"Blessed Are Those Who Mourn"

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Matthew 5:4

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I want to stay in Matthew 5 now beginning the second beatitude as we've begun this
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Sermon on the Mount and made the point last week to pronounce the fact that this sermon, unlike the sermons of John the
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Baptist when he was calling the mournful and the repentant out to the Jordan to be baptized with the baptism of repentance, unlike those sermons that began with the word repent,
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Jesus begins this sermon, this address to His people, to His disciples gathered to Him at this
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Mount. He begins with this word, blessed. We began to talk about that last week when we considered the first beatitude in verse three, blessed are the poor in spirit.
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Now with verse four, we read, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
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So let's begin again with the namesake of the beatitudes. Again, the name beatitude is simply a
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Latinization for blessing or for blessed. So let's begin again with this focus on blessing.
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Well, Matthew 5 verse four does not imply that mourning in and of itself is a good thing.
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Blessed are those who mourn. Oh, we should go about and try to find ways to mourn or try to conjure up some kind of mourning.
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That's not what Matthew 5, four is saying at all. If that was the case, we would deliberately try to make ourselves feel sad, find ways to show that we're mourning because that is what would be blessed or that is what would eventually lead to blessing.
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If we start there, we miss so much of what Jesus is seeking to do, not only in the second beatitude, but in the beatitudes as a whole.
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In fact, we're meant to keep the beatitudes as a whole. We really can't get to verse four if we don't begin with verse three.
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Blessed are the poor in spirit, leads to blessed are those who mourn. Someone is so empty, so helpless, so destitute, they can't help but weep when they consider themselves.
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How helpless they are, how much they need, how much they lack, how much they pine and long after things that aren't available to them that perhaps others have found, others have delighted in.
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And so you find that there's a series, a way that the beatitudes begin to unravel and we'll see that even as we press on in the next several weeks.
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If we view the beatitudes in this way, we recognize that the second beatitude builds on the first and it assumes all that would be true of the first.
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Those who are poor in spirit are those who actually are heirs and begin to enjoy the benefits of the kingdom of God.
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And those ones are mourners. Those ones are mourners who will be comforted.
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Now we also have to remember that not only is this a strict address to Jesus' disciples, as though it's sort of a fortune cookie that you're opening up and oh, this is for you.
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Here's a little personal devotional font for the day. Now you can go on your way. As we saw last week,
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Jesus is, as it were, casting a net through the Old Testament, through the law and the prophets and the wisdom writings and he's culling up so much of the thematic and powerful imagery, evocative imagery from those writings and he's casting it into these beatitudes.
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And that's no different here. In fact, with that, we take up so much of the history of God's people, the history of God's redemption as it's being worked out in the lives of Israel.
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And then of course, we situate Jesus' ministry into that. As we saw last week, Jesus being presented in Matthew's gospel as the fulfillment of the messianic promises.
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As the arrival of all that Isaiah had promised. And we'll come back to that later this morning.
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And so when we view it in this way, we can't help but read these words blessed as the culmination of God's people waiting, longing, thirsting, weeping for God's promise to dawn.
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Longing, desiring, seeking for the long -awaited consolation of Israel to arrive.
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And as Matthew relates, that time is now. Now the kingdom of God has come.
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Now it is near you. Where the Son of Man is, that's where the kingdom is.
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That's the great mystery of redemption being unveiled. Where the Son of Man is, that's where the temple is.
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Where the Son of Man is, that's where the sacrifice is. Jesus being presented as the fullness, the yes and amen of all that God's people had long awaited.
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And so in Isaiah 61, this consolation that God promised is now dawning. And with that dawning of the kingdom, we have
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Jesus saying, blessed are you if you belong to this kingdom. Blessed are you if your life is characterized in this way.
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You have been blessed. You do belong to the kingdom. It's evident in these ways. And so comfort has come to those who are poor in spirit.
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The Israelites that, like Abraham, looked far away for the day of Jesus and rejoiced in it.
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Now their comfort has come. Jesus has brought the kingdom of heaven.
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This is the blessedness that Jesus declares. Donald Hagner has a fairly good commentary on Matthew's gospel.
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And he relates to the term blessed in this way. He says, rather than happiness in its mundane sense, blessed refers to a deep inner joy.
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A deep inner joy of those who have long awaited the salvation promised by God and who even now begin to experience its fulfillment.
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That's a beautiful way of understanding blessed. Those who have long awaited God's promised salvation and are beginning to experience, even now, its fulfillment.
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So this joy results from God's blessing. In fact, we have a passive verb here.
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They will be or shall be comforted. And we have a series of passive verbs in the
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Beatitudes. And commentators rightly view these as what we call divine passives. God is the implied actor.
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God is the one who's going to comfort. In other words, blessed are those who are mourning for God will comfort them.
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They will be comforted by God. He's the implied actor. John Hendricks points out the
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Beatitudes in this way are a description of how God is blessing his people. I think we said this last week.
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We don't read the Beatitudes as a sort of carrot being dangled in front of us. Try to get your life in this way and then you'll be blessed.
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No, this is simply a declaration of what God is doing in the lives of his people and how he is blessing them.
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It's a declaration. And so they're not just connected blessings. They're not hidden or discreet.
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They're part of this great whole, part of what God is doing when he embraces people in his kingdom, translates them out of darkness into his great light.
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This is what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus. This is the blessedness that attends that way.
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And so we come to Matthew 5 .4. We come to the second Beatitude. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.
