Title: Trickles Of Tears, Torrents Of Blessing
Bible Book: Luke 19 : 41-44
Author: Stewart Simms
Subject: Tears; Revival; Conviction; Road to Blessings
Objective:
Introduction
As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, "If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace - but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you."
In addition, let me read Psalm 30:5. Weeping may remain for a night, But rejoicing comes in the morning.
While Dr. L. R. Scarborough was president of Southwestern Baptist Seminary from 1915 to 1942, he also taught several classes on preaching. He would often say to his students, "Young men, be resurrection preachers." When they began to look at him with sufficient bewilderment, he would add, "Go after these old, dead churches and resurrect them. Set them on fire for God. Give these neighborhoods a place to go to church" (Jack Hyles, sermon, "Stay in Crete").
We want our church to be consumed by the fire of revival, or we should. We have been talking about some things that can make that happen, such as repentance and prayer. But I am sadly convinced that our hard hearts and dry eyes are preventing revival. We have lost the ability to weep. We have lost the ability to have our hearts broken by the things that break our Lord's heart. Everything we do has become so proper, so formal, so by the rules, so programmed and organized, so under control, so dignified, and so calm, cool and collected.
I. Tears do not Necessarily bring Revival
Now, tears themselves will not bring revival or prove that revival has come. Some weeping is insincere and all for show. But sometimes tears can show that our hearts are ready for revival, if we are weeping over the right things. Some studies have showed the emotional and even physical healing properties of tears. I want to focus on the spiritually disturbing power of tears.
II. Tears may Reveal a Heart Ready for Revival
Weeping may indicate a heart that is ready to be moved over things that really matter. On the other hand, I know people who might as well have a faucet fastened to their forehead. They cry at anything. But they also seem insincere. For years the world mocked a female television evangelist whose make-up constantly ran from her eyes down into her shoes because of her tears, but her tears seemed put on for the camera. They were too practiced. They flowed too easily. They seemed more for the benefit of the audience than for God. Well rehearsed cameramen zoomed in on her tears at just the right moment. Her tears brought mostly jeers, at least from unbelievers. She seemed more concerned about herself than them.
III. Tears Must be backed up with Life
God is not impressed with a boo-hoo unless it is backed up with a new you. Some people who weep easily are not as spiritual or as soft hearted as they want people to think. But I also know people whose faces are so hard they make me think their hearts are too. They don't weep over anything.
They seem above weeping. And some of them don't seem especially spiritually minded either.
IV. Tears reveal Revival when they are for Others
I wouldn't give you much for the Christianity of a person who never sheds a tear, even over their own sin, or over the spiritually lost condition of other people. As far as I can tell from the Bible, "weeping" is not a "fruit of the Spirit," but weeping can surely prepare the heart for seeds to be planted so the fruit can grow. And weeping indicates that we are coming to have a heart that is like the heart of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
In our text, we find that Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem and the people in it. He had been to Jerusalem several times, as a baby, a young boy, and as a man. While there he preached, taught and performed miracles. But this visit was to be his last. He would be crucified by the very people he had come to save. When he walked to the crest of the Mount of Olives, and saw the full panorama of the Holy City laid out before Him, he wept. I've been privileged to see that same sight, as have many of you, and I understand how he wanted to weep. The word "weep" here means "a loud expression of grief."
Jesus was not weeping for himself though he knew the agony that was just ahead for him. Matthew 16: 21 says, "From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life."
He knew the ridicule, the mockery, the scorn, the crown of thorns and the nails and spear that awaited him. But still, the tears were not for himself. They were for the lost people of Jerusalem, the people who should have recognized and welcomed their long-awaited Messiah but didn't. Jesus told them, "Because you have rejected me, God will reject you. You have the Lord of all creation among you, but you have rejected him. So God will judge you and your city. There will not be one stone left on top of another." Jesus was forecasting the time the Romans, under Emperor Titus, would destroy the city completely in 70 AD, and the Jewish people would be scattered across the known world for the next two thousand years. What Jesus prophesied, however, broke His heart.
A. Jesus wept over the hopelessness of the people.
Their spiritual condition was such that they were lost in the darkness of sin and unbelief and didn't even know it, much like some of you. There was no way out of that hopelessness except through turning to Him and they were busy turning from Him.
