What Are We Mourning Over?

“Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted.” (Matt. 5:4)  When I asked you at the beginning of the last chapter if you knew what it meant to be poor in spirit, many of you may have readily admitted that you had no idea. But you probably think you have a better handle on what we are talking about in this chapter. We all know what it means to mourn. Each of us has mourned over the death of a loved one; you may have grieved as a child over a lost pet. We normally associate mourning with the pain that comes when you lose something you love very much. “I’ve been hurting for years over this situation,” you might say. “So I know exactly where this verse is coming from.” I wish that were true, and I don’t mean to diminish your pain. But that is not the type of mourning that Jesus refers to in this verse. He is talking about those who mourn over sin, not over loss. Many people are sorrowful for things they have done. We read in the Bible about the many people who came to see Jesus and inquire about His kingdom. There was one man in particular, a lawyer, who “went away sorrowful: because he had great possessions” (Matt. 19:22). He went away sad because of that one sin – greed – that kept him from what Christ would have him do. We can all relate to the emotional high that often accompanies a sin, followed almost immediately by the sickening feeling that you know you have done wrong. Some people try to show how sorry they are after a particularly sinful weekend by going to church on Sunday to get religious. They aren’t changing their lives; they’re just adding religion to help them feel better about whatever they feel bad about. Mourning, as presented by Jesus in this verse, is not just feeling sorry for your sin. It also is not vain repentance, like the Pharisee practiced in the presence of the publican. How many people have gone to the altar in a church service to ask forgiveness for something they did the week before, only to go back home and make absolutely no effort to re-order their lives and keep it from happening again? They fall under conviction from a Biblical message, run down the aisle and tell God how sorry they are, but never change the environment that leads to those sinful thoughts or actions. So they leave church and eventually have the same trouble again. Vain repentance is represented by a change of mind that does not result in a change of lifestyle. Many of you don’t like church, even though you attend regularly, because it is not a joyful experience for you. You spend your time feeling bad about something, you pray for forgiveness but don’t change your lifestyle, and you come back the next week feeling bad again. If you make decisions at the altar but don’t make changes in your life, you have wasted altar time. Mourning is not regret. King Saul expressed regret in his words to David after he had tried to kill him, acknowledging that he never should have done it. But he didn’t feel bad enough about it to stop, as the Bible shows nearly a half-dozen attempts on David’s life at the hand of Saul. You have probably felt regret hundreds of times in your life for various things, such as words you said to your spouse that you wanted to take back. Mourning is not remorse. Judas was remorseful after he betrayed Jesus, and he tried to give back the money he was paid, and the hypocritical men who had paid him refused, saying that they could not touch “blood money.” Judas threw the money in front of them, ran out and hanged himself. There have been times when I felt so bad about something I did that I wished I were dead. You may have felt that way also. I have prayed a few times, “Lord, just kill me before I mess up that badly again.” Actually, dying is the easy way out. It is the coward’s way out. Judas felt bad, but not bad enough to change anything. He just felt bad enough to die, so he wouldn’t have to face anything like that again. So what exactly does Christ mean when He says, “Blessed are they that mourn”? It is the attitude that causes us to, upon the slightest detection of sin, immediately confess and forsake it. Notice that there are two parts to this process. The other examples we have looked at may have included confession, but they did not include forsaking. Reformation is where one forsakes without confession and tries to reform oneself. The correct method is to acknowledge that you are helpless by yourself and can only change your life with God’s help. You may have gotten yourself in a mess, but you cannot get yourself out of it. Long before there is a sinful action, there is a sinful thought. You have meditated on it, mulled it over and considered the possibilities. That’s why making a decision at the slightest detection of sin means doing it at the very beginning. It is harder to get right with God when you are in the middle of something than it is before you ever start something. Too often, instead of confessing our sin when we first think about it, we allow it to take root in our lives and cause ourselves great problems. It’s a lot easier to kill grass before it has a chance to grow than to kill it while it’s growing. When we wait too long to confess and forsake sin, it gets its hooks into us and changes our thinking. Sin will always change your thinking; it takes that which is evil and makes it good, and vice versa. Before long, you’re wondering if it’s really such a big deal in the first place. Those who mourn according to Matt. 5:4 have such an effective sin detector in their lives – the Holy Spirit – and have such a good relationship with Him that they begin at the earliest opportunity the process of confession and forsaking that sin which grieves the holiness of God. There are several marks that prove one is living according to this verse. First, are you repentant of your sin and have you turned to God through a relationship with Jesus Christ? This is about more than knowing God, going to church, or being moral. It is a realization that your sin violates