Matthew 5:4 - 2nd Beatitude

Gospel of Matthew — Steve Gregg

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Matthew 5:4 - 2nd Beatitude

Gospel of MatthewSteve Gregg

In Matthew 5:4, Jesus teaches his followers to be "blessed" when they mourn. This may seem like an odd concept, as mourning is typically associated with feelings of sorrow and discomfort. However, the speaker suggests that there is a deeper meaning to this teaching. Mourning can lead to repentance for past sins, which in turn can bring comfort and forgiveness from God. By embracing our grief and seeking out God's guidance, we can transform our lives and find peace in the face of difficulty.

Transcript

Today we come to the second of the Beatitudes in Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount. These are eight statements that begin this famous sermon, and they all begin with the same word. Actually, the same two.

Blessed are. And after that, we have certain descriptions of classes of persons whom Jesus obviously declares to be blessed, which means happy or enviable. These people are to be envied.

These people are fortunate. Now, sometimes the people he mentions, the class that he calls fortunate, are not those that you would naturally assume to be fortunate people. And so Jesus justifies his statement in each case by saying for, in other words, because.

So if he says a certain class of people are blessed, he says they are blessed because of a certain thing, and he tells what that thing is. Now, in verse 4 of Matthew chapter 5, we have the second Beatitude. It says, blessed are those who mourn.

Now, you would not think, necessarily, that people who mourn, that is, those who weep, those who are in mourning, those who are sad, those who seem depressed, you would not think that these people are to be envied. We spend a great deal of time and money trying to entertain ourselves against sadness, trying to take our mind off of things that make us unhappy. We spend a great deal of time and money on entertainment, and even on counselors.

And in some cases, people use antidepressant drugs and so forth to avoid feeling low. And therefore, to say that people who are mourning, or people who feel low, are blessed and enviable and fortunate, is certainly a statement that goes against our conventional thinking. And we should not be surprised if Jesus, who came down from heaven, says things that go against our conventional thinking.

Remember what God said back in Isaiah 55, that my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts. He said, as the heavens are higher than the earth, so high are my thoughts above your thoughts, and my ways above your ways. We should not be surprised if this God, who is so high above us and so different in his thoughts, when he sends somebody down to tell us his thoughts, that we find them to go against the grain of our own thinking.

Now, Christians are people who are at least committed to change in their minds. That's what the word repent means, to change your mind. And to become a Christian, you must repent.

You must change your mind. And the principle mind change is that you must change your mind about who's boss. Before you surrender to Christ, you are acting as if you are the boss.

You are the one in charge of your life. Your rights, your privileges, your opportunities are all that matter. When you change your mind about that, that's what repentance means, that means that you change your mind about who's the boss.

And, of course, you determine that God is the boss, and his son, Jesus Christ, is the Lord, that he has sent for us to learn from and to obey. And, therefore, when you have repented, you've changed your mind from the way that natural people think to the way that God thinks. And you set about to do and to think what God says is desirable.

Now, Jesus said, Blessed are those who mourn. It's interesting that the word blessed, one of its principal translations, the Greek word's translations, is happy. And yet it would sound like a contradiction.

Happy are those who mourn. But, of course, what he means is that people who are mourning, at least a certain group of people who are mourning, and we need to specify, of course, what he has in mind when he speaks about those who mourn. Some of them have a particular reason for being happy that may not be evident to those looking on.

In fact, it may not even be evident to them while they are mourning. But Jesus gave a reason why those who mourn should be regarded as fortunate. It says, For they shall be comforted.

Now, that's an interesting idea that it's a blessing to be sad. It's a blessing to be bereft. It's a blessing to be down and mourning because you will experience comfort.

And he means, of course, from God. It sounds a little bit like husbands and wives who like to fight and argue because it's so much fun to make up. That's not exactly what Jesus has in mind, of course.

But the idea is interesting because we might have thought it's better not to mourn and not to need to be comforted. I mean, if there's two classes of people, those who mourn and are therefore comforted, as Jesus says, or those who never mourn so they never need comfort and they're always happy, some people say, Well, I'd rather be in the second category. I'd not just as soon be one of those who mourns and then is comforted.