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And we're gonna take two steps through this Beatitude. Two steps. And the first step is simply beginning with this question.
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Again, what sort of mourning leaves people blessed? What sort of mourning becomes blessed?
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And so the first step here, the first point is the place of mourning. What is the place of mourning? What kind of mourning is blessed?
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Well, we can't get away from the immediate and obvious fact that the kind of mourning that Jesus has in view is very much related to how
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Matthew's gospel began. As we said, some of the cloaks are still wet with the waters of the
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Jordan that are now gathered at the feet of Jesus. They were those who had been mourning their sin, had been mourning that God's kingdom had not come.
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They had gone to the Jordan to be baptized by the prophet. They were looking for God's yes and amen. And now they are gathered at Jesus' feet.
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And that means that mourning, already in Matthew's gospel, has been established as a mourning for sin.
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A mourning for evil, a mourning for wickedness, for failure, for shortcoming.
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A mourning for being crooked, a mourning for all that the prophets had testified to against the people of God.
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And we see this mourning for sin not only on the way toward the gospel of Matthew and Jesus' ministry within it, but even after the fact.
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Paul, when he's addressing the church at Corinth and a report has come to him about immorality breaking out in their midst, and he says, this immorality is such a degree that even
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Gentiles can't be charged with practicing it. It's astonishing to even them. And he says, but you're puffed up.
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Should you not rather have mourned? That's Paul's understanding. Paul doesn't expect that the man who's caught in the sin will mourn.
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He expects that the church will mourn. Wouldn't you mourn that kind of immorality?
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That's Paul's view. When it comes to mourning for sin, we recognize there's a mourning that is simply a mourning over consequences, a mourning over desires that can't be fulfilled or desires that are being fulfilled and are out of God's way.
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There's this mourning after the world, and there's a mourning that really is born because of the sin as it is before God, the sin that is against the desire of God, against the will of God.
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And we mourn when we see that and we feel the disgust that the hatred of that. We want to be in God's way.
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We want to desire God. We want to be pleasing to God. In other words, there's tears that follow godliness.
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There's tears that follow worldliness. Christians aren't the only ones who weep. But as Paul says in 1
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Thessalonians 4 in a different setting, we weep not as the world weeps.
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We don't sorrow like the world sorrows. Esau was a godless man, according to Hebrews 12.
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And you know that afterward, when Esau wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected and he found no place for repentance, though he sought it bitterly with tears.
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So you see, there's this mourning over consequences. There's a mourning over selfish desires.
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There's a mourning that follows the mourning of the world. But then there's a mourning of sin before God, a mourning of sin after God, a mourning of sin for God.
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We see that, for example, in Ezra. Think of the life of Ezra, one who has come now, is seeing the dawning of God's restoration, the exile now being turned back as people pour back into the land and come to the shambles of the previous foundation.
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And Ezra is one who's going to instruct them in the matters of the law. We come to Ezra 9, one of the great chapters, one of the great prayers in Scripture.
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And as we begin, we read, everyone who trembled at the words of the God of Israel assembled to me because of the transgression of those who had been carried away captive.
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This is what Paul's expecting in 1 Corinthians 5. People who are actually trembling at the word of God because of this immorality that's broken out among the people, they come, they're the ones that are mourning, they're the ones that are trembling.
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And they gather to Ezra. They've reported the immorality that's broke out among the people.
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The people who have just been taken out of the exile of God's judgment and brought back to begin to, as it were, rehearse and take recourse with the promises of God.
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And what do they do? They go right back into the sins that dragged them out into exile the first time. And so the teacher of the law, this leader,
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Ezra, what happens when the report comes to him? We read, I sat astonished until the evening sacrifice.
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Listless. And at the evening sacrifice, he writes,
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I arose from fasting. Having torn my garment, my robe, I fell on my knees.
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I spread my hands to the Lord, my God, and I said, oh my God, I am too ashamed.
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I am too humiliated to lift my face to you. So the report comes to Ezra and he goes, that's insane, you know what?
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Why don't we pray right now? God, judge them. I can't believe they would do that. When that report comes to Ezra, he can't speak for a whole day.
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He just tears his robe. He sits in ash. He can't eat. He can't speak.
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He's shell -shocked. And when he finally opens his mouth to pray, what does this righteous man say?
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I'm too ashamed to speak. I'm too humiliated to speak.
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In other words, though he wasn't directly complicit in his sin, he recognizes that what this sin had amounted to still has a seed form in his own life, in his own desires, in his own flesh, as it were.
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And so if he were to condemn the outrage of that abomination, he can't help but reflect in his own life of all the ways that fall so far short of the holiness that God requires.
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And he recognizes, if I'm abhorring that kind of sin, then I ought to be ashamed. Well, here's how you know you have a right view of sin.
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If you're praised, prayers begin like that. That is not the prayer of the Pharisee on the street corner when he's got the trumpet in his hand.
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How do you know you have a right view of sin? How do you react to sin? We actually,
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I didn't even read it. Verse three in Ezra 9. This is his immediate reaction. When I heard this, I tore my garment,
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I plucked hair out of my head and beard. I fell down astonished. You can't imagine that scene as him going, what?
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Oh, okay, get me my ceremonial tweezers. Okay, a few here, a few there. I want to seem like I'm very mournful, right?
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This was just the sort of guttural reaction. It's almost like he's clawing away at himself.
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He's so outraged, so horrified. He's astonished.
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What astonishes you? What astonishes you?
