Mercy in the Morning
Sunrises, Re-creation, and God's Mercy for Each Day
On Sunday mornings at Mountain Bible Church, we are walking through First Peter. The Christian concept of “new birth” comes up a few times explicitly and implicitly in the first few chapters. “New birth” is a theological metaphor that helps us understand how God in Christ brings all those with faith in him into a new identity, a new way of being, and a new trajectory of life. Jesus goes so far to say in the gospel of John that “except someone be born again, they cannot enter the kingdom of God.” (John 3:5)
I admit: I’ve always struggled with this idea of new birth.
Some people’s journey of faith has involved a radical change at some point in their life when they turned in faith to Jesus. Praise be to God for these testimonies. They are very obvious displays of how powerful the Christian new birth can be, reminding us that the extravagant grace of God can meet us wherever and whenever we are in life.
Others, like myself, might not have stories of dramatic turnarounds. I grew up in the Bible Belt, immersed in a Christian subculture for most of my life. It took a while for my faith in Christ to become my own and not just something that was culturally handed down to me, and I can recognize some defining moments along the way. Nonetheless, my journey of faith has often felt more like seasons of ups and downs rather than a one-eighty from one direction of life to another.
For many with a similar experience, this means that we don’t really have a moment to look to as a “fresh start” in life. Rather than wiping the slate clean and starting new, our journey of faith has been more like shuffling around with a mixed bag of Christian experiences, of mountaintops and valleys and everything in between, and trying to sort it all out with some sense of meaning. We hope we’re farther along in Christian maturity than we were a decade ago; but, if we’re honest, some days it feels like we’ve taken a leap backwards.
I’d imagine that any Christian, even those who have had a radical moment of transformation in their past, might start to eventually forget that sense of walking in the “newness of life” that was professed over us at our baptism. Our days often feel more like the same old same old in a decaying creation with all of its brokenness, rather than the experience of new creation life in Christ.
Perhaps we need to rethink what we mean by “new birth.” What if it is not just a moment in the past that we look to when we share our testimonies? What if the “newness” is also the grace of God that meets us each day, no matter how far along or how far behind we are in the journey of faith? Perhaps the “newness of life” with God can be thought of like words of Lamentations 3, words written in the context of deep pain and regret:
Because of the Lord’s faithful love
we do not perish,
for his mercies never end.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness!1
The book of Lamentations was probably written by a temple priest or poet-prophet who witnessed the devastation of Jerusalem in Babylon. Such devastation was a death blow to Judah. Jerusalem was the capital city and, more importantly, the home of the temple. God’s presence was believed to dwell with his people in a special way in Jerusalem. Since the prophets anticipated a future glory of Zion (a New Jerusalem) that would come when God’s Messiah arrived, the destruction of the temple would have thrown the people of Judah into a deep uncertainty about their identity as the people of God and their future as a kingdom of priests mediating God’s blessings to the world. This side of the cross, we may be able to look back on such events with hindsight, seeing it is a precursor the coming of the Messiah; but those who lived through such events likely could not imagine how God’s people and God’s redemptive mission in the world would continue.
Nonetheless, amidst deep lament and uncertainty, the writer of Lamentations rests their hope in God’s faithful love. They recognize that this faithfulness of God is not just to be located in a past event of God’s mercy to Israel or a new climactic event that is yet to come, but that this same mercy meets God’s people each day with the rising sun. Wherever (and whenever) God’s mercy is, there is the possibility of new life.
Such an ongoing newness that meets us each day is also implied by the great hymn to Christ in Colossians 1:
…all things have been created through him and for him.
He is before all things,
and by him all things hold together.2
This hymn indicates that creation itself does not just exist for the glory of Christ, its existence is through Christ and held together by him. Philosophers and theologians have proposed various ways of thinking about this kind of moment by moment dependency that creation has on the Creator. One proposal is that God in his infinite power recreates the universe anew each moment. This recreation is in continuity with what has gone before, yet it carries a newness that is moving creation along towards God’s final reconciliation of all things. This is a heavy idea, but such a theory expresses the gravity of radical dependence on God that creation has in being held together by God in Christ.
The poet of Lamentations saw this dependence on God’s life-giving mercy in the rising sun: the sun rising each morning is humanity’s reminder that God is continuing to hold things together and continues each moment to meet us with the newness of life’s possibilities according to his abundant mercy.
With this framework, we can learn to see that the “new birth” metaphor of the New Testament can indeed indicate a moment of repentance and radical transformation in our past; but it can also remind us of the ongoing, moment by moment, newness of life in which we walk.
To be clear, this new birth doesn’t mean a new memory. Even in the newness of God’s mercy, we are deeply aware of what has gone before, including our failures. There is mysterious continuity of our present experience of life with our past, and we can’t be too naive to think that we can just leave the baggage of the previous day’s mistakes at the edge of our bed each night, letting it slip away into the abyss of sleep. If we can’t remember all things in the way that God does, we certainly can’t forget our sins in the way that he can.
But the sun still rises. And with it God’s mercy still meets us.
So, maybe the new start of each day is not trying to wipe the slate clean. Maybe it looks more like gathering up all our baggage into the robes of God’s grace, knowing that the newness of his mercy can carry it, sort it out, and infuse it all with meaning in a way that we can’t.
As we do this each morning, lifting our prayers of praise, thanksgiving, and repentance, God meets us with his faithful presence in an incredible act of re-creation and empowers us to take a step forward into the day ahead. And with the newness of each morning’s mercy, we are closer and closer to the final day that will give birth to the ultimate new creation. Then, all shall truly be well as the glory of God’s face outshines the sufferings, regrets, and heartache of the old creation that has passed away.
Lamentations 3:22-23 CSB.
Colossians 1:16-17 CSB.