Devotion #2 – Matthew 5:4

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” The second installment of Beatitudes Jesus proclaimed in His Sermon on the Mount focuses on the process of mourning, and this is an easy verse to take out of context when we are faced with the issue of death. Logically, when we read this verse, immediately our minds filter to the comfort God promises when we lose a loved one. As difficult as the circumstance may be, Christians tend to cling to this verse for healing when faced with the reality of living life apart from someone whose impact on their life is immense. Make no mistake, there is nothing wrong with leaning upon Christ in times of mourning for strength and comfort, but what Jesus is addressing in Matthew 5:4 is a passionate mourning over the issue of sin and how that impacts a man’s heart. Remember that the Beatitudes build upon one another, creating a staircase of character attributes that gauge the spiritual temperature of man. Each blessing is a building block that depends on that which precedes it. So in consequential form, it is safe to conclude that the process of mourning sin is integral to becoming poor in spirit. D. Martyn Lloyd Jones describes it this way: “As I confront God and His holiness, and contemplate the life I am meant to live, I see myself, my utter helplessness and hopelessness. I discover my quality of spirit and immediately that makes me mourn. I must mourn about the fact that I am like that. But obviously it does not stop there. A man who truly faces himself, and examines himself and his life, is a man who must of necessity mourn for his sins also, for the things he does…It is a good thing for every man to pause at the end of the day and meditate upon himself, to run quickly over his life, and ask, ‘What have I done, what have I said, what have I thought, how have I behaved with respect to others?’ Now if you do that any night of your life, you will find that you have done things which you should not have done, you will be conscious of having harbored thoughts and ideas and feelings which are quite unworthy. And as he realizes these things, any man who is at all Christian is smitten with a sense of grief and sorrow that he was ever capable of such things in action or in thought, and that makes him mourn. But he does not stop merely at the things he has done, he meditates upon and contemplates his actions and his state and condition of sinfulness, and as he thus examines himself he must go through that experience of Romans 7. He must become aware of these evil principles that are within him. He must ask himself, ‘What is it in me that makes me behave like that? Why should I be irritable? Why should I be bad tempered? Why am I not able to control myself? Why do I harbor that unkind, jealous, and envious thought? What is it in me? And he discovers this war in his members, and he hates it and mourns because of it.” Great sorrow leads to great joy, and without sorrow there is no joy. This is true in how we see ourselves in the light of the truth of God’s Word and it holds true in how we must mourn the sins of others. Look around you—there is no shortage of sinful thoughts and actions surrounding you every day. Yet do you take time to mourn sin or have you become desensitized from it? Are your morals and values convoluted within the melting pot of political correctness and inclusivity? Do you mourn over and pray for God’s deliverance of salvation when you encounter people who blatantly live in contradiction to Biblical truth? Sadly, it is common-place even in the church to cast judgment upon those living in sin, but do you sincerely pray for them? Do you share the Gospel of Christ’s healing by pointing out their faults or by evangelizing through the depravity of your own soul and life experiences? True evangelism comes from a humble heart that is poor in spirit through mourning of sin. If you desire to address the issue of sin in this world, begin with your own heart and mind and allow the transforming power of the Holy Spirit change you from the inside out. If we desire to be sanctified in the image of Christ, we must mourn over sin as He did. Scripture tells us He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief who wept over the city of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41-44) and shed tears of blood in the garden of Gethsemane as he willingly accepted his fate as sin-bearer of mankind (Luke 22:39-46). Therefore, this is the image of mourning we must adopt within our own lives as we live within a sinful world. Again, as Lloyds Jones describes, “The true Christian is never a man who has to put on an appearance of either sadness or joviality. No, no; he is a man who looks at life seriously; he contemplates it spiritually, and he sees in it sin and its effects. He is a serious, sober-minded man. His outlook is always serious, but because of these views which he has, and his understanding of truth, he also has ‘a joy unspeakable and full of glory.’” Therefore, let us not diminish the destructive nature of sin but mourn over it—both in the world we live in and within our own hearts and minds. Only then will we understand the joy God promises to those who are simultaneously willing to speak truth in love to others while taking their own medicine on a daily basis.