I suspect that many of us have Christian acquaintances, friends or relatives who, for one reason or another, have turned back from following the Lord Jesus and returned to former disreputable ways of life. If so, I invite you to think about one such person today and ask yourself the following questions:

• do you know where they can be found now?
• when did you last pray for them?
• in spite of their misdeeds, have you ever shed a tear for them?
• do you think they can ever return to the Christian way of life?
• if you met them unexpectedly tomorrow, how would you feel and what is the first thing you would say to them?

Paul, one of Jesus’ apostles, had a Christian friend called Demas, who he spent a lot of time with; however, this changed and later on he wrote about him in one of his letters to Timothy, another friend: ‘Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world, and has departed for Macedonia’, 2 Timothy chapter 4 verse 10. What answers do you think he would give to the above questions?

If you were to read through the books of 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel in the Old Testament, you would discover that tears often stained the cheeks of David and flowed into God’s bottle. He wept for his subjects and for those who were defeated by the Philistines, their enemy. Indeed, he was even prepared to humble himself in the face of his own failures. Following his sin of adultery with Bathsheba, he displayed true repentance and confession. He humbled himself and took the lowest place ‘all night upon the earth’; he wept for 7 days and countless tears flowed into ‘God’s bottle’!