The Lord’s Day Evening
Lamentations 3:21-27
“Hymns of the Faith (9): Great Is Thy Faithfulness”
Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III
Keep your hymnals open to No. 32. Tonight we’re doing our ninth Hymn of the Faith—these occasional studies in some of the great hymns that we have come to love over the years, trying to get to know them better and to know more about them and more about the Scriptures upon which they are based.
This great hymn is actually a pretty new hymn. It was written in the twentieth century by a man named Thomas Chisholm, and it eventually became so popular that it was the unofficial song of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Chisholm did not write this in either a great time of crisis or of special blessing in his life. He says that there was nothing particular about the occasion that moved him to write these words, except “a general apprehension of the goodness and faithfulness of God” to him over the years.
He was actually a sickly man. He worked for a while in secular work. He eventually became a Methodist minister, but his health hampered him from doing all that he would have done had he had the choice to pursue his vocation without the hindrance of his health. Yet over the course of his life he wrote something like 1200 poems, about 800 of which were published, but this is the most famous poem that he ever wrote.
As you will have perhaps noticed over the course of the years singing this song, it is primarily based on Lamentations 3. Now that is a book that is filled with not happy things! And so when you hear Great Is Thy Faithfulness, it may well be that you associate this as a song of praise to God when the good things of God have come into your life, and yet the words of Great Is Thy Faithfulness come out of one of the bleakest portions of Scripture that you will find in this section—Lamentations 3, viewed with Psalm 88, and certain other low points of Scripture.
I think of the end of Habakkuk, you know when Habakkuk says, you know, ‘Though the fields yield no fruit, and though our enemies are set about us on every side, yet I will trust in the Lord.’ It’s not the circumstances of the people of God in either Lamentations 3 or in Habakkuk 3 that give Jeremiah or Habakkuk hope. There’s nothing about their circumstances that encourages them. It’s something about God that encourages them. And so when you hear Great Is Thy Faithfulness, though of course it is perfectly appropriate to use this song in great times of rejoicing when God has manifested in a plain and obvious way His love and provision and faithfulness and goodness to us, this song actually, because it is based on Scripture and because it is based on Lamentations and because it is based on the truth of God’s word, is appropriate for every season of life because God’s comfort to us is not conditional and circumstantial. That is, our assurance of God’s faithfulness is not based on our present circumstances and on happy conditions. It’s based on something much, much more secure, and this song helps us celebrate that.
Now, if you have your Bibles, I’d invite you to turn with me to Lamentations 3. In your bulletin it says verses 22-23, but I’d like to expand that just a little bit, and I’d like to go back to verse 21 and read to verse 27. And then later in our time together tonight I actually want to remind you of some things that Jeremiah has said in the very first verses of Lamentations 3, because I think it will help you appreciate all the more what he says here in Lamentations 3:21-27. Before we read God’s word, let’s ask for His help and blessing.
Lord, thank You for Your day. Thank You for the day of rest and gladness. Thank You for the day that we get to gather with Your people. Thank You for the encouragement that it is to be with one another, to hear words of kindness and friendship, to hear words of gospel and of cross, to hear words of the Lord Jesus spoken in our ears by those who know You and love You and live with You and walk with You, and worship You above everything else. It encourages our souls. It encourages our hearts. It encourages us in the Christian life. But there is no greater privilege that we have than to come under Your word and to hear You speak from Your own mouth into our ears and down into our hearts. And so as we hear Your word tonight, O Lord, help us to receive it as we ought: not as the words of men, but as the very word of God. This we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Hear the word of God in Lamentations 3, beginning in verse 21:
“But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
His mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness.
‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul,
‘therefore I will hope in Him.’
“The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,
to the soul who seeks Him.
It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.
It is good for a man that he bear
the yoke in his youth.”
Amen. And thus ends this reading of God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant word. May He write its eternal truth upon all our hearts.
