Gooding, David: True Emotion

I have three passages to read from the word of God this evening. The first of them is to be found in the book of Ezekiel and chapter uh eight, and we begin to read there in verse twelve. Then said he unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the elders of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in his chambers of imagery? For they say, the Lord seeth us not, the Lord hath forsaken the earth. He said also unto me, thou shalt again see yet other great abominations which they do. And he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house, which was toward the north, and behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz. And then a passage from the New Testament, the gospel by Luke and chapter twenty three. And we begin to read there in verse twenty six: And when they led him away, they laid hold upon one Simon of Cyrene, coming from the country, and laid on him the cross to bear it after Jesus. And there followed him a great multitude of the people and of women who bewailed and lamented him. But Jesus, turning unto them, said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming in which they shall say, blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the breasts that never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, fall on us, and to the hills, cover us. For if they do these things in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? And our third and last passage comes from the gospel by John, and this time chapter twenty. But Mary was standing without at the tomb weeping. So, as she wept, she stooped and looked into the tomb, and she beholds two angels in white sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say unto her, woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. When she had thus said, she turned herself back and beholdeth Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turns herself and saith unto him in Hebrew, Raboni, which is to say, Master. Jesus says to her, Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended unto the Father, but go unto my brethren and say to them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God and your God. Mary Magdalene cometh and telleth the disciples, I have seen the Lord. How that he had said these things unto her. God give us good understanding of his word. My topic tonight is tears. Good tears and bad tears. True tears and false tears. What wonderful things tears are, aren't they? And a little bit comical on times. Some people, of course, very naturally, and most people cry when they are in deep trouble, pain, or distress. Tears are a merciful mechanism put into our bodies by the loving Creator himself, that by our tears our feelings gain expression and sometimes wash away harmful chemicals that are produced in our system by overmuch grief. Tears, then, a relief for sorrow and pain. And yet, how comical creatures we are. Tears can sometimes be tears of joy, can they not? And people under intense joy, like athletes winning the marathon or something, can collapse in tears at the end of the race, even while they are holding the great triumphant cup that they've won. And without telling tales out of school, you know, some dear ladies, they love a good cry, don't they? They will tell you that if you're friend enough with them to confide in them, they really enjoy having a good cry. And so tonight I'm going to talk about three groups of women and their tears. The women weeping for Tammuz in the temple of the Lord at Jerusalem. The women of Jerusalem that wept at our Lord as he was being led out to be crucified. Mary Magdalene in the garden, weeping for her sorrow when the Lord appeared to her and dried her tears forever. And you say, but my good preacher, what on earth has that got to do with a pre-Easter celebration? Well, strange as it will seem, all these tears are concerned with death and burial and then resurrection. Though, of course, the theme is common, death, burial, and resurrection, I'm afraid too lots of the tears are bad beyond description, and only one lot of tears is good. For tears are an expression of our emotion, and of course, when it comes to our dealing with God, how could it be otherwise that from time to time we shall feel the strongest and the deepest of emotions? How could you possibly face your creator in all his holiness and in all his abundant love, and know his forgiveness as well as his justice, and not be deeply moved, whether it leads to tears or not? Therein is a danger lurking for us all. For in religion, there can, of course, be true and good tears, and there can be utterly bogus tears and useless tears. And so to our first story. If you had gone into the temple in Ezekiel's day, which is the house of the Lord, you might have seen women crying their eyes out in the temple courts. And had you known no better, you'd have said to your friend that walked with you, look at those dear women over there. I wonder what their grief and sorrow is. Where is anybody I can find to comfort them in their sorrow? They are obviously deeply distressed. Or you might have said to yourself, look at those dear women and their tears. I suspect they've been listening to a sermon from the word of God that has exposed their sin and made them conscious of the judgment and justice of a thrice holy God, and they've come under conviction of sin. Where can we find an evangelist to come and show them the way of forgiveness, that they might be reconciled to God