Matthew 5:4 (Part 1) - June 2, 2024

Mount Zion Community Church

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Matthew 5:4 (Part 2) - June 9, 2024

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Alright, we'll continue in our reading of God's word in Acts chapter 5 verses 1 -16.

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If you all would please stand. We stand when we read the word of God because as a lot of you probably know, standing is one of those acts that ultimately shows respect or shows deference to someone or something greater than yourself and when it comes to the word of God, there's absolutely nothing greater.

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So we stand as we read the word. Just in case you were ever wondering why I started asking you to stand up as we did this.

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It's because we are literally hearing the voice of God speak through his word. But a man named

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Ananias with his wife Sapphira sold a piece of property and kept back some of the price for himself with his wife's full knowledge.

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And bringing a portion of it, he laid it at the apostles feet. But Peter said,

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Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back some of the price of the land?

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While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your authority?

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Why is it that you laid this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men, but to God.

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And as he heard these words, Ananias fell down and breathed his last and great fear came over all who heard.

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And the young men rose up and wrapped him up and after carrying him out, they buried him. Now there was an interval of about three hours and his wife came in not knowing what had happened.

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And Peter responded to her, tell me whether you were paid this much for the land. And she said, yes, that much.

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Then Peter said to her, why is it that you have agreed together to put the spirit of the Lord to the test?

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Behold, the feet of those who buried your husband are at the door and they will carry you out as well. And immediately she fell at his feet and breathed her last.

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And the young men came in and found her dead and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear came over the whole church and over all who heard these things.

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Now at the hands of the apostles, many signs and wonders were happening among the people and they were all with one accord in Solomon's portico.

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But none of the rest dared to associate with them. However, the people were holding them in high esteem.

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And more than ever, believers in the Lord were added to their number, multitudes of men and women to such an extent that they even carried the sick out into the streets and laid them on the cots and mats so that when

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Peter came by, at least his shadow might fall on any one of them. Also the multitude from the cities in the vicinity of Jerusalem were coming together, bringing people who were sick or afflicted with unclean spirits and they were all being healed.

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This is the word of God for the people of God. So we're back in the

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Beatitudes today, back to the second Beatitude and I have a big surprise for you guys at the end and you'll see when we get there.

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But as you know, we've been taking this slowly and in depth so that we can truly understand what's going on.

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And initially, I was trying to come up with some kind of really interesting or clever way to introduce this particular

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Beatitude and I just, I came up short and I realized also that this is just a topic that's so important and also so equally misunderstood that we should probably just jump straight into it and not waste too much time.

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I mean, we can say that about a lot of stuff that's in Scripture. We could say that about just about everything that we read and everything that we learned.

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But still, as I've said before, we're looking specifically at one of the first teachings of Jesus Christ that we have access to in our

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Bible. And as we get started and continue to reflect on the true meaning and the implications of what

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Jesus is teaching here, I want to share a quote about the Beatitudes, this time from John Calvin. He said,

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And I love to take these quotes from great theologians in the church, pastors that have come before us hundreds and hundreds of years because they're often so holy and they have such an interesting perspective.

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In some ways, society was always the same, but in some ways it's different. But they were so committed to what

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Scripture had to say. And I like to put this in front of us as we get ready to discuss all these

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Beatitudes for a couple of reasons. And the first is, as we've said, because the Beatitudes are representing the type of lifestyle that we're expected to lead, the type of lifestyle that we're expected to lead through the power of the

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Holy Spirit. And let's be honest, we all need the help of the Holy Spirit, right? Because what's in the

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Beatitudes is not an easy way to live. It's not simple because it's so countercultural, because it's so different from what you'll be told is right, that people will possibly think you're crazy.

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And they might even tell it to your face that you're crazy or that you're stupid for doing this. And honestly, it doesn't take a lot of people to tell you that or to think that about you before you start to wonder if it's true.

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Those things get in your head. You have to constantly put the will of God before you so that you know what is true and what is right.

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Because we always have to remember what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1 .18. I bring this

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Scripture up all the time because it's so relevant to just about everything we talk about. He said, for the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, which is why people will tell you that you're stupid or that you're crazy or that you're wasting your time and you're wasting your life.

