“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Years ago when I was writing daily devotions for the inmates at Rio Grande County Jail in Del Norte, Colorado, I did one called “Dove’s Wings” from Psalm 55:6-8.
I’d like to use a portion of that by way of introduction today, although we will take it in a different direction that I ultimately did with my incarcerated congregation.
“AND I SAID, ‘OH, THAT I HAD WINGS LIKE A DOVE!
I WOULD FLY AWAY AND BE AT REST.
7 BEHOLD, I WOULD WANDER FAR AWAY,
I WOULD LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS.
8 I WOULD HASTEN TO MY PLACE OF REFUGE
FROM THE STORMY WIND AND TEMPEST’.”
I doubt that anyone has ever lived who has not at some point felt like that.
I have read that king David wrote this Psalm during the rebellion of his loved son, Absalom. Absalom had risen up against him, trying to gather an army of his own and take over his own father’s kingdom. For a while, to avoid fighting his son, David had to flee the city of Jerusalem and hide in the hills. Later, his son was killed and David’s kingdom was restored; but he had loved Absalom dearly, and though he had become an enemy, that didn’t make David’s loss any easier to take, as a father.
So can you picture him, prior to leaving the city, standing on the rooftop of his palace, overlooking Jerusalem as the morning sun peeks over the eastern hills? Tears run down his cheeks into his beard. His chest feels virtually constricted with the pain that squeezes his father’s heart. He turns and there, only yards away, a white dove perches on the edge of the roof.
Feeling a kindred spirit, the king holds out his hand and steps toward the beautiful, skittish creature; but the bird leans slightly into the morning breeze, then spreads his wings and gracefully leaves the rooftop; gliding effortlessly over the city and toward the distant horizon, until David’s tear-filled eyes can no longer focus on the retreating form.
A deep sigh shudders through his grieving body and in almost a whisper; he moans, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest.”
Can you identify? Maybe you’ve never lost a loved one in that way. Maybe what weighs you down is just the burdens of life. An addiction; a sad family life; constant physical pain; or just an unrest in your soul that you can’t put a name to, but it is there, doggedly disturbing your peace nevertheless.
Now as written originally I went on to tell the guys that if they put their trust in God through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ they would find rest for their souls and victory in Him. I finished by quoting Isaiah’s admonition and encouragement relating to waiting on the Lord and mounting up on wings like eagles.
But we’re here to talk about mourning, and surely here, David was in deep personal grief and mourning as he uttered the words, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest”.
Well, in the Psalm we don’t have to wait long to find out where David puts his hope and trust. In verse 16 he begins a new refrain with:
“As for me, I shall call upon God, and the Lord will save me”.
But David knew how to mourn, didn’t he? There was certainly plenty of opportunity for it in his life.
MOURNING IS OUT
In fact, throughout scripture we see God’s people mourning, often because of the Godlessness they see around them. I think we can safely use the word mourning in connection with the vexation of Lot’s soul in the city gates of Sodom, and of Paul’s troubled heart as he walked the Apian way and observed the many pagan idols there.
I wonder how much mourning goes on in God’s people today as they walk through this world on a daily basis.
It certainly isn’t a popular pastime in society in general; that’s certain! I doubt that most folks ever think about the word aside from the idea of losing a loved one or maybe dropping their freshly baked cake on the floor.
Hey, I’m not kidding. During my last year of High School I decided to bake my mom a birthday cake while she was at work. I made it heart shaped and iced it with strawberry frosting. Then as I cleared the bottom shelf of the fridge to put it away I accidentally knocked a bowl of stew onto the floor. So I went to work mopping up the mess and in the process forgot about the cake on the table. So when I lifted the table leg to mop under it that cake slid to the edge and over and landed upside down on the kitchen floor.
I mourned.
But what is the attitude we hear expressed around us in modern society? No troubles! It’s all good! Don’t worry, be happy! Hakuna Matata! (According to Disney’s Lion King, it means ‘no worries for the rest of your days. It’s their problem free philosophy, Hakuna Matata)
Even on the morning I was to set to work on this sermon I watched live news footage of people walking down Bourbon Street in New Orleans. CNN was making a big deal of Mardi Gras because it was the first celebration since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and many were saying it was time for people to put some joy and celebration back into their lives.
As I watched the crowds meandering down the trash-filled street enroute to one of the parades of Mardi Gras, at 9:30 AM, plastic beer cups in hand, some of them in colorful costume with grotesque masks, I grieved inside. I mourned, knowing full well that these were people without hope and affecting a joy that they could not truly feel inside.
