Grief Stricken No More

"So the Levites stilled all the people, saying, Hold your peace, for the day [is] holy; neither be ye grieved.” (Ne 8:11 AV)

The temple was repaired.  The people had repaired the wall.  Nehemiah and Ezra had placed all the servants of God in their place.  It was a time of worship.  As we read chapter nine, we hear of repeated failures of God’s people.  We hear of their pattern to follow the LORD, fall away, and return to worship again.  They have much over which to grieve.  They had just returned from seventy plus years of captivity under pagan kings and near extinction during the time of Esther.  All because they refused to honor the Sabbath.  There was much over which to grieve.  They would be right in doing so.  God deserved their grief over sin.  They owed Him that much.  However, this was the Sabbath.  They are meeting to worship the LORD.  To remain in their grief would have been narcistic.  What follows the recollection of failures of the past is a reminder of God’s mercy toward them.  Sure, they were to grieve over their sin and repent of it.  But then, it was time to rejoice at the mercy of God.  To remain in defeat is to love yourself.  To live in God’s mercy is to love God!  It is the Sabbath.  It is time to live in the victory that can be found in God’s mercy and not remain in the self-pity of permanent grief.

Have you ever known someone who loves the doctor’s office?  They cannot seem to get enough of appointments and treatments.  There are those patients who genuinely need these appointments.  There are others who seem to thrive off the attention.  When I was going through therapy for my shoulder, there were a few patients who had recovered years prior, but still came every week to go through the same exercises that were simply not doing much good.  There was something new every week.  A fresh pain.  A new symptom.  An unfamiliar sensation.  Something that had to be addressed or they could not function.  The fact of the matter was, they really had no intention of getting better.  They simply wanted the attention they received from the physical therapist.  They were content living in defeat while their therapist was trying to convince them they were perfectly fine.  It’s a hard thing to come to the place that you no longer need the attention you previously enjoyed.  I remember the last day of my therapy.  I remember walking to the car and wondering what I was going to do.  “What do I do now?”, was going through my head.  For months, I had a personal therapist who challenged me, stretched me, and shocked me.  He or she focused solely on my needs.  Now, I didn’t need him or her anymore.  There was still work to be done and I would do it at home, but the injury had healed sufficiently that my life could get back to normal.

Too many of us dwell in the failures of the past and enjoy the pity we think we are getting from them.  We go to church and expect God to love on us because we are such failures in life.  We want to be coddled.  We want to be stroked.  We want God to feel sorry for us.  We want Him to convince us that we are all right.  All the while we hand on to the self-pity, seeking more and more attention.  Stop it!  God forgave us and it is time to live in the reality of that mercy and forgiveness.  To do so means we leave behind what we were and live for God in what He has made us!  It is the LORD’s day.  Yes, we come to be challenged and changed.  Once the change comes, then it is time to get our eyes of Self and onto the God who made the change.  Time to straighten the weak knees and bring up the hands that hand down.  It is time to make the LORD’s day about the LORD and not about us!