B. Jesus wept over the destiny of the people.
He saw them experiencing, or about to experience the full wrath of God. The patience of God with them was almost exhausted. Their wealth, status and power could not protect them any more than those things can protect us if we persist in our sin and unbelief.
C. Further, Jesus wept over the response of the people.
He saw their hardness and unbelief and saw them reject their final and only hope. He was the Light of the world but they rejected that Light and drifted off into the darkness again, as some of you have. He was the Water of Life, but they chose to spew that refreshing drink out of their mouth. Mostly, Jesus saw the people being judged because they rejected Him, the only Savior, the only Messiah, the only King, and the only plan God had for their salvation.
D. So Jesus wept because of His Broken Heart.
I read recently that the Hebrew word for "liquors" comes from the same root as the word for "tears." It probably refers to pain, trouble, burning and desolation, all of which can be related to either liquor or tears. But it has the main meaning of something that is crushed or broken, as grain or grapes are crushed to make liquor, and as the crushed heart brings tears. Do we have a crushed heart and weep over people because we see their helplessness, their eternal lost-ness and their lack of any meaningful response to the Lord?
V. Tears are not a Sign of Weakness in Men
Now some men reject the idea of weeping because they believe that it is not manly to weep, that tears are not a sign of strength but of weakness. In 1972, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine was seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States. In a speech delivered on a snowy day in February of 1972, Muskie strongly defended his wife who had been unfairly attacked in a newspaper article. He wept rather profusely as he spoke of her. His popularity began to plummet almost immediately and he lost the nomination to Senator George McGovern. Muskie later wrote that that event, "It changed people's minds about me. They were looking for a strong, steady man, and here I was weak." But are tears a sign of weakness?
Jesus of Nazareth was a man's man, yet several passages in the New Testament speak of Him weeping. The Apostle Paul was as tough as they come, but he apparently wept easily and often. The main example of Jesus weeping is in our text, weeping over people and their great spiritual need.
Weeping is not a sign of weakness. Now, weeping itself may not solve our problem, it is true. But weeping may soften the soil of our hearts. And if our hearts are softened we may renew our witness to our friends, our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and our jogging partners. We may begin to pray for their salvation and for our own holiness of life and submission to the Spirit of God.
A. Tears can Reveal a Heart of Conviction
Weeping indicates a heart that is open to the conviction and the movement of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit who moved Jesus to weep over Jerusalem. We want revival in our church. We want a revival of spirit, a revival of witness and holiness. But without Holy Spirit conviction that leads to weeping over ourselves and others, there will be no revival. Only tender hearts get revived, not hearts that are holding out against the Spirit. Pray that you will grow into a more tender heart.
B. Tears can Reveal a Heart for Jesus
Weeping is a sign we are beginning to have the heart of Jesus. When we have the heart of Jesus, we will feel the hurt of Jesus. He wept over hurting people. He wept at the death of His friend Lazarus. He wept at the plight of the poor, the downtrodden and the abused. He wept at the arrogance, the hypocrisy, the hardness and indifference, and especially the lost-ness of people. Do we?
C. Tears can Reveal a Heart Dealing with Personal Sin
We should sometimes weep over the condition of our lives. Our hardness of heart, apathy, and bottled up anger creep up on us without us realizing it.
We should weep over our own sinfulness. But most of us either overlook our own sinfulness, rationalize our sinfulness, or we pronounce a quick, easy and costless forgiveness over ourselves. There should be a brokenness that leads to tears over our own poor, wretched and miserable spiritual condition. Often, the Lord of holiness does not reign in us and over us, and our lives are a poor reflection of Him, to our everlasting shame. We do not weep over our sins because we do not let Him turn the spotlight of truth and righteousness on us. So, we never see our true spiritual condition before Him. Psalm 51 describes King David weeping over his sins. Listen to the lament of Psalm 51:17, "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise." David said even more strongly in Psalm 6:6, "I am worn out from groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping, and drench my couch with tears." God never wants us to wallow in the mire of guilt. He wants to and He will forgive us and deliver us from the bondage of guilt when we honestly confess our sins before Him. But tears over our guilt may be part of our conviction and our release from guilt. I am afraid, however, that our consciences are often too seared to feel and weep as King David did. Is that true with you?
We should sometimes weep over our own apathy, our deteriorating relationship with God and our coldness of heart. But do we ever stop to honestly evaluate the condition of our relationship with the Lord, or our zeal for Him? Does what we see ever bring us to tears?
