A Strange Road to Repentance

SCRIPTURE: Jeremiah 9:17-20
This is what the LORD Almighty says:
“Consider now! Call for the wailing women to come; send for the most skillful of them. Let them come quickly and wail over us till our eyes overflow with tears and water streams from our eyelids. The sound of wailing is heard from Zion: ‘How ruined we are! How great is our shame! We must leave our land because our houses are in ruins.’” Now, O women, hear the word of the LORD; open your ears to the words of his mouth. Teach your daughters how to wail; teach one another a lament.

OBSERVATION: The thought struck me as I was reading this that people who have hardened their hearts and refused correction because they do not see that they have done anything wrong are the last ones who would wail over their sin. Yet here is the Lord telling them that they should do just that.
He says that the professional women "wailers" should teach their daughters how to wail and lament. These were women who would go to the homes of families who had suffered the death of a loved one and wail to bring out emotions of grief in the relatives of the dead so that they could go through the process of mourning.

APPLICATION: We are a society and culture very concerned with not being hypocritical and with being "honest" in expressing our emotions. Is it possible that when our hearts are hard the Lord wants us to make ourselves wail and lament over our sin even if we don't feel like it? If we are confronted with our sin but feel no remorse for it, should we force ourselves to mourn over it like professional wailing women who didn't necessarily even know the dead person whose family they were assisting to grieve? Maybe we need to be obedient to such a command from God and then He will bring us to a point of true understanding of, and repentance for, our sin. Maybe it's obedience to a word such as this that breaks the spirit of arrogance and apathy toward sin.
It's a thought that flies in the face of our culture.

PRAYER: Give me insight and wisdom to understand Your ways, O Lord. Even when they do not fit my paradigm of what is proper, continue to challenge my thinking. I want to be fully obedient to You. In Jesus' Name, Amen.