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So we need the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit that indwells each of us as believers in order to give us the power to live the lives that Jesus is telling us that we have to live and to be able to understand that when we get messages from other people that contradict the very clear meaning and the very clear teaching of Scripture that they're wrong.

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And we should be bold enough, confident enough and courageous to say they're wrong.

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It's not bad. I know that we're taught that everybody has their own kind of truth. And I'll tell you, we should just, we should abandon that idea for the truth of Scripture.

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Remember, when you read these teachings or when you hear them or you hear what they mean and then you start to push back or you start to feel the urge to argue against what the

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Bible says, then that's when it's time to pull back just a little bit and ask why it is that you feel this way, why it is that you're resisting what

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Scripture is telling you. Because a lot of times, that is a result of us putting something else ahead of God.

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That's a result of us putting some other desire or some other thing in God's place in our life and that's something that we have to reconsider.

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But again, it's only through the power of the Holy Spirit that this kind of thing can happen and that's why this is the kind of thing that we pray for.

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This is the kind of thing that we just prayed for, that the Holy Spirit would continue to change our heart, that the

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Holy Spirit would work in us to help us see, to help us understand and to help us be strong.

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And that's the meaning of what we see in Scripture in Ezekiel when God tells

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Ezekiel that he will remove the heart of stone from his people and give them a heart of flesh. He'll take away that heart that's resistant to God and give them one that loves him the way

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God loves us. And honestly, I say all this because I do suspect that some of the things we're going to consider today might be offensive to some people and it might directly confront some of our natural reactions to tragedy and the societally acceptable reactions that we have.

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And maybe it won't. We'll see. I keep telling you that. You know, hopefully I don't give you that warning so many times that it starts to sound like, you know, just the same old thing and you're like, ah, it's just Matty saying stuff.

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But that brings us to our beatitude today. So we're looking at Matthew 5 .4 and that says,

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And straight from the beginning, this is one of those beatitudes that is easily subject to some bad teaching and it's subject to some misunderstanding because we can read into this what we want to read into it if we just take the plain, straightforward

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English. But ironically, I think the first place that we need to start as we talk about this beatitude on mourning and as we discuss mourning is that we have to talk about the idea of happiness.

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And to be more specific, we have to talk about how this relates to the idea that Christians should be joyful.

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Now, what we have to understand first is that joy and the idea of joy as a

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Christian, true joy and happiness are actually pretty different things. We can use them interchangeably, but they're really not the same.

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And it's similar to what we said about the beatitudes last week, how we talked about to be blessed or blessed and to be happy.

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Those are also very different things because joy, like blessedness, is just a much deeper and a much more substantial concept than happiness is.

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And as a society, we've turned happiness really into an idol, into something that we should be unendingly striving after, while at the same time, we've taken it and we've trivialized it as something that we can easily obtain by getting stuff.

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And we see, you know, these aren't harmful quotes about happiness, but in some ways they're silly.

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I think it's the peanuts where they say happiness is a warm puppy, you know, that kind of thing.

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And if that is happiness, clearly it's something that's not that substantial.

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It's something that can be gotten easily. It's something that can be taken away easily. But joy, truly profound, substantial joy, it only comes from one place.

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It comes from knowing that God is who he says he is. And it comes from knowing that God is eternal,

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God is unchanging, and that God loved you enough to send his son to die for you, even though you didn't deserve it.

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That's joy. That's something. And the reason that that's so significant is because that joy is always there.

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That joy never changes. You change, but God doesn't, and neither does that offer of joy.

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You may change in how you view God because of circumstances, but he doesn't change.

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And when I think about happiness too, one of the first things that comes to mind is the

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Bobby McFerrin song, Don't Worry, Be Happy, right? That's just the first thing that pops into my head.

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And obviously it's a fun song, but I would say it's equally a representation of that idea of just trivializing and making happiness something that's silly, something that's light, something that's frivolous.

