Matthew 5:4
Blessed Are The Mourners?
Woodlawn Baptist Church
February 22, 2004
Introduction
This morning we are continuing our look at the Sermon on the Mount, and we are now at the second of the Beatitudes. Last week we considered what it meant to be poor in spirit, and why that was such a blessed characteristic. To be poor in spirit really is not just to be in a condition of spiritual poverty, but rather it is to recognize and embrace your spiritual poverty. We are all spiritually bankrupt – the problem is that most people don’t like to or don’t want to admit it. You remember that just a few years ago, when Jesse Ventura was governor of Minnesota, he told Playboy magazine…
“Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.”
Many of us got upset that he would say such a thing – but is organized religion, or Christianity a crutch? Looking at it through the eyes of the Sermon on the Mount, and particularly through the Beatitudes, I say, “Yes – Christianity is a crutch, but then, what is wrong with a crutch?” I’ll tell you what is wrong with a crutch – they make people admit their need, their weakness, and their inability to get along on their own, and that is exactly what we don’t like to do. The funny thing is though – that the best way for us to get along is to embrace our need, grab the crutches, and walk on! The man who breaks his ankle and has a cast is a fool if he leaves the crutches at home because of what people will think – and so is the man or woman who knows they don’t have it all figured out; but fails to embrace Christ’s offer because someone might think they are weak. “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.” I say to you that the fool has also said that he can make out all right without God. This gives great meaning to what we find in Mark 2:15-17.
“And it came to pass, that, as Jesus sat at meat in his house, many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples: for there were many, and they followed him. And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners? When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
Jesus came to help those who recognized their spiritual poverty, and those that recognize and embrace it are blessed beyond measure – theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Do you know why these people are so blessed? They are blessed because they realize they can quit trying to impress God with what they think they’ve got. Can you imagine the richest one of you trying to impress Bill Gates with your wealth? Can you imagine our best basketball player trying to impress Michael Jordan with his ability? or the best businessman in the room trying to impress Donald Trump with your business savvy? That’s exactly what we try to do with God – He is rich beyond measure, so much higher than we are, and yet we work and work and work at trying to impress Him when all He wants is for us to stop. The blessed man is one who has stopped and now lives in the freedom Christ offers!
What about the next statement? Jesus goes on teaching us what we are to be. In Matthew 5:4, He goes on to say…
“Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”
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 if we are to find happiness, or if we are to enjoy that rich, full, abundant life He offers, we’ve got to do so by mourning? Happy are the sad? Brother Kevin, we are missing something – that just can’t be. Look with me to Luke 6:25. Jesus says the same thing another way.
“Woe unto you that are full! For ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! For ye shall mourn and weep.”
Is Jesus a killjoy? 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? We know that’s not the truth, for the Bible teaches us for a fact that we are to be a people of great joy. In fact, it is a fruit of the Spirit. If we are following God as we ought, if we are walking in the Spirit, then our lives will be characterized by great joy. The Apostle Paul wrote the book of Philippians, teaching us how to have joy, and if you will look down your list of Beatitudes in Matthew 5, you will find Jesus telling us to rejoice in verse 12. How can that be? How is it that Jesus blesses those who mourn, then tells us to rejoice? Is it a contradiction? That depends on how you define what it means to mourn.
Some people mourn when they don’t get their way. David’s son Amnon mourned when he couldn’t have his sister Tamar. Others will mourn the loss of someone they love, but will carry it to extremes – leading them into depression, guilt, and bitterness. When this occurs you ought to see right away that it is not of God. That sort of mourning is selfish and sinful; it reveals a lack of trust in God and His plan.
The word mourn is used in several ways in the Scriptures. We normally do think of mourning the loss of a loved one. When the Patriarch Jacob died, the Bible says that the Egyptians mourned for him for seventy days, but there was nothing sinful about it. Their mourning was legitimate, done out of respect for his family, and when it ended (notice that it did end), the people went on about their business. People might mourn because of an accident, or adverse circumstances, or for some other reason, but that’s not the kind of mourning we’re talking about today. Remember that the Beatitudes are spiritual in nature – making this a mourning that is done in a spiritual sense, but what exactly does that mean?
When we talk about mourning, understand that we are first speaking about a deep, inner agony that a person carries around about something. But what brings on this spiritual mourning and how does it look? Again, and perhaps most importantly to you, is the question we asked last week, “So what?” “What difference does this make to me, and how is this going to help me one bit?”
Let’s begin by remembering that God’s ultimate desire is that He be worshipped – that we give Him the glory due His holy name – and the most obvious way we do that is by allowing Him to conform us into the image of His Son Jesus Christ, so as we think about mourning – let’s think about how it was manifested in His life. You’ll never find a sinful demonstration of mourning in Christ’s life, but always this mourning in the spirit that He spoke of in the Beatitudes. Did Jesus know about mourning? Long before He was born into our word, Isaiah prophesied,
“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
Imagine Jesus, having come from the glories of heaven to reveal Himself to man as God’s only begotten Son, the God who would die on the cross to pay for our sins, the God in the flesh who had come to live among us, feel our hunger and thirst with weariness and feel the temptations you and I experience, and in the midst of it all offer deliverance from our sin. Jesus comes into this world of sick, maimed, lame people who are in need of a physician, in need of spiritual heart transplants, and He is rejected; the greatest news ever offered to man. Jesus doesn’t just offer a crutch – He offers complete transformation! Did everyone jump at His appeals? We know that they didn’t. In fact, Luke 19 records that Jesus looked over the city of Jerusalem, and “he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known…” Those people were so full of themselves and their self-sufficiency they couldn’t see their need for a physician, and it broke Jesus’ heart.