God’s nature to the point that He separates Himself from you. You have no way to get to God because your sin has separated you. That barrier between His holiness and your vileness cannot be taken down until the sin is taken care of. If all you had to do to remain close to God was be good and go to church, why did Christ have to die on the cross? If you could do anything about your sin by being moral or religious, then Christ’s death for us would have been unnecessary. Mourning over your sin gets you to the point that you realize, “Christ died on the cross for one person: me.” There is a difference between knowing that Jesus died for the sins of the world and understanding that He died for your sins. A friend of mine was saved recently, and she told me, “Preacher, I’ve known all my life that Jesus died for sinners. But I finally realized that I am the sinner He died for.” That’s the point I’m trying to make. It’s not just that He died on the cross, but that I put Him there. Forget about the debate over whether the Jews killed Jesus or the Romans did. I killed Him. You killed Him. None of us actually beat Christ or physically nailed Him to the cross, but our sins were vile enough to put Him there. He died because none of us are good enough, or moral enough, or religious enough to get to Heaven on our own. Until we understand our role in His death, we are not truly mournful over sin. Here is another question. Do you constantly seek to restore your broken relationship with Christ? To be saved is to be in the family of God, but even within the family you can have a strained relationship. After you repent of your sins and trust Him for salvation, you will still do some sinning. If you get saved at 8:05, by 8:10 you could be doing something you shouldn’t do. I love my children dearly, but I will spank the fire out of them when they disobey, because that is a violation of my rules. But I don’t kick them out of the house or disown them, and I could never do that as long as I live. They will always be my children, and that can never be changed. As my wife will tell you, I hate it when I have to discipline them. I love it when they come to the realization on their own that they have done wrong and they take steps to correct it. But that doesn’t happen very often. If my son remembers that he failed to put his clothes away, then decides on his own to go back and pick them up off the floor and put them away, there is no need for me to correct him. But usually I have to tell him to do it or else, and I might even have to discipline him because he still doesn’t do it. But once that particular disciplinary action is over, it’s over. As born-again Christians, we all mess up from time to time. Sometimes you will sin and then say, “I messed up. Forgive me, Lord. I need to fix that.” Then God says, “OK.” But there are times when we don’t do that. The Lord keeps reminding us about it, but we put it off until we forget about it and just go on with our lives. But when we let that sin build up, it can cause us to lose the joy of our salvation, and as Peter says, you can even forget that you’ve been washed in the blood of Christ. A Christian who mourns is one who keeps short accounts with God. The moment you have a problem, you deal with it. People wonder how good Christians can get into such bad sin. It’s because they don’t take care of the little sins and confess them when they are small, so they grow into big sins. A Christian who mourns has this attitude: “I can’t let the world become comfortable in my life. I can’t let the things I do become so anti-God that I don’t realize at the moment they happen my need to confess and forsake them.” You say that you try to keep a close relationship with the Lord. Here is a test for you: How close is your relationship with other Christians? How often do you communicate with them? If you are not right with other people, you cannot be right with God. When there is a problem with another person, the tendency can be to just let it go. But you need to correct it before it becomes a big deal. If you are truly mourning as a Christian, you are reordering your thinking about sin. I Cor. 2:12-16 says, “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? but we have the mind of Christ.” II Cor. 10:3-5 says, “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.” These passages convey the message that, as Christians, we are not supposed to act like the world. We have been so infiltrated with the thought processes of the world that Christians now have the world’s reasoning that they use to solve their problems. Lester Roloff, who died in 1982, said in one of his final messages, “Forty years ago [the 1940s], two things happened that are destroying America. One is the invention of television, and the other is the introduction of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Those two things together have killed the church.” Roloff said that the RSV was the first version that began the “dumbing down” of the Bible to man’s way of thinking. The Bible is a holy book, he said, and it should not be a “Reader’s Digest” type of book. As for television, every one of you reading this book can attest to its influence. Think about the things that you may have partaken of that were wrong, but you saw them on television long before you did them. I remember my military days in the late 1980s, when everyone on the base knew what was happening on certain soap operas. We would come off the flight line every day and tune in. I have never committed a murder in my life, but I’ve seen hundreds of them. I bet you have never actually been to an autopsy, but if you watch any of the most popular shows of the past few years you’ve seen dozens. When I was a kid I had no idea what a homosexual was, but now we watch them together as families and chuckle at how cute and funny they are. Long before I drank my first beer, I knew what “Miller time” was. It’s called desensitizing. The devil is a genius; he stops attacking head-on and comes