Feeling! We don't feel sufficiently. How can our prayers be heard, for lost souls, for specific people who we bear up before the Lord in our ministry of intercession? How can our prayers be heard, the prayers of churches calling upon God for revival, if there is no feeling, no deep earnestness, no concern? So this is important, and the prophet, though he has every justification to be against the people in his own priestly village says, ‘Oh that my head were waters. If only I had the level of feeling that I ought to have. Sorrow at what people do to themselves, sorrow at what is happening to people as graves fill up, even anguish, pain.
We must surely pray for deeper concern and more feeling, all of us. In the pulpit, in the pew, in the prayers that are offered before services, particularly evangelistic services. If only there really was a concert of prayer from feelingful hearts! This is so vital. The proof of our feeling is that we are trying to reach the lost. There are many churches that are praying for revival, and they are not doing anything. That doesn't exactly show feeling, great sorrow. Why, if you had feeling for souls and concern for the nation, you would get on with something. You would open up Sunday Schools, you would try to reach the community, you would preach evangelistic services, even before revival came. But the seeming reluctance of many dear people and sound people to get on with things doesn't indicate very much feeling.
How much feeling do we really have, or how hardened are we at the godlessness around us? How indifferent, or even, sometimes, how angry at it? It can affect everyone. It can affect pastors. There are pastors who struggle to get people to attend their churches, and in talking to some you find they have begun to get angry with their communities, and so feeling, sympathy, and sorrow disappear. All these things ought to motivate us, and drive us and inspire us, and cause to be genuine in our prayers before the Lord. Sometimes you hear sermons or clips and recordings of sermons that are so jocular and light, and you begin to ask, are we serious enough as people? Yes, congregations like a light-hearted preacher, but does that affect the seriousness? Perhaps Jeremiah would have been a very unpopular preacher in our times. People would have said, ‘That old, too serious, too deeply concerned man!’ But this is his prayer, even though he was already ‘the weeping prophet’. He prays for more feeling. Strong feeling is what makes us diligent, so that we leave no stone unturned, and we visit our children, and we overcome our natural shyness, and go out with the contact teams, and witness to people who know us well in place of employment, and places of study. We witness even to people who might be very haughty and give us a crippling kind of response, a sarcastic response. It is feeling that will keep us at these things for the Lord.
We lament the state of the nation. We consider the fact that among our national leaders of all parties, there are so few who anything about principles of conduct, about faith and the word of God. Now the people in the highest places are so ignorant and untaught. Yes, but to what extent is it the fault of the churches: the lack of Sunday Schools, of witness, and outreach? We have got in high places, educated men and women, who have never read anything that has touched them, or informed them.