The pastor’s tears
“My sorrow is beyond healing, My heart is faint within me! … For the brokenness of the daughter of my people I am broken; I mourn, dismay has taken hold of me. … Oh that my head were waters And my eyes a fountain of tears, That I might weep day and night For the slain of the daughter of my people!” (Jeremiah 8:18, 21; 9:1)
Even a pastor sometimes sheds tears. The reason is because it's sad. Why is it so sad that the pastor sheds tears? The reason is because a soul whom God loves and who is entrusted to him for shepherding is spiritually ill. Not only that, also the pastor's heart is sick. When the pastor sees the poor sheep who are spiritually ill and goes its separate way, leaving the Lord, the true Shepherd, the pastor's heart aches from anxiety. And he is also afraid. He fears that perhaps a holy and just God will punish that one soul. In this fear, the pastor weeps before God. The pastor sheds tears in front of God because he wants that one lost soul to return to the Lord even after being disciplined by God in love. And he believes that Heavenly Father will see and hear the tears of his earnest prayers and answer his prayers according His will in His time. And he believes that God will wipe away his tears and make him dance. So, in the end, he sheds tears of thanksgiving before God.
When we look at Jeremiah 8:18, 21 and 9:1, we see that the prophet Jeremiah was sad. He wept with sorrow and broken heart. He wept day and night for his people. This was because the prophet Jeremiah foresaw the tribulation that the people of Judah would face in the future. Why did the people of Judah have to suffer? It was because they sinned against God and didn’t repent. They didn't even know what sin they were committing against God. That's how much their hearts were hardened. The prophet Jeremiah was sad and wept when he thought of God's chastisement on the people of Judah who didn’t consider sin as a sin nor could they do so. Of course, he shed tears and mourned for the tribulation that would come upon the people of Judah. But the real reason that the prophet Jeremiah truly grieved and wept was because of the unrepentant people of Judah. Think about it. Why is a father sad? Why does he cry? Doesn't he cry when he sees his child in pain when he disciplines the child with love? But what makes him even sadder is when he sees his child who is being disciplined, but don’t realize his wrongdoing and doesn’t repent. When the father sees that, his heart is filled with sorrow and brokenness. That was the case with the prophet Jeremiah. The prophet Jeremiah fell into deep sorrow when he saw the people of Judah who didn’t repent because they didn’t consider sin a sin. More than that, he fell into deep sorrow when he saw the unrepentant people of Judah because they didn’t consider sin a sin. Therefore, he said, “I might weep day and night For the slain of the daughter of my people!” (9:1)
We pastors should be in deep sorrow. We must weep for God's people. But we have more reason to weep than that. The reason we must weep is because of ourselves. We should weep over our sins: The sin of not proclaiming the word of God directly to His people, the sin of forgetting the essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ and spreading the false gospel, the sin of living a lukewarm life of faith because the passion for the gospel has cooled down, the sin of not valuing one soul even though it is said to be precious, the sin of not teaching in life the secret to being content with the Lord alone as the shepherd to the flocks God entrusted to us by pastoring in greed, the sin that hardens our hearts so that we don’t even realize the sin that we are committing against God and thus we cannot repent of, and the sin of drying up not only the tears of repentance but also the tears of gratitude, and so on. Because of these many sins, we must weep. We earnestly pray that God will have mercy on us.