Nothing here is financial advice, and there will not be any on this site. No method, no route, no scheme, no product. I am not qualified and this is not that.
And I am not going to ask you how it started. That question gets asked of people in your position constantly, usually gently, and it is always a small accusation wearing a helpful face. It does not matter today.
What I want to talk about is the specific despair of a payment that changes nothing.
You pay it. It goes out. And the number moves so slightly that you would have to look carefully to see that it moved at all, and next month it will do the same thing, and you have started to feel that you are not actually paying anything down, you are just feeding something.
And so a strange thing has happened: the paying has stopped feeling like an achievement and started feeling like evidence.
New every morning, in the worst book in the Bible
There is a verse everybody has on a mug, and almost nobody knows where it lives.
They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:23, King James Version)
That sentence is in Lamentations.
Lamentations is a book about a city that has been destroyed. It is five chapters of unrelieved grief, written by somebody watching the worst thing he has ever seen, and nothing in the book gets fixed by the end of it. There is no resolution chapter.
And in the middle of that, the writer says that God's mercies are new every morning.
Not that the situation improves. Not that there is an end in sight, because there is not one and he does not pretend there is. What he says is that the supply arrives daily, in a situation that is not changing, and Lamentations 3:23 makes that a statement about God's faithfulness rather than about the circumstances, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that be usable by somebody in a long thing.
You are being supplied daily inside something that is not moving, and the supply has never once depended on the situation improving. Lamentations 3:23 puts new mercies in the middle of an unresolved catastrophe, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes daily faithfulness land on somebody making a payment that changes nothing visible.
The payment is not nothing
Here is what I want to say about this month's payment, and I mean it literally rather than encouragingly.
It counted.
Not because it moved the number much. Because you did it. You could have not done it. A great many people in your position do not, and I am not condemning them and neither is God, but you did, and doing a right and unglamorous thing that produces no visible result is one of the harder forms of faithfulness there is.
Nobody will ever congratulate you for it. There is no moment where anybody notices. It produces no event, and Lamentations 3:23 is a verse about exactly that kind of arithmetic, where the supply is real and the situation looks identical, and the Holy Spirit is the one who counts something that leaves no mark.
You did something faithful this month, and the absence of a visible result has never once meant an absence of substance. The written word says great is thy faithfulness, said by a man in the ruins of a city, and the Spirit of God is the one who values a thing that produced no event.
What I will not promise
I have to be honest about the limits here, and I would rather disappoint you now than encourage you falsely.
I am not going to promise you that this ends. I do not know that. Some of these do and some of them take a very long time and some change shape into something else, and anybody who tells you confidently otherwise is either selling something or has not thought about it.
And I am not going to tell you that God will clear it. That is the sentence people in your position get told most often and it is not one I am able to make. We declare what God has said. We do not promise what He will do.
What is actually promised in Lamentations 3:23 is daily mercy in an unchanged situation, and that is a smaller promise than the one you have probably been offered elsewhere, and it has the enormous advantage of being true, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a smaller true thing more useful than a larger false one.
You are given today rather than an end date, and it has never once been a lesser provision. Lamentations 3:23 promises new mercies each morning rather than a resolution, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes daily enough for a person who cannot see the end.
So here is what I believe is going out over somebody today.
You are not feeding something, and the payment has never once been evidence against you. I am not encouraging you. Lamentations 3:23 puts new mercies inside a book with no resolution in it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my telling who makes a daily supply usable by a person who cannot see an end.
And this, which is the word I came with:
You are supplied for today, and the end date has never once been the thing you were given. The written word says they are new every morning, great is thy faithfulness, and the Spirit of God is the one who arrives daily in a situation that looks the same as it did last month.
This month counted. Say it out loud, because nobody else is going to.
Declare this over yourself
- Total that has barely moved in nine years, you are not an accusation and you never were. Lamentations 3:23 says they are new every morning in the middle of a ruined city, so by the Holy Spirit you do not get to name me in the name of Jesus.
- Feeling that I am only feeding this, you have no standing in my kitchen. The word says great is thy faithfulness, said where nothing was resolved, and by the Holy Spirit I am done treating a faithful thing as evidence against me.
- Father, You supply daily inside situations that do not change. Your word says they are new every morning, so by Your Spirit I make this month's payment, and I say out loud that it counted.
Lamentations 3:23
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