Scripture Reading: Matthew 5:4 Intro: Beatitudes - Blessed Are those who Mourn Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. (NIV) We are continuing in our series on the Beatitudes found here in Matthew 5. Today, we are going to look at the second of the Beatitudes. Last week we considered what it meant to be poor in spirit. We discovered that to be poor in spirit really is not financial or material poverty, but rather it is to recognize and embrace our spiritual condition before God. We are all spiritually bankrupt the problem is that most people don t like to or don t want to admit it. We don t just have some sin at the edges or fringes of our character. We are sinful to the core. We are totally depraved morally corrupt and wicked. It is only because of the grace of God that He allows us through the Holy Spirit to see our spiritual condition and turn to Him. Last week, we talked about how many if not all of the Beatitudes appear to be oxymorons contradictory statements. They are perplexing to us and that leads us to the paradox of this next statement made by Jesus. Body: Matthew 5:4 Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. (NIV) Blessed are the mourners? Surely we are missing something, right? After all, we spend our entire lives in pursuit of happiness, so why would Jesus come along and tell us that those that mourn are blessed? Doesn t He want us to enjoy that rich, full, abundant life He offers? Is there something wrong with enjoying life and having fun? Are we to go around with a sad look on our faces all the time? The first thing we need to understand is what Jesus means here when He talks about mourning. This does not mean here what many people would take it to
mean. Many think it probably means something like: God will comfort those who have lost loved ones or something like that. Not that that isn t true, but that is not the primary meaning here. We must remember what we learned about the Beatitudes. They are spiritual attributes and attitudes. They deal with the spiritual realities in our lives. What Jesus is speaking of here is mourning over sin, both in our own spiritual life, and in the lives of other people. James 4:7-10 Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. (NIV) This is the kind of thing Jesus is talking about here in Matthew 5:4. He is referring to mourning over sin. Now this may sound odd to us. We have been taught by our world that if we want to be happy, we shouldn t dwell on our sins. We justify them, blame them on someone else, forget about them and sweep it under the rug. The world would never call anyone a sinner it would damage a person s self-esteem! Mourning over sin is the exact opposite of what popular opinion would encourage us to do. Jesus message was just as counter-cultural then as it is today. He says that we must NOT skip over our sin, minimize it or sweep it under the rug. Instead, we need to be confronted with our sin. We need to mourn over it and let our mourning over sin cause us to take it to the Lord in confession. Jesus said in John 16:7-11 But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me; in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where
you can see me no longer; and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned. (NIV) This is such an important lesson from this text: a genuine encounter with God always convicts a person of sin. We looked at the prophet Isaiah last week as he responded to his sin after being in the presence of God. Isaiah 6:5 "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty." (NIV) When we experience a genuine encounter with God, we will see our sin for what it truly is. We see that we fall short of the glory of God. Maybe you are feeling bad about the sins in your life. Maybe others are telling you to just put it behind you and forget it. Maybe you have tried to cover up your guilt with alcohol, drugs or something else. God is telling us that mourning our sins is actually GOOD. It can lead us to Jesus where we can find forgiveness and cleansing and comfort. God is using that guilt in our life to bring us back to Himself. Last week, we looked at what it meant to be poor in spirit. We cannot begin the Christian life without bowing in humility before God and we cannot live the Christian life with our pride. Being poor in spirit does not stop when you depend upon God for salvation, so mourning over sin does not stop when we find forgiveness in Christ. It is a quality, attribute, attitude that God continues to use to mold us into the image of Christ. He will continue to bring a mourning over sin into our life, so that it will keep on bringing us to Him for continued cleansing and transformation in our life. We see this in the Apostle Paul. Paul had been Christian since he met Jesus on the Damascus road, but he continued to mourn the sin in his life. Romans 7 is one of the great examples of this. Paul was frustrated with the ongoing sin in his life. He expresses this in Romans 7:19 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do this I keep on doing. (NIV)
