Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

It I had a dollar for every tear shed by men and women if the Bible, I would be a wealthy man, for the Bible is a book soaked with the tears of the saints.

The weeping of the wicked and the sobs of sinners added to the tears of the saints makes a salty sea of liquid.

Not only was Jesus a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, but the Bible is a book of sorrows, and is acquainted with grief.

The Bible deals with life as it really is, and real life provides abundant opportunity for the exercise of the tear ducts.

Not all tears are bad.

Charles Dickens said, "We need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are like rain upon the blinding dust of earth."

Tears, like rain drops, have brought forth much fruitfulness.

Tears can move the very heart of God.

When Hezekiah was told he would die he wept bitterly, and God sent Isaiah to say to him in II Kings 20:5, "Thus says the Lord, the God of David your Father: I've heard your prayers, I have seen your tears; behold, I will heal you."

Tears of repentance have transformed dying weeds into living flowers of faith.

Dante, in his Divine Comedy, has a story of a demon and an angel debating over which should have possession of the body of one who had died in battle.

The angel clinched his argument for possession by opening the eyes of the dead man.

"See," said the bright angel, "The trace of a recent tear."

This can be overly sentimental, and people can weep without repenting, but the fact is, tears of true repentance do move the heart of God.

Few things are more tragic than eyes that have never shed tears over sin.

O ye tears, O ye tears!

I am thankful that ye run!

Thou ye trickle in the darkness, ye shall glitter in the sun.

The rainbow cannot shine if the rain refused to fall,

And the eyes that cannot weep are the saddest eyes of all.

Tears of repentance are worth their weight in gold.

Those who shed such tears will enter that land of bliss where God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.

But those who never shed them will never escape them, for their destiny is outer darkness where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Blessed are those who mourn now for sin, for they shall be comforted forever.

Those who will not weep in time, will weep in eternity.

There is no escape from tears, but you have a choice as to when you will shed them.

Spurgeon said, "The tears of penitents are precious, a cup of them were worth a king's ransom.

It is no sign of weakness when a man weeps for sin."

Henry Martyn is a legend among missionaries.

One of the greatest ever, but he may never have been heard of had it not been for tears.

As a student he got into a quarrel with his father.

In a fit of passion he stormed out of the house, never to return.

Before he could return and seek his father's forgiveness, his father suddenly died.

His remorse was so pitiful, and his eyes so swollen with tears.

F. W. Borham writes, "But that torrent of tears so cleansed those eyes that he was able to see, as he had never seen before, into the abysmal depths of his own heart."

He saw himself as a sinner who desperately needed a Savior.

His father, by dying, gained an answer to his prayers.

The poet describes how tears of repentance can be a dead man's blessing.

When I was laid in my coffin,

Quite done with time and its fears,

My son came and stood beside me-

He hadn't been home for years;

And right on my face came dripping

The scald of his salty tears,

And I was glad to know his breast

Had turned at last to the old home nest,

That I said to myself in an underbreath:

This is the recompense of death.

There are many kinds of tears.

There are the tears shed for the sins of others.

Compassion for others has made the strongest men weak.

Jesus wept for others, and tears like these have changed the course of history.

Shakespeare said, "Did he break into tears?

There are no faces truer than those that are so washed."

Psa.

126:5-6 says of this kind of weeping, "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.

He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him."

Compassionate tears, like raindrops, have brought forth much fruit.

When Lincoln got the telegram that General Lee was about to surrender, he left Washington to go to the front.

He found officials preparing for his entry into Richmond.

Lincoln put his foot down and said, "There shall be no triumphal entry into Richmond.

There shall be no demonstration just now."

He walked alone into the city with his head bowed and his heart heavy with sorrow.

He went to the Southern capital, and sat at the desk of Jefferson Davis.

He put his head in his hands and wept.

His sympathetic heart bound the North and South together.

Pride and a gloating smile of victory could have widened the division, but a great man's humble tears cemented this split nation, and brought it together.

Lincoln was just one of the many great men who won great victories with the power of tears.

Someone once built a statue to commemorate a victory, and when an observer said, "Why there is a tear in the eye," the sculptor said, "I know, we won the war, but we did not win the enemy."

Lincoln's tears did not win the war, but they won the enemy.

No radiant pearl, which crested fortune wears,

No gem that twinkling hangs from beauty's ears,

Not the bright stars which night's blue arch adorn,

Nor rising suns that guild the vernal morn,

Shines with such lustre as the tear that flows

Down virtue's manly cheek for other's woes.

C. S. Lewis in, Letters To An American Lady wrote, "I am very sorry indeed to hear that anxieties again assail you.

By the way, don't weep inwardly and get a sore throat.

If you must weep, weep a good honest howl!

I suspect we-and especially, my sex-don't cry enough now-a-days.

Aeneas and Hector and Beowolf, Roland, and Lancelot blubbered like school girls, so why shouldn't we?

A concordance will reveal that almost every great man in Scripture wept.

Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the apostle Peter, the apostle Paul, and the greatest of all, Jesus.

Paul even counseled us to weep with those who weep, as he did.

The fact is, there is more about the tears of men in the Bible than about the tears of women.

Women are suppose to be the crying sex, but there are very few descriptions of it in the Bible.

One of them we do have is of a wife's cleaver use of tears to get her own way.

The woman in the Bible who cried the most was the bride to be of Samson.

She wanted him to tell her the answer to his riddle.

He would not do it, so we read in Judges 14:17, "She wept before him the seven days that their feast lasted, and on the seventh day he told her...." Samson may have been the strongest man in history, but even he could not take more than a week with a weeping woman.

Women have used this fact effectively.

Ladies, to this advice give heed:

In controlling men,

If at first you don't succeed,

Cry, cry again.

Tears can be a virtue, but these were tears that were a vice.

Samson probably wept himself for ever getting mixed up with this fake cry-baby.

She ruined his riddle bet for him, and he got angry, and the whole wedding was off.

Even these tears had some value, for they led to Samson never having to live with this cry-baby.