Everlasting Consolation

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Jeremiah wrote that from the ruins of a burned city, and the detail worth noticing is the word new. Not lasting. New. He is describing a supply that has to arrive again.

Which is roughly the problem with encouragement. Somebody says the right thing on Tuesday and it holds until Thursday, and then you are awake at midnight running the same arithmetic on the same problem, wondering why the lift did not last. It did not last because that kind never does. It was a good sentence with a shelf life.

Paul prays for something with a different shape here, and the word is worth stopping on: everlasting consolation. Not repeated, not renewed, everlasting, and he grounds it in a completed act rather than an ongoing supply. Which hath loved us, past tense, finished, nothing being auditioned for. Then look at what he asks that consolation to do, because it is not what people expect comfort to be for. Comfort your hearts, and stablish you in every good word and work. He is not praying that they feel better. He is praying that they be put back on their feet and set going again. A consolation that leaves a person sitting down is not the thing he asked for.

So go back to Jeremiah in the ash, with a supply that had to arrive again in the morning. What Paul asks for is the other kind, and the difference is not that it is warmer. It is that a consolation grounded in something already finished does not have to be resupplied on the morning you cannot find it. The good sentence somebody said on Tuesday was never what he was praying for.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 319 is Another Man's Servant (Romans 14:4).

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