and their tears be turned to joy? But if you thought like that, you would have been thinking far from the truth. They were, in fact, enjoying their crying. And it was nothing to do with God or his temple or his word. They were having a good cry. They were having tremendous emotions. It was nothing whatsoever to do with salvation, and I can tell you what it was all about. They were in the temple of the Lord. They weren't concerned with his word. They were concerned with an old, old, silly old legend. They were weeping for Tammuz. And Tammuz, you ought to know the story of it as briefly as I can put it. You'll see Tammuz was a Sumerian shepherd. Sumerian, he belonged to the Sumerian civilization, and that was on donkey's years and centuries ago, of course, thousands of years ago. And he was an ordinary shepherd, except for this, and here the, the story begins to get daft, doesn't it, and sentimental nonsense. Uh, he fell in love with the goddess of love, and the goddess of love fell in love with him, you'll see, and you can see this is the beginning of a kind of a Barbara Cartland no- novel, can't you? What? You shouldn't be able to see it because I doubt whether you should have read her stuff. Not if you're a Christian and have got something worthier to read than that whole sentimental stuff. But never mind, there you are. Uh, there was this goddess of love, and I'll tell you about the goddess of love in the ancient world. You'll see, once upon a time, original mankind knew the true and the living God. But the Bible tells us they didn't like to retain the knowledge of the living God in their mind. They found it inconvenient. They wanted to strike a blow for freedom and be free of his constraints and his solemn laws and the promise of his judgment. And so, of course, uh, they got rid of the idea, banished him to the fringe of their thinking. But after that, of course, they s- they still found that they had to have some things to go for in life. And so what they did was to begin to deify the world around them. They made a god out of the sun and a goddess out of the moon. They made a god of the storm and of the process of fertility. And, you know, when they felt the sexual urge inside them, they deified that as well, do you see? And they called her Ishtar in their ancient tongue. Only many nations did the same thing. In Greece, they would have called her Aphrodite, do you see? The goddess of love. She never did exist, of course. She was but the people's imaginative deification of the sexual urge that they found inside them. And you see, it had a terrible effect upon them, many of them. Because when you elevate the sexual urge to a goddess, then anything that the goddess commands goes, doesn't it? And people getting into all kinds of immorality and unfaithfulness in their marriages thought they had explained it all when they said, well, Ishdati made me do it, the goddess of love made me do it. Like the secretary who's just corrupted her boss and broken his marriage and ruined his family. And when you ask her what on earth she was thinking about doing it, she says, oh, but the, uh, uh, but love made me do it. As though love was some goddess that when she begins to move, out of the window goes all moral consideration, all considerations of God and his law and other people's happiness and homes. It's enough to say you were moved by Aphrodite, your love, and that explains it all. Hence the multi-million divorces that are going on everywhere around us in society. Deification of the goddess of love. Well, anyway, Ishtar was the goddess of love, you'll see, and the women, very often when their marriages hadn't gone too well, sought relief in contemplating what for them was simply a projection of their own wishes and fantasies of the ideal love situation. And then in a silly old story about Tamis, which is a bit of re- uh, uh, religious idolatry, this humble shepherd fell in love. Oh, isn't got, they've got a mix for a really good old sentimental novel, that is. This humble shepherd fell in love with the goddess of love, and the goddess of love fell with him, in love with him, and he died, poor chap, and went down to the nether world. And if you please, oh, how marvelous love is, the goddess of love descended to the nether world to seek her shepherd, you'll see. Oh, well, in those days, when the women heard that story, they thought it was marvelous, and it, uh, sent forth the gushing tears out of their eyes for the sheer sentimentality of the story. And the old story spread throughout all the nations, of course. You can't think how people could be so silly, could you? But in Greece, of course, and in Egypt, they had their version, and in their story, when the goddess of love went down to see her lover, and by this time his name was Adonis, you see, uh, she managed to get him resurrected again. Hence the connection got a bit with what this Easter celebration is. And here they were in God's temple, supposedly worshiping the Lord. And what was moving them was not God or his word, but sheer idolatry, the sheer enjoyment of sensuous emotions provoked by idolatrous ideas. God called it an abomination. What has that got to do with us? As we now approach to celebrate and remember the death of the Lord Jesus and his rising again. Well, the first thing it does is to ask us to watch our emotions. You'll see it is easy in religious circles to ap- to work on people's emotions, isn't it? I've known preachers that were past masters at it by telling