Lamentations 3:40-42

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the Lord. Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens. We have transgressed and have rebelled: thou hast not pardoned." Lam 3:40-42

Thus the sufferers turn themselves to wise counsels. Suffering only fulfils its mission when it constrains a man to look within himself and search and try his reins and ways that he may know how far he is sincere. Only suffering can get at our hearts with any profound and saving effect. Joy touches the surface, success hovers above us like a singing bird: it is when we are in the furnace of affliction that we discover what we really are, and what we really need. The sufferers in this case come to wise decisions. No longer will they murmur against the Lord, as if providence were fickle and arbitrary, as if providence found a wicked pleasure in the torture of human life: the sufferers say, The fault must be in ourselves; we carry the deadly poison within us; our hearts are lacking in the spirit of loyalty and obedience; they are lifted up in the ways of haughtiness, and they submit themselves to the rule of vanity; the time has now come for a different discipline and a different policy; we must lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens: we do not lift up the heart alone, as if we were intending to be religious in one part of our nature, and to reserve the liberty of self-service in another; nor do we lift up our hands alone, as if we were willing to indulge in bodily exercise, in ceremony, in ritual, or as if we were prepared to render in some degree the service of a hireling; but we lift up both our heart and our hands in sign of a complete consecration. Religious exercises cleanse and elevate the worshipper. The very act of lifting up heart and hand unto God in the heavens is an act of purification and ennoblement. All such exercises are valuable as parts of a larger discipline. Herein is the value of public worship: man helps man; voice increases voice; joy and sorrow mingle together, and produce a tender melancholy that is the surest pledge of perfect and enduring delight. Here we have the gospel before the time, because the gospel proceeds upon the basis that without repentance there can be no real joy. The Old Testament is indeed full of exhortation to repentance and broken-heartedness before God: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts and innumerable other passages all testify to the fact that without repentance God himself cannot begin to reconstruct shattered human life. This is philosophical as well as theological; that is to say, it is based on the plainest and soundest reason as well as inspired by the most inscrutable and metaphysical faith. We adopt this philosophy in all departments of life; we must cleanse away the evil before we can begin to put up the good; we must get rid of the poison in the system before we can fill the veins with healthy blood; we must displace all the superstitions of ignorance before we can get standing ground for the deductions of reason and enlightened reverence. Let no man imagine therefore that he can love his sins, and yet avail himself of God's mercy. The mercy is excluded from all who bring love of sin in their hearts; but it is offered with infinite generosity to all who hate their sins and desire to be restored to sonship and spiritual harmony. This is the law, and there can be no change in it; this is the decree, and it admits of no tampering; and of no compromise. Let us therefore preach the doctrine of repentance towards God; deep, earnest, thorough, heartbroken repentance: thus only can we throw down the falsehoods of an organised or invented morality, and bring in the righteousness that springs from the very throne and heart of God. Until we know the need of repentance we cannot realise the need of salvation. When a man does not realise his sickness he does not realise the necessity for calling in a physician. Any one contented with ignorance can never know the pain and the joy of thirst for knowledge. When man is so insensible to the joys and responsibilities of freedom us to be content with slavery, then he cannot understand those who have devoted themselves to the extension of human freedom. The gospel is a tinkling cymbal to those who have not felt the pain, the bitterness, and the burdensomeness of sin. Blessed day for the Church, blessed day for the world, when men shall arise and say with heart and voice, "Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the Lord. Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens." Scarcely will they have formed the resolution before God himself shall come down, and heaven and earth shall find music in one thorough and everlasting reconciliation.