they were forfeited yesterday by our sins; (2) because new light is thrown upon them, and our hearts have been renewed to see them better; (3) because they can be dedicated anew, used for new services and new love; (4) because of the "night of heaviness," which endureth but for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.
J. Vaughan, Sermons,11th series, p. 13.
Taking the opening of the chapter along with the text, we seem to find a good deal of inconsistency and, in fact, positive contradiction. Spiritual experience must be looked at as a whole. One side is very dark and full of sadness, sharply inclined towards despair; the other is brighter than the summer morning, tuneful, sunned with all the lustre of saintly hope. So we must take the night with the morning, if we would have the complete day. Taking Jeremiah's experience as a whole, what do we find that sanctified sorrow had wrought in him?
I. In the first place, it gave him a true view of Divine government. Jeremiah was brought to understand two things about the government of God: (1) that it was tender; (2) that it was minute.
II. Jeremiah gives us two notions about human discipline as regulated by God the Judge and God the Father. (1) He tells us the goodness of waiting: it is good for a man to wait. A determination to go, yet a willingness to stand still that is the mystery of true waiting. (2) It is good for a man to bear the yoke. Commend me to the man who has been through deep waters, through very dark places, through treacherous, serpent-haunted roads, and who has yet come out with a cheerful heart, mellow, chastened, subdued, and who speaks tenderly of the mercy of God through it all. That man I may trust with my heart's life.
Parker, City Temple,1871, p. 61; see also Pulpit Analyst,vol. i., p. 638.
I. There is no greater evil committed by any of us than a practical forgetfulness of the commonmercies of life: mercies, which because of their commonness, cease to be regarded as mercies. The Psalmist calls upon us to "forget not all God's benefits," and he thus indicates our perpetual danger, a danger which he himself felt, and against which he had to guard his own soul. There are two great causes which may be said to account for our forgetfulness of the mercies of God, which are new every morning. The first is that the hand of the Giver is invisible; and the second is that they come to us with such marvellous regularity.
II. Notice a few of the common mercies which we are most prone to forget: (1) Take, as the first illustration, sleep. There are thousands who never kneel down and thank God for sleep. I do not think that any man who finds sleep an easy thing has ever calculated rightly its inestimable value. It is when pain or overwork chases sleep away, when he lies upon his bed and waits for its coming but it comes not, when he begins to dread the nights lest he should have the same wretched experiences again and again a fear which prepares the way for its own fulfilment it is then that he begins to learn what is meant by sleep, and what high rank it takes among the common mercies of life. It is a mercy which no money can buy, which no rank can command. (2) Our reason. When we consider how closely the reason is allied with the brain and with the whole nervous system, it is a surprising circumstance that insanity is not a more widespread evil than it is. The possession of reason should stir us up to daily thanksgiving to Him whose mercies are new to us every morning. (3) The power of motion and action, and speech, is another mercy which is new every morning. We live not upon old mercies, but upon new ones fresh from the Divine hand, fresh from the Divine heart.
E. Mellor, The Hem of Christ's Garment,p. 138.
References: Lamentations 3:24. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. viii., No. 451; Ibid., Morning by Morning,p. 321.