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And like I said just a moment ago, happiness is fleeting. Happiness goes away as easily as it comes to you, because a lot of times we relate it to physical comforts or we relate it to material comforts, things that can just be taken away.

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For example, I hope this is the case, but if I tell my children that we're gonna go and they're gonna play a soccer game after church, they like soccer, so they're probably gonna be happy about that, right?

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They'll be happy. But what if I turn around a couple minutes later and said, you know what, nevermind, we're not going. All of a sudden that happiness could be gone, right?

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And it's just that easy to take it away. Me personally, I'm very happy when my wife does the things that I want her to do, but I can very easily be made unhappy when she stops doing the things that I want her to do.

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Happiness, again, happiness is fleeting. Like they said in Ecclesiastes, life is a vapor.

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All is vanity and striving after the wind. Now as Christians, we are to be joyful.

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In fact, one element of the fruit of the Spirit is joy. Scripture calls us over and over again to rejoice.

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Rejoice, again, I say rejoice, but again, the joy comes from the knowledge of who

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God is and it comes from the knowledge of what God has done and that never changes, but here's what we've done as a church.

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We have mixed up happiness and joy. We've conflated the two things as equal and consequently, we've elevated the idea of happiness to an inappropriate place in our life as opposed to joy.

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And the practical consequence of this idea that as Christians, we should always be happy is we've developed this culture that says to us, because we're a

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Christian, we should always have a smile on our face and nothing should ever be wrong. And when we come to church, we have to be perfect because we don't want someone else in church to look at us and know that something's not right and know that something else is going on in our life.

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So we put on the smiley face and when someone asks how we're doing, we're like, we're great. We're blessed, right, every day, even though it's not true.

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I think they call that like the stained glass syndrome, you know, specifically because it's for churches and for Christians.

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We put on this beautiful facade to hide what's actually going on and as a result of that, church can easily become a silly place and a frivolous place, a place that's focused on developing that happiness and keeping us feeling that happiness and focusing on things that just aren't that challenging.

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And then as a consequence, that is just a never ending cycle.

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So we put on our happy face when we come to church because everybody else puts on their happy face and then we're told why we should be happy, maybe not necessarily why we should be joyful, we're told why we should be happy because we don't want to be weird.

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People might think we aren't real Christians because we're not perfect because we're not happy all the time.

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And, you know, don't misunderstand. I have this phrase that has popped into my head every time

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I'm sitting here writing this stuff and I'll just tell it to you again and you can remember it.

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Please don't hear what I'm not saying, okay? Which means don't take the words that I'm saying and make them mean something else.

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Because I'm not saying that we all have to walk around every day with a sad face and we all have to walk around being grumpy and we need to tell everybody everything that's wrong all the time.

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Like that's not it, okay? We're allowed to be happy and hopefully that stems out of our joy.

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But the practical outcome of the pretend happiness is that when we have these problems, when we have these struggles, we don't have a place to put it.

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We don't have a framework to work it out in when we're sad, when we're anxious, when we're depressed.

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And then, I mean spiritual warfare is real and we haven't talked about that much but we will someday.

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And that's when you sort of get the devil in your head telling you, well maybe you're not a Christian because you're not happy.

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And that's where we have to be careful of those lies. We have to have that framework for processing this and understanding the difference between joy and the difference between happiness.

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Because look, if we're supposed to be happy all the time and we come to a passage like Matthew 5, 4 and it says, blessed are those who mourn, that causes like a little glitch to happen in our head because mourning is not happiness.

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So how are we blessed if we mourn? I think it might have been John MacArthur in his commentary on this, he titled the chapter on this verse, happy are the sad.

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You know, just to kind of show how unintuitive that idea is.

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So what we have to do today, our task today is probably twofold. So we're going to have to understand the concept of mourning the way that it's used in Scripture.

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And then we also have to understand what it is to be comforted, like the second half of this verse says.

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And what it is to be comforted as a result of our mourning. So we're going to begin by looking at the concept of mourning and specifically what it is, but we'll also look at what it isn't.

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Because like so many things, it's important to define it and it's almost equally as important to tell you what it's not so that you don't get the wrong idea, or at least in the context of what we're talking about here in the

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Sermon on the Mount. Because that kind of meaning can really change this verse.