You know the condition in which Jeremiah speaks. The promised judgments of God have come against his people, and now he looks upon a ruined and empty Jerusalem and he cries out to the Lord some of the bitterest words of Scripture. You know, it’s ironic. The Lord called Jeremiah to be a prophet and to speak His word. And what does every servant of the Lord long to get to do when he’s called to speak the word of the Lord? Every servant of the Lord wants to speak a word of comfort. He wants to speak a word of grace. He wants to speak a word of blessing. And God says to Jeremiah, ‘Jeremiah, go to My people. And here’s your word: You preach judgment, wrath, and destruction.’ And for the course of his ministry, he delivers that message of judgment and wrath and destruction. And now here at the end of his life, he has seen with his own eyes the fulfillment of God’s promise to unrepentant Israel that He would bring judgment and destruction upon them because of their sin. And do you think that Jeremiah enjoyed that? He didn’t enjoy delivering the message, and he did not enjoy seeing the message fulfilled. But he was faithful to the word of the Lord, and as the Lord spoke, so spoke he. If you think that it did not break his heart, then you just look at what he says about himself in Lamentations 3:1 –
“I am the man who has seen affliction because of the rod of His wrath.
He has driven me and made me walk in darkness, and not in light.
Surely against me He has turned His hand repeatedly all the day.
He has caused my flesh and my skin to waste away;
He has broken my bones; He has besieged and encompassed me
with bitterness and hardship.
In dark places He has made me dwell like those who have
long been dead.
He has walled me in so that I cannot get out;
He has made my chain heavy;
Even when I cry out and call for help,
He shuts out my prayer.
He has blocked my ways with a hewn stone;
He has made my paths crooked.
He is to me like a bear lying in wait, like a lion in secret places.
He has turned aside my ways and torn me to pieces.
He has made me desolate.
He has bent His bow and set me as a target for the arrow;
He made the arrows of His quiver to enter my inward parts.
I have become a laughingstock to all my people,
their mocking song all the day long.
He has filled me with bitterness.
He has made me drunk with wormwood.
He has broken my teeth with gravel.
He has made me cower in the dust, and my soul has been rejected from peace.
I have forgotten happiness, and so I say
‘My strength has perished, and so has my hope from the Lord.’”
That is the man who sang,
“Great is Thy faithfulness, O God, my Father.
There is no shadow of turning with Thee.
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not;
As Thou hast been, Thou forever will be.
Great is Thy faithfulness; great is Thy faithfulness;
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed, Thy hand has provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.”
It’s that man. Now all I have to say is this. I don’t know where you are tonight, but I do know this: no matter where you are, if he can sing Great Is Thy Faithfulness, you can sing Great Is Thy Faithfulness. And that to me is a very encouraging thought.
Now if you look at this hymn, it is based on Lamentations 3 in the first stanza, and then the refrain. But you will also have noticed some words that come out of James 1 in the first stanza. I’m going to point you to those in just a moment. The second stanza is based on Genesis 8:22, and the third stanza is based on five gospel truths that you will find sprinkled all throughout the Gospels and the Epistles that are numbered among God’s choicest blessings to His people. And I’m going to walk through each of those stanzas with you.
Let me give you two words, and then I’ll give you a hint as to what I’m going to do on the last stanza to outline this. Here are my first two words:
Immutability. Who would have thought that immutability would be the source of your comfort and hope when the whole world is falling down around your ears? But it is, and we’ll see it in just a moment. So there’s your first word, immutability.
The second word is easier:
Covenant. That’s the second stanza. The first stanza is immutability; the second stanza is covenant.
And the third stanza…I’m not going to give away my words, because I’ve got five “P” words that go in the third stanza! He gives it away…the first three start with “P”…I knew I had to figure two more “P’s” that would go with the first three “P’s”—I’m a preacher, after all—we’ve got to get something that will rhyme here! So there are five “P’s” in the third stanza that are the basis of his comfort.