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Have you had encounters? Have you come across things that have astonished you in that way? Where it's so far beyond the pale that you can't even speak indignantly.
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You almost can't say anything at all. I remember seeing, you know, they had sort of GoPro cams from a number of people outside an abortion mill.
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And of course, they have the sort of escorts that are kind of covering them and shuttling them into these places of evil.
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At one point, one of the staff members came out to go sort of confront some of these witnesses, some of these preachers.
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And clearly, just to get a rise out of them, she came right up to the face.
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You could kind of see it in the GoPro camera, and she said, I love dismembering these children. And for the first time, a guy who was basically speaking nonstop, appealing, he was speechless, astonished.
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It's because we're so desensitized to sin that we don't view it rightly in this way. We don't view our own sin rightly, therefore, we don't view sin rightly around us.
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We don't see sin rightly in our own life. We rarely see it rightly in others. In fact, when we do see it, it's usually to puff ourselves up or to vindicate ourselves, make ourselves feel better about ourselves.
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Even in that way, we fail to see sin rightly. But notice that Ezra doesn't do any of these things.
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And if we don't view sin rightly, there's absolutely 0 % chance we'll ever get even a single toe toward Matthew 5, verse four.
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If we don't view sin rightly, it will not compute what in the world
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Jesus could mean when he said, blessed are those who mourn. When we don't view sin rightly, we minimize it.
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When we don't view sin rightly, we justify it. We have a thousand caveats that explain it away.
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By the end of the algorithm, it really wasn't all that sinful at all. In fact, it was almost inevitable and natural.
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Any reasonable person would have done it. They were in my shoes in my circumstance. We minimize sin, we justify sin.
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We're so desensitized to it that we ignore it and carry on our way unaffected by it.
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And all of these things constitute spiritual decline. This is why our faith weakens.
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This, above all things, is why we lose that love that we first had for Christ. It's where zeal dies.
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When we minimize, when we marginalize, when we ignore or feel no effect of sin in our life.
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The perfections of the atonement become distant, abstract. Out of concern, we're unmoved by our sin, therefore we're unmoved by our
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Savior. We're unmoved by the gravity of the offense, therefore we're unmoved by the glory of the gospel.
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Here is where we become sullen, corpses as it were, half dead. Oh, here's where we develop half inch thick calluses on the bottoms of our feet and we walk through life like Johnny Appleseed.
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I have very tender feet. I don't get out much and I never wear sandals or go barefoot. So every now and then when we go to the ocean or something like that and I'm not wearing shoes and I come across little pebbles or shells,
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I'm like, it's like I stepped on a landmine. I have the feet of like a Japanese homemaker.
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I sort of shuffle around and I'm like, ah, in agony. Everyone's looking at me sort of strange.
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I'm trying to kind of tough it out, like grimacing as I walk like a robot across the pebbles.
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It's good when your conscience has that kind of tenderness and as you're walking this narrow path of righteousness, you feel slight offenses in that way.
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I'm speaking to younger folks now, partly because your conscience is so fresh and raw and sometimes sins have that kind of impact and it's a sad thing, let me tell you.
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When a decade goes by and your feet are so thick that you're completely unmoved, you'll step on the equivalent of glass and not even wince.
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A tender conscience is a precious thing. Blessed are those who mourn.
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Spiritual decline begins here. And if we have spiritual decline, then there's no hope of ever coming to joy, of ever coming to peace, of ever being comforted.
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And now we see, as we'll explore later, the wisdom of holding together mourning with comfort, being troubled and poor in spirit and convicted with genuine peace and joy.
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We always want to separate the two. We want one without the other. We avoid conviction of sin or ways of addressing our sin as we avoid poison, when in fact it's medicine to cure us.
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We find joy, counterfeit joy, peace as counterfeit peace. As Lloyd -Jones, and if you come tonight at our discussion tonight, we'll hop on this point from Lloyd -Jones.
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A shallow view of sin always leads to a superficial experience of joy. 100 times out of 100.
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If you don't view sin rightly, your view of joy will be paper -thin. Your experience of joy will be paper -thin, always.
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This is what Lloyd -Jones says. A real sense of sin must come before there can be any true joy of salvation.
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Not just an acknowledgement, some sort of bare, yeah, I guess I blew it. A real sense, a real engagement, a real affectation of sin must come before there can be any true joy of salvation.
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That's the essence of the gospel. Isn't that what we see in every beatitude? Emptiness, poverty, right?
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Hunger, deprivation, these are what leads to God's clothing, covering, filling. We see that, this is the essence of the gospel.
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And Lloyd -Jones says so many people spend their whole lives trying to find this Christian joy. They say they'd give the whole world if they could find it, or be like someone else they know who maybe has it.
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Well, he says, I suggest that in 99 cases out of 100, I'll say 100 out of 100, they fail to see that they must begin with conviction of sin if they have any hope of finding joy.
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And they don't like the doctrine of sin. Who likes the doctrine of sin? We're some twisted people that like the doctrine of sin.
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I came across, I don't know who runs the account, but it was some sort of Calvinist meme maker.
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I probably spend too much time looking at reformed memes. It's sort of become a hobby of mine.
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I collect them. But what I noticed in all of his posts, he also is very excited to talk about just sort of conviction.
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And it was almost like the things that he most liked to talk about was just basically the burn, or when you're shown your sin, or when
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God confronts you, when God shows you just how horrific your state is before him.
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And it was almost like he was celebrating being able to discover this. It's like for the first time in my life, I really see things rightly.