D. Tears can Reveal an Appreciation for the Glory of God
We should sometimes weep as we think about the utter glory, majesty, beauty and holiness of God. I cannot imagine that when the prophet Isaiah had his encounter with the Lord in Isaiah chapter six, saw Him high and lifted up and surrounded by glory, that his humble and wide eyed worship was not accompanied with tears. Like some of you, when I sing, "Holy, Holy, Holy," "We Are Standing on Holy Ground," "To Him Who Sits on the Throne," "How Great Thou Art," "How Great is our God," "God is Worthy," and "Worthy of Worship," I often find tears of awe welling up in my eyes. I get overwhelmed with God's greatness, and with the thought that One so great as He would have anything to do with me, much less send His precious Son to die on a cross for me. Do you ever have those same feelings of awe and humility?
We should sometimes weep as we find our way back to the Lord after a time of wandering and unbelief. It is still amazing to me how long the Lord holds His patience with us, that even when we go off wandering, He does not cast us off. Instead, He gently seeks and finds us, calls us to come to Him, then lifts us up onto His shoulders as you would expect from a caring Shepherd. Does that move your heart?
We should sometimes weep as we think that we didn't deserve for God to have anything to do with us in the first place. However, like the father in the well-known parable of Jesus, He never stops waiting and watching for us Prodigals to come home, then celebrates our return.
We should sometimes weep as we think of the suffering Jesus experienced for us. One of the most gut wrenching experiences of our lives comes as we read the accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus in the four Gospels and think, "He did that for me." If that doesn't bring tears to your eyes you must have callouses on your soul.
But mostly we should weep, as Jesus did, over the lost condition of people. God will not revive a church that does not care about lost people. What would He revive them to do? Theologian John R. W. Stott, in an article in Christianity Today magazine on November 7, 1969, identified two kinds of tears a Christian might shed.
One he calls "tears of nature." These are the tears that come naturally in response to the difficulties and trials of life - like when we are having problems or when we separate from someone we love. This is a natural part of the human community.
The other he calls "tears of grace." These are tears we shed, not because we are human, but because we are believers. These might be tears over our own sin or tears over the sinfulness of our fallen world. Jesus shed these kind of tears over the city of Jerusalem.
Stott decries our "tearlessness" as a misunderstanding of Scripture. He concludes: "The eyes that do not weep are blind eyes - eyes closed to the facts of sin and of suffering in ourselves, and in the rest of humanity."
The absence of tears in the modern church reflects the reality that many of us have become "matter of fact" about our relationship to Christ. We have made Him merely a part of our lives, something inserted in along with everything else we feel obligated to do. He is no longer everything to us.
Coupled with a diminished concept of His Lordship is a loss of this passion for the lost and dying multitudes surrounding us. The absence of tears reflects the fact that we have little concept of how terrible and tragic a Christless eternity will be. That is not a pleasant thing to think about, but we must think about it.
Perhaps we have fallen for the insidious, and now wide-spread lie of "universalism," the belief that all people will be saved in the end, with or without a personal relationship to Christ. Universalism is the product of sentiment, not Scripture. We don't weep if we don't believe that people are eternally lost without Christ, and if we don't weep, we won't witness.
If we, ourselves, have been saved from the horrors of hell, how can we not want others to experience that same deliverance? Worse yet, if we don't care, are we even saved? Tears for the lost don't necessarily have to be shed in public. They may flow only in your private prayer place. But our hearts should be moved enough to cause us to occasionally weep over the lost.
Once again, I don't think very highly of the spiritual condition of any pastor, deacon, Sunday School teacher or any other professing believer who never sheds a tear over the lost condition of someone else. We say we want to be like Jesus in His generosity, His honesty, His love, His kindness, His sacrifice, and His purity in thought and deed. But if we truly want to be like Jesus, we must ask for a heart that will break and then weep over the deepest needs of other people, over sins that will take people out into eternity with no hope of ever seeing heaven. To have the heart and the love of Jesus is to have all the heart and the love of Jesus, and that includes his weeping over a lost world. Again, remember that it is not the tears themselves that impress God or bring revival or change lives. But tears often show that our hearts are soft toward God and that our lives are ready for God to move in us. Tears have a way of lubricating our feet and liberating our testimony.
