Tears of Sorrow

I recently was grieved while I watched tears I'd caused roll down the face of my girlfriend. It grieved me to see her hurt, especially when it was my stupid words that caused the hurt. In the midst of this I was convicted; convicted not of my sin towards her but rather of a lack of grieving about the pain I cause God.


While God is not mortal and does not feel human pain, my sin is serious in His eyes. My sin required that He send His only Son to earth to be the perfect sacrifice for me in place of the perfect life I could never live. The SON OF GOD had to die because of me. Why does a momentary pain in the life of my girlfriend cause me more sorrow than pain caused to the Sovereign, Holy, Perfect, Creator of the world?


This is because every human fails in two areas of the law. Matthew 22:36-40 has those areas: loving the Lord your God with all your heart, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Elyse Fitzpatrick writes,

Pure, unadulterated, consistent love for God and pure, unadulterated consistent love for others is the summation of all the law God has given us in both the Old and New Testaments. Of course, the problem is that we never obey these simple commands. We always love ourselves more than we love God or others. We are always building idols in our hearts and worshiping and serving them. We are always more focused on what we want and how we might get it than we are on loving him and laying down our life for others. The law does show us the right way to live, but none of us obeys it. Not for one millisecond.

So when these moments of failure and conviction happen, as they inevitably will, where can we turn. Clearly we can't turn to the law and work harder to earn salvation because this is the same law we are blatantly failing at. Elyse continues,

The law of God also hinders our advance toward righteousness because, in our pride, we think that if we just try hard enough or repent deeply enough, we’ll be able to obey it. We read the promises of life for obedience and think that means that we can do it. The promises of life for obedience are not meant to build our self-confidence. They’re meant to make us long for obedience and then, when we fail again, they’re meant to crush us and drive us to Christ.

Our only option in these moments is to throw ourselves into the loving arms of our Heavenly Father who never runs out of grace for our constant failures.