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Now I know this is not a pleasant way to start things out, but when you think about the idea of mourning, what's usually the first thing to come to mind?

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It's somebody dying. And mourning is what we do when we've lost someone who was close to us.

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But is this what we're talking about when we talk about blessed are those who mourn? Because this is a verse that gets used at funerals.

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Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. This is what we tell families when they've lost somebody so that they'll feel better.

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And but is that really what this verse means? And we see examples of mourning in Scripture.

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And however, as you can probably imagine, I'm about to tell you that there are proper ways to mourn and there are improper ways to mourn.

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There's basically two types. And only one of those types of mourning makes you blessed.

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Now, but rather than improper or proper, I want to be even more specific with this. And I'm going to borrow terminology from a gentleman named

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William Hendrickson. So we can consider mourning to be either God -centered mourning or man -centered mourning.

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So what is man -centered mourning? We'll start there. Man -centered mourning is exactly the thing that I just mentioned.

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It's the mourning of the loss of someone or something. It's mourning over something that we no longer have.

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So it doesn't have to be a person. It can be a thing. It can be an experience. It can be any number of things.

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But the point is, with this, with losing something, man -centered mourning, we get so overcome and overwhelmed by our sorrow for what we no longer have.

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Now, is this a sin in and of itself? It is not. Absolutely not.

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Mourning is biblical, but this man -centered mourning can easily be turned into something that ultimately is sinful.

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And I'll talk about that in just a minute. But the point I'm trying to make is that this is not the kind of mourning that we're talking about when we talk about those who mourn and being comforted.

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In fact, the Puritan Thomas Watson said that there is a twofold man -centered mourning, which is, and I quote, far from making one blessed.

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So now we're going to take this idea of man -centered mourning and divide it a little further into two pieces.

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Now, the first of these is what he calls diabolical mourning. And even diabolical mourning can be split.

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So we're going to cut this up again, right? So now we got two sub -subheadings under this. So the first example of diabolical mourning, or what this means is that this is when somebody mourns for a lust or a sin that they don't have the opportunity to satisfy.

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And there's a perfect example of this in Scripture. So one of David's sons was named

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Amnon, and Amnon lusted after his half -sister Tamar. We see this in 2

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Samuel 13 too. It says, and Amnon was so distressed because of his sister

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Tamar that he made himself ill. So this is the idea of being so distressed that he became ill over the mourning that he had for the lust that he couldn't fulfill for his stepsister.

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Now, I'm trying not to draw too explicit of a picture here. Now, ultimately, he did scheme to fulfill that lust, and it did not bring comfort to him.

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So this kind of mourning, I don't even have to belabor this, I don't think, because you all probably understand that being really sad that you can't sin or you don't have the opportunity to commit a sin is not something that most of us experience,

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I hope. The second type is also interesting. And this is when we are mourning the fact that we have done something good.

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And I know that doesn't make any sense either, but Scripture shows us this as well. Exodus 14 .5, after Pharaoh has let the

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Israelites go again, instantly he regrets it, and he says, what is this we have done that we have let

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Israel go from serving us? So he did what he should have done before God, but then he realized he lost all these slaves, so he was upset.

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And the condition of our hearts can at times be so dark that we mourn the good things that we've done because it didn't serve our selfish longings.

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So we'll leave diabolical mourning behind for right now. But the second type of this man -centered mourning is called carnal mourning, and that's kind of what we're talking about, and that's a lot more common.

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This is when we are lamenting those outward losses. An example of this in Scripture is something that we saw earlier in Matthew.

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Matthew 2 .18, this was after Herod killed all the male children. And that says, a voice was heard in Ramah weeping in great mourning,

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Rachel weeping for her children, and she was refusing to be comforted because they were no more.

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And this is something that we can probably all recognize and even identify with in some cases, but the thing about this kind of mourning is that this can also be taken too far.

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In 2 Samuel, we see a story about another one of David's sons.

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So David, David the psalmist, the great king of Israel, had tremendous issues with his children.