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And instead of being horrified, I bring that through the gospel to Christ, and therefore I celebrate. In fact,
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I want to go further. I want the Lord to find even more that I can bear out and be sanctified in my walk with him.
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We don't like the doctrine of sin. So intensely we dislike it,
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Lord Jones says. We object to it being preached. Why? Because we want joy without conviction of sin.
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But that's impossible. We want peace without conviction.
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That's impossible. It can never be obtained. Those who would be truly happy and blessed are always those who first of all mourn.
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Conviction is an essential preliminary. That's Lloyd -Jones. Now let me make a very important point.
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It goes in line with what we're saying about the Beatitudes not being a carrot, a sort of if you meet this side of the equation,
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God will show up to, as the sort of answer of the prize. No, as we said, it's a declaration.
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And here's the really important point. We are not saying with the second Beatitude or with any of the
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Beatitudes, we need to conjure up mourning so that we can find joy. Now are you feeling bad yet?
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Yeah, go home and try to conjure up some mourning so that hopefully you can find some joy. No, what we're saying is a believer is a mourner.
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That's all we're saying. We're not saying you should mourn so that you can become a believer. We're saying a believer is a mourner.
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That when you embrace Christ, you become as Christ, a man of sorrows, a woman of sorrows.
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You become acquainted with grief, grief inside your life, grief all around you. You become more acquainted with it as you walk with him in fact.
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And yet you also have a deeper reserve of joy, a deeper peace, a brighter lining.
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These things coincide, these things are married and as it were become one flesh, though they're so different in the
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Christian's life. You mourn over personal sin. When we say a believer is a mourner, it begins there.
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It begins with Ezra. I'm too ashamed. I'm too humiliated. But why is
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Ezra praying in the first place? Because of the sin that's broke out among him, all around him.
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It's Isaiah. I'm a man of unclean lips. That's reason enough to mourn. But why is he still mourning?
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I'm dwelling in the midst of a people of unclean lips. And so a believer is a mourner first and foremost with his personal sin, but then for sins that he's not even directly responsible for.
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He's affected by sin around him. That's what it is to be a believer.
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That's what it is to be a mourner. These are the ones that Jesus says will be comforted. So they're not so self -consumed that they, as long as they're doing well, the whole world's doing well.
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They have sorrow because they see the plague all around them. They have sorrow because they see what sin is twisting, not only in their own life, but in all of their relationships.
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And everywhere they turn, they begin to resonate with the suffering in the world. I took, on Monday, as a sort of belated
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Father's Day present, I took my dad, and it was a late concert, so I, Alice, he tends to be a night owl, but we took her out to Tanglewood.
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I was very excited because I knew my dad was a fan, and I've been a fan for many years of a certain symphony by a
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Russian composer named Dmitri Shostakovich, a fifth symphony. And so they were performing this out in Tanglewood. And the thing about the fifth symphony, it's so fascinating is
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Dmitri Shostakovich had this sort of avant -garde career, and he had published an opera, and it was performed with Stalin in attendance.
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And he left during the performance, not a good sign. And the next morning, in the state newspapers, it was condemned as Western, as sort of poisonous to Russian culture,
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Soviet culture. And so Shostakovich said, well, basically, I'm a dead man walking now. And so when he went to his studio to compose after that point, he would bring his suitcase with him.
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He'd put socks and underwear in it. He's just like, I'm off to a gulag. I'm just waiting to get taken away. But basically, they allowed him to be, and all the pressure was on what he was gonna write next.
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So there's a lot of debate about how to understand or how to interpret the fifth symphony, because on the one hand, there's things that the statists loved.
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It was epic, sweeping, the first, and especially the fourth movement, triumphant, very powerful, but then interposed, especially in the second and third movement, it was this lament.
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Now, Shostakovich said, this is sort of a war memorial, and he was taking pieces of Russian memorial hymns from the
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Russian Orthodox Church, and he was transposing it into those movements, but the reality was, it was just this huge lament.
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And you almost got the sense that he was making a farce out of the triumph, and the real heart, the real core was, look at the misery of our lives.
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And so when it was first performed, it said, the crowd was awash in weeping.
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They had caught what maybe the official state critics had missed. It resonated with them, the sorrow, the longing, the lament, the misery, the hopelessness of that third movement, it hit them to the core.
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And I'm laughing thinking about this, because I've been playing it in the van as we've driven around lately, and my girls could care less about that third movement.
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Just play the end, play the booms, play the timpanis, play the tubas, play the brass, we want all the excitement.
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You're just too young to appreciate, to resonate with the sorrow that's contained within this.
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You don't know anything about Stalin, you don't know anything about these years of misery, millions of people losing their lives, the sense of absolute despair.
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In other words, you have to grow up in this world just to have the hope of being attuned to some of the suffering, some of the effects of being fallen and dwelling in a fallen world.
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It takes time to resonate, and there's so many distractions in Vanity Fair that you may never get there. You may never actually resonate with the pain and the disfigurement and the mutilation of sin.
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You want the brass, you want the fanfare, you don't know how to weep for the intricate parts, the sweeping moments, the movements that actually show you a window into how the world really is before a perfect God.
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So when Jesus came among us, he came as a man, in every respect as we are, and there had never been a human being prior nor since that had seen so perfectly, so steadfastly, so comprehensively all of the suffering and pain and disfigurement and abomination of sin all around him all of the time.
