Asking God for a Fresh Start

Today we finish our devotional journey through the OT book of Lamentations in our series: Learning to Live in Lament and Hope. I particularly like the title of this series: Learning to Live in Lament and Hope.

Learning suggests that there are both things to unlearn and things to learn that will enable you to enjoy God and live a more redemptive life on this side of heaven. Lament and hope are in my estimation two “faith-life-skills” that when learned and practiced allow you to navigate the dark and hard experiences of life in a way that leads to life, rather than sucks life out of you. As we finish this series I want to add a third “faith-life-skill” to lament and hope and that is Asking God for a Fresh Start.

While I believe that learning to lament and learning to hope, via cold and broken hallelujah’s, are two basic skills for the God-formed life, they are incomplete without a third—and that is asking God for a fresh start. This trinity of lament; hope, and fresh start is in many ways the essence of redemptive living and all gifts of God by his Spirit to help us get on in this world.

As we continue in The Lord’s Prayer, we now get even more personal to consider the issue of forgiveness. Frankly, we need to be forgiven and to forgive as much as we need daily necessities like bread. This morning, our own Tyler Milley will talk to us about our ability to forgive others which comes as a response to our being forgiven. Stanley Hauerwas writes: [Forgiveness] is not so much an act of generosity toward our fellow offending human beings as an act of gratitude toward our forgiving God.”