And this brings me to talk about the mourning that Jesus was talking about in Matthew 5. Because as has already been said, these characteristics He is listing in His sermon are spiritual and have nothing to do with the physical.
When Jesus said Blessed are those who mourn He was not talking about mourning from the emotions, but a mourning that goes on in the spirit; is, in fact, a mourning that is by the Holy Spirit in us. That is why those without the Holy Spirit can never know it, and it is also why Jesus says that those who mourn are the ones who are really happy.
SPIRITUAL MOURNING
I’ll repeat here that in the beatitudes Jesus is giving us a picture of the Christian. This applies to no one else in the world but the born again believer in Christ.
We can talk about being humble and grieving and being teachable and loving peace and so forth, all on a human level, but that has nothing to do with the person Jesus is talking about.
Why then, you may ask, did I begin the sermon with the example of David from Psalm 55?
Because the mourning of David at that moment was probably closest to the kind of mourning Jesus is talking about that we’re likely to get on a purely human level.
He was grieving for a son lost to him through rebellion, as God’s heart must mourn for mankind lost to Him through rebellion.
And this calls for some speculation, but it may well be that during that time and in his reflections David was recounting his own sin with Bathsheba and the baby that was lost in death and many of the other sorrows of his life, many brought on by his wandering from God, and mourning over them.
Grieving from a heart made heavy, perhaps because he knew that he had grieved his God, but also grieving for the inevitable suffering that was to come through Absalom’s rebellion.
When Jesus said “Blessed are those who mourn…”, he was talking about the one who had become poor in spirit in realizing his own spiritual bankruptcy and recognized that it was sin that made him empty and dead, and in mourning for his sin was brought to submit himself to God.
Only the one who has come that far and appropriated to himself the truth of the Gospel and been given spiritual life from above can begin to understand sin at all.
One day while we lived in Del Norte I was standing at the kitchen sink doing something, what I don’t remember now, when little 8 year old Jacquelynn came to me with her dead hamster cupped in her hands and crying.
I took the little body from her and told her to go find a shoe box so we could have a proper funeral for ‘Chewie’ in the back yard. As she went, tears running down her cheeks, to find one, I looked up from that dead hamster out the window toward the yard, and I thought about this precious little girl who was always free-spirited and happy, experiencing for the first time the loss of something she loved. And the words went through my mind, “Through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin…” and at that moment I felt mixture of grief and rage like never before in my life, and it was directed at sin.
I truly believe that my Lord used that moment and those circumstances to awaken me spiritually to the sinfulness of sin. Because there was something supernatural in the way it came upon me so suddenly.
At that moment I think I came closer than I ever have to hating sin the way God hates sin because my little girl had to experience the grief that death brings.
Christians, God hates sin because every moment of every day since Adam His precious children, His creation itself, have had to experience the death that it brings.
This is the kind of mourning Jesus was talking about.
But it goes beyond that. At the moment, standing by that sink, that hatred against sin rose up within me I thought that if sin could take on a physical form just for a moment I would lash out at it with all the fury I could muster.
But you know what? Sin does take on a physical form. In me. In you. Whenever we surrender our members as slaves to obey its deceptions, sin becomes physical.
This, in the true Christian, is another source and cause for mourning.
Even after we become Christians we need to continue to mourn sin. We need to continue to recognize and admit sin in ourselves. Because when we stop doing that and when we begin to put on this façade that all is right with us and we’re on top of things and we’ve got it all handled, that is when we become the hypocrites that those outside the church recognize and love to point out.
A worse fate than being seen as a hypocrite though, is that when we cease mourning we forfeit the opportunity to be comforted and to have our joy renewed.
Lloyd-Jones, without naming anyone in particular, generalized that great saints of the past have recommended daily self-examination.
They say it is a good thing for a man to pause at the end of the day, look back on his thoughts, his actions, his behavior, his attitudes and judge them by the light of the scriptures and the message of the cross, and give the Holy Spirit the opportunity to shed His convicting light on those things that spring from a sinful nature, so the man might then have the opportunity to mourn for them, repent of them and find comfort in the Spirit.
Christians, the moment we believed, God began His progressive, sanctifying work and we cannot partner with Him in that work apart from sober self-examination and confessing to Him what He already knows well about us.
