WWUTT 1922 Blessed are They Who Mourn (Matthew 5:4)

Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit and the Pattern of the Beatitudes

In the beatitudes we hear, blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted. What kind of mourning should we as Christians have, and what kind of comfort do we receive? We know when we understand the text.

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Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. In our study of the Gospel of Matthew, we are in the Sermon on the Mount, and still in the beatitudes at the beginning of the sermon. So I'm going to start off here by reading these eight beatitudes again.

Matthew 5, verses 3 -10 out of the Legacy Standard Bible. Hear the word of the Lord. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the lowly, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And you see there at the start and end of the beatitudes that same statement. They will receive the kingdom of heaven. As I mentioned yesterday, the statement of blessed means approved. Approved are you.

If you are poor in spirit, if you are in mourning, if you are lowly, if you hunger and thirst for righteousness, you will receive everything from the Lord. Yesterday we looked at verse 3. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Something that I forgot to mention is that with each one of these beatitudes, you can find the same truth in the Old Testament. Jesus is not issuing anything new. He's actually summarizing things that were even given in the law.

In Psalm 40, verse 17, as for me, I am afflicted and needy. May the Lord think of me. You are my help and the one who rescues me. Do not delay, oh my God. There are constant expressions like this throughout the Psalms.

Mourning Over Sin and the Comfort of the Gospel

The one who is needy, the one who acknowledges their poor estate or condition is the one to whom God shows favor. So they are blessed. Blessed are the poor in spirit. And what do they receive? They receive everything.

We see that with every one of these beatitudes. The humility that the follower of Christ has and then the reward that they receive, which is everything. God shows them all favor, all blessing that is guaranteed us in his eternal kingdom.

So blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed is the one who acknowledges they have nothing and they must receive from the Lord. Verse 4, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

The beatitude that we're looking at today. Let's define our terms once again. Blessed means to be approved by God. Are those who mourn, what does it mean to mourn? Well, the word literally means with tears.

So we're talking about some kind of sorrow, but what kind of sorrow? And then the next part, for they shall be comforted. What kind of comfort then are we talking about? So blessed are those who mourn.

Now the Greek word, if you'll remember again, the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Greek. The Greek word for mourn means to lament. But it also means and is synonymous with feeling guilt. So it doesn't just mean to be sad or to have this condition of sadness.

Remember that I mentioned yesterday, blessed is commonly translated happy, but that only makes sense if you understand why the person is happy. It's following the stream of blessedness from God to us.

We've done nothing. God gives us everything. Knowing we have the approval and favor of God should certainly fill the believer's heart with joy. Likewise here, it's recognizing why a person would be in mourning.

Why would the follower of Christ mourn? And then they receive comfort from the Lord. So what is the follower of Jesus mourning over? Very specifically, the follower is mourning over his own sin. I think you could broadly define this as all kinds of sin, because you and I are still in a state even now as mature followers of Jesus.

If you've been growing in Christ for a long time, there's still probably a sense of mourning in your heart. At least there should be, because we see sin in this world. We see its effects and we even feel its effects whenever we lose loved ones or whenever some sort of tragedy happens to us that hits close to home.

We are witnessing and experiencing the effects of sin in this world. So in that sense, there is still kind of an ongoing mourning in the heart of a believer that will not truly be completely relieved until we join God forever in his perfect glorious kingdom when all of these things will be no more.

But I think more specifically to the point, what is being described here is mourning over our sin. Mourning over our sin, not just the sin that's in the world or the effects of sin, but we mourn over our sin.

Because again, just like with the first beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit. This is a person who acknowledges they have nothing. God does not need me, but I need God for everything. It's that person who has the approval of God and the reward is everything.

They will receive the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn the attitude of the person who comes before God is that I am not worthy to be in your presence. My mourning is in the sense that I know what I deserve is wrath and judgment.

My sin is egregious. What I have done to betray the God who made me, who made me in his image, he who sits enthroned on high, who has created the universe and sits over all of it. I've sinned against him, the God who made everything.

When you go out at night and you look up into the heavens and you see the vast array of stars, God made all those stars. God made the universe that stretches beyond our imagination. We hear the numbers.

You know, you might go to a Cosmosphere or a planetarium or something like that. And the person who's doing the presentation is talking about how many millions of light years, billions of light years across the universe is.

We hear those numbers. We can't even fathom how big that is. We can barely fathom the size of our own world sometimes. How much land is before us, how much yet to be explored, how much ocean there is.