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But this is the story of his rebellious son, Absalom. So basically what he did was lead a rebellion against his own father, and ultimately,

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Absalom was killed. And despite the fact that he was coming for his own father,

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David was still completely distraught. David was inconsolable.

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So we'll turn to 2 Samuel 18 .33 and read through 19 .6.

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It says, then the king, this is just after he found out that Absalom was killed. Then the king trembled and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept.

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And thus he said as he walked, O my son Absalom, my son, my son

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Absalom, would I have died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son? Then it was told to Joab, behold, the king is weeping and mourns for Absalom.

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And salvation that day, because the people were saved from this attack, salvation that day was turned to mourning for all the people.

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For the people heard it said that day, the king is grieved for his son. So the people stole away to enter into the city that day as people who are dishonored steal away when they flee in battle.

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But as for the king, he wrapped his face up. Then the king cried out with a loud voice, O my son

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Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son. Then Joab came into the house to the king and said, today you have shamed the faces of all your servants who today have provided escape for your life and the lives of your sons and daughters, the lives of your wives and the lives of your concubines by loving those who hate you and by hating those who love you.

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For you have informed all of us today that princes and servants are nothing to you. For I know this day that if Absalom were alive and all of us were dead today, surely then it would be right in your eyes.

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So David needed Joab to call him out on this mourning. In this case,

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David is mourning the loss of someone. And let's just be clear, it doesn't even have to be the loss of someone who was trying to kill you or someone who was trying to do something terrible to you.

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It can be the loss of someone who was close to you. But in that mourning, David was ignoring everything else that was going on in the world.

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He was ignoring all the other people who were there for him, all the other people who had served him and all the other people that were in danger because of this and were saved as a result of this situation.

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Now, if we put this in our own context and the loss of a person completely changes our life or functionally ends our life, we've come to the place where we're ignoring what

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God has done. We've come to the place where we know, we're evidencing that we don't believe

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God's word because for us, death is a tragedy and we don't have a person with us.

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But death is not the end for a Christian. You will see that person again. And that person is now hopefully with God and better off.

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But again, don't hear what I'm not saying. In no way am

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I saying that you can't mourn. You can. You can.

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Mourning is good. Again, I'll say this. I actually did a funeral a couple of days ago. I told everybody this.

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Mourning is good. Mourning is helpful. Mourning is a process that we have to go through and mourning is biblical.

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But listen to this, and this might be hard for some people to hear. If the loss of a person devastates you to the point that you cannot carry on your own life, then you have put that person in God's place.

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Not intentionally, I bet. It wasn't your goal, but functionally, that's what's happened.

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Again, grief and mourning are good. We have to have them, but it can be taken too far.

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I'll go back to Thomas Watson again. We're going to hear a lot from Thomas Watson because the Puritans tended to do, they'll put this stuff in a way that basically puts it right in your face.

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He said this. He said, we have many that can mourn over a dead child that cannot mourn over a crucified savior.

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That means that we can mourn the loss of earthly things, but we don't care that Jesus died for us.

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We don't care that it was basically our sins that killed him. So all that is to say that there are ways of mourning that do not result in the blessing of God.

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And the reason for this is because the comfort that people are seeking is the comfort of having their earthly longings restored, and that's not the comfort that God's word promises.

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So obviously if there's man -centered mourning, which is what we just talked about, and which

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I keep saying is not what this passage is about, then that means there has to be an alternative. An alternative for which we should actually be striving, and that's the one that we called

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God -centered mourning. And actually this connects perfectly back to our beatitude from last week about being poor in spirit.

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Recognizing one's spiritual state before God, that's what we talked about, and it brings humility.

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It brings poverty of spirit. And out of this poverty of spirit naturally follows mourning for the sin that we've committed against God.

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When we truly understand what's in our heart, and we truly understand that what's in our heart is offensive to God, that's when we should mourn.

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And the mourning of our sins against God, it can take two forms. We can mourn over our own sinfulness, which we should, but we can also mourn over the sins of the world.

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We can mourn over the sins of our culture, the sins that are potentially bringing

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God's judgment against our culture. And we should mourn for our own sin.

