While working on the extract
from Miller’s Church History on Jerusalem, we were impressed with his comments
at the end of it:"Need we wonder at the Redeemer’s tears, shed over the
infatuated city?"

 

It made us thoughtful. Do we
wonder at them? We quote that verse:"And when He was come near, He beheld
the city, and wept over it" (Luke 19:41). "Wept over it!" Oh,
those tears! How they tell us what was in His heart — the heart of God
His Father. We would be prone rather to think—if not say — what fools they
were, how wilful and stubborn and blind!

 

Thy foes did hate, despise,
revile,

Thy friends unfaithful prove;

Unwearied in forgiveness still,

Thy heart could only love!

 

We think of those tears; we try
to see them. Do we reflect those feelings? They reflect the new nature reacting
to self-will and the rejection of God’s grace and love. Those tears make us
ashamed. Don’t they affect you that way too? We know so little of such
feelings. How many tears have we shed in this respect? When did we last weep
over the stubbornness and self-will that we saw within us or around us? Oh, for
the capacity to feel things!

 

Scripture draws our attention,
many times, to those who wept. Consider Joseph. "He wept." "He
wept aloud" (Gen. 45:2) for his hard-hearted brothers who hated him and
had "conspired against him to slay him." So far from harboring
feelings of resentment and malice toward them, he entreats them, when in the
position to do so, "Come near to me … I will nourish thee" (Gen.
45:4, II.) This, surely, is the spirit of Christ.

 

Let us go further back in
thought to Job, a man "that feared God." "Did I not weep for
him that was in trouble?" (Job 30:25) Do we? Ever? Here, too, is
the spirit of Christ.

 

Turning over the pages of our
Bibles, we may view, as it was reported to Nehemiah, the state of God’s people,
and the broken condition of Jerusalem where God had put His Name. Greatly
affected by it, that earnest devoted man writes that "when I heard these
words … I sat down and wept" (Neh. 1:4). Feeling that condition
as his very own led him, then, to pray about it, and to pray for his
brethren — far away from him though they were. (It led him to do something
about it too; Neh. 2:5). How all this breathes of that lowly and compassionate
spirit seen in our Lord Jesus when here among men.

 

Now Christ is in the Glory:Head
of the church, which is His body. These feelings should properly flow through
the members of that body. We hear the Apostle Paul, in Acts 20, pouring out his
heart to the Ephesian elders; he knows they will not see his face again. He
reminds them of how he had served the Lord with all humility of mind, and with
many tears; "of how he had warned every one night and day with tears"
(Acts 20:19, 31).

 

We could draw other and similar
instances to your attention, but that is not our purpose. This is enough.

 

May we drink in deeply of that
lowly and loving spirit that feels things as the Lord Jesus would have us feel
them. Such godly emotion as tears express is not queer, nor feminine, nor rare
either — as we have been noticing. Let it not be lost on us that it is our God
Himself who draws our attention to this spirit, this distinctive trait of the
new nature, in the Scriptures at which we have been looking.

 

"They that sow in tears
shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed,
shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him"
(Psalm 126:5, 6).

 

FRAGMENT "And He shall wipe
away every tear from their eyes" (Rev. 4:21, J.N.D. Trans.). Won’t you be
a little disappointed if you have none to be wiped away?