Someone recently told me that they avoid coming to church, because invariably the worship service moves them to tears, and they don't want others to see them cry.
There is grief and pain beneath those words, and a world of hurt -- but the sentiment is misguided. Tears are not the enemy, even tears shed in the worst trial, the worst pain and brokenness of heart. God creates beautiful things from our tears. He uses tears to reshape, to remake and heal us. He uses tears to reveal the heights of divine love and holy will. He uses tears to clear our eyes to see Him in the midst of our pain. He uses tears to wash the soul of His loved children. Never yet has a tear fallen from the eyes of God's dear child, but that He did not see, and appoint the tear as a balm of healing: every place the tear dripped on face or skin, there brushed the liquid love of Abba God, and the sacred tears of the Holy Spirit, and eternal, sacrificial tears of Jesus, still poured out upon those He loves.
Flee not your tears, friends. Let them flow in full accord, as your eyes are turned upon the holy God of the universe. Priceless gifts will spring up where the tears fall. And the tears will simply drop from time to eternity, bottled up in love by God himself, stored up as future diamonds in a forever of love.
Alleluia!
Selah.
In a similar line, Venus Bardanouve writes a meditation entitled, "He Gave Us Tears." Listen to her apt thoughts:
Lord, I don't want to cry in front of my children and grandchildren. Help me to be brave and show them how a Christian faces death."
This was my friend's prayer when she lost her husband. And she sat dry-eyed through his funeral.
Weeks went by and she was still tearless, but her weight of sorrow grew heavier every day. Finally she called out in desperation, "Lord, give me back my tears." He did, and as the tears flowed, her pent-up burden lightened and her broken heart began to heal. She realized that tears are one of God's gracious gifts to us. The all-knowing and compassionate God, who fully understands us, knew we needed them for many reasons.
My friend found that she needed her tears to help relieve the burden of loss. Abraham wept when he buried Sarah, Jacob cried when he thought his son Joseph was dead, David poured out his sorrow with tears over his slain son Absalom, and Mary Magdalene wept at Jesus' tomb.
Sometimes it is not loss, but God's blessing that brings tears. When Jesus enters a heart, old walls are often washed away by tears. As tears poured down the cheeks of a big, burly man who had just found God, he said, "Twenty-five years ago when I was twelve years old, my father almost beat me to death. I vowed then that no one would ever make me cry again, and I have never shed a tear since that day. Now I can hardly stop crying."
Four-year-old Kyle had a touch of that same experience. He was having lunch with Grandma. As she held his small hand, she thanked God for the food and for her little grandson. As she finished praying, he wiped his hand across his eyes and said, "Grandma, when you pray it makes my eyes water." The Holy Spirit often brings tears to the eyes of those with tender hearts.
The Bible tells us to "... weep with those who weep" (Romans 12:15). Jesus wept in compassion when He saw Mary and Martha's grief at the loss of their brother, Lazarus. Tears of others may move us to compassion and action as we sense the hurt that caused them.
Selah.
You can read the rest here: HE GAVE US TEARS.
The money quote, for me: "Grandma, when you pray it makes my eyes water."
Oh the riches of God's appointed tears for His loved children!
Let your love leak out today, friends, and splash redemptively around your world in acts of kindness, servanthood and prayer... and yea, even through your tears!
17 comments:
Tears are prayers when one can't find the words..
Amen. And God helps us pray in those times of our wordless, tear-soaked prayers. Rom. 8:26 and 8:34!
Psalm 6,
Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your wrath.
Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am faint;
heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony.
My soul is in deep anguish.
How long, Lord, how long?
Turn, Lord, and deliver me;
save me because of your unfailing love.
Among the dead no one proclaims your name.
Who praises you from the grave?
I am worn out from my groaning.
All night long I flood my bed with weeping
and drench my couch with tears.
My eyes grow weak with sorrow;
they fail because of all my foes.
Away from me, all you who do evil,
for the Lord has heard my weeping.
The Lord has heard my cry for mercy;
the Lord accepts my prayer.
All my enemies will be overwhelmed with shame and anguish;
they will turn back and suddenly be put to shame.
Amen.
Hope in the night: "The Lord has heard my weeping. The Lord has heard my cry for mercy; the Lord accepts my prayer." Praise God!
God has surely listened
and has heard my prayer.
Praise be to God,
who has not rejected my prayer
or withheld His love from me!
Selah.
Isaiah (53:3) prophesied that Jesus would be “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” The fact that Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus shows that whatever our grief may be, Jesus knows it and He enters into it with us.
A friend linked me to your blog. I look forward to reading more as time goes on. Peace to you brother.
Thank you for the blessing of peace, and I'm glad that the blog is an encouragement to some people. Also, I appreciate the depth of seeing the Isaiah passage like that -- a new glimpse into what it means for Jesus to call himself a man of sorrows, on very familiar terms with grief! Very good stuff. Depth of truth. Thank you!
James 1:18 Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.
Amen! So humbling to think of this high truth... Good word. I just read Romans 9:15-16 today. Struck by its fre freshness & power -- God has birthed us with Spirit life by His own will -- grace alone! I'll swing out my life on that, in joy!
For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion.”[f] 16 So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.
Alleluia!
Yes!
Eph 2:3-5 Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved.