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We'll talk about that first, for many reasons, but first we should mourn over our sin because it's an act of hostility against God.

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It's an act of direct rebellion against God's word.

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It's an act of direct rebellion against God's holiness and who he is. We have his word, there's no excuses, and we still all do it.

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And we should also mourn our sin because it's the ultimate act of ingratitude toward our

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Savior. You know, despite our unworthiness,

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Romans 5, 9 tells us, yet while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And that act of grace and that act of mercy, which if we understand it even a little bit, should result in nothing but worship, nothing but praise, nothing but thanks.

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But instead, what we do is we spit directly into Jesus's face. And finally, we should mourn because our sin keeps us from God, and it actually keeps us distant from this blessing and from this comfort that this beatitude is about.

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It keeps us from the very comfort that we're seeking and the very comfort that we're reading about. And that in itself is cause for mourning.

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So again, I am deeply indebted to Thomas Watson for some of these concepts.

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And I wanna continue by sharing seven characteristics of properly oriented

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God -centered gospel mourning. So let's just say seven characteristics of God -centered mourning so that we can identify what this mourning looks like.

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The first one is that it must be for particular sins. And the reason we say this is because a lot of times, we know that we should confess our sin to God, we know that we should take this stuff to God in prayer, but we just wanna say,

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God, I'm so sorry that I sinned. Because we don't want to bring up the specific things that we've done for a variety of reasons.

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One, it might be painful to us. We don't remember the things that we've done that we know that dishonor God. We probably also think that somehow, if we just don't say it, maybe it's not real and maybe

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God won't hold it against us, and obviously that's not the case. But true mourning is for the specific things that you've done, the specific ways that you've sinned against God, because he's not fooled.

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This is how you repent and seek forgiveness. I mean, I know that I'm hammering everybody about how we're sinful, right?

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We have to understand that. But we also have to understand that the grace and mercy that was shown to us by God is far greater than anything that we could have ever done.

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And there is literally nothing that you could have ever done that would make God turn away from you if you repent and come to him.

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So please understand, your condition is sinful, but his grace still welcomes you back in love.

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So let me just put that out there for you so that you know that it's not all condemnation.

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Now that I've said that, true gospel -centered mourning is often joined with self -loathing.

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Here's a message that you don't come to church to hear, right? Thomas Watson says, the sinner admires himself, the penitent loathes himself.

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Again, I can't state this strongly enough. It's the true understanding of what sin is and what sin is before God that we have to have, that we have to receive from the

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Holy Spirit to truly grasp this. And this is what we saw with the Pharisee and the tax collector last week.

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I thank you that I'm not like these other men. I tithe, all that stuff. And the tax collector said, Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.

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Pride is the exact opposite of poverty of spirit. And if you can be comfortable or okay with your sin, then obviously it's not true mourning.

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True gospel -centered mourning, God -centered mourning is purifying because true repentance will often bring us to the point of tears, bring us to the point of weeping before the

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Lord and tears that cleanse us of these sins. Thomas Watson, again, he says, we must so weep for sin as to weep out sin.

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And that purifies us as we truly understand and mourn and get rid of this sin.

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Similar, it must be joined with a hatred of sin. This is number four, by the way, if you're taking notes, which

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I hope that you are. It's not enough for us just to resist sin.

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To truly understand what it is should result in us hating it. It's not just that we have had the willpower to not commit a sin, even though it's still very tempting and it's still very appealing, but we didn't do it.

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If it's still very appealing, then we have work to do, prayer to the

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Holy Spirit that needs to be done because we should hate the sins that we commit.

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Number five, it is sometimes joined with restitution. Now, this is the case if you sin also against somebody else and you harm another person.

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Sometimes those sins will result in the need to make things right with someone else.

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An example of this is Zacchaeus. You know, he was a tax collector too. And when he came to know

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Jesus, he said he would give back fourfold everything that he took from others. Now, the sad part of this sin is,

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Zacchaeus' case, this is material. If you hurt someone emotionally, they may not forgive you.

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It is still right to seek restitution, but guess what? It might not work because they may not be willing to forgive.