How about if I just have unbroken comfort, unbroken happiness? You know, the Apostle Paul was of a mind similar to Jesus on this, obviously. And he said in Second Corinthians, chapter one, verse three, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of all mercies, the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. He says, For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also abounds through Christ.

Now, this is interesting because Paul starts with the beatitude too, but this one is aimed at God. Jesus says, Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. Paul says, Blessed is the God of all comfort.

God is a blessed God who comforts us, as he says, in all our tribulation. Now, again, wouldn't it be nicer if we didn't have to have tribulation at all? And then we wouldn't need to be comforted. But Paul doesn't seem to agree with that.

He seems to feel that there's some special privilege in experiencing the comfort of God in tribulation. He says, One of the advantages is that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble with the comfort which we ourselves are comforted by God. That is to say, if you suffer and God comforts you and you are encouraged, then you have a point of being able to relate with others who suffer and to share the encouragement with them that you have received.

It is an encouragement when you are suffering to be with somebody who has been through suffering also and who has been comforted. I remember many years ago, this would be 17, 18 years ago, I guess, I was living in Soquel, California, close to where many of our listeners are. And my wife was out walking on the road and she was hit by a car and was killed.

And of course, many people in the church came out to comfort me when they heard that she had been killed. One person who particularly I appreciated his visit and I found very comforting was a man who himself had been in an accident and had lost a wife and a child a few years earlier. And yet he was going on with God.

He was serving the Lord. And seeing him appear at my door right after my wife died was especially meaningful to me. I mean, everyone in the church wanted to comfort me, but most of them had never lost a loved one.

Most of them had never been comforted through that kind of affliction before. And many of them, as you must know from trying to comfort people who have been through deep waters of affliction that you have never been through, many of them just didn't know what to say. And yet this brother came and I knew that he had lost a wife and a child in an accident not many years earlier.

And when he walked in the door, he didn't have to say a thing. I knew that there was a trophy of the grace of God, a man who had been through hard sufferings and who had been comforted and had received the grace to be faithful. And it was more meaningful to me than I can explain.

It's very difficult to visit somebody in the hospital or somebody who's going through great suffering that you've never been through, the like of, and to know what to say. I mean, I'm not saying you can't say anything, but one thing that really you can't say is, I know what it's like. I know what you're going through.

And sometimes that's a very important thing to be able to say. If you desire to comfort others who are in affliction, then Paul said it's a great blessing to have gone through comfort so that we can receive comfort and consolation from God. And as our tribulation increases, so does the consolation we receive, Paul said.

And that enables us to minister to others who are in need. But I don't think that that's necessarily the principle thought Jesus had in mind. It certainly is not absent if we would take the full range of things that Jesus' comments could mean.

But when Jesus said, Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. I believe what he means is people who are mourning over their sinfulness. Now, it may not be the only category he has in mind, but he has in mind here people who are turning to God.

He's mentioned the people who are beggars in spirit in the previous Beatitude. He talks about those who are meek and who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness. He's talking about people who are sensitive about their own spiritual condition.

And those who mourn, if he is talking about mourning over their own spiritual condition, then it has a very special sense, which it would not be the same as being bereaved of a loved one or simply going through trials. If a person is sorry for his sins or her sins to the point of mourning, and mourning is... By the way, we need to make a distinction between mourning and just crying. I have on many occasions ministered on the streets and had occasion to minister to men who were drunk.

And I would preach the gospel to them and I'd try to minister to them to turn them to Christ, which is, of course, their only hope of not ruining their lives further, but also necessary for all men to come to Christ so that God's purposes can be fulfilled in their lives. And I have on many occasions heard and witnessed drunken men on the streets cry about their sins and just go into an emotional pity party over how much they've ruined their lives. Now, I'm not saying that that can't ever be true repentance.

I believe that true repentance often is accompanied by that kind of a show of emotion. But what I'm saying is that show of emotion sometimes exists without any repentance accompanying it. Because repentance is a change of mind, principally.

