Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.
Joel 2:13
The key to growing in this life is the ability to humble yourself in the midst of people and situations… There are a lot of things that we face in life which we do not want others to know; however, we are told today in the book of Joel that we must break ourselves down in order to build ourselves up… We enter this life with a mindset that is not of the will of God; when we realize this, the enemy tries to keep us thinking that our way of life is okay, when in fact the truth of the matter is that nothing of this world can produce the life-altering results we seek… In the Old Testament, men would rend (tear) their garments as a sign of disagreement, humbleness, or repentance toward God… To rend your garments also would show a sign of pain or ache within that cannot be contained… Job tore his garments when he received the bad reports about his children. In Job’s instance, this was to be considered as a sign of humility and total remorse from whatever actions or choices that had been made… Job didn’t understand why this had happened and he broke himself down before the Lord seeking an answer as to why all these things have happened to his household… As we understand what it means to rend your clothes, let us also understand that God isn’t concerned about our clothes. God is focused on our hearts which is why we are instructed today to, “Rend your heart and not your garments…”
This passage reminds us today that it is not about what we do on the outside to show our remorse, but if we really have a broken and contrite heart! It wasn’t about David going to the temple or pleading with God over his son which was bore by Bathsheba, but it was indeed about how he handled the situation within and how he sought God’s face in his most trying time… So many people claim to be upset at their past failures and mistakes, but their heart has not turned from them, so they continue down that dark and steep path… To rend your heart is to be completely uneased by your failures and to seek a transformation daily! Again, David is a perfect example of a broken heart when he fasted for numerous days hoping his son would not perish; but the bible says that when he received word of his son’s death, he cleaned himself up and went into the temple of the Lord… He was broken, he was suffering and he knew that God was his only answer, he wasn’t worried about his stature as King, he wasn’t worried about what men had to say, he was seeking a transformation of character through our Lord and Savior… We too need to stop worrying about what people think, we need to cease caring about what this person may say if we do this or do that, we must come to the understanding that God is standing and waiting for your broken heart to be brought to him so that he can mend it…
ALL FOR HIS GLORY!
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