Word of Salvation – Vol. 36 No. 12 – March 1991
Congratulations To Mourners
Sermon by Rev S. Voorwinde on Matthew 5:4
Scriptures: Luke 6:17-26, James 4:1-12
Introduction
How do you make people think? This has been the basic question facing preachers and teachers throughout the course of history. How have they solved this fundamental problem? One way is by asking questions and provoking discussion. Another is by speaking in parables or symbols. But perhaps the most effective way to make people think is by using the paradox. And what is a paradox?
A paradox is a statement that seems to bring two opposite ideas together. Let me give you a few examples. I heard a person say once: ‘Even when I was little I was big.’ Another paradox would be: ‘She plays the part of a poor little rich girl.’ The famous psychologist, Sigmund Freud, summarized much of his teaching in a paradox: ‘The child is the father of the man.’ A paradox, then, is a mind-teaser. It gets you thinking.
The Bible itself uses a lot of paradoxes. Paul, for example, describes himself as ‘poor yet making many rich’, and as ‘having nothing, yet possessing all things.’ Again he says: When I am weak then I am strong’. Paul seized his readers’ attention. He made them think.
The same was true of Christ. There He was on a hill facing a crowd of Mediterranean peasants. How was He going to make such people think? He used a paradox: ‘Blessed are those who mourn.’ It was almost like saying: ‘Happy are the unhappy!’ Now what do you do with a statement like this? How can it be explained? How can you, too, be a happy mourner?
So for a start then let’s try to unravel this paradox. Who is the ‘blessed mourner’? We had to have a good look at this word ‘blessed’. It’s not quite the same as ‘happy’.
Blessedness and happiness are not identical. Happiness is how I feel within myself. Blessedness is what God says about me. If I mourn He pronounces me blessed. So the word blessed’ doesn’t exactly mean ‘happy’. But rather the ‘blessed’ man is the lucky man, the fortunate man, the person to be envied. He’s the one who’s got it all together – he’s got it made. And this makes Jesus’ paradox stand out even more. ‘How lucky are those who mourn! How fortunate they are! How much to be envied!’ Here’s a statement that’s designed to shock the system. It’s meant to blow your mind. Jesus is here speaking to the truly fortunate of this world. You might say that He’s offering His congratulations. But he’s not congratulating a young couple at their wedding, or a mother with her brand new baby, or a student at his graduation, or a politician who has won an election. He is congratulating people whom we would never think of in those terms:
‘Congratulations to the poor in spirit.’
‘Congratulations to the meek.’
‘Congratulations to the pure in heart.’
In fact He is even offering congratulations to those who would receive our condolences. Where we would send our sympathy cards, He says: ‘Congratulations to those who mourn.’ Where we would say ‘I’m sorry’ He says, ‘I’m delighted.’ Now all this might sound very hard-hearted. How callous and insensitive can you get! If you deserved a card of sympathy and I were to send you a note of congratulations you would think I were the most unfeeling person you’d ever met. And you might even think the same of Jesus until you realize the kind of mourners He’s referring to.
In the Beatitudes the mourners of vs.4 are the poor in spirit of vs.3. And just as the poverty is not financial poverty, the mourning is not natural mourning. It is spiritual poverty and spiritual mourning. The poor in spirit are those who see how helpless and hopeless they really are. They see Christ in all His purity and they see how filthy and polluted they are themselves. But does it end there? No! Once you’ve realized you are hopeless and helpless, filthy and polluted, then what do you do? You don’t think of excuses. You don’t blame someone else. You mourn. And what kind of mourning is this? It is Christian mourning. It is mourning over sin. The Christian must ask himself: ‘Why is it I behave the way I do? Why should I be irritable? Why should I be bad-tempered? Why am I not able to control myself? Why do I harbour that unkind, jealous and envious thoughts? What is it in me?’ He hates his sin and he mourns over it. This is genuine Christian experience. And it is to this kind of person that Jesus says: ‘Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.’
So let me ask you: Do you mourn over your sins? Do you? Be honest now when was the last time you were mournful because you knew you had sinned? Does this Beatitude fit you? ‘But I thought that the Christian life was supposed to be joyful and happy. Surely that doleful approach went out with the dark ages.’ Yes, maybe so but there’s a Biblical balance that we mustn’t lose sight of. A leading evangelical churchman has given a timely warning, and he puts it like this:
‘I feel that we evangelical Christians, by making much of grace, sometimes thereby make light of sin. There is not enough sorrow for sin among us… we need to observe that the Christian life, according to Jesus, is not all joy and laughter. Some Christians seem to imagine that, especially if they are filled with the Spirit, they must wear a perpetual grin on their face and be continuously boisterous and bubbly. How unbiblical can one become? No. In Luke’s version of the Sermon Jesus added to this beatitude a solemn woe: ‘Woe to you that laugh now.’ The truth is that there are such things as Christian tears, and too few of us ever weep them.’
