"Blessed Are Those Who Mourn"

Blessed Are Those Who Mourn and the Second Beatitude

I want to stay in Matthew 5 now beginning the second beatitude as we've begun this Sermon on the Mount and made the point last week to pronounce the fact that this sermon, unlike the sermons of John the 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, Jesus begins this sermon, this address to His people, to His disciples gathered to Him at this 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. Now with verse four, we read, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

So let's begin again with the namesake of the beatitudes. Again, the name beatitude is simply a Latinization for blessing or for blessed. So let's begin again with this focus on blessing. Well, Matthew 5, verse four, does not imply that mourning in and of itself is a good thing.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

Those who are poor in spirit are those who actually are heirs and begin to enjoy the benefits of the kingdom of God. And those ones are mourners. Those ones are mourners who will be comforted. 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.

Here's a little personal devotional font for the day. Now you can go on your way. As we saw last week, 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.

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. 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. As the arrival of all that Isaiah had promised. And we'll come back to that later this morning.

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. Longing, desiring, seeking for the long-awaited consolation of Israel to arrive.

And as Matthew relates, that time is now. Now the kingdom of God has come. Now it is near you. Where the Son of Man is, that's where the kingdom is. That's the great mystery of redemption being unveiled.

Where the Son of Man is, that's where the temple is. 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.

And so in Isaiah 61, this consolation that God promised is now dawning. And with that dawning of the kingdom, we have Jesus saying, blessed are you if you belong to this kingdom. Blessed are you if your life is characterized in this way.

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. The Israelites that, like Abraham, looked far away for the day of Jesus and rejoiced in it.

Now their comfort has come. Jesus has brought the kingdom of heaven. This is the blessedness that Jesus declares. Donald Hagner has a fairly good commentary on Matthew's gospel. 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. A deep inner joy of those who have long awaited the salvation promised by God and who even now begin to experience its fulfillment.

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. So this joy results from God's blessing.

In fact, we have a passive verb here. They will be or shall be comforted. And we have a series of passive verbs in the Beatitudes. And commentators rightly view these as what we call divine passives. God is the implied actor.

God is the one who's going to comfort. In other words, blessed are those who are mourning for God will comfort them. They will be comforted by God. He's the implied actor. John Hendricks points out the Beatitudes in this way are a description of how God is blessing his people.

I think we said this last week. We don't read the Beatitudes as a sort of carrot being dangled in front of us. And try to get your life in this way and then you'll be blessed. No, this is simply a declaration of what God is doing in the lives of his people and how he is blessing them.

It's a declaration. And so they're not just connected blessings. They're not hidden or discreet. 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.

This is what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus. This is the blessedness that attends that way. And so we come to Matthew 5 .4. We come to the second Beatitude. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.

And we're gonna take two steps through this Beatitude. Two steps. And the first step is simply beginning with this question. Again, what sort of mourning leaves people blessed? What sort of mourning becomes blessed?

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? 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 Matthew's Gospel began.

As we said, some of the cloaks are still wet with the waters of the 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.

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. And that means that mourning, already in Matthew's Gospel, has been established as a mourning for sin.

A mourning for evil. Evil, a mourning for wickedness, for failure, for shortcoming. A mourning for being crooked, a mourning for all that the prophets had testified to against the people of God. 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.

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 Gentiles can't be charged with practicing it.

It's astonishing to even them. And he says, but you're puffed up. 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. He expects that the church will mourn.

Wouldn't you mourn that kind of immorality? 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.

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. 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. We want to desire God. We want to be pleasing to God. In other words, there's tears that follow godliness. There's tears that follow worldliness. Christians aren't the only ones who weep, but as Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4 in a different setting, we weep not as the world weeps.

We don't sorrow like the world sorrows. Esau was a godless man, according to Hebrews 12. 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.

So you see, there's this mourning over consequences. There's a mourning over selfish desires. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

And they gather to Ezra. They've reported the immorality that's broke out among the people. 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.

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, Ezra, what happens when the report comes to him? We read, I sat astonished until the evening sacrifice.

Which is listless. And at the evening sacrifice, he writes, I arose from fasting, having torn my garment, my robe, I fell on my knees, I spread my hands to the Lord my God, and I said, oh my God, I am too ashamed.

