Mourning

Today we are looking at the second Beatitude, or Blessing, in The Sermon on the Mount. This week was also Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday, and, while I didn’t intentionally plan this, these things actually go together quite well. 

Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, is a day of decadence and debauchery. It is the day before the start of the Lent Season, which is the 40 days leading up to Easter, and it is meant to be a time of fasting and righteousness. It is a time when you intentionally remove something from your life and replace it with time spent with God. You are supposed to identify and remove something from your life that is or could be a distraction, or something that occupies a good deal of your time/attention. It is meant to be a sacrifice. Mardi Gras, being the last day before Lent, is a celebration of gorging yourself on everything that you will be removing from your life. It is an overindulgence of that which you have deemed needs to be removed. It is said, by some, to be a celebration of life, but it is a distorted celebration of life as true life comes from Christ “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” not from the perverted sweets of the world. 

This is where the next Beatitude comes in.

Matthew 5:4 – “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

Now, again, many take this as a promise from God that if you are facing hardship and struggle and loss in your life, if you have experienced grief and mourning, that God will comfort you. It is 100% true that God is a God of comfort, and He provides comfort to those who grieve and mourn. However, that’s not really what Jesus is talking about here. 

The word that he uses in Matthew 5:4, is, indeed, a word that means “mourning” or “deep grief and sorrow,” but rather than speaking of physical loss and sadness, and saying that those who experience that are blessed, Jesus is talking about a feeling toward sin. He is speaking of grief and mourning over sin in your own life, in the world, in the lives of others. 

Last week we looked at being poor in spirit and how that means that we have a right attitude toward our own spiritual state. We recognize that we are broken and in need of a Savior because we aren’t good in and of ourselves and we can’t do anything about it in and of ourselves. We can’t work hard enough or do enough good to outweigh the bad. We need Jesus.

With that as a foundation, Jesus then says, “You need to mourn the sin, the brokeness, the bad, the evil. You need to have intense, deep grief and sorrow for it.” Sin, which is anything that goes against God’s perfect plan, is totally and completely awful. It should not be endured or justified or accepted in any way. You should not be ok with sin in your life or the world or in your friends’ lives. You should not be used to it. I think a lot of people have a very nonchalant attitude toward sin. We should be repulsed by it, we should be in deep grief and sorrow when we see it in our lives and in the world, but for many, we just don’t. We accept it without a second thought. We even joke about it. We celebrate it with carnivals and parades and beads. However, God has called you to something far greater, and the broken destruction that sin causes should be mourned and fought against. 

1 John 2:15 – “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

This is a kinda scary verse. “the Father is not in him.” Wow. So, what does this mean? Does it mean that if you enjoy football or Star Wars or Disneyland or the mall or technology or any music other than Praise & Worship, etc… that you aren’t a Christian? Of course not. God created beauty and music and fun and wants you to experience these things, but in the Bible, when it talks about “the world” it is often referring to those things that are expressly opposed to God, those things that are sinful and destructive. This is not a warning against anything that wasn’t created “by the church,” but rather a command that the disease of sin should be hated and rejected, not loved and embraced. 

To put this in a practical sense, my daughter is allergic to artificial food dyes and flavors. They make her crazy and cause her a lot of pain. When we first figured this out we started becoming extremely diligent in looking into the ingredients of the food that we were buying, and we started learning a lot more about these artificial dyes and flavors. Do you know what I discovered? Many/most of these artificial dyes and flavorings are actually banned in other parts of the world, but they are allowed in the US, and they are included for no other reason, especially the dyes, than to make the food more visually appealing. They are completely unnecessary, and they are actually harmful and destructive, but they look really pretty. We are pretty vigilant, now, in making sure that she doesn’t eat any food with these artificial dyes in it, and it actually makes me angry that they are still in food here.  

This is like sin. It is destructive and harmful. We are allergic to it, not meant for it to be a part of us. It causes pain and is absolutely unnecessary, but it’s pretty and tastes good and activates certain responses in our mind and soul that tell us that it’s what we want, even if we don’t. We should mourn this. We should be in deep grief and sorrow over the fact that it is present in our world, in our loved ones, in ourselves. We should be moved by that mourning to action. The mourning is not a stagnation. We don’t wallow in grief, but we are broken by sin and moved to action. The mourning leads us to want to do something about the sin in our lives and the world. It leads us to repentance, which means both feeling bad, but also changing direction and doing something different. It leads to forgiveness and restoration and restoring a right relationship with God. It leads from mourning to joy in the fullness of God.

One last verse to close this out.  

Isaiah 6:5-7

“5 And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

The prophet Isaiah is here faced with the reality of sin in his life, and we see his response is mourning and grief and sorrow. There is no hiding or justifying, just open grief and repentance.

What comes next is the comfort that Jesus is speaking of.

6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

Those who mourn sin are blessed because that mourning will lead to “your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.” 

I want to challenge you: Mourn Sin. It’s awful. I know that for so many people sin is looked at as something that is not all that important if not down right appealing, and even if we recognize some wrong it’s more of a temporary bad feeling that we quickly shrug off and go back to the sin, like someone who is lactose intolerant, but still eats ice cream. It’s not enough to temporarily feel bad, we need to mourn and grieve sin, but when we do, God promises atonement, forgiveness, comfort because He cleans and removes the source of our mourning.