The Church Has No Tears!
By: Greg Gordon
An Urgent plea for revival and spiritual awakening
Saints of God can we sit by idle as the hour creeps on till we are in eternal bliss? Revival is tarrying and men are slipping into hell-fire by the moment! Oh the horror of it! Do you feel the concern dear reader or is your heart passionless, tearless, prayerless. Do you have tears for the lost? Surely revival tarries for the simple fact that we do not have tears. - Greg Gordon??
dry-eyed christianity Machinery, Methods and Models characterize the modern day 20th Century Church. Never in the history of the Church have we been so sufficient yet lacking so much! By our actions we are saying what God has begun in the Spirit we can perfect in the flesh. We are Laodicean! Rich, increased with goods, and we have need of nothing. We want to have revival man’s way, not God’s way. We know nothing of revival, nothing of God’s power, nothing of God’s travail, nothing of God’s sorrow over a lost and damned world. A Laodicean church is dry-eyed, a Laodicean church never loses sleep, shuns pain, suffering and anything that disturbs its status-quo. The Laodicean church cannot share God’s heart, for it is so far removed from God and His economy. David Smithers accurately says: “There are many who want the joy of revival without the sorrow of travail. God’s chosen revival instrument’s have always embraced both.”
It is almost a offense to the modern Christian mind that we need to have tears or travail. We have lost in our vocabulary the concepts such as: Soul-Travail, Mourning, Pleading, Praying-Through, Weeping, Godly Sorrow, Burdens. With dry-eyes we attempt great things for God and then tell Him about it afterwards. We have left God out of our modern day attempts to do Church, though we do at times remind Him of things and ask for the occasional blessing, yet overall God is outside the Church. With dry eyes we read the mighty exploits of God’s men in the past and it does not disturb us to think we are so far removed from these things. We have no burden or soul-riveting desire to see these things manifest in our generation. By the way Christian’s live in our day we are saying that “God is the same yesterday, and forever,” but not today! Could God disturb our status-quo and give us brimming and bursting eyes over the fact of the lostness of men and the fact of their spending a eternity without God. We lay our burden’s on God but who does He lay His burden’s on? Can God share His burden with you? Our dry-eyed Christianity is a denial of two thousand years of Church History. Oh the weight of testimony that will be against you in that dreadful day, the day of Judgement! We know to live better then we are living and that is our condemnation.
SHOULD WE NOT WEEP?
Surely a vision of hell, a glimpse of the horror of its reality would shake us out of complacency and lukewarmness. Surely for those that are “asleep in Zion” the very mention of this is repugnant to their minds. Those that discuss hell and the lostness of men would surely be ostracized in modern churches where there is a heaven without a hell, salvation without damnation, eternal joy without eternal suffering. I can assure you that those that have been gripped by such a vision cannot remain “dry-eyed.” Let us hear from some saints that have gone before us, Leonard Ravenhill shares two startling accounts in the last two hundred years.
“The scholarly Andrew Bonar lay on his bed on a saturday night in Scotland, and as people below tramped the streets from taverns and shows, he used to call from his tortured heart: ‘Oh! they perish, they perish!’ Alas, brethren we have not so learned Christ. Many of us know only a slick, tearless, passionless, soulless round of preaching which passes for the minister’s office these days.”
“William Booth of the Salvation Army is quoted as saying that if he could do it, he would have finalized the training of his soldiers with twenty four hours hanging over hell, to see its eternal torment. Fundamentalism needs this awe-striking vision again! Because the Church has lost Holy Ghost fire, men go to hell-fire.”
Saints of God can we sit by idle as the hour creeps on till we are in eternal bliss? Revival is tarrying and men are slipping into hell-fire by the moment! Oh the horror of it! Do you feel the concern dear reader or is your heart passionless, tearless, prayerless. Do you have tears for the lost? Surely revival tarries for the simple fact that we do not have tears. Hear the impassioned plea from Oswald J. Smith who brought to gospel to over 50 countries:
“Can we travail for a drowning child, but not for a perishing soul? It is not hard to weep when we realize that our little one is sinking below the surface for the last time. Anguish is spontaneous then. Nor is it hard to agonize when we see the casket containing all that we love on earth borne out of the home. Ah, no; tears are natural at such a time? But oh, to realize and know that souls, precious, never dying souls, are perishing all around us, going out into the blackness of darkness and despair, eternally lost, and yet to feel no anguish, shed no tears, know no travail! How could are our hearts! How little we know of the compassion of Jesus! And yet God can give us this, and the fault is ours if we do not have it. Jacob, you remember, travailed until he prevailed. but oh, who is doing it today? Who is really travailing in prayer? How many, even of your most spiritual Christian leaders, are content to spend half an hour a day on their knees and then pride themselves on the time they have given to God!”
