The Only Thing Sadder than Sorrow

"Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted." Matthew 5:4

To truly confront the sin within us is a devastating experience. If pastors preached on sin, as my pastor Erik Braun did yesterday as he described Zacchaeus' encounter with Christ in Luke 19, many people would flee their church pews never to return ... not so much for us at Four Oaks as we're used to it by now ... but the painful reality of sin's effect on our souls should never be glanced over or trifled with. The abiding fact is that man has always been in need of such an encounter. And to this end Jesus has given us the second Beatitude, because it shows the necessity of truly facing one's sin.

The intimate connection of this second Beatitude with the first is beautiful and compelling. The first Beatitude, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," is primarily intellectual [those who understand that they are spiritual beggars are blessed]; the second Beatitude, "Blessed are those who mourn," is the emotional counterpart. It naturally follows that when we see ourselves for what we are, our emotions will be stirred to mourning. Again as with the first Beatitude, it is impossible to overstress the importance of these spiritual truths as they relate to the gospel. The Beatitudes are NOT the gospel because they do not explicitly explain Christ's atoning death and resurrection and how one may receive Him. But most certainly, they are PREPARATORY to the gospel.

The Beatitudes are preparatory in the sense that they slay us so that we may live. They hold us up against God's standards for the kingdom so that we can see our need and fly to Him. They cut through the delusions of formulaic Christianity and expose the shallowness of "Christians" who can give all the "right" answers but do not know Christ.

To begin with, what does the paradoxical pronouncement "Blessed are those who mourn" mean? Maybe we should start with what it does not mean. Jesus does not mean, "Blessed are grim, cheerless Christians." Christ is not pronouncing a Beatitude on a forlorn disposition. Neither does He mean, "Blessed are those who are mourning over the difficulties of life." The Bible does not say that mourning by itself is a blessed state. Sorrow is not blessed any more than laughter is.

A great day has come when we see our sinful state apart from God's grace and begin to mourn over its devastating consequences in our souls, words and deeds as described in Romans 3.

Souls: "There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one" [vv. 10-12].

Words: "Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit;" "the poison of vipers is on their lips;" "their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness" [vv. 13-14].

Deeds: "Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know" [vv. 15-17].

Such are we all if left to ourselves. There is always room for decline if we resist the grace of God.

But it is an even greater day when we are truly confronted with our individual sins, when we refuse to rationalize them away, when we reject superficial euphemisms, when we call sin "sin" in our lives. And it is the greatest of all days yet when in horror and desperation over our sin and sins we weep, so that the divine smile begins to break through.

Such personal mourning is naturally expansive because one who truly mourns over his or her own sins will also grieve over the power and effect of sin in the world ... as so many have done this past week following the unspeakable tragedy in Tucson, AZ. David mourned for the sins of others in Psalm 119:136, "Streams of tears flow from my eyes, for your law is not obeyed." This, in fact, was the great characteristic of Jeremiah, the Weeping Prophet, known for the many tears he shed over his people Israel. Of course, no one was more grieved by the sin of the world than was our sinless Lord Jesus. Through the mystery of the Incarnation, His heart became a spiritual seismograph registering the slightest tremors of the earth's pain and sorrow. It is no wonder that some thought Him to be Jeremiah returned from the grave [Matthew 16:14].

With this understanding we can begin to see the brilliance of Jesus' paradox in the second Beatitude. He stands truth on its head, and it then shouts for us to take notice and comprehend, "Blessed [approved] are those who mourn [over sin -- that is their own sin and the sins that poison the world], for they shall be comforted." Christ begs for us to understand and we are blessed if we hear and put our understanding to work.

It should also be noted that mourning is most certainly not in vogue today, despite its necessity for spiritual health. It should also be said that humor and laughter are good and necessary for the believer and no less than Solomon has written that a merry heart acts as a "good medicine" [Proverbs 17:22], and we all know this to be true. So despite the fact that laughter is essential, the world does not see the same need for sorrow. In fact, the world so despises sorrow that it has gone to great lengths to avoid it. We post-moderns have structured our lives to maximize entertainment and amusement in a vain attempt to make life one big party. We laugh even when there is no reason to laugh, and, in fact, often laugh when we really should be weeping.

The world thinks that mourners [and especially those who mourn the course of the world, who mourn over sin] are mad. And sadly, it is not much different with the church. Some actually hold that if we are good Christians, filled with the Spirit, we will experience a life without sorrow and that we almost literally will walk around like modern day Mona Lisas with plastic smiles on our faces. There are far too many pastors who, though they claim to be in the evangelical tradition, never mention sin in their preaching because that would make their people unhappy. The obvious result is a Christianity that is pathetically shallow -- if, indeed, it is even Christianity at all! True Christianity manifests itself in what we cry over and what we laugh about.

In matters of spiritual life and health, mourning is not optional. Spiritual mourning is necessary for salvation. No one is truly Christian who has not mourned over his or her sins. You cannot be forgiven if you are not sorry for your sins. Because there is one thing worse than sin and that is the denial of sin, which makes forgiveness impossible. In fact, the saddest thing in life is not a mourning heart, but a heart that is incapable of grief over sin, for it is a heart without grace. Without poverty of spirit no one enters the kingdom of God. Likewise, without its emotional counterpart -- grief over sin -- no one receives the comfort of forgiveness and salvation.

Moreover, for Christians, mourning over sin is also essential for ongoing spiritual health. R. Kent Hughes notes that the verb used in this verse is the most intensive of the nine verbs employed in the New Testament for mourning, and it is continuous. Godly believers, therefore, perpetually mourn, and thus perpetually repent of their sins. And what is the result of our mourning? In the first Beatitude we saw that an ongoing poverty of spirit leaves us open to the ongoing blessings of the kingdom. Here, our ongoing mourning opens us to His unspeakable comfort and joy.

Lastly, notice that this comfort is actually immediate. Don't misinterpret the future tense, which Hughes states is merely used to sequence mourning and comfort because the actual sense of Christ's words is, "Blessed are the mourners, for they will be immediately comforted, and they will continue to be so." And notice, above all, that the basis for this comfort is forgiveness. Believers are the only people in the world who are free from the guilt of their sins. The word "they" is emphatic. The sense is: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they alone will be comforted." We can actually know we are mourners if we have the paradoxically comforting sense of God's forgiveness. This forgiveness is also accompanied by changed lives, diminishing the sources of so much personal sorrow -- arrogance, judgmentalism, selfishness, jealousy among others. Therefore, comfort springs from within -- literally from changed lives. May this be true of each of us.