Hope Renewed in the Faithfulness of the LORD: Lamentations 3:21-23 Sermon and Study Outline

Sermon and Study Outline • Lamentations 3:21–23 (KJV)

Hope does not come from dwelling on the loss. It comes when the mind is turned, on purpose, to the LORD.

I. What the Text Says

Step One: Textual

The wording of Lamentations 3:21–23 is stable in the Hebrew copies. One point deserves a note. In verse 22 the Hebrew reads “we are not consumed,” and that is what the King James Version prints. Two ancient translations, the Aramaic Targum and the Syriac, read the verb as “they do not cease,” making the mercies rather than the people the subject, and several modern versions follow them. The King James Version follows the Hebrew text as it stands, and the sense is not in doubt either way: the people survive only because the mercies of the LORD have not run out.

Four King James phrases carry the passage. “This I recall to my mind” is an act of the will, not a mood. “The LORD’s mercies” is plural, a supply rather than a single act. “His compassions fail not” says that the supply has no bottom. “Great is thy faithfulness” turns from speaking about God to speaking to Him, and the whole passage rests on that turn.

II. Where This Sits in the Book

Step Two: Contextual and Literary

Lamentations is five poems written over the fall of Jerusalem. The city had been besieged, starved and burned by the Babylonians, the temple was gone, and the people who survived were on their way into exile. The King James Version carries the ancient title “The Lamentations of Jeremiah,” and the tradition that the prophet wrote it is old and reasonable, though the text itself names no author.

Chapter 3 is the centre of the book, and it opens in the voice of one man: “I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath” (Lamentations 3:1). For twenty verses that man describes what the judgment has done to him. By verse 18 he has reached the bottom.

Verses 19 and 20 keep him there. He remembers the affliction, “the wormwood and the gall,” and his soul is “humbled in me.” Then verse 21 turns, and the word “This” is the hinge of the whole book. It does not point back to the affliction he has just described. It points forward, to the mercies, the compassions and the faithfulness of verses 22 and 23. The man who said his hope was perished says, three verses later, “therefore have I hope.” Nothing outside him has changed. What he is thinking about has changed.

III. What the Words Mean

Step Three: Grammatical and Lexical

IV. The Background They Would Have Known

Step Four: Historical and Cultural

The setting is the year the Babylonian army finished with Jerusalem. The siege had lasted long enough for famine to do its work inside the walls. When the city fell, the commander of the guard “burnt the house of the LORD, and the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem” (2 Kings 25:9). The temple that had stood since Solomon was ashes.

The first hearers knew this was not bad luck. Moses had warned that covenant rebellion would end in exactly this way: “he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and fenced walls come down, wherein thou trustedst” (Deuteronomy 28:52). Jeremiah had preached the same warning for forty years and named the enemy and the length of the exile: “these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years” (Jeremiah 25:11). The book of Lamentations never argues with the verdict. “The LORD is righteous; for I have rebelled against his commandment” (Lamentations 1:18).

That is the background against which verse 22 must be read. When the writer says “we are not consumed,” he means that the judgment could rightly have gone all the way, and it did not. A remnant lived. The same Jeremiah who announced the seventy years had also carried the promise on the other side of them: “after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you” (Jeremiah 29:10). Mercy and faithfulness were already written into the sentence.

The picture of mercy “new every morning” would have carried its own memory for Israel. In the wilderness the manna came fresh each day and could not be stored: “they gathered it every morning, every man according to his eating” (Exodus 16:21). The people had been taught for forty years that the LORD provides by the day.

V. The Preaching Points

Step Five: Exegetical

A. Hope begins with remembering the right thing.

Verses 19 and 20 show a man remembering his misery, and it drags him down. Verse 21 shows the same man deciding what to remember, and it lifts him. The difference is not in his circumstances. It is in what he brings back before his mind. Scripture describes the same discipline elsewhere.

Hope is not a feeling that arrives on its own. It is a truth deliberately called to mind while the sorrow is still real.

B. The mercies of the LORD keep His people from being consumed.

Jerusalem was in ruins under a judgment it deserved, and yet a remnant was alive. Verse 22 gives the only explanation: “It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed.” Israel had heard that before, and would confess it again after the exile.

Malachi gives the reason under the reason. The people are not consumed because the LORD does not change. Survival under judgment rests on the mercy of the LORD, never on the merit of the people, and the New Testament says the same of every believer: “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4–5).

C. His compassions never fail.

The word is the tender word, the mother’s word. The LORD Himself chose that comparison when Zion said she had been forsaken.

Lamentations says it again a few verses later, in case the hearer thinks the judgment proves otherwise: “But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men” (Lamentations 3:32–33). Our failures are many, but the compassion of the LORD toward His people has never once run dry.

