You know, while we tend to want unending happy hearts and contented days, our Father in Heaven wants something greater for us, and the pathway to that is a broken heart and a contrite spirit.

The story is told of Abraham Lincoln and his courtship of Mary Owens. Now, Abe had met Mary several years before through an association with a friend. Well, following a tragedy in his life, Lincoln’s friend suggested that Abe and Mary would make a fine couple, and that she, the friend, would be willing to travel to Kentucky and bring Mary back. Abe was much in favor of the idea. However, when Mary Owens arrived, she was far different than Abe remembered, having gained considerable weight.

Well, try as he might, Lincoln could not persuade himself to fall in love with Mary Owens. He tried to convince himself that the brilliancy of her mind eclipsed her size, which it evidently did, but the desired flame of love would still not kindle.

He was a man in trouble! He had committed, sight unseen, to marry her. Well, he procrastinated the proposal until finally in a letter he asked for your hand. Now, I suspect no woman has ever received a proposal worded quite like this one. This is what he wrote:

“…This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business after all. I’m afraid you would not be satisfied. There’s a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without sharing in it. You would have to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty. Do you believe you could bare that patiently?

“What I have said I will most positively abide by – provided you wish it. My opinion is that you had better not do it. You have not been accustomed to hardship, and it may be more severe than you now image.

“Yours, Lincoln”

Well, Mary Owens turned him down. Lincoln was surprised by the rejection, and a little broken-hearted, probably more at the blow to his ego than the infatuation of his heart, and he resolved “never again to think of marrying,” and for this reason: “I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be block-head[ed] enough to have me.”

Well, fortunately for Lincoln and history, he met Mary Todd shortly after, and they were married. She healed his heart and gave him to history as the great emancipator.

Now, my point: All men set their hearts on something or someone, and it because that some of us set our hearts on the things of this fallen natural world that we’re called natural men. And it is for that reason that all men must experience a broken heart and a contrite spirit. Hearts set on natural things must first be broken to then be bound on heavenly things.

My friends, our greatness in the hereafter and here will be directly connected to our willingness to let God have His way with our hearts right now.