"Rend your heart, and not your garments" (Joel 2: 13).
Garment-rending and other outward signs of religious emotion are easily manifested and are frequently hypocritical. But to feel true repentance is far more difficult and far less common. Men will attend to the most multiplied and minute ceremonial regulations that are pleasing to the flesh. But true faith is too humbling, too heart-searching, and too thorough for the tastes of carnal men. They prefer something more ostentatious, flimsy, and worldly. Eye and ear are pleased, self-conceit is fed, and self-righteousness is puffed up. But they are ultimately deceived, for in death and at the day of judgment, the soul needs something more substantial than ceremonies and rituals to lean on. Apart from vital godliness, all religion is utterly vain. Offered without a sincere heart, every form of worship is a sham and an impudent mockery of the majesty of heaven. Heart-rending is divinely wrought and solemnly felt. It is a secret grief which is personally experienced, not in mere form, but as a deep, soul-moving work of the Holy Spirit on the heart of each believer. The text commands us to rend our hearts, but they are naturally hard as marble. How, then, can this be done? We must take them to Calvary. A dying Savior's voice rent the rocks once, and it is as powerful now. O blessed Spirit, let us hear the death-cries of Jesus, and our hearts will be rent even as men rend their vestures in the day of lamentation.