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, 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.

He just tears his robe, he sits in ash, he can't eat, he can't speak, he's shell shocked. And when he finally opens his mouth to pray, what does this righteous man say? I'm too ashamed to speak. I'm too humiliated to speak.

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.

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. 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. 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. How do you know you have a right view of sin?

How do you react to sin? We actually, I didn't even read it. Verse three in Ezra 9. This is his immediate reaction. When I heard this, I tore my garment. I plucked hair out of my head and beard. I fell down astonished.

You can't imagine that scene as him going, what? Oh, okay, get me my ceremonial tweezers. Okay, a few here, a few there. I want to seem like I'm very mournful, right? This was just the sort of guttural reaction.

It's almost like he's clawing away at himself. He's so outraged, so horrified. He's astonished. What astonishes you? What astonishes you? 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. 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.

And of course, they have the sort of escorts that are kind of covering them and shuttling them into these places of evil. At one point, one of the staff members came out to go sort of confront some of these witnesses, some of these preachers.

And clearly, just to get a rise out of them, she came right up to the face. 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.

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. We don't see sin rightly in our own sin.

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, to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. Even in that way, we fail to see sin rightly.

But notice that Ezra doesn't do any of these things. 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 4. If we don't view sin rightly, it will not compute what in the world Jesus could mean when he said, blessed are those who mourn.

When we don't view sin rightly, we minimize it. When we don't view sin rightly, we justify it. We have a thousand caveats that explain it away. By the end of the algorithm, it really wasn't all that sinful at all.

In fact, it was almost inevitable and natural. Any reasonable person would have done it. If they were in my shoes, in my circumstance. We minimize sin, we justify sin. We're so desensitized to it that we ignore it and carry on our way unaffected by it.

And all of these things constitute spiritual decline. This is why our faith weakens. This, above all things, is why we lose that love that we first had for Christ. It's where zeal dies. When we minimize, when we marginalize, when we ignore or feel no effect of sin in our life, the perfections of the atonement become distant, abstract.

Out of concern, we're unmoved by our sin, therefore we're unmoved by our Savior. We're unmoved by the gravity of the offense, therefore we're unmoved by the glory of the gospel. Here is where we become sullen, corpses as it were, half dead.

Here's where we develop half-inch thick calluses on the bottoms of our feet and we walk through life like Johnny Appleseed. 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, I'm like, it's like I stepped on a landmine. I have the feet of like a Japanese homemaker.

I sort of shuffle around and I'm like, ah, in agony. Everyone's looking at me sort of strange. I'm trying to kind of tough it out, like grimacing as I walk like a robot across the pebbles. 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.

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, 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. A tender conscience is a precious thing. Blessed are those who mourn. 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 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.

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. 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. A shallow view of sin always leads to a superficial experience of joy. 100 times out of 100.

If you don't view sin rightly, your view of joy will be paper thin. Your experience of joy will be paper thin. Always. This is what Lloyd-Jones says. A real sense of sin must come before there can be any true joy of salvation.

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. That's the essence of the gospel.

Isn't that what we see in every beatitude? Emptiness, poverty, right? Hunger, deprivation, these are what leads to God's clothing, covering, filling. We see that, this is the essence of the gospel. 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. 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.

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. I came across, I don't know who runs the account, but it was some sort of Calvinist meme maker.

I probably spend too much time looking at reformed memes. It's sort of become a hobby of mine. I collect them. But what I noticed in all of his posts, he also is very excited to talk about just sort of conviction.

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 God confronts you, when God shows you just how horrific your state is before him.

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. And instead of being horrified, I bring that through the gospel to Christ, and therefore I celebrate.

In fact, 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. We don't like the doctrine of sin. So intensely we dislike it, Lord Jones says.

We object to it being preached. Why? Because we want joy without conviction of sin. But that's impossible. We want peace without conviction. That's impossible. It can never be obtained. Those who would be truly happy and blessed are always those who first of all mourn.

Conviction is an essential preliminary. That's Lord Jones. Now let me make a very important point. 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, God will show up to, as the sort of answer of the prize.

No, as we said, it's a declaration. And here's the really important point. We are not saying with the second Beatitude or with any of the Beatitudes, we need to conjure up mourning so that we can find joy.