On and on it goes. These things are huge for us to conceive of and contemplate. How can we possibly fathom the far reaches of the universe? And yet God has made all of that. You know, I often wonder about those persons.

I don't often wonder this, but every once in a while it comes to mind. Those persons who we call flat earthers, they believe that the earth is flat and we're just under a big dome and the sun just kind of traverses across that dome and sets and then comes up in the east again the next day.

The moon is on its track and whatever. But we're not on a globe. We're not actually hanging out in this vast universe. We're just on this flat disc with a dome over our heads, apparently. That's what flat earthers believe.

And what a sad belief, really, because they don't truly know and understand the vastness of what God has created. I think that's why God has allowed us to explore the universe the way that we have. And we can't get very far.

I mean, we're still trying to get to Mars. We put a man on the moon, but no one's ever actually made it to Mars, although Elon Musk is trying to be the first one to put a manned mission on Mars. We've not even gotten that far.

Maybe during my lifetime, there will be a man who sets foot on Mars, but we'll never populate Mars. I mean, if you know anything about the atmosphere, the living conditions on that planet, there's no way.

Mankind is never going to be populating Mars. Maybe they'll get there, but we won't ever live there, and an understanding of what it means to live on another planet. So God has allowed us to get that far.

He's allowed us to even look beyond that. We've got incredible telescopes that are able to look into the reaches of the universe and see galaxies we will never, ever make it to. And I think the reason why God has allowed us to explore those things is so that we would see how great he is, how huge this universe is, and yet God is greater than that.

And the calculations regarding the universe change all the time. In my lifetime, I've seen calculations change regarding the number of stars that scientists theorize there are out there in the universe.

That number keeps changing because there's so many stars in the universe, we can't know how many stars there are. The sun itself being so big and so vast, we can barely contemplate that, and yet there are millions upon millions upon millions of those suns out in the far reaches of the universe.

But we look at those things, we look at the vastness of space, and we see how huge God is, and yet he considers us. This God who has created all things actually looks upon man whom he has created in his image.

How uniquely made we are. But because we are uniquely made, that makes what we do more significant than what an animal does. Right? A lion killing an antelope is not murdering a creature and committing some kind of a sin that is now an offense to the face of God.

But when we who have been made in his image, when we do something that is unholy and unrighteous, it is as though we are depicting God doing something unholy, again, because we're made in his image. We were made to give glory to God.

So instead, when we go against God and we sin, that is an offense to God. It is a blasphemy against God, because we've taken that which was made in his image and done something unholy with it. Even the smallest of sins, or what we might conceive or perceive of being the smallest of sins, from our perspective, we might call them small sins, they're still great offenses against God.

Because God who is perfect and holy would never be tainted with such evil, but we would do an evil thing in God's image, and therefore it's as if we communicate that God is unholy or that he would do unholy things, and this is why that is such a blasphemy against God.

Let me give you an illustration that I think would better encapsulate this, or at least on a certain scale you might be able to understand this a little bit better. There's a pastor that I know of who had to confront a man in his congregation who was committing adultery.

And I don't know how the circumstances played out in just this way, but I know that the night that he confronted the man, he found out that he was at a restaurant with the woman who was his adulteress.

When the pastor came into the restaurant and approached their table, the man spotted him and already sickness overcame him, you know, you could see his countenance fall because he knew he had been caught.

But when the pastor came over to their table, he looked at the woman and he recognized the dress that she was wearing. The dress had been given by the pastor's wife to this man's wife, and he had given it to the woman with whom he was committing adultery.

And so now the offense is compounded. It is, it's a gown that had been given to his wife, but it was even a gown that came from the pastor's wife. And what an unholy thing was being done with that dress that night, so that the pastor even took personal offense by that.

You've now even brought this sin against my own household. And so if you can relate to that, if you can see the connection there in that story, how much greater the offenses we commit against God. And when we recognize the sin that we've committed against the God of the universe, so big and so mighty is this God who have created this vast universe that this world hangs in somewhere.

And yet he is mindful of us. Yet he made us in his image and set us on this small planet. Yet God's affections are toward us and it's against him, against this great God who loves us that we have sinned.

And when we recognize the seriousness of our sin and what we deserve for that, that causes us to mourn. How could it not? How could you not mourn over the offense that you have done against the God of the universe?