D. His mercies are new every morning.

Yesterday’s mercy is not asked to carry today. The LORD supplies fresh mercy for each day, and the Psalms teach believers to look for it at daybreak.

E. Great is His faithfulness.

The passage ends by turning to God directly: “great is thy faithfulness.” Mercy and faithfulness belong together throughout Scripture, because mercy that could not be relied on would be no comfort at all.

Even the judgment on Jerusalem was the LORD keeping His word. Our hope is only as strong as the One we hope in, and His faithfulness is great.

F. The soul that remembers learns to wait.

Verses 24 to 26 are the outflow of verses 21 to 23. Having remembered, the writer can say what he has left.

The priests of Israel were given no land, because the LORD said to Aaron, “I am thy part and thine inheritance” (Numbers 18:20). The writer, stripped of everything, takes that priestly confession for himself, and so does the psalmist: “My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever” (Psalm 73:26). Remembering the mercy, the compassion and the faithfulness of the LORD turns a mourning soul into a waiting, hoping soul.

VI. How It Fits the Whole Bible

Step Six: Canonical and Theological

The three words of this passage, mercy, compassion and faithfulness, are the words the LORD used of Himself when He passed before Moses on the mountain.

Lamentations 3 is that self-description confessed from inside the judgment. The same God who would “by no means clear the guilty” is the God whose compassions fail not, and the book holds both without apology.

The New Testament takes the same three words and fixes them on the Lord Jesus Christ. The mercy that spared a remnant in Jerusalem is the mercy that saves a sinner now: “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us” (Titus 3:5). The compassion of the womb becomes “the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us” (Luke 1:78), the coming of Jesus Christ Himself. And the mercy that is new every morning found its greatest morning at the empty tomb.

The faithfulness the writer praised is the faithfulness that holds every believer: “God is faithful, by whom ye were called unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:9), and “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). What Lamentations hoped for from inside the ruins, the gospel has delivered.

Scripture List

• Lamentations 3:19–20. Remembering the affliction humbles the soul.
• Lamentations 3:21. “This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.”
• Lamentations 3:22. The LORD’s mercies keep His people from being consumed; His compassions fail not.
• Lamentations 3:23. New every morning; great is thy faithfulness.
• Lamentations 3:24–26. The LORD is my portion; it is good to hope and quietly wait.
• Psalm 42:5–6; 77:10–11. The cast-down soul told to remember the LORD.
• Nehemiah 9:31; Psalm 103:10; Malachi 3:6; Ephesians 2:4–5. Not consumed, because of His mercy.
• Isaiah 49:15–16; Psalm 86:15; Micah 7:18–19; Lamentations 3:32–33. Compassions that do not fail.
• Psalm 30:5; 90:14; 143:8; Isaiah 33:2; Exodus 16:21. Mercy by the morning.
• Deuteronomy 7:9; Psalm 36:5; 89:1; 1 Thessalonians 5:24; 2 Timothy 2:13; Hebrews 10:23. Great is His faithfulness.
• Numbers 18:20; Psalm 73:26; 130:5–7; Romans 15:13. The LORD my portion; the soul that waits.
• Exodus 34:6–7; Titus 3:5; Luke 1:78; 1 Peter 1:3; 1 Corinthians 1:9; Hebrews 13:8. Mercy, compassion and faithfulness fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

VII. Recall It, and Hope Again

Step Seven: Application and Appeal

The first application is a discipline. The writer did not wait until he felt hopeful; he brought the truth back before his mind while the wormwood and the gall were still in his mouth. Believers are to do the same. When the loss is fresh and the mind keeps circling back to it, the command of this passage is to interrupt the circling and to say on purpose what is true of the LORD: His mercies, His compassions, His faithfulness.

The second application is a habit. Mercy comes by the morning, so it is to be sought in the morning. “Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning” is a prayer to be prayed before the day’s trouble is opened, not after it has done its worst.

The third application is a confession. When everything else is gone, the believer can still say, “The LORD is my portion.” A person whose portion is the LORD has not lost the thing that matters, whatever else has burned.

And there is an appeal for anyone reading who is not yet in Christ. The mercy that spared Jerusalem is offered to you in the Lord Jesus Christ, who bore the judgment your sins deserve. You do not earn it, and you cannot outlive it. “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Come to God the Father through His Son, trusting the Lord Jesus Christ alone, and the God of hope will fill you “with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost” (Romans 15:13).

Whatever you woke up to this morning, His mercies woke up with you. Recall that to your mind, and hope again.

This study accompanies the three-minute video short Hope Renewed in the Faithfulness of the LORD. Two related outlines take up the same confidence in the One who never changes: He Ever Liveth to Make Intercession: Hebrews 7:25, and The Other Side of the Storm. A printable Word version of this outline is available here: Hope Renewed in the Faithfulness of the LORD (DOCX). If you have questions about anything you have read here, we would be glad to hear from you.