Conclusion
Our tears about the things that break Jesus' heart are an unspoken pledge of loyalty and caring. Tears are a down payment on the most real and lasting help we can give someone, the message of eternal deliverance for their soul. A friend of mine once said, "There is enough injustice in the world to cause us to weep -- crime, poverty, racism and abuse. To paraphrase L. R. Scarborough, 'We must have more weeping if we want more reaping in the church.' And to quote Charles G. Finney, 'It is doubtful we will ever have revival until Mr. Amen and Mr. Wet Eye are back in church again' " (Paul Powell, "How to Start a Church Fire," p.46).
According to our text, Jesus wept over lost cities. We, on the other hand, usually just shake our fists at them. You have often heard me refer to Dr. George W. Truett, long time pastor of First Baptist Church Dallas, Texas and possibly the greatest preacher in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention. When he finally had to retire from the ministry because of failing health and dementia, he still found his way to the church frequently. They kept a small office for him in the building. In the office was a window that overlooked the city of Dallas. Often people who met him in the church hallways said that though he spoke when passing them, much of what he said, sadly did not make much sense. One day Dr. Truett's long-time associate Dr. Bob Coleman found Dr. Truett standing and looking out the window in his small office with tears streaming down his face. Dr. Coleman asked what was wrong and in halting words Dr. Truett managed to say, "So many lost people, so many lost people. . . ." Even though he barely had a clear mind, what mind he had was on the lost people of his city and he still wept over them.
We should weep over Gospel hardened people who have heard and rejected the Gospel so many times they may be reaching their last opportunity to respond, the true unpardonable sin. We should weep over people across the globe who have never heard the name of Jesus for the first time.
We should weep for an America that no longer considers anything to be sacred except the personal freedom to do or say whatever one wants with no consequences. We should weep for an America that is revising its history to virtually eliminate all references to our very real spiritual - and Christian - foundations. We should weep for an America that by its immorality is squandering its' place of greatness in the world.
We should weep for a hard-hearted and unrepentant America that is racing headlong towards disaster, and perhaps toward overthrow. We should weep for mainline Christian denominations that have rejected the plain Word of God, become unholy, and forfeited their prophetic voice. We should weep for politicians who lack the courage and conviction to keep their promises to their spouses or their country, and who will sell their votes for a barrel of pork, which is mostly fat.
If anyone ever wept over lost and dying people it was the prophet Jeremiah, who said, "Oh that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears. I would weep day and night for the slain of my people." (Jeremiah 9:1).
Our church and the entire Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) are looking for ways to motivate our people to share their faith more regularly. They say we need a "Great Commission Resurgence." I am convinced that if we were to allow the Holy Spirit to break our hearts so that we developed the ability to truly weep over the lost condition of others, we would never again have to berate, beg, beguile or bribe Christians to share their faith in Jesus. We wouldn't need gimmicks or slogans or campaigns to motivate witnessing. We might not even have to develop one method of witnessing after another, each one simpler and shorter than the one before it. Sharing our faith would become a part of natural conversation instead of a memorized presentation.
Tears will soften our hearts and open us to the work of the Spirit. The reality is, when Jesus truly reigns in us, He will give us the tears, the compassion, and the heart for sharing.
Fortunately, the Bible promises our tears will not be in vain. Our weeping will be rewarded when it is from a clean heart and when it is followed by action. Psalm 30:5 promises, "Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning." Psalm 126:6 is even more specific as it declares, "He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him." Souls will be the fruit of tearful praying and faithful sharing. The nightly weeping over lost children, lost spouses, lost neighbors and lost friends will be rewarded. The weeping and praying of Jesus over Jerusalem was answered on the Day of Pentecost as thousands in Jerusalem were swept into the Kingdom of God.
Let us turn our eyes toward the weeping Jesus and realize that He loved us enough to not only weep over us but to die for us. Let us ask Him to break our hard hearts, then put them back together to resemble Him. If the church is to experience a new flame of revival, we need to weep for the lost as Jesus did, then go and do as He did and share the good news of salvation. Broken hearts and genuine tears will overcome our fear of sharing our faith. Broken hearts and genuine tears will produce a Great Commission Resurgence such as we have never seen. It is a broken heart and heartfelt tears, not simply good intentions that we find the answer to reaching our world. How recently have you asked God to break your heart with the things that break His heart? Would you be so bold as to ask that now?