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And let me tell you, there is a profound depth in those two words,
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Jesus wept, Jesus wept. Words aren't wasted in ancient writing, words aren't wasted when they're inspired by the
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Holy Spirit, every jot and tittle. Let me tell you, there's a profound depth, there's a tectonic plate of theology underneath those two words,
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Jesus wept. It was not just a mere weeping over the fact that Lazarus was a friend, we find
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Jesus as the Jeremiah, the weeping prophet wherever he goes. We have a record that Jesus wept, we have to assume that Jesus laughed, and I do assume that by the way.
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But scripture doesn't care to remark about his joviality, where scripture emphasizes the fact that he's a man of sorrows.
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Blessed are they that mourn. We find
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Jesus mourning not just at the tomb of Lazarus, we find Jesus mourning when he's at the hilltop overlooking the city.
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When's the last time you went to the summit of Wachusett and turned back to look around Princeton or Hubbardston or Berry and just started weeping?
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How many times do we have this sort of infection of triumphalism and patriotic fervor and when we see the impacts of so much of the fringe leftist movements, the effects of the sort of socialist drives in our culture where our blood begins to boil?
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That's often our go -to, how often have you mourned over that? When's the last time you've seen a young woman that was so confused and so depressed and so interiorized in her life and cut off from society, therefore any logic, any hope, any understanding of what it means to be a human being, what it means to be male or female in this world, what's the last time you've seen that young woman who's now surgically altered herself to try to present herself as a man and instead of being sort of uncomfortable and turning aside or rolling your eyes at the effect of leftist propaganda, when's the last time you've just looked in those eyes and wept?
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Blessed are those that mourn. I love what D .A.
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Carson writes. He says, we're prepared to walk with Jesus through Matthew 23, we love repeating his pronouncements of doom, right?
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Give us a soapbox, give us a powered microphone, we'll repeat the pronouncements of doom, but we always stop when we get to the end of the chapter and he begins to weep over the city.
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We don't follow him there, do we? But the great lights of church history were men and women who learned how to weep.
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In this sense, Carson writes, the Christian is the truest realist. The truest realist.
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He reasons that death is there, death must be faced. We all distract ourselves, turn away, but the
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Christian recognizes that death is there, that death is an enemy, that death has a sting, but that sting is removed and death is the last enemy and so the
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Christian is able to face, to engage, to square off with death as it were, where the world wants to mute and muzzle and distract itself from even thinking about mortality.
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So in that sense, the Christian is the truest realist, isn't he? Realistic, you're going to die. Why do you think you're invincible?
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The Christian is a realist in the sense that God is there. Death is there and good news if you're a believer, the worst news if you're not,
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God is there. You either face him as redeemer or as judge. In this sense, the
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Christian is the realist, not a comfortable reality, but a reality nonetheless. Are Christians realists?
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And not only is God there, but sin is there in all of its unspeakable ugliness, in contrasted by the light of the purity of God.
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And then eternity is there, every living human being among us rushing headlong into eternity toward one destiny or toward the other.
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And God's revelation is there with all of the warnings, all of the promises, with all alternatives boiling down to simply this, life or death, eternal life or eternal death, eternal pardon or eternal condemnation, heaven or hell.
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The Christian embraces these truths, lives by them. In this sense, a Christian is the truest realist. The man who lives in light of these things,
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Carson says, rightly assesses himself and his world in the light of them. And if he does so, if he's really, really, really a realist, he can't help mourning.
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He can't help mourning. So if we're not mournful, if it couldn't be said of us in some respects in our lives that we're men and women of sorrow, we're just not being real enough with the way the world really is.
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We're just not being real enough with the truth of what's going to happen in this life and after it for every single one of us.
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A believer is a mourner. And so I asked the question, does that describe you?
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Can you say I'm blessed because I mourn? There is some place, some plateau, some point of contact in my life where I have genuine sorrow, not just sorrow for my own sin, but over sin's effects as I see it.
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And I feel the weight of that. I mourn that sin has this kind of consequence in my life and in the lives of others.
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Are you so poor in spirit that you mourn? Are you just not quite that poor enough? You recognize you're poor, but you're not that poor.
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You're not gonna cry. You're gonna put on a brave face, right? Well, if we're disciples of Christ, we're going to mourn over our sin, mourn over sin's effects all around us.
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Even if it's not our own direct action, we'll mourn it. In the church, what does this look like?
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It looks like weeping with those who are weeping. A sudden death happens, a tragic death happens.
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You can't help but weep. Why? Wasn't supposed to be this way. And you know that as a
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Christian, and so you mourn. You mourn. Life wasn't supposed to be this hard.
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Things like this weren't supposed to happen. And so we're grieved.
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But let me draw it back, of course, to where it all begins. To think somehow that you could mourn what's around you, and then that could be brought back to mourning your own sin as a fool's errand.
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The only hope you have of actually mourning sin's effects beyond you is if you've really sat in and dwelt in mourning your own sin.
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It takes a long time of reflecting on yourself, examining yourself, being sorrowful before God about your own sin, before you have any sense of sorrow about sins all around you.
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Most Christians spend most of their time just trying to find sorrow in their own life. They have no sorrow for anything. They're almost happy that they can skate by.
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Sort of like when the Titanic went down, and they had all these under -capacity lifeboats. And of course, swimmers were coming over and sort of clinging to the edges.
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And sometimes they were sort of pushing people off with the oars. They were afraid of having it brought back under the water.
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And so they sort of had to plug up their ears and just keep rowing away. I remember reading an account of one who was sort of, water's so cold it's like being stabbed 1 ,000 times.