all the sob stories they could tell and getting people coming forth in droves to the front to get converted, in inverted commas, by all sorts of sob story stuff that had very little to do with true repentance for sin and faith in the Lord Jesus. And of course, the conversions didn't last. They were only a form of religious sensationalism. And our good friends who have played to us tonight will know, won't they, the vast dangers that depend on music when music is misused. In the early days of the Beatles, you could see what their mo- their music was meant to do, what it was geared to. That is, you had in our city young women going up into ecstasies and stripping themselves dark naked in front of the Beatles, because the Beatles music, a lot of it, was deliberately directed towards provoking sensuous emotions. And it has become a sad thing as I travel around this world in some countries to see Christian groups of music adopting the same style of music. Watch any film star, if you must, uh, singing or crooning or whatever you call it, with all the bodily swaying and the ecstatic look on the eyes. And of course, you recognize that at once as an appeal to the sensuous. But you can find some Christian groups nowadays, can't you, where they croon in the same fashion and they sway with the same bodily motion. And how much it has to do with the gospel of Christ and God's revelation. It would be difficult to guess, wouldn't it? It seems to be directed towards provoking sensuous emotions. And God calls it an abomination. God save us all from that type of thing. But let's come on to the second group of women. They were far more healthily minded, weren't they? They weren't provoked to their tears by some idolatrous ditty. What provoked them to tears? Well, it was the sight of our blessed Lord Jesus being led out to be crucified. And they were women of their time enough to know what kind of an agonizing death, the death by crucifixion would be. They knew in their hearts that our Lord Jesus was innocent. And as he was being led by the soldiery to his place of crucifixion, they came round him, wringing their hands and weeping profusely for this poor young man that was going to be so cruelly put to death. And it seems strange at first sight, doesn't it, that the Lord Jesus should have answered them so severely. Weep not for me, he said. You weep for yourselves, my dear ladies. And the very severity of it startles us, doesn't it? Was he not grateful for their compassion? Ah, but you see, we must be aware of what was really going on at Calvary. And our Lord began to explain to them, it's not I, said he, has got the wrong end of this stick, you know, my dears, it's you that's got the wrong end of the stick and your fellow citizens. Or if they do this kind of thing, this extreme perversion of justice in a nation that is what you might call a green tree and still moderately civilized, what will they do when sin of this kind eventually brings forth its inevitable harvest. For God is not mocked, you know. What you sow, you reap. And if you sow this injustice and this sinfulness, one day you will reap it with a vengeance. The time is coming, my dear, said the Lord Jesus, when men shall call on the rocks to hide them from the face of God for his judgments that are coming upon them. Don't you weep for me. You weep for yourself. It's not that our Lord was ungrateful for their womanly sympathy for him in his suffering. But you see, it is the fact, you know, if there were a terrible motor car accident outside and you went out and saw mutilated bodies on the street of otherwise young men and women. Some amongst us would be moved to tears, wouldn't they, at the shock of it. Oh, poor young people, poor young people. The psychological reaction, that is what it would be, wouldn't it? The psychological reaction of seeing suffering would move people to burst into tears. And ten weeks down the line, they would have forgotten all about it. And for the women of Jerusalem, it was but a psychological reaction, seeing a poor young man, as they would have described it, going to his execution. And that's all. Ten weeks after that, they would have forgotten about it completely. Nice as it was of them to be compassionate, it didn't add up to conviction of sin. It didn't add up to repentance. It didn't add up to any even faint idea of what mankind's situation is, that this is a wicked world. And very soon, as we now know it, very soon the heavens will part, and men, as the book of the Revelation has it, shall see God sitting upon his throne, and men shall cry for the very rocks to hide them from the face of him that sits on the throne. Let us tear all fantasy from our eyes. Men and women cannot go on sinning as men and women do, and ever more so, without reaping a harvest. That is the thing, says Christ, to get hold of, my dears. It's coming a great, great harvest. From his way towards Calvary that we shall be thinking about in these coming days, the blessed Lord Jesus speaks to you, and he speaks to me. Have you got the right end of the stick? How stand your emotions tonight? Realistic in face of the world and what the world really is, and human sin and the coming judgment of God. Doesn't call for psychological reaction. It calls for genuine repentance and faith and reconciliation with God. How different the dying thief was, as we call him, wasn't it, to these women at Jerusalem. There he writhed in his agony, nailed hand and foot to the cross, and first of all