Never Cast Off

Transcript

Hello, my friend… so glad you're with me today. This is By God's Call — day 306, Never Cast Off.

"For the Lord will not cast off forever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love." Lamentations 3, verses 31 and 32.

Let that settle for a moment. Because these words did not come from a comfortable place. They came from a man who watched everything collapse. Jeremiah was standing in the ruins of Jerusalem — not a setback, not a difficult season — total destruction. The city he loved, gone. And it was from that place, from the very bottom of despair, that he drove this stake into the ground: the Lord will not cast off forever.

That is not denial. That is not shallow faith. That is an anchor thrown into the storm.

Look at what the verse does. It does not soften the suffering — it uses the word grief, plainly, without flinching. It does not ask you to pretend everything is fine. But it makes a declaration that changes everything: this is not the final chapter. What feels endless to you right now — that weight, that waiting, that quiet sense that God has gone silent — has a boundary in God's calendar. Forever has an end.

And the promise is not that God will keep you from all sorrow. The promise is bigger than that. It is that His compassion is greater than any sorrow He allows. The abundance of His steadfast love outweighs everything that is pressing down on you today. Not most things — everything.

And if any doubt still lingers, look at the cross. Jesus cried out — from the cross, He cried — "My God, why have you forsaken me?" The Son of God, bearing the full weight of what abandonment feels like. And God answered. Not with silence — with resurrection. What looked like abandonment was, in fact, redemption. The cross is the ultimate argument against the thought that God casts off His own.

There is one more thing that needs to land. The Hebrew word for compassion in this verse does not carry the feel of a cold, distant decision. It carries the image of deep inner parts — a visceral, maternal love. Like a mother who feels her child's pain inside her own body. God does not feel compassion from a safe distance, through cold calculation. He feels with you, from the inside out. And when He feels, He moves.

That is what is written. Not what I am adding — what is written. And this Word was kept, carried through centuries of fire and exile, to reach you today, on this specific day, in this specific moment when you need to hear it: He has not cast you off. He will not cast you off. The grief has a limit. The love does not.

So today — before breakfast, before you check your phone, before the noise of the day rushes in — I want you to do one thing. Take this verse and say it out loud, with the pronoun made personal: "The Lord will not cast me off forever." Say it again. Let your own voice preach to your own soul this morning. Because sometimes the soul needs to hear the truth with its own ears, spoken in its own voice, to believe what it already knows.

Stay close to God. Pray — then act. I'll see you tomorrow, my friend.