Letting this truth wash over me, eating dinner. So thankful! :-)
On grace:
God’s pure grace gets polluted from two sides. On the one side, grace runs counter to the way the world works, so it’s difficult for us to grasp it and get used to it. The world works on the merit system. If you do well in school, you get good grades and win awards. If you do well in sports, you make the team and get a lot of applause. If you get into college, the merit system continues to reward excellence. This carries over into the business world after college. Exceptional performance earns promotions and raises. Sloppy performance will get you fired.
In the spiritual realm, all of the world’s religions, except for biblical Christianity, work on the merit system. Even the major branches of Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, teach a system of merit-salvation, where you have to add your works to what Christ did on the cross in order to go to heaven. Most believers who die go to purgatory, where after suffering for a while, eventually you will have enough of your sins purged away and enough merit to qualify for heaven. This merit system of salvation permeates the public mind. Ask anyone on the street his opinion of how a person gets into heaven and you will hear something about being a good person. It was at the heart of pharisaic, legalistic religion in the times of Jesus and Paul.
But God’s grace also gets distorted from another side, which mistakes the grace of God for licentiousness (Jude 4). Many professing Christians wrongly think that God’s grace means that He gives out free passes that allow us to sin, with no consequences for disobedience. If you emphasize the need to obey God’s commandments or do good works, they call you a legalist. If you warn them that their sloppy view of sin will result in God’s discipline, they don’t want to hear it. Their mantra is, “I’m not into your rules kind of religion. I’m under grace, not law.” For them, grace means permission for sloppy living.
So true, on both accounts.
The reformers (expositing clear biblical truth) taught that saving faith necessarily contained repentance -- Grace alone births us in Christ, yet this new birth is evidenced by new life & a new heart, concerning sin. We learn to call our sin "sin," by this saving grace. We learn to abhor our sin, even imperfectly. And we learn to love God's law, where once we hated it, keeping it in Christ, in the law of love.
Again, good word!
I hope I am not monopolizing your time. I just get enthused to share Christ's truth with a fellow servant. So many shoot arrows in this day and age, woefully missing the mark.
On Sin:
The Bible teaching about sin and the Christian discloses a sharp distinction between our eternal position as a child of God, and our present family fellowship with Him. Our position in this universe changes as a Christian. We become a child of God by spiritual birth and legal adoption (John 1:12, 13; Galatians 4:5-7).
A new unalterable and permanent relationship has been formed: Father and child. He has promised us, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). Paul reminds us there is no transgression greater than the grace and forgiveness of God (Romans 5:19-21). We have been declared righteous, are being made righteous over time, and are treated as righteous by God.
This provision is possible because of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His one time sacrifice paid all the penalty of all the sins for all time for all those who by faith become Christians (Hebrews 10:10-14). The legal punishment was permanently canceled in Christ. This cements the Christian’s relationship to God (Romans 3:21-28; 8:1; 8:28-39).
No, it's all good. You are posting good stuff. Thank you! And more good thoughts re: sin & our new relation w God, and new standing in the world -- toward sin, self, and others. Rollin gold. :-)
Last thoughts of the evening.
A Gallup poll indicated that 34% of all Americans 18 or older believed that they were “born again.”
Few of us would dare to believe such a statistic could be true, especially in the light of other findings by a later Gallup poll.
Yet now, because of the words of a friend I visited, I can understand why so many people think of themselves as “born again” Christians. They believe so because they see themselves as 80% saved, and in their mind, that ought to be close enough. When Paul stood before Agrippa, this king told the apostle, tongue in cheek, that he was almost persuaded to become a Christian (cf. Acts 26, especially verse 28). While Agrippa was “almost persuaded,” he knew that he was far from almost saved. Agrippa knew he was, by Paul’s gospel, a lost man. But those who are 80% saved conclude that anything over 50% must be sufficient. They are lost and don’t even know it. As a result, the greatest need for many “Christians” today is to be born again, genuinely and thoroughly saved.
Good Night Friend
Yes. If 34 percent of Americans 18 or older were in saving relation w God in Christ, well... America would not be where she is right now.
It seems that most Americans who declare themselves born again do so from subjective bases: an emotional experience, an intellectual assent, or perhaps a decision made in times past. However, the new birth is a work of the Spirit -- born "not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God." God works and defines the new birth, not us! And this Spirit birth is accompanied by Spirit fruit: faith, repentance, and divine (holy) love, etc.
This is why we are commanded to examine ourselves, to see if indeed we are in the faith (examine whether or not this new life, and new, holy fruit is at work in us). Because the Spirit life is divinely worked and defined, with necessary fruit. Without it, we are in the condition described by Jonathan Edwards, of false conversion and false conviction -- which he saw time and again, in the fires of the Great Awakening. And, such things that eventually caused the flame of the Awakening to stop: false convictions, false conversions and false actions in the name of Christ.
It is a sobering, and humbling, and yet amazingly joyful and freeing thing to realize that we are chosen by God in Christ for salvation. It is also just as sobering and humbling, and freeing on another level, to continually allow His Word and Spirit to examine us. The choice of God for us also comes with results and responsibility.
So we draw near to God, in sincere heart and full assurance, with heart and conscience cleansed, and He draws near to us. And we resist darkness and all its works in us. Grace at work, and so we work. Alleluia!
Good night, too, and many blessings!
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