Another passage with which you may be more familiar is found in John 11:35. Jesus was standing at the tomb of Lazarus when the Bible records that He wept. Those weren’t tears mourning the loss of His friend – He had already said Lazarus had to die – Jesus was weeping over the unbelief of all those around Him – for when He was revealing Himself to them through His miracles, they were plotting His death for fear of loosing their places of authority. Mark 3:5 also records that Jesus was grieved because of the hardness of the people’s hearts. I can imagine as Jesus walked among the people He grieved over what He saw and what He knew to be true about the people. Jesus looked out over the crowds time and time again and saw hard-heartedness, pride, self-sufficiency, apathy, and despondency. How it must have broken His heart to carry the burden, knowing that so many would reject Him and miss what He offered.
Look through the gospels sometime and see how often you come across something causing Jesus to mourn – it’s there more often than we realize. Did He mourn over the Samaritan woman? Not as much as He mourned over His disciples missing the point of the trip to Samaria. Did He mourn over the woman caught in adultery? Not as much as He mourned over the Pharisees who brought her. You will find in your studies of the Scriptures that the Bible never says that Jesus laughed, but it does speak about His grief, His sorrows, His pains, His weeping, and obviously His mourning, but why? Why did Jesus mourn in these and other situations? You can sum it up in two words: sin and unbelief. Every time we see Jesus mourning – it comes down to sin and unbelief. We like our sin and are unwilling to let go of it, and we do not like to be told we are wrong – so we’ll hang on to our faulty thinking and perceptions and ideas even when presented with the truth.
So what does any of this mean for you and me? Well remember, if we are to be like Jesus, then the things that caused Him to mourn should also cause you to mourn. You ought to mourn over the lost. It ought to break our hearts that people are so deceived that they refuse to be saved. I know the Bible says that we ought to shake the dust off our feet when someone doesn’t believe, but it doesn’t say that we ought to be indifferent. We’re offering the best news known to man! We’re offering the drowning man a lifejacket, but he thinks he’s so much of a man that he refuses to take it, choosing to try and swim instead. That ought to weigh heavy in our hearts, but for those who fail to feel the inner agony over a man’s refusal to receive Christ, we do one of two things: we either react with passive indifference, or we react with a sort of elitism that causes us to look down on a man for not believing the gospel. Both are wrong and sinful, and both will keep you from grieving over even one lost soul.
As we work and carry out our lives here in our community, it ought to grieve us to think of the thousands of people who curse the name of Jesus, who refuse to accept and call on the name of Jesus, who have determined to live their lives apart from Jesus. As you’re walking through Wal-Mart, do you see the multitudes? Do you realize that they are all around you? When was the last time you wept because of someone’s unwillingness to believe?
Not only should our hearts be broken for the lost, but also for the saved who have failed to commit their lives to Christ. Stop and think about our community. We talk about needing jobs and boosting the economy and revitalizing downtown. We talk about rain and the lake and about there not being enough for our kids to do. What about the families that are breaking up? What about the kids that are pregnant? What about the young adults that are forsaking church? Why do we as Christians laugh at the world’s crude jokes? Why do we make light of immorality? Even though we may not retell the filth, are we any better by choosing to be entertained by it? We can’t honestly say we mourn over the filth on TV when we choose to sit in front of it. To joke about divorce, to make light of brutality, to be indifferent to sexual immorality all indicates whether we are heart-broken over sin like Jesus is.
We ought to be mourning over the sin in our lives; over the sin in the lives of those we know and love, over the sin that is running rampant all around us. Same-sex marriages in California. New Mexico, and other states. Christians taking lightly the marriage covenant. Absentee parents. Irresponsible dads and on and on we could go. Where is the real, deep conviction of sin? Where is the man or woman who is sick and tired of posing and pretending, tired of the superficial, tired of the shallow, tired of not dealing with the real issues rather than smiling over them? Listen, people ask me why we’re not more concerned about the lost, why we’re not reaching more people. I’ll tell you why – its because we’re not mourning over their condition! We have holed up in our Baptist monasteries and have turned a deaf ear to their cries for help!
We ought to be mourning over our personal struggles with sin and being conformed to the likeness of Christ. Paul said, “O wretched man that I am! The things I want to do I don’t do, and the things I don’t want to do I do.” The man or woman who is truly following the Lord is the one who is able to cry out in grief and sorrow, “O wretched man that I am!” There’s nothing good in us – not one thing. We are rotten to the core, and no amount of personal effort can change that fact. All we can do is cast ourselves at the mercy of Jesus in sorrow and grief and weep and wail and cry out, “God be merciful unto me a sinner!”