in from a different direction. He didn’t worry about our parents and grandparents, but he decided to work patiently toward grabbing hold of the future generations. When television was first introduced, people still were active outdoors more than they stayed inside. Then they focused on the housewives during the day. There was a time when all of the prime time shows portrayed couple in separate beds. Now our kids know more at age 14 than we knew when we were 24. There are words I never heard of until I got into the military, and now I hear my nine- and ten-year-old nephews saying them. Long before the church fell into the state it is in now, Christians were at home being desensitized. Today, everything goes when it comes to television. It has brought about a change in thinking. Many of you probably think that separation is abnormal. Going to church every time the doors are opened, dressing modestly, and guarding where you go and what you do are considered abnormal behavior in our present day. “They’re just church people.” Well, isn’t that what all of us are supposed to be? As those passages in I and II Corinthians state so clearly, there is the church and there is the world. The church is to win the world but not become part of the world. We have to reorder our thinking. My hope is that people will get to the point that they are sick of “church lite” and an anything-goes philosophy, and sin will once again become something they hate. I want that to be true in my life as well as in yours. I’m thankful that I don’t know what is popular in the world as well as I used to, but I still know more than I should. If true revival is going to come and our churches are going to be what they should be, we must stop thinking like the world. Finally, we should recognize our own sin as well as the sin of others. Our own sin should certainly grieve us, but so should our nation’s sin. The Lord has impressed upon me that, while we continue to preach about sin from the pulpit, the church should mobilize somehow and deal aggressively with sin in the community. I want my church to be confrontational but I’m not even sure what to confront. I don’t know how effective it would be to just picket downtown with signs that read, “We hate sin.” But there is so much out there that we need to be aware of. A friend of mine recently pointed out to me that the sin of abortion has not really been tackled by the church as it should have. If you found someone trying to kill a friend or a family member, you would use force if necessary to stop that from happening. So what do you do when you know someone is killing babies? You shouldn’t bomb a clinic, of course, but you should do something. When was the last time you considered the fact that more babies have been murdered through abortion than in all of this country’s wars combined? The blood of millions of innocent babies drips from America’s conscience. Many of us in the church don’t bother to face it until one of our own daughters becomes pregnant out of wedlock. Sadly, there is often a battle within church families over whether a teenager should deliver her unborn baby. We don’t grieve over our moral sin in this nation. We hear about another homosexual march and we say, “That’s their problem.” I’m not in favor of going out and fighting them or being obnoxious, but we should share the truth in love and stand confidently for the cross. How often do we grieve (in a non-judgmental way) over a dear brother or sister whose life is a mess because of some bad choices? We would rather condemn or judge than consider how that sin grieves God and hurts the cause of Christ, not to mention their families. We must recognize in a deep, meaningful way what sin is doing to ourselves, our nation and the church. The problem with this Beatitude is that we still delight in our sin too much. Sin is pleasing and pleasurable for a season, and until the consequences come we just enjoy it. We delay getting right not only because of our delight in sin, but because God delays His judgment. Sometimes we wish that He would strike everyone immediately when they deserve it, but then we reconsider upon the realization that we would receive many thunderbolts. We love God’s mercy, but we often keep ourselves from right because of it, thinking we’re OK since God hasn’t done anything to us. Most families that come to me for help as a pastor don’t seek me out until after the crisis has hit. Occasionally they will come before the crisis and get things right, but not too often. Sin deceives us that things will get better. We have all awakened at some point and thought, “How in the world did I get here?” We got there because Satan kept telling us, “It’s not that bad. It’s going to get better.” Countless gamblers have started out by losing their first 10 dollars, then bet the next 10 to get it back, and eventually end up broke or in debt. They keep thinking, “I’ll hit the next one.” But it never happens. That’s how sin works. Sin never fulfills its promise. It always deceives. The promise of Matt. 5:4 is that those who mourn will be comforted. This comfort is in God’s assurance that we will have His presence and blessing. Most of us think that if we give up something we won’t have anything, and that’s why we are hesitant to give up our sin. But God says that when we mourn over sin, He will be our fulfillment. We will be so full of God that we won’t miss whatever we thought we couldn’t live without. I don’t miss my old lifestyle or its consequences because God has replaced it with something much better. We must agree with God and ascertain the root of our sin, whether it be anxiety, pride or whatever. It is often more than just the behavior itself. We must also apply Biblical principles in our lives, beginning with salvation. Once you become a child of God, be obedient to His plan. No one has ever failed when faithfully applying the Word of God. You don’t always have to understand His ways. Just do what He says. I promise you that it will work.