James Caughey who was converted in the days of Finney and used mightily by God shared this burden of weeping for souls: “Jesus wept over Jerusalem, when He beheld a cloud of wrath gathering over it - why, Oh, why, should not we weep? I repeat it, why should not we weep to behold the mouths of the grave and of hell preparing to open and to engulf so many. Instead of repressing our tears, should we not rather say with the prophet Jeremiah, ‘Oh, that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people?’ And if sinners will despise, and sin on, we can only resolve with Jeremiah again, "But if ye will not hear it, my soul shall weep in secret places for your pride, and mine eyes shall weep sore and run down with tears." Who of us, or who that has ever read the writings and history of Jeremiah the prophet, would charge him with weak-mindedness? We are the followers of ‘The Man of Sorrows.’ Like Him, we are ‘acquainted with grief.’”
THE VALUE OF TEARS
The old Puritans used to pray for "the gift of tears." Have we considered ourselves to have reached a higher plateau or echelon of spiritual experience? Oh to realize the value of tears in God’s Kingdom. “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.” The Holy Scriptures places this principle clearly, shall we neglect it? Ask the Prophets, Apostles, or the Lord Jesus Himself, their ministries were bathed in tears. Hear three testimonies from the past that will show you the utmost value of tears:
“E. M. Bounds in the Christian Advocate once wrote; a tearful ministry is at a premium in the Bible; however, it may be discounted by our gospel of fun, which seeks to make people feel good and laugh heartily. God's Hebrew prophets were serious men - men of the tearful eye and of the tearful heart. Jeremiah was the weeping prophet who wanted his head to be water and his eyes a fountain of tears that he might weep day and night. Isaiah, the most gifted of them, said, "I will weep bitterly, labor not to comfort me." The minister is not to deal with a system or a church - he is neither a professor nor a pope - but he deals with men, and a tearful tenderness is the gift for soul winning power. The ministry of Christ was a tearful ministry. The summary of His ministry is drawn by the divine pen, "who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears." His ministry broke His heart as well as sacrificed His life. The true apostles of Christ, the bravest and the best, have ever been, like their Lord, tearful men. They have followed in His footsteps "weeping, bearing precious seed," and all their songs and success have grown out of a soil that they have watered by their tears. Paul's ministry was tuned to this strain of tearful tenderness. "Serving the Lord with all humility of mind, and with many tears." "I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears." His letters were inspired by hearty compassion and sorrow. "For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears." "I ... tell you, even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ." His strongest and sharpest utterances were softened and bathed in tears. Timothy's ministry was one of tears: tears that touched Paul and gave intensity and charm to Timothy and his ministry. Tears are the symbols and fruit of a compassionate ministry. How we need to be in the company and school of Christ till our hearts are broken and we have caught somewhat of the sober seriousness, somewhat of the infinite tearfulness, somewhat of the fathomless sorrow that possessed Him!”??“A. G. Osterberg was an eyewitness of the Azusa revival. He gives some interesting insights into this remarkable move of the Spirit. "I have been asked what in your judgment was the outstanding spiritual phenomenon of the revival?" My reply was, "Without question, it can be answered in one word, namely tears! The greatest hindrance in the entire realm of revivals is the hardness of heart and spirit. Its cause is spiritual rebellion against God, exercised in an embezzled human sovereignty. Among Christians, hardness of heart is probably the greatest single obstacle to revival. The Azusa revival began where every revival should rightly begin - in repentant tears. It began in tears, it lived in tears, and when the tears ended, the Azusa revival ended. Tears of guilt confession; tears of fault confession; tears in humble contrition; tears of self-denial in expression of soul humility, tears of sheer gladness and heavenly joy; Holy Ghost tears intermingling testimony and praise, often overflowing upon the congregation as a benediction from the battlements of glory."??“When Mrs. McAulay went to toil in the East of London with her devoted husband, she was so heartbroken at what she saw of the ravages of sin and the impotence of the Christian Church that she cried herself blind. The sight of one eye was restored, but she carried one sightless eye to her grave, thus bearing in her body the marks of the Lord Jesus. She knew, indeed, what it was to sigh and cry over the abominations done in the city.”
WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO MOVE US?
The Church has no tears! and the world around us perishes. Read carefully the words of the Apostle Paul: “For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even with weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ.” The blunt hard fact to deal with is that “many” are walking apart from God whose “end is destruction.” Can we truly understand this and fathom this without tears in our eyes? The Apostle Paul could not! What will it take to move us? Oh how we need to pray for a soul-shaking, hell-robbing revival in these last days. The choice is ours brethren!
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