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Most of the people died of frost shock, of cold shock within half an hour.
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And there was one account from one of the survivors in the boat, an oarman, who as he was rowing past, a man was saying, please help, please help.
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And he recognized, you hear me, you just, you can't afford to take me and others on.
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And so the man said, okay then, good luck, God bless you. There's a sense of, you'll never be able to deal with the sin around you if you're not dealing with the sin within you.
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You'll never have sorrow for the effects of the fall in this fallen world if you don't have any sorrow or grief over the fallen effects of your own life.
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And this is what it means, again, to mourn, to be grieved, to be affected. Paul says in Ephesians 4 .30,
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don't grieve the Holy Spirit of God. What does it look like to grieve the Holy Spirit of God?
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To lack grief in your own life. That's when we grieve the Spirit of God most, that we don't have grief.
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Isn't that a funny thing, how this works? That the Spirit seems glad when we're grieving, and He's grieved when we're glad and unaffected.
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But God is seeking these things within us. He says in Joel 2, now therefore says the Lord, turn to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, with mourning.
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Rend your heart, not your garments. It's nice that Ezra can claw away and pull away things, but God says,
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I just want you to do that in tune. I want you to do that in your heart, at the level of your deepest person before me.
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Rend your heart, not your garments. Turn to me with mourning, He says. Doesn't James 4 say the same thing?
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So the question is, as it stands before us, do we know this kind of mourning? Do we know this kind of grief?
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On the one hand, we can say, far off I stand with tearful eyes, nor dare uplift them to the skies, but thou dost all my anguish see.
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Oh God, be merciful to me. But then you have a good cry, and you don't realize you're simply
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Esau. Somehow you thought the fact that you felt bad, the fact that you were even moved to tears, somehow that that atoned for you, that that became your repentance.
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Now we have to acknowledge what Bonar said in his great hymn, not all my sighs and tears can bear my awful load.
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The devil loves making a little swap. Like those game of cups that the street magicians like to play.
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You know, you win five bucks if you guess where the ping pong ball went. Sleight of hand. We read
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Joel 2 and it says, turn to me with mourning and weeping. And so we begin to feel the effects, we see the offense, we see the consequences of our sin and we're struck to the core.
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We maybe begin to mourn, begin to grieve that. And then the devil does this little sleight of hand and he goes, there, there, there now, you've repented.
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Go on your merry way. And we think, oh, I've been atoned because I cried. I've been covered because I cried.
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No, not all my sighs, not all my tears can bear my awful load. The fountain that cleanses us is not a fountain filled with tears, brothers and sisters.
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And so the blessed mourner grieving over his sin, grieving over the sins all around him, sees how great his own and other's offense is before God, but he recognizing tears don't atone for that,
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Christ's blood atones for that. And so he's more and more drawn to the one who actually cleanses from sin, the one who is most offended by sin.
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And if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins, to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
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That's how we can say, blessed are those who mourn. They will be comforted. The mourning itself, we can never stop there.
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But you never get the comfort if you don't begin there. That's the point. And this is, of course, the point all the way along.
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Paul says to the Corinthians in seven when he shows the difference between tears from the world and tears from God.
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He says, now I rejoice, not that you were made sorrowful, but that your sorrow led to repentance. You were made sorry in a godly manner.
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In other words, Paul says, if you think rightly, you can be rejoicing too. Your sorrow had this effect. It led you to repentance and from repentance to life.
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And what does that ultimately look like? How do you know you've arrived? Because God himself has comforted you.
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You haven't comforted yourself, God has comforted you. You haven't dried your own eyes, made up your own resolve.
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No, God has comforted you. God has brought you back to the foot of the cross. God has brought you through all of the promises that are yes and amen in him.
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And therefore, Paul says in verse 13, we've been comforted in your comfort. They have the comfort now. That's the goal.
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There's no other way to get there. It's actually the goal that Paul sets out at the very beginning of 2 Corinthians.
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It's almost this clue, this key of where he's going by the time he gets to chapter seven. Blessed be the God and Father of our
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Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, the God of all comfort. Let's count the ways.
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Comfort, who comforts us all in our tribulation that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
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You see the point? God is the God of all comfort. God desires to comfort his people.
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God desires for you to be a comforter of those who are in trouble because it's his comfort comforting through you. And comfort becomes this roundabout way of looking at redemption as a whole.
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What happens when Noah is born? What is said of his name?
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This one shall comfort us. It's a foretaste of the fact that though this great judgment would sweep over the world, comfort would come for the people of God in due time.
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And so second step here, second step, is the promise of comfort.
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The first step was the place of mourning and now the promise of comfort. And the question that we ask is this, what does this comfort look like?
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How does it come about? Well, we said last week that there's this whole backdrop of the book of Isaiah.
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Isaiah is definitive for the ministry of Jesus. And so we see from the very beginning, we recounted this last week,
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Jesus' ministry is light to those sitting in darkness. Matthew says this was spoken to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet
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Isaiah. That's chapter four. Isaiah 57, we saw this last week with the first beatitude.
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Thus says the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity, whose name is holy, I dwell in the high and holy place with him who has a contrite and humble spirit to revive the spirit of the humble.
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We saw that Isaiah 61, being fulfilled in Jesus' own ministry according to Luke four, the spirit of the
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Lord God is upon me, the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor, he has sent me to heal the broken hearted.
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So all of these things, all of this presentation of Isaiah. And of course, as we begin our service and even saying after, we have to look at this whole complex of God's judgment dragging the people into exile, and yet the promise, the hope of God's restoration.
