Phil Cox

The Beatitudes


(Bible quotations are from the NIV unless otherwise stated)

The Beatitudes
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The Beatitudes - Part 2

Blessed are those who mourn

1st June 2008

Jesus said:

Matthew 5v4
Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.

The world says "Put on a happy face", "Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile", "When you're smiling, when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you". The world is desperately trying to pretend that everything's fine.

That's why the leisure industry is booming. It's why people go shopping at the weekend when they don't really need to buy anything. It's why car boot sales are so successful. It's one reason why we now have shopping on a Sunday. It's why many people take drugs or drink too much. It's why so many people are always listening to music. Because they can't stand silence. Silence makes us think. It puts us in touch with how we really feel. And there's a real danger that we might realise how desperately unhappy we are.

But sometimes we can’t pretend. When a loved one dies, when we lose our health, when we lose our job, or when an important friendship ends, we mourn. And sometimes we know that turning to the bottle, or the drugs, or the party lifestyle, or another shopping trip, just won’t be enough.

It’s then that we know that we need something that we haven’t got. And we mourn.

And sometimes, we can’t ignore the fact that we’re going to die. And we mourn.

And when we see ourselves as we really are: our emptiness, our mortality, our weakness, our sin, we mourn.

And blessed are those that mourn.

Mourning leads us to seek for truth, for comfort, for meaning. We need to know why we’re so sad, and what, if anything, we can do about it. Mourning leads us to think about what life really is, and if there’s life after death, and if it’s going to be any better than life on Earth. And this can lead us to repentance, which brings us to God. And when we turn to God, we are truly comforted.

Romans 7v24-25 says:

"Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord."

And Christians mourn, too. And they should.

In some churches we’e constantly told that we should be “more than conquerors”, that we should be full of “the joy of the Lord”. Both of these are true, of course. But we can be made to feel embarrassed if there isn't a silly grin on our faces morning, noon and night. This is unbalanced. We’re to be like Christ. In Isaiah 53v3 (AV), Jesus is described as:

a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

Luke 19v41-42 says:

As He approached Jerusalem and saw the city, He wept over it and said 'If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace...'.

So we see it’s OK to weep, to mourn. More than that, it is blessed. When we mourn over loss, or wickedness, or sickness, or loneliness – our own or someone else's – we share God's emotions.

We mourn for our country, for war zones, for the suffering in the world. And it leads us to pray. And God answers prayer.

I hope you pray for the lost to find salvation. Some of us might be praying for this because we want our church to grow in number. I think a purer and rather more effective motivation to pray for the lost to be saved is because they’re very, very unhappy (although they usually won’t admit it) and they're going to hell.

That’s something worth mourning about.