Christian Hedonism - Pt 5

You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book? Then my enemies will turn back in the day when I call. This I know, that God is for me. In God, whose word I praise, in the Lord, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me? (Psalm 56:8-11 ESV).

God gathers our tears in a “bottle” (v. 8). I must confess I do not know all of the meaning of the psalmist in making this declaration. However, I do know that it is indicative of how we are to view our relationship with the Lord. He will never be indifferent to our pain and suffering, whether it is a result of our actions or not. There are times when we cry from the sorrows of life. At other times we cry at the remembrance of a significant event in our lives. At times it is the intense physical pain we may be enduring at the moment that brings tears to our eyes. And, of course there are the tears we shed at the thought of some hurt we may have caused to someone through our sin. We should consider this understanding of the tears of contrition and the tears of sorrow carefully. I have known many people who have sought my help as they confess that when their joys go down, they simply feel bad. It is this miserable emotion that prompts their tears. Often they also confess that, although their deepest desire is to have joy, they simply cannot find a way through the thick fog of guilt. They want to read their Bible with gladness and happiness and thankfulness and strength, and they simply don’t. That may be the place you find yourself today. These are what have been called the tears of the fruit of languishing joy in Christ, impeded by weariness or weakness or sin. In other words, when joy fades and you feel sorrowful and contrite and brokenhearted because of this fading joy that you should have in Christ, is not the feeling of sorrow. It is the feeling of regret and the feeling of contrition evidenced by the fact that your soul is the kind of soul that has a taste for the goodness of God, the sweetness of God in Jesus! This should be an encouragement to rejoice. Thus, these tears are evidence that we are born of God. They show that our soul has been made into the kind of soul that will never be satisfied apart from God. Even when joy has gone away, there is an aftertaste of joy that is weeping, and the weeping is the aftertaste of joy giving evidence that our soul is the kind of soul that will have joy forever. Relish these tears. They are significant enough that God notices, and collects each one, saving them as a memorial to our relationship. You see, Christian Hedonism is not the seeking of pleasure; however, it is the seeking of our God who brings us pleasure through redemption and relationship! Celebrate that!