Prayer of tears

[Psalms 6]

As we prepared for our church revival meeting, we prayed in tears because of God’s delicate God.  The pastor who came as the guest speaker of our church revival meeting conducted the gospel radio broadcast interview with other two pastors from two other churches before leading the revival meeting at our church on the first day.  While listening to the interview, I was hopping that the guest speaker would say a word about our church revival meeting.  But I was a little bit sad because he didn't say anything about it.  But after a while, a reporter whom I didn’t know at all from one of the Korean newspapers called the church and asked to interview me regarding our church.   After I hung up, I bowed my head to my desk and prayed to God in tears.  The reason is because I felt the delicate love of God.  I shedded tears of thanksgiving because I was deeply moved by that love of God that He knew and heard my little desire in my heart.

In the word of Psalms 6:6, we can see that David, the psalmist, wrote “I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.”  I think about what his tears meant.  When I think about it, I think David's tears were tears of repentance.  The grace I received during the preparation for this revival meeting was a reminder that I had no tears of repentance.  As the guest speaker said in the radio broadcast interview, he said that we who would attend the church revival meeting need heart of repentance but my tears of repentance had already dried up.

David wanted to be disciplined by God with His love rather than His anger because he sinned against God.  And he shed tears of repentance to God amid agony of his bones and anguish of his soul because of God’s discipline of love (vv. 2, 3).  ‘It is the gift of the Holy Spirit that we can repent of our sins in the presence of physical suffering’ (Park).  David shed tears of repentance over the sins, the gift of the Holy Spirit, in the pain of the flesh that had come upon him.  He knew that it was the discipline of God's love for sin, so he took it for granted and refused to avoid it.  This is the psychology of repentance (Park).

                I lack even this psychology of repentance.  I also seem to have lost my sensitivity to sin.  Therefore, it seems that not only I don’t regard sin as a sin, but also I lost my ability to feel it.  I have an instinct not to fear God's wrath and to reject even the discipline of His love.  Now I am trying to avoid God's loving discipline rather than humbly accepting it.  I am being disciplined by God and I don’t know what my own sin is.  So I have many tears to shed before God.  Of course, I have to shed tears of thanksgiving, tears of devotion, and tears of love for a soul.  But now I want to shed tears of repentance.  The reason is probably that without a tear of repentance, I cannot honestly appreciate, dedicate, and love with an unclean soul.

He whose tears of repentance is being dried up,

James Kim

(Trusting in the precious blood of Jesus Christ on the cross)