joined his companion, the other thief, in blaspheming Christ and saying to Christ, look here, you say you're the Christ, don't you? You're supposed to be the Messiah. You're the Messiah, get us out of this one too. We shall not believe you. There are lots of people like that, aren't there? They go on merrily singing, and they get themselves into trouble, and they say, if it Jesus Christ were God, why doesn't he get me out of my trouble? The Lord made no attempt to get either of them out of their trouble. They had sinned against the laws of the state. They were suffering their due reward. And salvation isn't an easy way to get out of your trouble. But presently, the other thief, he began to think and think, and as best he could, as the pain seared his very brain and drained his lifeblood away, he began to think. It's leaving it rather late, isn't it, to start thinking. And presently, as best he could, he turned to the other thief with his rigorous rebuke, told him to shut up. Don't you even fear God, said he. And why should the man fear God? Well, said the dying thief, seeing you are in the same condemnation. Same as who? Well, he didn't mean the same as the other thief, did he? It's no consolation to be dying, you know, is it? If you're dying with another sinner and both of you going to hell, that won't comfort either of you. What the thief was saying was this, don't you fear God, seeing that you, crazy sinner that you are, like I am, are in the same condemnation as Jesus Christ. We are being justly rewarded for our evil lives. This man has done nothing amiss, and what does that show? It shows that this world is a desperately unjust place. Where the innocent and the good suffer very often alike. And what does that mean? That will tell us this, at least it told the dying thief this. This world is not the end. There must come a day of judgment. This feeling of right and wrong that we have, we didn't originate it ourselves. If it comes from God, and it does, then life can't end like this, where the just and the unjust suffer equally. If God gave us this feeling of right and wrong in our hearts, we know it as we know anything, that there will come a day of judgment. Don't you even fear God, says he to the other fellow. Now you're on the very eve of eternity and going out to face God's judgment. There will be a judgment, my good man, he said. And you and I are not fit to meet it. If there's going to be a judgment, and there's a God. The very cross of Christ tells us that. There's a God who cares for justice. How shall we meet it? And now the thief had forgotten about his companion. He had very few minutes left to get right to meet God. Tonight he would be in the grave. And then he began to think about this Jesus. Marvelous to relate, he'd never met anybody like it. But when the soldiers pierced his hands and feet and nailed him to Calvary, instead of turning round and cursing them, he prayed for them. Father, forgive. And as he thought about the coming judgment and meeting God, then led by God's Holy Spirit himself, he turned to the Savior. Lord, he said, I've been an outlaw all my life, but would you allow me into your kingdom? Lord, remember me, he said, and thou comest into thy kingdom. The Lord said, today, my good man, thou shalt be with me in paradise. We have no great description of what the thief suffered. If Luke had been concerned, for he was a doctor, he could have painted the most harrowing scene, couldn't he, of the groans and the swabs and the sweat and the gore and all the rest of it. Luke wasn't interested in it. He's not interested in describing the Savior's physical sufferings beyond the merest stroke of a pen. Why not? Because Calvary is not there to evoke our emotions, our psychological emotions at physical suffering. You can gaze on a crucifix and see its gore and terror and work yourself up into a psychological state and never be born again, you know. That's false. Calvary is there to talk to our conscience, not our emotions. Bring home to the fact, us to the fact we're sinners. There's going to be a judgment. We need to repent and get right with God. Sure, if we take those steps, we shall find forgiveness and assurance of paradise, as the dying thief found. And for many of us, that will result in copious tears of gratitude to God. But it's not the tears that are important. It is the repentance and the faith. One lot of tears were very good tears, weren't they? They were Mary's tears. Mary Magdalene, dear woman. She came to the sepulchre weeping, you see. And as she wept and looked in, suddenly she saw behind her what she thought to be the gardener, and she said, look, uh, I- I'm looking for Jesus Christ, my Lord. I can't find his body. Somebody's taken him away. Can you tell me where they've put him so I may get him and take him away? And he said, Mary. She realized it was the risen Lord and found the living Savior, and he dried her tears, and he said, you don't weep any more, Mary, lie. Ah, blessed gospel message that Christ not only died for our sins and was buried, but he rose again the third day according to the scripture, and there's an end for our t- our crying. He's overcome death and risen the other side of the grave. You say, do you believe that story literally about the resurrection of the Lord Jesus? Yes, I do. And here before us, John gives us a number of reasons why he did. There were the great apostles, John and Peter, and they came to the grave, and they saw the evidence of the grave clothes