JEREMIAH 9: 17 – 19
Please take the time to read these verses and the surrounding chapter in their entirety. For the moment know that the Lord Almighty tells the people to call for the wailing women, the most skillful among them and let them wail over the nation … “till our eyes overflow with tears and water streams from our eyelids.”
The sound of wailing is to be heard and the lament spoken… “how ruined we are! How great is our shame…”.
And why was it so necessary to have this sound of sorrow? It was necessary and desirable to cry profusely because the nation had continuously disobeyed the Lord, setting aside His laws, and refusing to repent.
It’s funny – the world doesn’t like the sound of sorrow. We are discouraged from crying, certainly from wailing loudly and calling ourselves ruined. It is perhaps acceptable to dab at our eyes quietly and talk to a counselor but this whole lamenting over life has pretty much been buried as an archaic custom.
And the way we often “get over” our sorrow for sin is to reframe it into an acceptable need for something else. We don’t need to feel sorry for a behavior if we can justify it as a “need” to express ourselves. Hogwash!
The first wrong step in this process of avoiding sorrow is to decide to call a sin something else. If God has defined a behavior as a sin – we don’t get to change that – even if the whole world calls it acceptable.
Let me use myself as an example. (yikes!) God has said not to sin in my anger. He has also made perfectly clear that my anger does not accomplish His righteous purposes. So when I tell myself that lashing out in my anger is “justified because of what the other person did” or that my anger is “needed to get results” – I’m deceiving myself and allowing sin to take hold.
What should my response be? You guessed it. The sound of sorrow … weeping that I have turned from God’s ways … shame for my behavior … and the sound of my knees hitting the floor before Him.
Seriously there are worse things than sorrow.
Like the inability to know when we should be sorrowful before God.
Is there something in your life today that you need to be sorry for? Has the sound of sorrow been drowned out in your life by the excuses of the world? Go ahead and cry in the Lord’s presence – it will be accepted and comforted.
Have a day open to the sound of sorrow.