Morning, December 18
Go To Evening Reading
“Rend your heart, and not your garments.”
Joel 2:13
Garment-rending and other outward signs of religious emotion, are easily manifested
and are frequently hypocritical ; but to feel true repentance is far more difficult, and consequently
far less common. Men will attend to the most multiplied and minute
ceremonial regulations—for such things are pleasing to the flesh —but true religion is too humbling, too heart-searching, too thorough
for the tastes of the carnal men; they prefer something more ostentatious,
flimsy, and worldly. Outward observances are temporarily comfortable ; eye and ear are pleased; self-conceit is fed, and self-righteousness
is puffed up: but they are ultimately delusive , for in the article of death, and at the day of judgment, the soul
needs something more substantial than ceremonies and rituals to lean
upon. Apart from vital godliness all religion is utterly vain; offered
without a sincere heart, every form of worship is a solemn sham and
an impudent mockery of the majesty of heaven.
Heart-rending is divinely wrought and solemnly felt . It is a secret grief which is personally experienced , not in mere form, but as a deep, soul-moving work of the Holy Spirit
upon the inmost heart of each believer. It is not a matter to be merely
talked of and believed in, but keenly and sensitively felt in every
living child of the living God. It is powerfully humiliating , and completely sin-purging; but then it is sweetly preparative for those gracious consolations which proud unhumbled spirits are
unable to receive; and it is distinctly discriminating , for it belongs to the elect of God, and to them alone.
The text commands us to rend our hearts, but they are naturally hard
as marble: how, then, can this be done? We must take them to Calvary:
a dying Saviour’s voice rent the rocks once, and it is as powerful now. O blessed
Spirit, let us hear the death-cries of Jesus, and our hearts shall
be rent even as men rend their vestures in the day of lamentation.