Are Your Tears God-Centered?

Lamentations :16-18  -  "This is why I weep and my eyes overflow with tears. No one is near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit. My children are destitute because the enemy has prevailed."  Zion stretches out her hands, but there is no one to comfort her. The LORD has decreed for Jacob that his neighbors become his foes; Jerusalem has become an unclean thing among them.  "The LORD is righteous, yet I rebelled against his command. Listen, all you peoples; look upon my suffering. My young men and maidens have gone into exile.

 

Jeremiah opens this second book he wrote with a funeral song for Jerusalem. He saw the desolation and destruction…the empty streets and he mourned for her the way we mourn for a lost loved one. His eyes were wet with the tears of a broken man….broken from God’s great judgment on the city he had tried to save.

 

Jeremiah’s tears flow freely as he realizes and fully admits the city’s guilt. They are God-centered tears…that show he accepts God’s judgment.  They signal his own acceptance of God’s will and his intentions to keep following him….no matter what.

 

His God-centered tears remind me that most of my tears of self-centered. They fall when I am feeling left out…or lonely.  They fall when I feel the least loved…and fuel the pity party that tries to become a part of my soul.

 

Jeremiah’s God-centered tears will eventually help wash the sadness of his heavy heart away.  They use the supernatural power of God’s healing. When we cry those tears of remorse and guilt that focus us on God…they begin to heal us and repair the brokenness that brought us to the place of tears in the first place.

 

Father…thank you for reminding me of the power of tears to heal and repair a broken heart.  Forgive me for the times that I have let my tears represent my own sadness and start a pity party.  Help me to use the brokenness of my life to cry God-centered tears that heal me and restore my soul….so I can begin to be used by you to help others.  Amen.