A change of mind about who you will serve, about which direction you will go. Now, it is often accompanied with mourning, and should be. You see, if you've lived your life going a certain way, assuming that you have the right to do what you want, you have the right to be happy, you have the right to find your own way, to ignore God, to maybe look to Him later on in life, but to seek out your own enjoyment and your own fulfillment in life, and to do things your way.

If you act as if you own yourself, and you do that all your life, and then you change your mind about that, that is, you repent and you come around to the truth, and that truth is that God owns you. Let me interject this here. What a ridiculous thing it is for anyone to think they own themselves anyway.

How did you come to own yourself? You didn't buy yourself. You didn't make yourself. That's how we usually come to be in possession of things and to own them.

We own them by making them or buying them or inheriting them or something. But we didn't make ourselves. We didn't inherit ourselves.

We didn't buy ourselves. We have done nothing that would give us any title to ourselves. It says in Psalm 100 that we are His people, meaning God's people, and the sheep of His pasture.

It is He that has made us, not we ourselves. We didn't make ourselves. He made us.

Therefore, it's quite obvious He owns us. We don't own ourselves. And what a shock it is to the person who comes to a full realization, whether in their youth or in their old age, it's worse in old age, to realize that they've lived out such a portion of their life as if they belong to themselves and making decisions for themselves as if they had the right to decide for themselves.

And then they come to the realization, I don't own myself. I never have owned myself. God owns me.

God made me. Christ purchased me. I belong to Him, and I have been robbing Him of these years of my life when I should have been doing the thing that pleases Him, and instead I've been doing the thing that pleases myself.

If that thing really comes down on you in a full realization, and you have a full change of mind in this area, which is what repentance is, there will be almost certainly emotion. And not everybody can cry. A lot of people have dry eyes and simply don't know how to shed tears.

Jesus didn't say you have to shed tears. And a lot of people who do shed tears never really have a change of mind of the kind we're talking about. But if that change of mind really happens, there will certainly be deep regret.

There will be deep, thorough regret over the years of life that we've robbed God of by pretending that we owned ourselves. And this regret will produce mourning. You see, mourning and weeping are not exactly the same thing.

Weeping is where you actually shed some tears and you have a little time of crying. Mourning is more what happens when you lose a loved one. When somebody dies, you go through mourning over that person.

That takes a little longer. That's a more protracted thing. It shapes your personality more.

To have a moment of disappointment in which you cry may not shape your personality at all. But to lose a loved one or to have a similar traumatic experience through which you go through a period of mourning, that is going to change you in many ways. It will change your perception of things a great deal.

I remember, as I mentioned earlier, my wife died. Going through that experience changed my personality to a certain extent. I look at things much more seriously now.

I'm much more living every day in the awareness of my own mortality and looking more at eternity and so forth as issues. Not that I didn't before, but it had a tremendous effect in that direction on my life. That's a good one.

Thank God that I went through that. What I'm saying is that when you mourn in repentance for your sinful past, it's supposed to be something that colors your personality the rest of your life. It doesn't mean that you're weeping all your life.

I certainly don't weep over my wife who died almost 20 years ago. I don't even feel emotion about it anymore. But it certainly did make me a more sober, a more grave individual than I used to be.

For my money, it's desirable. Frankly, not that I want to lose a wife again, but what God lets you go through, he does for your good. I can say that that kind of mourning over such a loss as that does change you in a positive way, at least can.

Now, repentance should also. What you're mourning over there is the death of your old life. It's really the fact that you've wasted those years and can never get them back and that those years were years you should have been serving God because he owned those years and you stole them from him and you can't recover them.

It's like losing a loved one. You can't get him back. And it's something that changes the way you view life forever afterward.

And that mourning is an attitude of sobriety and an attitude of maybe at times even ongoing melancholy. Although, of course, the Christian life is full of paradoxes. In one sense, it's a life of rejoicing.

In another sense, it's a life of mourning. And there's sort of intermittent rejoicing and mourning, but there's also a sense in which these two things are held in tension. At the same moment, we can be rejoicing in our salvation and still mourning the years that we did not give to God.