Do you think that’s too harsh an assessment? James says,
“Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness.”
What’s the point? Just that we ought to be so broken over our poverty and sin that all we can do is mourn.
“Sin and happiness are totally incompatible. Where one exists, the other cannot. Until sin is forgiven and removed, happiness is locked out. Mourning over sin brings forgiveness of sin, and forgiveness of sin brings a freedom and a joy that cannot be experienced in any other way.”
I’m going to add one last thing that we ought to be mourning over, and that is the lack of concern we have today for doing the work of God with excellence. Folks, Jesus Christ deserves our very best, and that’s just not what He gets from most of us. Some of you are neglecting your places of service and it is hurting your church and it is offensive to God. Those who want to work and are willing to work are being used – and it may be you who are using them because you know that they’ll be here when you don’t carry your load. I want to tell you that my phone rings almost every week with church members asking me this question, “Don’t people care?” I don’t know what to say to that question – I wonder the same thing. There are many in our church that do care, and they are the people you’ll never see or hear from. Where would this church be without the faithful, diligent work of the few who recognize this as more than a place to come on Sunday mornings to get the devil off your back? However, to some of you, God and the work of the ministry is taking a back seat, and we ought to mourn over our lack of concern for the way we approach the work of God’s church.
What it all boils down to is you and I waking up and realizing where we are and just how wrong things really have become. We’re a long way from Eden, and we’re feeling the pains of it. We’re a long way from what God wants us to be, from what His Word teaches us to be, from what the Spirit in us is leading us to be, and it is high time that we began to take it all seriously. The problem though is that we like our sin, and we don’t like to admit we’re wrong. We get along in the world just fine the way we are. So I don’t always do what I ought to do, at least I’m in church. So what if I miss an occasional service to do what I want, I’m here most of the time. We like ourselves just the way we are and we have little intention of change. So I’m not serving anywhere in my church today, you forget about the years I gave yesterday. Maybe I have; maybe you should too.
Okay Brother Kevin – how do I begin to be more sensitive to the sin and unbelief in my life and in the lives of those around me? How do I move from happily getting along in the world to recognizing it the way Jesus does and grieving over it, and if I do begin to mourn over these things, how do I keep from becoming depressed or overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all? That answer is quite simple – Jesus says you will be comforted. The word comfort is taken from the same word Jesus used when He promised that we would be given a Comforter – the Holy Spirit. Let me just encourage you to trust God on this point. If you will concern yourself with being who He wants you to be, He will see to it that it is not more than you can handle. So again, how do you grow in Christlikeness and mourn like He did?
First, you’re going to have to turn from your sin. You can’t turn from it until you first admit that you still wrestle with it. Then you need to identify it and deal with the real problems, not just the symptoms of your problem. When you recognize and begin to deal with your sin, you’re working on being poor in spirit, because you’ve got no room for pride when you’re dealing with your ugliness.
The second thing is going to be common to all the things we’re going to deal with in the Beatitudes, and that is to spend adequate time in prayer and the study of God’s Word. The more time you spend with God, the more you’re going to see things the way He does. The more time you spend in the closet with Him, the better off you’ll be when walking among the multitudes.
Folks, the multitudes today are starving for the goodness and the glory of God. There’s a famine in our land – a famine that is affecting many right here in our own church. Most people don’t know they’re starving for God’s greatness. They don’t know they’re starving for His holiness. They don’t know they’re starving for His righteousness, for His presence, for His purpose and for His power. They’re literally starving to death and don’t know it.
The image of a desert comes to my mind this morning, and all around us people are crawling around, deluded and deceived by the mirages of life. Jesus has spread for us a great banquet in the middle of this desert, and while we sit and feast at His table men and women are shoveling sand down their throats thinking all the while it is water for their soul and food for nourishment. They are shoveling down the sands of immorality, drunkenness, idolatry, success in the workplace, money, fame, greed – and on and on the list goes. As we sit and fill our bellies on the bread from heaven and wash it down with living water, as we find our needs met in Christ we watch the multitudes starve for the things they need the most, and I ask you, how can we sit and get fat on the goodness of God and let those around us starve and we not feel anything? We have forgotten what it was like to be poor, to be hungry, to be thirsty.
Perhaps today you are the one who is hungry for what Christ offers. You know the Lord has been dealing with you about some thing – being saved, being baptized, being real with Him, finding peace from your worries, finding rest for your soul. Are you tired of searching and coming up empty? Are you tired of the loneliness of trying to do it on your own? Are you tired of trying to prove to everyone, especially yourself, that you don’t need Christ? Then today, I want to invite you to respond to the Spirit’s leading as we sing this song of invitation.
Associated Press. “Ventura Slams Organized Religion, Calls Tailhook Scandal Overblown” Dallas Morning News September 30, 1999: 7A
Isaiah 53:3
James 4:8-9
MacArthur, John. The MacArthur New Testament Commentary: Matthew 1-7 (Moody Press: Chicago, IL) 1985 p. 158
