02.25. Mourning Days Ended

Chapter 25 MOURNING DAYS ENDED. The general opinion is that we have to enter Heaven before sorrow can possibly end with us. We are told this is a vale of tears, and sighs, that moans and lamentations are the common and unchangeable language of the human family until Time shall be no more, and we have all entered through the Gates of Pearl into the everlasting city. And yet Isaiah distinctly tells us in the thirty-fifth and in the sixtieth chapters of his Prophecy that our days of mourning can and shall be ended, and that on earth. The man has not entered Heaven, but Heaven has entered the man. Of course the Scripture does not mean that causes of natural sorrow will cease; or that our hearts shall not feel the bitter pangs of bereavement while our tears drip on the white, unconscious face in the coffin. The Savior wept. and the best and holiest of people will continue to feel the pain that will spring up naturally, involuntarily and of necessity under the mistreatment and ill-treatment of ingratitude, falsehood, cruelty and wrong. Suffering can actually be felt in the words of our Lord when he said, "The hand that betrayeth me is with me on the table." Evidently there is an anguish that has no personal relation with wrong doing, and by which the pure heart and godly life is affected through the hand, tongue and act of a wrongdoer. The existence of this state of things is no contradiction to the promise in the Bible of a religious experience in which mourning days are ended.

It must be remembered that the Scripture is not a book on Science, nor written to satisfy mysterious and really unknowable facts concerning the universe and the life beyond the grave. It is a volume on Salvation. It treats of our cure and deliverance from the disease of Sin, and is looking at and dealing with men from the standpoint of Redemption. It recognizes and teaches that the original cause of all sorrow in the world was the entrance of Sin into the race. And that even now in every life the great cause of our days of grief and nights of sadness is sin in some one of its many forms.

Hence in presenting a Full Salvation from all sin, and looking at men always in the light of Redemption, the Book of God naturally and properly declares a blessing can be secured in which the days of our mourning shall be ended.

First, this state of blessedness begins in pardon. For if the recollection of our transgressions and their pressure on conscience bows down the heart and brings repeatedly the sigh and groan to the lip, it stands to reason when God for Christ’s sake forgives all our sins, then that much sorrow is ended and those periods of gloom connected with their existence are terminated.

Second, through the Birth of the Spirit we receive an ability through grace to live without sin; for the Word says, "Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin."

Now we all know through bitter experience that the instant we do wrong, shadow and sorrow fall upon and take possession of the whole being. This gloom is not only indicative of the divine displeasure but is the protest of the soul itself against iniquity. For man was never made to sin. It is clear then that if the salvation of the Son of God can break up the sinning business, it has also with that achievement ended the days of mourning which invariably dawn or rather darken over our heads when a commandment of God is broken and some kind of guilt stains the heart. A third cause of sadness to the soul is the presence of inbred sin. This peculiar heart heaviness is not continuous, but occasional and always a mystery to the regenerated. Sin is a gloomy principle, and where it remains in the Christian in the form of the carnal mind, it is certain to affect the spirit with the strange periodical melancholy to which we have referred. In such cases no wilful sin can be recalled, or has for that matter been committed; and yet here is this mind depressing influence at work, leading to fits of prolonged silence, or despondent remarks, and to a cast down appearance as well as an equally weakened and lapsed condition of the man’s spirit life and activities. The Word of God declares that this "body of sin" can be "destroyed," and in that event of course, those days of spiritual eclipses, sunset shadows and midnight gloom are no more, and so another large number of mourning days are ended. A fourth cause of gloom with the people of God can be traced to the mistakes, blunders and failures which seem necessarily connected with human life we find it here on earth.

Certainly as long as we do not know all things, we cannot infallibly read and measure men; and while we fall short of certain infinite attributes called omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence, it ought not to appear astonishing nor remain unpardonable with ourselves and others, that we make unwise decisions, blunder in our judgments, and fail in our enterprises and labors in ways too numerous to mention.

There are godly men and women today, whose hearts are clean, and lives right and acceptable in the sight of God, who have not ended their days of mourning because of just such happenings and conditions referred to in the above paragraph. As wholly sanctified people it is their privilege to live as described in Isaiah 55:1-13 and Isaiah 60:1-22, and they do the most of the time. But the day of mistake, blunder and failure coming, and neglecting to deal with it as God would have them, or not understanding what to do with it, the necessary consequence is an additional period of mourning.

Terminated are the days of sadness over sin dwelling within, or sins committed without.

They know how to dispose of the shadows originating from those old-time experiences, but go down into gloom over a lesser evil and a smaller trouble.

We have known the best and godliest of people to make an unwise speech; fail to do the exactly correct and proper thing in some trying complication of duties, and then sink into gloom for hours over the occurrence.

We have known a layman to limp and stumble in prayer; a leader of religious song make a break or mistake in service; or a preacher through exhaustion of body or an overheated audience room, fail conspicuously and unmistakably on his sermon. With some the pain and shadow of the failure or blunder remained for hours, and even days, while with still others it abided as a constantly recurring life memory of sorrow and mortification.

We hardly need to show how this state of mind is certain to affect the person in duties and labors that follow, and its equally unhappy influence upon others with whom such a person is thrown when in this mood of mind and condition of soul. If mentally burdened and preoccupied one can hardly do what God wants him to do, or be what He desires him to be. The anxious face and worried tone and vacant eye, are all against us in the work of doing good. And we thank God we need carry none of these things with us in the journey to Heaven. I beheld them, said Isaiah, and sorrow and sighing had fled away, and everlasting joy was on their heads.

Perhaps the crowning gladness of Full Salvation is the discovery that we can place our blunders and failures just where we cast our sins and sin, under the Blood of Christ, and in the hands of an almighty, overruling God.

Some have learned how to do this, and are living that way daily, hourly and momentarily. So with them the Scripture is at last perfectly fulfilled, and all their mourning days are ended. In a meeting once in Ohio, a good brother stood up in the hour given to testimony, to tell some thing; when to his amazement the whole circumstance or recollection had escaped him. With hundreds of people looking at him, and a silence that grew with every passing second, the situation was anything but pleasant and enviable. But suddenly we saw a sweet light steal over his face, while he said, "I have forgotten what I wanted to say--but Hallelujah anyhow"--and then he sat down. It was all so simply, humbly and beautifully done, that tears stood in many eyes, while amens and shouts abounded.

Some men would have grieved over the mortifying circumstances for months and years, but our brother possessed the secret of which we are writing, and never felt a shadow; the days of his mourning were all ended. In a certain camp meeting in the South, no matter how men resisted nor devils raged, nor the tide of battle turned, two faithful preachers laboring with us would inform the Lord with glad cries from their knees that they "were on top!"

It was the same truth taught in this chapter only embodied in different words. For as far as we have been able to see and understand things in life, it is the man "on top" who does the shouting, and the man underneath who does the mourning. Verily our speech betrayeth us. Our very words declare our spiritual location.

Certain it is, that if we turn down our sins, get our feet on the adversary, put every sad, trying circumstance of life under the Blood, where we had previously plunged the past and the soul itself, and keep at this--then are we undoubtedly on top, and the days of our mourning are all ended.

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