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Number six, true God -centered mourning must be speedy. And what

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I mean by that is that that mourning should follow the sin closely.

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The opposite of this is people who say, oh, I'll just continue to live this way and then

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I'll go for the deathbed confessional, right? Make myself right with God right before I die. And I used to chuckle at that too.

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But then I came to realize that what that actually is, is that's actually a love for sin. And not only is it a love for sin, but by implication, it's a hatred for God.

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It's a hatred for God. You can't love sin and love God. And you can't intentionally sin over and over and over and put off your repentance until someday in the future.

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Because you don't know when that future is coming, first of all. But again, even if you don't, even if you did know when it was coming, that's not real repentance and that's not real mourning over your sin.

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And finally, number seven, true God -centered mourning is constant because of our condition.

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Our poverty of spirit helps us recognize the constant and consistent desire for things that are sinful.

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So we should be constantly mourning those things. In fact, it's when you stop mourning over even the desire for something sinful that you start down the road of thinking that maybe it'll be okay or maybe

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I can get by with it. So again, the mourning over sin will not stop until we're dead.

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A couple other things to point out is that true mourning has to be spontaneous.

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And by that, I mean, it can't be something that you have to force. It needs to be spontaneous, naturally occurring, something that you don't have to work up the bad feelings over because you didn't actually have them in the first place.

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So you have to convince yourself that you feel bad. And then, this is another common one, mourning should be for the sin itself and not for the consequences of the sin.

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A lot of people can easily mourn the fact that they got caught sinning, but not mourn the sin itself.

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You should mourn that you ever even considered violating, for example, the covenant of marriage that you swore before God and your spouse, not the fact that eventually you got caught.

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And obviously, I'm not talking to any of you. And in fact, you should mourn any sin that you commit, whether or not any other person ever finds out about it.

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Because again, our concern is our soul before God.

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It's not our soul before other people. And I mentioned, and this is where we'll wrap up, is that I said that in addition to mourning for our own sins, we should also mourn for the sins of other people.

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For example, we can mourn for people in the church who think that they are saved, but are not.

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We can mourn for those who are being led astray by false teaching. We can mourn for those who are simply playing church for the appearance that it brings, but not the ultimate salvation that they should be going after with their church attendance.

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We can mourn for the utter lostness of people who would murder an unborn child for convenience and call it healthcare.

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We can mourn for people who are so confused about the nature of God's creation as to think that they're not what

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God created them to be, or that they insist on violating God's design for marriage.

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We can also mourn for those who use other people for their own physical needs, for their own emotional needs, violating so many of God's commands for us.

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And the list of sins of the world that we can mourn for goes on and on.

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But as I was thinking about this list of things, I think it's important to understand something.

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And this is a shift that I've had to make in my head. And I honestly can't take credit for the making of this shift.

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But we need to mourn over those things. Our natural reaction, or some of my natural reaction, has been to judge those things, right?

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To tell people why they're wrong. But as I consider my own heart and my own standing before God, I realize that judgment is not my role, and judgment is not my prerogative, because I have no right to stand in judgment of someone else.

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I have to stand in for my own judgment. So we can't get so, again, this is not to say that things that are happening are right, and we have to notice them, and we can say stuff about them.

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But again, people that are doing these things are lost, and we should mourn for that as opposed to condemn them for that.

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So that's my exhortation to you. Jesus came to seek and to save the lost.

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He came the first time to save and not to judge. So how would it be our role to judge?

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So again, the big surprise that we have at the end here is that I've only covered the first half of this beatitude.

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So we haven't even got to the comforting part yet, but we're gonna save that for next week.

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So as we consider that, just one more reminder that we all have sin in our life.

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We all have things that we need to take to God, that we need to mourn for what we have done before God.

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And we can also mourn, and we can also pray for others as well. Pray that they would find, that they would be changed by the

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Holy Spirit. Now the God of peace who brought up from the dead the great shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, our

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Lord Jesus, equip you in every good thing to do his will by doing in us what is pleasing in his sight through Jesus Christ to whom be the glory forever and ever.