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Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Matthew 5:4
Today, we return to our study of the Sermon on the Mount. Specifically, the first twelve verses of Matthew 5 are known as the Beatitudes while Matthew 5-7 are known as the Sermon on the Mount. Beatitude means blessed. The word blessed describes those who are being granted the ability to see the futility of the deception levied upon man in the Garden of Eden. It also grants the believer in Christ the ability to see the wisdom of God's description of things. This is transcendent because the greatest temptation of all is to try to look good without being good.
In the previous verse, in Matthew 5:3, we read, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The Beatitudes describe the process involved in the changing of the human heart with reference to God. When we recognize that our sin is the result of being deceived by the enemy of God and that it is a violation of what God has said is true, we naturally mourn over our sinful condition. This is the content of today's second step involved in the changing of our hearts in reference to God.
This blessed condition enables the believer in Christ to recognize the waywardness of the way of the evil one. The word translated "mourn," speaks of grieving over our spiritual poverty with reference to God. This is the type of grief that takes hold of a person and it cannot be ignored. This is why in Matthew 4:17 the Lord Jesus told the people to "repent because the kingdom of heaven was at hand."
Mourning over our sin is not natural for fallen man. It is, in fact, contrary to the whole structure of the fallen human expectation. The pleasure madness, the drive for amusement, entertainment, thrills, the mania that seeks the next high, the love of money, the energy and enthusiasm expanded in living it up are all products of the deception of the evil one. All of those things are an expression of the world’s aim to avoid mourning over their sin. This mourning over sin condemns the shallow and superficial approach to this life that was offered to us through the serpent in the Garden of Eden. This mourning introduces us to real life, the kind of life that transcends this world. When we get to the point of recognizing our utter bankruptcy before God due to the fact that we are under the rule of the devil, we will naturally mourn the fact that we are hopeless and that we desperately need God's help.
There are nine different Greek words used in the New Testament to describe mourning. Man’s history is a story of tears and sorrows. Here, the Lord Jesus taught those gathered on that mountain of Godly sorrow. According to 2 Corinthians 7 this is the sorrow that produces repentance which ushers in blessing and comfort into our soul from God. Those who mourn over their sin are those who are shamed beggars before God because they have absolutely no capacity to help themselves, and they know it. They are absolutely destitute spiritually, and they can only beg God for His grace and His mercy. These are the only ones who enter the kingdom, those who enjoy the comfort of God. Entrance to the kingdom begins with an overwhelmingly helpless feeling of spiritual poverty and bankruptcy of soul. And, friends, that never changes. We never get past this feeling of helplessness apart from God.
The only right and acceptable response to God when we realize that we are hopeless before Him is to admit it and repent from the self life that got us into this mess in the first place. The Prodigal Son in Luke 15 did it right. After he had left his father and wasted all of his blessing, he ended up working as a feeder of pigs. Since he had no food to eat, he ate what he fed the pigs. He was the son of a preeminent and wealthy father, yet he ate pig slop. This, of course, was the result of having lived a destructive life of rebellion. When he came to himself and saw what his rebellion produced in his life, he went home and said to his father, "I have sinned against you and I am not even worthy to be called a son." The Prodigal Son came back home bankrupt spiritually. He came back as a humbled and repentant failure. And, that was when his father embraced him, took him in, and blessed him.
In Psalm 51:17 King David wrote, "A broken and a contrite heart you will not despise, O God." God never rejects the broken who cry out to Him for help. This is how we come into the kingdom when we are ready to stop believing the lie of the devil and we mourn over our deceived condition and we reach out to God for help. And, this isn’t a momentary phase, this is our way of life. We come into God's kingdom mourning over our sin, and for the rest of our time on this earth we mourn over our sinfulness not to gain God's acceptance but because we have His acceptance through the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Once we get to this place in our lives where we mourn in this manner, God promises that we will be comforted. Mourners are not joyfully happy because they mourn, they’re joyfully happy because their mourning has been comforted. There’s no happiness in the sorrow of this world. This world mourns but they never get any real comfort because this type of comfort is the product of God's forgiveness. Having confessed our sin, we have come to know God's complete forgiveness. Only those who mourn over sin know true forgiveness. And, the most comforting reality of all realities is to know that all our sin is forgiven in Christ.
When we improvised to the sound of the destructiveness of our sin and we do not mourn our sin, we missed out on God's forgiveness. It is only from the posture of mourning that we begin to understand that sin tramples on God’s law, that it slights His love, and it robs us of God’s image. The answer, of course, is the ability to see that our sin is against God and to get to the place that we mourn over this condition. This is the soil that produces good fruit. God invites such to come with our brokenness, realizing we can bring nothing to the judgment seat of God. Such mourning directly leads to the comfort of believing. Since the Lord Jesus has fulfilled the law and we have believed that His death on the cross procured our forgiveness before God, we now know the ultimate comfort, the forgiveness of God that renders His comfort.
