“Remove Sorrow from Thy Heart”

My mother lived for young folks. The young folks were her world. In all of my young days growing up out here at Shawnee, my mother taught the young people’s Sunday School class. Every Monday night she would have her Sunday School class come to her home. They would study the Sunday School lesson and have maybe a Bible question-and-answer session. Then she would let them have a little social time, with refreshments, etc., and they all had a nice time at my mother’s home. She never did let her young folks get out from under her wings, so to speak, or enter into marriage or any important venture of their lives without her having a good time of counsel with them and talking with them. But sometimes my mother would see young people taking steps following the wrong course, doing things that she, in her advanced years and experience, knew would bring sorrow and trouble to them all their lives. In her very serious way she would shake her head and say, “There will be a hereafter to all this.” My text says, “Walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes,” but know that there is going to be a hereafter, folks. There is going to be a reckoning time, “Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart.” How are we going to handle this? How can one remove sorrow from his heart? My answer is to remove the thing that causes the sorrow. Sin is what brings sorrow.

“Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.”* (Proverbs 14:34) Remove the thing out of your life that causes the sorrow. It will save you a lot of sorrow and trouble on down through life. Remove sorrow out of your heart. Now let me tell you something—children, young folks, listen to me well. They that are coming up through that period of their lives resent restraint. They do not want anyone telling them what to do. They want to be turned loose. The sad thing about it is, so many are being turned loose—just going their own way. But that’s what they want. There are some who kick and fuss, resent discipline and fight against restraint. God’s word says, “It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.”* (Lamentations 3:27) Now God said that. What that means is that it is good for one to have some restraint on him—good for him to be held in check and to be under discipline in the time of his youth. That is a good thing for him. But we find that we are living in a time now when young people want to be let go and they resent discipline; they resent being told what to do, and having any restraint on them.

We have a lesson in the word of God about a young fellow who got it into his mind, “My daddy is holding me back. If I were just out from under the restraining hand of my father and had a little money to go on, I could really go places and do things.” He thought he had great capabilities, and maybe he did have, if he had given them time to develop. But he just thought, “My daddy is holding me down. He is restraining me. If I could just get out from under his hand and get a little money, I could really go places. I could do things.” So he went to his father and said, “Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me. I am going away now, I am going to leave home.” Young folks get that in their minds a lot of times. They want to get out on their own right when they need the guiding hand of their parents the most. They just want to get out from under their parents and get out on their own. That’s the spirit of this age. This young man had that idea. His father gave him his portion of the inheritance and he went out from home, no doubt with his head high and his chest out. “I am on my own now, I can really do something now. I have a little money, I am out from under the hand of my daddy, and I can make my own decisions and exercise my own judgment and my own ingenuity. No doubt my judgment is better than Daddy’s, anyway. I can really go places and do things now.” But he wasn’t prepared for that. He got out there and he found people doing things he didn’t know humans did. He wasn’t prepared to meet that, and he fell a victim to many different things, squandered all of his money in riotous living, and finally, reduced to a condition of want, he hired himself out to a man who sent him out into a field to feed swine. Oh, such a detestable job for a man of his standing! How differently things turned out to how he thought they were going to turn out—what he had in his mind!

There is something about the spirit of youth and the vigor, vitality, and strength that youth has, that just gives them an urge that makes them feel that they can meet things that they are unable to meet. They don’t even know they are going to meet that thing, but they venture out. They go out and before they know it, before they actually come to themselves, they have their lives all mixed up and ruined and there is a trail of sorrows and woes that will follow them right on to their graves.

Now, you see, your parents have been over the road before you. They are older than you are, and have had more experience than you have had. They know a little better than you do how to weigh things out, and they realize a little more than you do what the fruit and outcome and potential of these things are. If you would just realize that and listen to them and accept admonition and instruction from them, they would save you from the woes and troubles that follow these things if they could.

Now, I dare say there is not anyone here that has any years on you but who can look back on your life and remember things that you wish you didn’t have to remember, and see things that you wish weren’t there. Your parents would save you that kind of trouble if they could. I have thought so many times that if each succeeding generation would just take up where the preceding generation left off and build on that foundation, and go on from there, oh, how far along we would be! But it doesn’t work out that way. Every fellow seems to feel that he has to learn for himself. Maybe Daddy was an alcoholic, and they saw what happened to him. It seems that they would be restrained. “It won’t happen to me like it did to Daddy. It got him, but it won’t get me that way.” But they just go on, dabble and dabble, and pretty soon it has them just like it did Daddy. We can’t profit by the experience of those before us, so we just keep covering the same ground generation after generation, over and over again, and never get any farther than where we started.

“Remove sorrow from thy heart.” Your daddy and mother, children, could help you do that if you would just accept admonition and instruction, discipline and restraint from them.