His mercies are new every morning

 

His mercies are new every morning.

I can be a very angry person. 

To most my friends, that may seem like the opposite of who I am. Never have they seen me hot tempered with a red face and smoke coming out of my ears. I'm also pretty sure they have never even seen me raise my voice to yell at another human being.

Yet, on the inside I know I am a very angry person. I am quick to get annoyed and irritated with others. I am quick to be stubborn. I am quick to get bitter and keep a long list of wrongs that others have done against me.

Still no matter how many times my anger slips through the cracks in forms of passive aggressiveness and silent treatments and I go to bed kicking myself for messing up again, 

His mercies are new every morning.

I can be a very lonely, self pitying person.

My go-to reaction to most things is to become a self-pitier. It's a lot easier to pity myself and say my loneliness and issues are, "because of x, y, an z" than to accept that the common ingredient to every one of my problems, well is myself.

It's an excuse I use often. I use it so I can avoid the problem, the conflict, the struggle, the sin... and blame it on something or someone else.

Afterwards I'll go to bed, feeling ashamed of how foolish I am to not own up to my own brokeness, but knowing...

His mercies are new every morning.

I can be a very selfish person.

I try to convince myself I'm not. I try to build up some false sense of self-righteousness in myself, that I'm actually not that bad of a person. I despise having to face the dark selfishness that resides in my heart.

I hate seeing how so many of the things I do and say are from a selfish motive. My eyes seem to be blinded with a self-focused viewpoint that only seems to care about my own little world, that does everything only for the benefit of myself and no one else.

As I lay my head down, my heart silently groans to God, Romans 7:15, "For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate."

Yet, His mercies are new every morning. 

I've always loved sunrises. 

In college I would wake up before my roomates to try and catch a glimpse of the break of the new day, it felt like I was getting to be a part of the moment before the world wakes up.

I think the way God created the sun captures the truth of the Gospel. 

We all learn from a young age that the sun rises every morning, sets in the evening, and whether we want it to or not rises again the next morning.

It rises again, with rays of light bursting through the darkness of the night illuminating every corner of the world bit by bit.

I feel defeated most days. Most days no matter how I seek to live that day, I tend to fall back into my broken, flawed, and sinful ways. 

Yet, every morning as I sit here in the moments before the world awakes, with sleepy eyes and a coffee in hand the only thing I can think is, "His mercies are new every morning."

Cling to that. Write it down. Put it somewhere you can always see it. Memorize it. 

With every sunrise comes a new day, a new chance, and a clean slate. It comes with God's light slowly cracking through the darkness in our hearts, covering it all bit by bit. When you sit and really think about that, how can you not just be filled with love and joy? The God of the Universe extends His mercy to every one of us, each and every day. It comes each morning, like the sunrise, whether we want it or think we deserve it. 

So today live in the truth that:

His mercies are new every morning.