I can't tell you the number of times that I encounter individuals. I've had a conversation with such an individual just this week, as a matter of fact, and it's still at the beginning of the week. I can't tell you the number of times that I've had a conversation with somebody who has said to me, why would God, why would a loving God send a person to an eternal hell?

It's like, really? When you ask that question, you don't understand how holy God is and how sinful you are. That is exactly what we deserve. We deserve eternal separation from God and punishment for eternity because we have sinned against an eternal God.

We receive an eternal punishment. Somebody may not go that far with their question. They may just simply say, why would a loving God allow bad things to happen to good people? Even that question assumes we're good and that God is somehow unjust because he would allow us to go through these difficult things.

Oh, how we should be praising God that he didn't snatch the life right out of us while we were sleeping last night, but has given us another day to live according to his name, to grow in righteousness and holiness and sanctification that we have in Christ Jesus.

So we have a certain sense in our hearts in which we mourn over sin. And maybe when you came to Christ, there was a very deep mourning over that sin. Maybe when you came to Christ, your conversion was like mine in that you really didn't understand all that deeply your sin.

You knew that you had sinned against God and that you needed a savior because the Bible told you so. And that's the way it was for me. So I knew that I needed a savior, but I just did not understand the gravity of my sin.

And it wasn't until years later, really decades later, probably 20 years later before I finally understood this is how wicked I am. My goodness, what I don't deserve and yet what God has shown to me. And it was like mourning this overwhelmed me all over again.

There was just a deep mourning in my heart when I came to recognize how sinful I am and what I deserve. And yet the favor that God has shown to me, the love that he's shown to me through his son, when we have that kind of recognition before God, when we recognize before God, the sin that we've committed against him, and yet he shows us his love and favor anyway.

We're comforted. We're comforted by the gospel. We've mourned over our sin. We have the comforts of the gospel because we know that in the gospel of Jesus Christ, our sin has been atoned for and we are not going to perish.

We won't have to live in eternal punishment though. That's what we deserve. We instead have been atoned for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us. We have been adopted into God's family that we might be called the children of God.

1 John 3, 1, and that is what we are. And in Christ, we have also been made fellow heirs of his eternal kingdom. So the things that the father gives to the son, we are fellow heirs. We get all the stuff the king gets.

And that comforts our spirits. How could that not comfort our spirit? We recognize our sin. We know what we deserve for our sin. And yet Christ has paid for our sin and we're comforted by the truth of the gospel.

And in fact, we're comforted every day because we know that the blood of Christ covers us every day. Lamentations 3, his mercies are new every morning. Great is his faithfulness. And so we have that comfort every single day.

But we only truly know that comfort when we only truly know what we have done and what we deserve. And yet God has shown comfort to us, has shown favor to us. It's in 2 Corinthians 1 where Paul starts that letter in a very powerful way.

He says, grace to you and peace from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

And so if we know that we have been comforted by the gospel of Christ, how can you extend that comfort to others? That same comfort that you know through Jesus Christ, you can share that with somebody else by telling them the gospel.

Or maybe you have a friend who is mourning because of the effects of sin in the world. This is a Christian brother or sister in the Lord. And you can come alongside them and remind them of the goodness that God has shown to us so that they may be comforted in their spirits once again.

But here, just like with the previous beatitude, we see that it's those who humble themselves before God who receive everything from God. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. And my friends, even though we mourn over sin that is in this world, we see the effects of sin, we feel the effects of sin.

We pray with the Apostle John, come quickly, Lord Jesus, so that all of these things would finally be put to an end and we join God forever in his glorious kingdom. We are comforted by these words. Revelation 21 .3, I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and he will dwell among them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be among them.

And he will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will no longer be any death, there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain. The first things have passed away. Those words are a comfort to us now, and that comfort will be our reality when the day of the Lord comes.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for what we've read today, and I pray that we would remember our sin, what we deserve for our sin, and yet what you have shown to us in Christ, so that we may mourn over our sin, but it's in our mourning that we are also comforted by the gospel of Christ that was proclaimed to us.

Continue to grow us in the knowledge of your word, in the effects this gospel has on our lives, and give us the courage and the charity to share this gospel with others who need to hear it, that they too would mourn over their sin, but be comforted in Christ our Savior.

In his name we pray, amen.

Pastor Gabe is the author of several books and Bible studies, available in paperback or for your e-reader. For titles and more information, visit our website at www .utt .com. Join us again tomorrow as we grow together in God's word, when we understand the text.