and how they were lying, and they did a little bit of detective thinking on the evidence and came to the conclusion that the body must have come just right out of the grave clothes without touching them. And they decided that this was no fraud. And thus and thus, in the early hours, as they surveyed the objective evidence in the tomb like a couple of detectives, they came to believe that, yes, Jesus had bodily risen from the dead. And I have not time to discuss with you this evening the significance of that objective evidence for the resurrection of the Lord. I concentrate on the other bit of evidence that John supplies us, the evidence that Mary gave. Now, ladies, you'll forgive me if I say what I'm going to say, won't you? But sometimes we men are pretty hard-hearted, as you'll see I am. But anyway, never mind the ladies, they they have a loving nature, don't they? And they naturally cling to loved ones that are gone. I remember as a boy being taken by a good lady, I can't think why, up into a bedroom. I couldn't have been more than four and she got out of her blue bar there, an envelope, you see, and in it was a curl of very lovely, uh, li- li- light fair hair, and that was a curl from her little Tommy, or was he Johnny, I forget now, when he was a little boy, and she still had it in the envelope, you see. Johnny was now fifty, I should think, and as bald as he could be, you see. But they were, uh, mother's love couldn't let it go on her, the clinging for, you know, syndrome, clinging to the past, not wanting to let it go. Thank God, so dear ladies whose love is so steadfast, say what? And Mary was like that, wasn't she? The learned apostles went home to breakfast, having seen the evidence, do see. And I don't know whether they said to Mary, now, Mary dear, you come home to breakfast with us. You've been here a long time, and this is distressing for you. Now come home, Mary dear. There's nothing more to be seen. The tomb is quite empty. But not Mary. She stayed put. For without Christ. Life was empty and desolate. And even now she thought he was dead. She'd brought her spices, and so had the other women, and they were going to get the body and do their best to embalm it finally, and then make a tomb of it where they might come, as is natural, isn't it? People recently bereaved coming to the tomb of their relatives that they might weep there and express their grief. And they were coming to hold on, even if, if they could, to the very dead body of the Lord Jesus, and make of his grave a shrine where forever after they may honor his memory. Then something happened. And the women of Jerusalem, Magdalene included, abandoned the tomb completely, and so completely abandoned the tomb that in a few decades nobody knew where the original tomb was. And in Byzantine times, they had to go looking for the tomb and searching old records out and legends galore, trying to find the tomb because the Christians had abandoned it completely, couldn't care less where the tomb was. Marvelous, isn't it? And why didn't the early Christians care less why the tomb, where the tomb was? Would you care nothing about the tomb of somebody who has risen? Goodness me, when you get home to glory with your grandmother, you'll not ask permission to come and visit her and put a few flowers on her grave, will you? Well, of course not. Who will worry about graves when the Lord comes and raises the dead? Why do the Christian women leave the grave and dry up their tears? Because, like Mary, they have found the risen Lord. And they've heard him speak. Ah, what a word is his to dry up the tears. Calm. No fuss. No full Rory. Mary has said, go and tell my brethren, I ascend to my Father and your Father, my God and your God. The marvel is that he was standing already the other side of death, already risen the other side of the grave, out in the eternal world, and he announced a relationship that bound Mary to his father and to his God and to himself. And how was the reality conveyed? By the calm word of the Lord in In the the resurrection resurrection more. morning. Mary went to grasp him, feminine like still, wanting to cling hold of him. He said, no, Mary, it is not a matter of sensual feeling or sensuousness, nothing like that. This is a spiritual thing, a spiritual relationship. Don't you try to grasp me. I have to ascend to my Father. And so it remains. It is not, of course, to despise emotion, but we have to be on our guard against it, lest we evoke false emotion, sensuous. It's not that we despise tender emotion, but conversion is a deeper thing than emotion. It is a moral thing and requires us to use our moral judgment. It's not that we despise emotion. Let's love the Lord with all our heart. But the source and key spring of it all is a spiritual relationship with the living Lord. And as he speaks to all his people this very night from the other side of the grave, I've ascended to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. Oh, if we should grasp it, the wonderful spiritual reality of this union with God and his Son, it will dry our tears and send us on our pilgrim way home to heaven, rejoicing. And even when through life's hard knocks, troubles, bereavements and distresses, our pains draw out our tears, as they naturally and rightly do, we shall smile through them. They shall not have the victory. Joy shall be ours in the morning. We're on our way home to God's eternal heaven. Thus may God bless his word to all our hearts, for his name's sake.