Forgiveness and cleansing flow to the repentant but the prerequisite to repentance is recognition and admission and mourning is in itself the first half of repentance. The second half is the actual turning.
Well finally, there is a mourning that is not only for our own sin but the trouble we see all around us that is fundamentally a result of sin.
If the Christian cannot grieve in his heart just watching the morning news and the pain and suffering they pass before our eyes on a daily basis, or reading it in the newspaper or driving by it as we go to work, then he needs to reevaluate his true spiritual condition and judge whether he is a believer at all.
We cannot allow ourselves, church, to become desensitized to effects of sin all around our world. People representing the organization called the ‘church’ have so often gone public with condemnations and criticisms of people and businesses and governments for their sinful actions and mindsets, never showing or expressing a moment’s compassion or a desire to help relieve suffering, even of those who admittedly have brought the suffering on themselves.
Instead we’re supposed to mourn for them as Jesus mourned for those who suffered around Him. You never read of Jesus saying, ‘you brought it on yourself’.
He wept outside the tomb of Lazarus. How many bad sermons have you heard on that one?
Why did He weep? Because sin brings death. He was mourning. He was weeping for the tears of His beloved Mary and Martha. He was weeping for His friend who had to experience death. He was weeping because due to sin those around Him didn’t understand.
When He was forced to pronounce the coming judgment on Jerusalem for her rejection of Him, He lamented. He mourned.
That’s the kind of mourning that comes from the Christian. But there is a second half to this beatitude too. “…for they shall be comforted.
COMFORTED
Let me go back one more time as we close, to David and Psalm 55. Because again, here is the closest we’re likely to get on a human level to the kind of spiritual mourning Jesus was talking about.
Like David, the man after God’s own heart, only the man or woman of God can find joy and comfort through mourning because the reason for their mourning brings them to look at the One who bore the whip for their healing; who was crushed for their iniquities.
As he always does with his Psalms, David goes on from his inner turmoil to say things like, ‘…He will hear my voice…” and “…He will redeem my soul in peace…” and “…cast your burden on the Lord and He will sustain you…”
The one who has put his trust in Christ and has the Holy Spirit within will mourn as He mourned at the thought of sin, and at the surrounding devastation of sin in the world, and like the groaning creation itself he will yearn for righteousness and holiness to triumph.
But he will also mourn that the sinless Son of God had to suffer because of him. And he will remember his sin and repent anew, and his newfound repentance will remind him that his sins are washed whiter than snow in the blood of the sacrificed Lamb.
And that is what will bring him around to remembering that the time is coming when “…the ransomed of the Lord will return, and come with joyful shouting to Zion, with everlasting joy upon their heads, (and) find gladness and joy, and sorrow and mourning will flee away”. Isaiah 35:10
And he will be comforted.
I’d like to read an excerpt from Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ commentary on Matthew 5:4 as we finish today.
“What sort of man is he?” (who mourns) “He is a sorrowful man, but he is not morose. He is a sorrowful man, but he is not a miserable man. He is a serious man, but he is not a solemn man. He is a sober-minded man, but he is not a sullen man. He is a grave man, but he is never cold or prohibitive. There is with his gravity a warmth and attraction. This man, in other words, is always serious, but he does not have to affect the seriousness. The true Christian is never a man who has to put on an appearance of either sadness or joviality. No, no; he is a man who looks at life seriously; he contemplates it spiritually, and he sees in it sin and its effects. He is a serious, sober-minded man. His outlook is always serious, but because of these views which he has, and his understanding of truth, he also has ‘joy unspeakable and full of glory’. So he is like the apostle Paul, ‘groaning within himself’, and yet happy because of his experience of Christ and the glory that is to come. … Indeed, he is like our Lord Himself, groaning, weeping, and yet ‘for the joy that was set before him’ enduring the cross, despising the shame. That is the man who mourns; that is the Christian.” Studies in the Sermon on the Mount,
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Eerdman’s 1974, pg 62
Be willing to hurt, Christian. Don’t shrink back from remembrances of past sin, not to feel guilty again but to remind yourself that the God of the ages looked beyond your fault and saw your need.
Do not neglect times of quiet and solitude where you can, without distraction, meditate on the devastation you’ve seen that day in the lives of people because of sin and even your own actions and attitudes that have proven the sin nature to be alive and on the prowl.
Hurt for them. Hurt because of them. Hurt the way God hurts and as you do you will sense His comfort. He promised. And He said you’d be blessed.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