Now are you feeling bad yet? 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. 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. That when you embrace Christ, you become as Christ, a man of sorrows, a woman of sorrows. 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. And yet you also have a deeper reserve of joy, a deeper peace, a brighter lining. These things coincide, these things are married, and as it were, become one flesh, though they're so different in the Christian's life.

You mourn over personal sin. When we say a believer is a mourner, it begins there. It begins with Ezra. I'm too ashamed, I'm too humiliated, but why is Ezra praying in the first place? Because of the sin that's broke out among him, all around him.

It's Isaiah. I'm a man of unclean lips. That's reason enough to mourn, but why is he still mourning? 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.

He's affected by sin around him. That's what it is to be a believer. 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.

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. And everywhere they turn, they begin to resonate with the suffering in the world.

I took, on Monday, as a sort of belated Father's Day present, and 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. 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 Russian composer named Dmitri Shostakovich, a fifth symphony.

And so they were performing this out in Tanglewood. And the thing about the fifth symphony that's so fascinating is Dmitri Shostakovich had this sort of avant-garde career, and he had published an opera, and it was performed with Stalin in attendance.

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, 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. 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. 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.

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. Now, Shostakovich said, this is sort of a war memorial, and he was taking pieces of Russian memorial hymns from the Russian Orthodox Church, and he was transposing it into those movements.

But the reality was, it was just this huge lament. 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. And so when it was first performed, it said the crowd was awash in weeping.

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.

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. Just play the end, play the booms, play the timpanis, play the tubas, play the brass.

We want all the excitement. You're just too young to appreciate, to resonate with the sorrow that's contained within this. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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.

And let me tell you, there is a profound depth in those two words, Jesus wept, Jesus wept. Words aren't wasted in ancient writing. Words aren't wasted when they're inspired by the 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, Jesus wept. It was not just a mere weeping over the fact that Lazarus was a friend. We find 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. But Scripture doesn't care to remark about His joviality where Scripture emphasizes the fact that He's a man of sorrows.

Blessed are they that mourn. We find Jesus mourning not just at the tomb of Lazarus, we find Jesus mourning when He's at the hilltop overlooking the city. 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?

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.

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?

Blessed are those that mourn. I love what D .A. Carson writes. He says, we're prepared to walk with Jesus through Matthew 23. We love repeating his pronouncements of doom, right? 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.

We don't follow him there, do we? But the great lights of church history were men and women who learned how to weep. In this sense, Carson writes, the Christian is the truest realist. The truest realist.

He reasons that death is there, death must be faced. We all distract ourselves, turn away, but the 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 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.

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? 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, God is there.

You either face him as redeemer or as judge. In this sense, the Christian is the realist. Not a comfortable reality, but a reality nonetheless. Are Christians realists? And not only is God there, but sin is there in all of its unspeakable ugliness.

Ugliness in contrasted by the light of the purity of God. And then eternity is there, every living human being among us rushing headlong into eternity toward one destiny or toward the other. 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.

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, 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. 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.

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. A believer is a mourner. And so I asked the question, does that describe you?

Can you say I'm blessed because I mourned? 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.

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. 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.

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, even if it's not our own direct action.

We'll mourn it. In the church, what does this look like? It looks like weeping with those who are weeping. A sudden death happens, a tragic death happens. You can't help but weep. Why? Wasn't supposed to be this way.

And you know that as a Christian. And so you mourn, you mourn. Life wasn't supposed to be this hard. Things like this weren't supposed to happen. And so we're grieved. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

And sometimes they were sort of pushing people off with the oars. They were afraid of having it brought back under the water. 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, the water's so cold it's like being stabbed a thousand times.

Most of the people died of frost shock, of cold shock within half an hour. 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.

And he recognized, you hear me, you just, you can't afford to take me and others on. 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.

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. And this is what it means, again, to mourn, to be grieved, to be affected.

Paul says in Ephesians 4 .30, don't grieve the Holy Spirit of God. What does it look like to grieve the Holy Spirit of God? To lack grief in your own life. That's when we grieve the Spirit of God most, that we don't have grief.

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. But God is seeking these things within us. So He says in Joel 2, now therefore says the Lord, turn to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, with mourning.