Y Safle

“Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth. The meat offering and the drink offering is cut off from the house of the LORD; the priests, the LORD’s ministers, mourn. The field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted: the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth. “Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers, for the wheat and for the barley; because the harvest of the field is perished. The vine is dried up, and the fig tree languisheth; the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of men. “Gird yourselves, and lament, ye priests: howl, ye ministers of the altar: come, lie all night in sackcloth, ye ministers of my God: for the meat offering and the drink offering is withholden from the house of your God.” –Joel 1:7-13

The plague of locusts would surely be the signal for a time of great mourning. God’s people had been at ease, being rich and content with their vats of wine and their abundant crops. When God sent the locusts all this was taken away from them and they were left with nothing.

The people had everything but they left God out. Maybe they did not realize they had done it but God had been ignored until the day of his wrath. When God sent the locusts the people were stripped of all their possesions and forced to realize their spiritual poverty as well as their material poverty.

When they realized how far they were from God, and how great was his wrath then obviously there came a time of mourning. The people looked at their depravity and were ashamed. They looked at the possesions they thought they owned, but which were taken from them, and they wept.

Again, Joel’s message is timeless, for we live in a time that knows so little of God’s riches in glory. We live in a time which is not blessed. We live in a world divorced from God and a church that is like a spoiled child, always seeking to claim its inheritance, but never willing to give its love in the form of allegiance.

This is not a time for celebration. When we have a Holy Spirit led revival, that will be a time for celebration, but now we live rather in a time of mourning. We should be mourning for the lifeless church, so in need of God’s regenerating power. We should mourn for the millions of souls who are heading for a lost eternity without God because the church is too impotent to be able to affect their lives. We should mourn at our own prayerlessness and our own lack of holiness which is acting as such a blockage to the movement of the power of God.

When we emerge from prayer - true intercessory prayer - our eyes should be red-rimmed from tears for the moral depravity in the world and the open fraud, as well as the lifelessnes, within our churches. We should be shedding tears for the lost. Our souls should be heavy within us, weighed down with grief for those who do not know Christ. If the thought of people suffering an eternity in hell when they could spend eternity with our blessed and loving Saviour - and all because of our failure as the body of Christ - does not move us to tears then we should pray first for tears.