Paul realizes his spiritual state before God. Romans 7:24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (NIV) It is clear that Paul was mourning his sin. However, his mourning led him to forgiveness in Christ! In the next verse, Paul expresses the joy of God s forgiveness in his life. Romans 7:25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (NIV) His mourning over sin, even as a Christian, led him to be comforted. Unfortunately, this kind of mourning for our sins is too often missing from our lives as Christians. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, I cannot help feeling that the final explanation of the state of the Church today is a defective sense of sin and a defective doctrine of sin. Because we don t fully mourn our sin, we also can t experience the true nature of Christian joy. Mourning our sin and experiencing Christian joy are related. Because we don t have great mourning and grief over our sins, we don t experience great comfort and joy in our forgiveness. Jesus is saying that it is the MOURNER who is comforted. It is the one who MOURNS their sins first, who then finds great comfort and joy. We must first learn to Biblically mourn the seriousness of our sins before a holy God. We need to notice an important thing about mourning for our sins. It is not just feeling bad about our sin. It is an inward conviction of sin that leads us to action to change it. Many don t understand this. They think that if they simply feel bad about their sin, that is what God wants. It is not. Real repentance is not just a feeling but involves action. Paul makes this clear in 2 Corinthians 7:8-10 Even if I caused you sorrow by my letter, I do not regret it. Though I did regret it I see that my letter hurt you, but only for a little while yet
now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. (NIV) Paul was saying there that there is a kind of worldly sorrow for sin a feeling bad for what you have done, that never really changes anything. He said that kind of sorrow does not do us any good. But, he said, there is a godly sorrow the kind of mourning over sin that Jesus is talking about here, that causes repentance and that word repentance means a u-turn a change in direction. Biblical mourning is not just a feeling, it takes action to do things differently! It is one thing to feel badly about our sin, but it is quite another to DO something about it. It is like the character Caleb in the Christian movie Fireproof that came out a few years back. He had been involved in internet pornography, and he was mourning over what it had done to his marriage. So at one point in the movie, he takes the computer outside and just starts hammering it with a baseball bat! Now, I am not recommending that this is the step of action you take (just get some screening software and save your computer!) but the point is, where there is real mourning, real conviction of sin, we don t just feel badly about our sin; we don t just say we are sorry ; we DO SOMETHING about it! Some may say: I feel really bad about a sin in my life today. Feeling badly can be a first step. But if what we have is Biblical mourning over our sin, a godly sorrow brought about by the conviction of the Holy Spirit, we will not only feel badly about it, it will lead us to DO something about it. Carry-Over: Over the years, people have come to me, feeling very troubled over a sin or a habit in their life. Sometimes they will say something like: I feel so bad about that sin; I am not even sure that I am a Christian. The truth is, oftentimes the OPPOSITE is true. If we have a sincere relationship with God, we will most likely feel worse about our sin than an unbeliever would.
Jonathan Edwards once said, I have had a vastly greater sense of my own wickedness and the badness of my heart than ever I had before my conversion. Donald Whitney in his book 10 Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health wrote the fact that there is a struggle with sin, and a sense of grief because of sin, is good. Unbelievers have no such struggles or griefs. I want to provide 4 steps to mourning for our sins. 1. State our sin clearly, without excuse or evasion. This summer as we went through various Psalms and we saw this clearly from King David. David said in Psalm 51:4a Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight (NIV) A general sense of our failure is not spiritual mourning. This doesn t move us forward in our relationship with God. It just leaves us feeling miserable. Spiritual mourning is mourning over particular sins in our life. 2. Weigh what our sin has done to us. David said in Psalm 51:3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. (NIV) Think of how God could have used us if sin had not limited our usefulness to Christ. How has sin dampened our worship, dulled our testimony, and kept us at a distance from God? What does sin do? It robs us from innocence. It destroys ideals. It enslaves us. It produces a callousness to sin and causes more sin. Ultimately, it causes death.
Look at what our sin costs us. Imagine what our lives could be like if we left sin behind. 3. Recognize what our sin has done to others. The people God has placed around us are affected by our sins, even if they remain secret. We just need to watch the news this past week at the individuals fired at Wells Fargo for reporting fake reports. Our sin makes us less, and that robs others of what they might have received from us. Our sin makes us harder to live with, tougher to work with, and more difficult to love. 4. Look to the cross. Christ hung there for the sins of real people, in real places, for which there was real punishment. The sin we are mourning was a sin for which Christ died. But there s more to the cross than seeing what our sin did to Jesus. See how much we are loved! We have been sinning against Christ, and what does He do? He bears our sins. Understanding the love of Christ will do more to strengthen our battle against sin than anything else. Decision: This week, take some time and write down what God is leading you to do. Hold yourself accountable by asking somebody to pray with you about a sin you are struggling with. Remember that God desires us to humbly bow before Him and submit to His will (being poor in spirit). It is only when we mourn our sins that God can comfort us through His forgiveness of our sins. 1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. (NIV) Godly sorrow/repentance isn t just a feeling. It is mourning for our sins and making an effort to surrender that area of our life to God.