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And so in the midst of this pronouncement, this judgment of exile, and by the way, we really can't even wrap our minds about what exile was like to experience for the
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Israelites. We have this modern Western distant air that immunizes us against thinking deeply about place and cultural identity and the significance of geography and all sorts of things.
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We're so transient now, so rootless, we don't even have a sense of cultural legacy that's really deeply rooted in this land.
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So it's hard for us to really read the passages that deal with exile, the laments contained within the
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Psalms and identify, resonate with that. We're like children listening to Shostakovich, we just don't pick it up. But Isaiah 40 is already put before us just when we begin
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Matthew's Gospel. What does Isaiah 40 contain? A voice crying in the wilderness, makes straight the way of the
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Lord. And so we begin Matthew's Gospel, here's John the Baptist, a voice in the wilderness, makes straight the path of the
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Lord. And when the Lord comes, and He gathers His own to this mount, and He says, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
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We can't help but think of Isaiah 40 in that way. And if you're some of the OGs among us, for GRBC OGs, meaning from the beginning in our
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Princeton days, you'll remember in that community center with all the clanging steam pipes, what did we recite week in, week out for at least a year?
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Comfort, yes, comfort my people, says the Lord. And so we look at Matthew's beatitudes here, and we can't help but see in the ministry of Jesus, this one has come, not just to say, hey, by the way,
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I'm going to comfort you, but to say all of the kingdom promises, all of the hope spanning from Genesis 3 .15
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all the way down now to this fullness of time when God said that though judgment would come, whether by being dragged out of Eden or washed over by the great flood or dragged into exile, that now is the time in the person and work of Jesus Christ that yes, comfort has come,
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God himself will comfort his people. So what does this cry to comfort say?
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It's a declaration, right? Doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, and then Isaiah 40 erupts with this sunshine piercing through the darkness.
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Comfort, yes, comfort my people. Speak comfort to Jerusalem. Tell her her sins are pardoned. Tell her her warfare is over.
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Now God's moving to redeem. And it takes on this.
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So if there, if it's the sort of ambassador bringing good news, gospel tidings, the war's over, all's been forgiven, peace has now come.
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If that's sort of the triumphant military image, it takes on a whole maternal image by the time we get to Isaiah 66.
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Thus says the Lord, behold, I'll extend peace to her like a river, the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing stream.
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Paul taking gifts from the Gentiles, sending it to Jerusalem, most likely seeing this as a fulfillment of Isaiah.
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Then you shall feed on her side, shall you be carried, dandled on her knees. As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you.
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You will be comforted in Jerusalem. So God, as it were, takes on this nurturing maternal motif to show the kind of comfort he's gonna give.
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Dads, can you relate to this? Callum will wrap himself on the corner or something.
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I kind of look and keep walking, you know. If he dies, he dies, right?
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He's gotta be tough. But what does a mother do? She runs in, scoops up like she's almost hurting more than the child is.
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God says, that's how I comfort my people. I don't say, ah, you know, come on, you're making a big deal out of it.
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It's elaborate, the way he seeks to comfort. In fact, we can't help but see that this is spanning
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Genesis three all the way to the dawning of the kingdom. He says that in Isaiah 51, and Isaiah 51 is addressed to those who are pursuing or seeking after righteousness.
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They're hungry for it, they're thirsty for it. The Lord will comfort Zion. He will comfort her waste places.
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He'll make her wilderness like Eden, her deserts like the garden of the Lord. There it is. There's this creation, fall, redemption imagery.
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We have it in Genesis, we have it in Isaiah, we have it in Matthew's Gospel. This is the fulfillment.
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And so then, in other words, God's redemption is being held forth to us in this word, comfort.
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Comfort. How often do you think of your salvation as God's comfort?
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Isn't that something? Isn't it something that Jesus says, it's better that I go so that I can send the
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Comforter to you? Of all the things we can call the Spirit of God, for Him to be relayed to us as the
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Comforter. Do you ever think of your salvation as God's comfort?
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Well then, how could you possibly make sense of, blessed are you who mourn, for you will be comforted.
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The great Psalm that comes out of the exile is Psalm 126, and Psalm 126 in part promises this, those who sow in tears will reap in joy.
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I do not have time to go into many things that could come out of a lot of the things we've covered, but let me just at least stamp this here, especially to the younger generation, the sort of war -ready, culture -engaging, matrons, warrior children, people of my own heart.
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But let me just say this, and I say this in part just having a lot of reverence and regard for an older generation of saints that sometimes can be characterized by a younger generation as just sort of being inactive, out of touch, not really being where the fight is, and we can finally kind of make some pressings forward if we could just kind of stoke them up, but don't worry, we'll do it.
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And I feel like I'm between the bridge, I'm wanting to merge these two worlds together, but let me just say this in light of Psalm 126, beware of triumphalism.
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Not only can we say, blessed are those who mourn, but we also say, those who sow in tears reap in joy.
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There's a warrior spirit, God bless it, we need that. There's a warrior spirit among Reformed Christians, but let me just say, beware of triumphalism.
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A warrior spirit is not good if there's never any sowing of tears. So beware, that's maybe all
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I'll say about that. Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. Notice, he who continually goes forth weeping, bearing seed for sowing, will doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing sheaves with him.