Let’s look at the first stanza:
“Great is Thy faithfulness, O God, my Father.
There is no shadow of turning with Thee.”
Now that line, “There is no shadow of turning with Thee” …There are a lot of saints with hoary heads here tonight, and you will have been reared primarily on the King James Version of the Bible, the Authorized Version. And you will perhaps remember that in James 1:17, James says this in the King James:
“Every good gift, every perfect gift, is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”
It’s from James 1:17 that Thomas Chisholm swipes that glorious line, “There is no shadow of turning with Thee.” In other words, the basis of his comfort is God’s un-variableness, God’s immutability, God’s un-changeability. In other words, God is unchangeable in His character, His compassion, and in His faithfulness. It never fails no matter what our circumstances are, and therefore we are comforted.
“There is no shadow of turning with Thee.
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not;
As Thou hast been...”
[You’ve been faithful, You’ve been compassionate, You’ve been good…]
“Thou forever will be.”
[You will be faithful, You will be compassionate, You will be generous and good and kind and caring.]
And so the first stanza is based upon not only the words of Lamentations 3, especially 22-23, but also James 1:17 and that beautiful line out of the King James, “with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”
Now the second stanza comes right out of God’s covenant with Noah. Do you remember at the end of God’s encounter with Noah (from Genesis 6-9), right at the end of Genes s 8, when the flood has dissipated and the civilization is restarting, God says to Noah – what? Turn with me in your Bibles to Genesis 8:22:
“I will never again…[verse 21]…curse the ground on account of man.”
[Verse 22] “While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease…”
So that the regularity of God’s ordered cycles in nature are designed to be an evidence to us that God is fulfilling His promise not to destroy the world again by water, and to preserve it until such time as the Lord Jesus comes and the new heavens and the new earth are established. And so when we look out and we see the sun rise, and we see the seasons change, and when we see the cycles of the sun and the moon make their paces, we are seeing an evidence of God’s fulfilling the promise that He made in the covenant with Noah thousands of years ago. And that’s what the second stanza is about. Look at it:
“Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
sun, moon, and stars in their courses above,
join with all nature in…”
[What?]
“…in manifold witness
to Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.”
And you ask yourself, “How do they bear witness to God’s faithfulness, mercy and love?” Because the fact that there is summer and winter and springtime and harvest, and day and night and the cycles of the rotations of the earth and the movement of the planets is witness that God is fulfilling His promise that He made to Noah. It’s a sign of God’s being faithful to His covenant.
Have you ever been at one of those crisis moments of life and you’re talking with a loved one? Maybe it was many years ago, and it was your father or your mother. Or maybe it was your husband or wife or a dear friend, and they said something like this to you in a season that was very dark: “Honey, the sun is going to rise tomorrow.” And somehow you felt a little better after you heard that. Now if you think about it, the mere fact that the sun is going to rise tomorrow doesn’t do you a lick of good because your circumstances are still going to be there. But what does that saying indicate? Well, in a certain way it indicates the very truth that’s being pointed out in the second stanza of Great Is Thy Faithfulness and in Genesis 8:22. God in His faithfulness is going to cause the sun to rise tomorrow. And the same God who was faithful to you yesterday is going to be waiting for you at the dawn tomorrow. And in fact, He’s with you in the night of your difficulty right now. His faithfulness is not changing, even though your circumstances are. And that is a comforting thought, and that is what Thomas Chisholm is pointing out in the second stanza of Great Is Thy Faithfulness: that even when you see the sun rise and set and the seasons change, you are seeing witness that God’s word can be trusted. Because thousands of years ago He promised Noah, ‘These cycles are going to keep on going until I send Jesus.’ So when the sun rises, it’s rising not because it’s always risen before, but because God has promised that it will rise until the day that it is no longer necessary because He and the Lamb will be all the light that you will need then.