And that mourning will cause us to be ever more vigilant not to rob God of any more of our life and to serve him with every day that we have left. Now, that kind of mourning will be comforted. Now, not all mourning is followed with comfort.

Certainly, there are people who mourn and don't know God and they don't receive any comfort, for one thing. There are people who, for example, lose loved ones and they don't know God. Now, Paul said in 1 Thessalonians 4, he says, I don't want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep in Jesus, meaning those who have died.

He says, lest you should mourn as others who have no hope. When my wife died, I actually, of course, I went through mourning for her. But at the same time, I was rejoicing because I knew where she was and I knew I would see her again.

There was a mixture of great sadness at her being taken from me. But there was gladness that she was in heaven with the Lord and I knew it and I knew I would see her again there. And there was this mixture of sorrow and comfort.

Now, if I had not known the Lord, I would have had the sorrow without the comfort. And Paul said he doesn't want us to be ignorant of what happens to Christians when they die, lest we should mourn or sorrow like others who have no hope. The mourning of the believer is mixed with comfort.

And if we lose loved ones, we will be comforted. But there are people who mourn and don't have any comfort. They don't know God and there's no comfort for them.

And therefore, not all mourning is mourning that promises comfort. A lot of people mourn and go through great periods of depression even over their own misfortunes because of their selfishness. What I mean is I'm not saying their misfortunes come upon them because of their selfishness, but their mourning about it is because of their selfishness.

They can't see how any such thing bad should happen to them. Although amazingly, they never think that way when bad things have happened to others that they're not close to. But somehow when something touches them, they're grieved, they indulge in self-pity, they go into depression.

This is not mourning. This is not the mourning of which there is a promise of comfort. There is a carnal kind of mourning, a carnal kind of suffering that's worldly.

It's not godly and there's no comfort promised to that kind of sorrow that's just motivated by self-pity and self-centeredness. Paul speaks about two kinds of sorrow in 2 Corinthians 7 and verse 10. He says this, For godly sorrow produces repentance to salvation, not to be regretted, but the sorrow of the world produces death.

Now Paul talks about the sorrow of the world. There's no comfort in that. That's a person who's going through sorrow and they don't know God.

They're in the world and they can come down to their gray hairs in death through sorrow. A person can pine away to death out of great sorrow and depression and bereavement and some even resort to suicide. This is not what people are supposed to do or what people need to do.

Of course, we're not supposed to have the sorrow of the world. We're supposed to be committed to God so that all things are received from his hand, hard things and easy things. Things we consider blessings and things we consider disappointments.

They can all be received from his hand because we know he's a sovereign God who not even a sparrow falls to the ground and dies without his consent. But there is that sorrow, Paul says, unlike the sorrow of the world, that is a godly sorrow. This is 2 Corinthians 7 and 10.

He says the godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation and that is not to be regretted. So although sorrow is something that people typically avoid at great expense, whether it's by going to psychiatrists and getting medications or whether it's going to counselors or whether it's just insulating themselves against all disasters as best they can. Sorrow is something people try to avoid and indeed some sorrow is truly not a blessing.

But that is the sorrow of the world. It is the sorrow that comes upon a self-centered person who can't help but be sorry for himself because self is all that he cares about. But a person whose sorrow is over his own sin because he cares about God and he cares about having offended God and he realizes that the years he has spent away from God are years that he has robbed God of because God is his true owner.

That person can be mournful over those years lost in a way that leads to true repentance. And true repentance is not a thing to regret. It is not always the case that we need to avoid sorrow at all costs.

I'm not saying we should go looking for sorrow or have a melancholy aspect to us all the time. But I am saying that some sorrow, first of all, is unavoidable and secondly, some sorrow is desirable. It is a sweet feeling to experience sorrow over your own sins and to know the comfort of God as He comes and announces to you that your sin is forgiven.

That you can go down to your house justified today because you have been called out to God and you've mourned over your sin and you're going to receive forgiveness and go on with God from that day on. What a comfort that is. What a blessing it is.

That's all for today. We'll talk again tomorrow.