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So here's the picture of the one who had a bare field, nothing to show for, a pitted stomach, he's so starving, so destitute, poor in spirit in that way, and all he can do is go forth in the scant field and he's weeping, how am
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I gonna live? Where's the garden of the Lord? This is a waste place. And he's going and he's weeping and the psalmist says, but all of those tears, all of that longing, all of that waiting, all of that patience, that was like seed going into that hard -packed soil.
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And the moisture of those tears caused it to sprout. And now you come back rejoicing, you have sheaves in your hand.
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It came out of nothing but sorrow. It didn't come out of strength. It came out of sorrow, came out of weakness, came out of need.
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And notice that this promise of comfort is for those who are continually weeping. This is not something that happens at the beginning of your
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Christian life. Oh, I'll never forget how horrified I was when God really showed me my sin. Thank God that was 30 years ago.
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I've never looked back. What? Continually weeping.
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That's not just in Psalm 126, that's right in Matthew 5 .4. Those who mourn is a present tense participle.
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Present tense usually has a continuous aspect. Blessed are those who are mourning. Why? Because those who are continually weeping are the ones that get the sheaves and the joy.
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Why? Because those who are continually mourning are the ones who are comforted at the end. And even along the way.
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Now does this mean that since God has said comfort, yes, comfort, that, and this is where we're answering the question, what does this look like?
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How does this come about? Well, as we said, it's declared. This is what it means to be a believer. As you press into the reality, be a realist about your life, your sins, your standing before God.
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Be a realist about the state of the world, the state of our society, the state of our household. Don't do what the spirit of Babel does.
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Try to contain it and manage it and pretend it doesn't exist. White picket fences, you don't have to worry about the slums.
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We can sort of make a tower to heaven and not really have to deal with the effects of the fall. Don't do that.
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So what does this look like then? Does this mean we're to have a dismal, miserable appearance?
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That if we're not sort of like showing up on a Sunday morning being like, hey, I just,
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I can't, you know. Is that how it's to be? No. We're not to be sullen.
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Real sorrow is something beneath that. We're not to be grave. There's an anguish beneath it.
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Blessed are those who mourn. Luther, in talking about this, he says, there's a mourning that goes deeper than weeping.
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Weeping is somewhat effervescent. It can come and go. You can cry about something and then not feel affected by it at all after that.
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This is not the kind of sorrow, not the kind of mourning that Jesus is holding out. This is not something superficial. This is not something in a moment.
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This is something characteristic of a life. It's continual. And so Luther said, there's a mourning that goes deeper than weeping.
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It's so deep that one doesn't often cry or even complain about it. It's just there.
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It's just there. The same could be said of joy. It's not the superficial joy.
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It's not skin deep. It's so deep that even when you are weeping, it can still be there.
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It can still be a sort of tear -strown face with a little glimpse of a smile, a
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Mona Lisa smile in the midst of suffering. It's that deep. So Ecclesiastes 3 maintains, among other things, there's a time to laugh, there's a time to mourn, and then you keep reading and Ecclesiastes 7 says, sorrow is better than laughter.
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By a sad countenance, the heart is healed. It's made whole. And the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning.
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The heart of fools is in a house of mirth. So here's how I would characterize.
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Here's what I think we ought to aim for. If the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, and this sort of picture of feasting and mirth is actually the house of fools, then we should walk out into the world, the world being this great feast, this great vanity fair, this great festival, this great repudiation and denial of sin, this great escape from the effects of sin, this denial of sin within and sin without, this doubling down, even celebrating of sin.
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So we see this house of folly, this house of evil. We have to walk through that house of mirth as those who are sorrowful, like Jesus did, as a man of sorrows, as a woman of sorrows.
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But then, coming out of that world, maybe into our own home life, into our own private life,
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I think the image has to flip. If the world is this house of feasting and folly and we walk through this world as men and women of sorrow, then when we look at our own lives, when we come back home, when we're in the church, it ought to be the obverse.
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That world out there has become the world of sorrow, the world of anguish, the veil of tears.
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But here, among God's people, here in the family worship and prayer and time of the
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Lord, here in my own private walk, here is my little tent of feasting, as it were.
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I think the image has to flip. So we walk through with a certain regard of sorrow in the ways of the world, but then we find those deep pockets of joy, of mirth, of happiness among brothers and sisters, among those who can rejoice with those who rejoice, even as they grieve with those who grieve.
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That's how we walk through in this way that we become blessed and comforted together.
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And so I only ask you the question, how are you dwelling in this world? And how are you walking before God, before your family, before this church?
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Do you stand as those disciples that alone are blessed? Do you seek the day that is fixed when the desert of this world is made like Eden?
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When all the tears that you've sown through this world now become sheaves of rejoicing?
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Do you seek that city whose builder and maker is God, the city that Isaiah 60 holds out where the days of mourning finally end because all the people are now righteous and they inherit the land forever?
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Do you seek the promise that when we return, God Himself will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and there'll be no more sorrow, no more crying, no more death, blessed are those who mourn.
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For they shall be comforted, amen? Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word.
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Please bless it to us, Lord. As you declare these things of your people, Lord, by your own spirit, make them realities in our lives,
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Lord. Show us the ways that our feet have been calloused as we walk on the paths of righteousness. Show us in light of our
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Savior what it means to not only weep over our own sins, but Lord, weep over the city whose sins are so great before you.
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Lord, may we have anguish before we have anger. And may that mourning be comforted,
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Lord, because we sow it in hope, looking as all the faithful of God have ever looked for the kingdom to be consummated and for us to experience all of our mourning being dried by your own nail -pierced hand.