So this passage is a witness to the faithfulness of God and His covenant. So the first source of our comfort and confidence is God’s immutability, His un-changeability; that His compassion doesn’t change with the wind, and doesn’t turn with the shadow. It’s something that you can count on. And the second comfort is God’s covenant; He’s promised that summer and winter and seedtime and harvest will continue until Jesus returns.
Then the third stanza gives you five Bible truths, especially from the Gospels and the Epistles, that give us comfort in every circumstance. Here they are: Pardon; Peace; Presence; Power; and Promise. Let’s just walk through what Thomas Chisholm piles up on us in the third stanza:
“Pardon for sin.” You understand that no circumstance in this world can take away from you the pardon for sin that you have at the purchase of God’s own Son. They can take everyone and everything from you, but they can’t take that. They cannot take the pardon of God from you. It cannot be taken from you. It is utterly secure. And thus it is a reason for confidence and rejoicing in God’s faithfulness, because God has been faithful to forgive you and nobody can take that away from you. They can take your name, they can take your reputation, they can take your family, they can take your money, but they can’t take God’s pardon from you. It’s secure! God’s given it, and He’s not granted that anyone else should be able to take away what He’s given in the pardon to His people.
Secondly, “
And a peace that endureth.” God is the one who gives His peace which passes understanding, and no one can take it away. Doesn’t Jesus say that? Turn with me to the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John, in the most unpeaceful situation in the world, on the night of Jesus’ betrayal, in John 16, Jesus says,
“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage. I have overcome the world.”
In other words, Jesus is saying, ‘The peace that I give to you endures because it doesn’t come from the world, and it’s not based upon an absence of tribulation in the world. It comes from Me, because I’ve overcome the world; and, therefore, you can have this peace in every situation and in every tribulation in this world, because I, who have overcome the world, have given it to you. It is a peace that endures.’ It is a “peace that passes understanding,” Paul says.
Third, Chisholm says not only pardon for sin and a peace that endureth, but
“Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide.”
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me.
Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.” The gospel presence, the evangelical presence of God with His people will never abandon them in their time of need. “Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide.”
“Strength for today” – God’s power. Not innate strength in ourselves, but strength given to us by God. What does Paul pray in Ephesians 1? “That you would be strengthened according to the power which raised Jesus Christ from the dead.” And he prays it again in Ephesians 3: “That you would be strengthened in the inner man.” So God supplies us with strength from without, within. He puts in us strength that we don’t have in and of ourselves.
And,
“Bright hope for tomorrow.” God has made a promise. And that promise is the basis of our blessed hope, and that blessed hope is this: We win. It doesn’t matter what happens here, we win. Jesus is coming, and when Jesus comes, He will come as the victor and as the judge and as the Lord, and as the ruler. And every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. So no matter what you’re going through right now, here’s how it ends: We win.
Do you remember the story of the little boy who was shining shoes, and he was shining the preacher’s shoes one day? And he had his Bible open, and he was reading it, and the preacher said to the boy, “Son, what are you reading there?”
“I’m reading the Bible.”
“What book of the Bible are you reading?”
“I’m reading Revelation.”
“Huh! Revelation, eh? Do you know what that book means?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, tell me what it means.”
“We win.”
He’s exactly right. That’s what the book of Revelation means: We win. It’s the basis of our bright hope. No matter what the circumstances of your life may hold, we win.
And then he says – just tacks it on at the end –
“Blessings all mine, and ten thousand beside.” In other words, I’ve just named five blessed privileges that give us hope and comfort and cause to praise God for His faithfulness, but, you know, I could name ten thousand others. (Got the time?)
“Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see:
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided—
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!”
The next time you sing it, if you haven’t noticed those things before make sure you take note. Take strength and give praise back to God.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your word, and we ask that You would work it deep down into our hearts and that You would help us to sing this song with faith when we sing it again. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Would you stand for God’s benediction.
Peace be to the brethren, and love with faith, through Jesus Christ our Lord, until the day break and the shadows flee away. Amen.
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