His Mercies Are New Every Morning: Lamentations 3:22-23, What It Means, and the Latin
The most hopeful line in the Bible is in the saddest book in the Bible. That is not an accident.
Lamentations 3:22-23, King James Version
It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.
They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.
Where it is in the Bible
Lamentations, chapter 3, verses 22 and 23. Lamentations is five poems written in the ruins of Jerusalem after the Babylonians burned it in 586 BC. Tradition says Jeremiah wrote them, sitting in the rubble of the city he had spent forty years warning. The first two chapters are a widow crying in the street. Chapter 3 is a man who has been beaten, starved, and shut in the dark, and halfway through it he turns around and says this. The verse is not a greeting card. It is a man in a destroyed city deciding to get up anyway.
What "his mercies are new every morning" means
Three things, in order. First, you are still here. "We are not consumed." Whatever happened yesterday did not finish you, and the only reason is God's mercy, not your management of it. Second, the supply resets. The Hebrew word for mercies, chesed, is the covenant love God promised and cannot stop giving, and it does not carry over or run out. You do not get yesterday's mercy today. You get today's, fresh, and tomorrow there will be tomorrow's. Third, the reason you can bank on that is the last line: great is thy faithfulness. The mercies are new because the one giving them does not change.
The practical version: you are allowed to start over in the morning. Not because you earned it, because He restocked.
Why it was written in a ruin
Because hope that has never been tested is just mood. Jeremiah wrote this line with the temple in ashes behind him. Everything the people thought was permanent was gone, and what was left was the character of God. The verse works because of where it was written. If it had been written on a good day it would mean nothing. It was written on the worst day in the history of the nation, and it has held up for twenty-six hundred years of other people's worst days.
Lamentations 3:22-23 in Latin
Misericordiae Domini, quia non sumus consumpti
Novi diluculo, multa est fides tua
The mercies of the Lord, that we are not consumed. New at dawn, great is your faithfulness.
The Vulgate gives it as Misericordiae Domini, quia non sumus consumpti, quia non defecerunt miserationes eius. Novi diluculo, multa est fides tua. The word for morning is diluculum, first light, the moment before sunrise. Not morning in general. Dawn specifically, the exact point where the night ends.
The hymn
If the line sounds like a song, it is because it is one. "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" was written in 1923 by Thomas Chisholm, a Kentucky schoolteacher with no dramatic story at all; he said he wrote it about ordinary daily faithfulness. "Morning by morning new mercies I see" is Lamentations 3:23 put to a tune, and it has been sung at more funerals and more Sunday mornings than almost anything written in the last century.
Why it is on a mug
Because the verse is about mornings and so is coffee. The Morning Mercies mug carries the Lamb of God on one side and faith & based on the other, on an 11 ounce ceramic with a gold handle. The Lamb is there because the mercies that are new every morning were paid for once, on a Friday afternoon, and the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world is the reason the supply never runs out. It is the first thing we made that was not clothing, and it is the one that sits on the most counters.
"They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness."Lamentations 3:23