And why is this? Why are there so few Christian tears today? Why is there so little mourning over sin? Listen just for a moment to Christians of a bygone age and you’ll notice that this kind of sorrow wasn’t foreign to them. The English Reformer, Bishop Cranmer, wrote a Lord’s Supper service for the Church of England in 1562. In it he included these words:
‘We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness.’
In the eighteenth century David Brainerd, one of the first missionaries to the American Indians, wrote in his journal:
‘In my morning devotions my soul was exceedingly melted,
and bitterly mourned over my exceeding sinfulness and vileness.
Admittedly the words may sound old fashioned, but why are these thoughts so strange to us? Why is there a drought today when it comes to the holy water of Christian tears? Why is there so little in the way of godly sorrow and mourning and weeping?
I’ll tell you why! It’s because in so much Christian thinking today there is a defective sense of sin and a defective doctrine of sin. There is not the real deep conviction of sin as once was the case. Somehow we’ve made it all so cheap and superficial. And we take it so easy: ‘She’ll be right, mate. God won’t mind if I lust or lose my temper or use bad language. And you can still be a Christian even if you haven’t really forgiven that brother or sister and restored that relationship. And surely God’s big enough to overlook that little bit of gossip and slander and the pride that I feel in my heart.’
Why is sin taken so lightly, brothers and sisters, when it was that sin that nailed Jesus to the cross? Why take it so lightly, when God obviously takes it so seriously? Isn’t it time for some Christian mourning and some good old- fashioned repentance?
2. ‘Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.’
Jesus never tells us to wallow in our sorrow. The comfort follows the mourning as surely as dawn follows darkness. But it is always the negative which comes first and only then the positive:
You must be poor in spirit before you can be filled with the Spirit.
You must mourn over sin before you can have the joy of salvation.
An old English proverb says: ‘No sweet without sweat.’ It is the same for the Christian no joy without mourning. If you have mourned over your sin you will be a truly joyful person. If you have never mourned over sin you may well wonder whether you are really a Christian.
Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones has put it very well:
‘Conviction must precede conversion, a real sense of sin must come, before there can be a true joy of salvation. Now that is the whole essence of the gospel. So many people spend all their lives trying to find this Christian joy. They say they would give the whole world if only they could find it, or could be like some other person who has it. Well, I suggest that in 99 cases out of 100 this is the explanation. They fail to see that they must be convicted of sin before they can ever experience joy … They want joy apart from the conviction of sin. But that is impossible: it can never be obtained. Those who are going to be converted and who wish to be truly happy and blessed are those who first of all mourn.’
A deep doctrine of sin, a high doctrine of joy, and the two together produce this blessed, joyful person who mourns and who at the same time is comforted.
And why is he comforted? Because the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, lives in his heart. And therefore the comfort that he experiences is not a natural joy but a supernatural joy. It is not something that you can work up and even less is it something that is artificially produced, but it is the work of the Holy Spirit. ‘Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted’ – and they will be comforted in the deepest possible way because the Comforter himself will put heavenly joy in their hearts.
But that’s not all, and here comes the surprising part. The Comforter not only comforts, but it was He who brought conviction of sin in the first place. He convicts first and He comforts afterwards. And it is He who enables you to mourn first and to rejoice afterwards. If you are doing this then it is clear evidence that the Holy Spirit is living and working in your heart.
If you are mourning over sin (and not just because you have been caught, but because God has convicted you in your heart), then you are doing what no human being by nature would do. Do you ever find people mourning over sins that haven’t caught up with them? And even when people’s sins do catch up with them genuine sorrow is still a rare thing. It is not a natural thing for us to mourn over sin – it is a highly supernatural thing which only comes through the operation of the Holy Spirit.
Do you know what it is to mourn over sin? ‘Then congratulations’ says Jesus, ‘you are doing what no man can do on his own. And it shows that your naturalization has come through – you are now a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. That kingdom is a kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Therefore you will be comforted.
3. ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’
But the Christian does not stop with Himself. He also mourns over the sins of others.
Christ had no sin of His own to mourn over, but He did mourn over sin. In Luke 19 we see Him weeping over the sins of Jerusalem. Instead of being glad that He was coming to the end of His journey, He mourned because of the city’s sin.
In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul tells his readers to be ashamed of themselves. One of their members had been having sexual relations with his step-mother. Yet they were arrogant and proud of their spiritual condition. Paul said: ‘You ought rather to mourn.’ Yes, the Christian must mourn over the sin around him.
How about the world today? What do you do after you’ve read the newspaper? What is your attitude toward the state of society and the moral muddle we’re in? By and large the older generation condemns, the younger generation is resentful, and pretty well everyone is disgusted. But who mourns? We do not need bitterness and hate but mourning and love. And strangely enough mourning leads to change. Christ mourned over Jerusalem. Then He went in there and threw all the merchants out of the temple. The Corinthians mourned over the sinful member. He repented. And let me give you a more modern example. In 1886 there was a spilt in the national church in Holland. The group that split away was nick-named ‘The Mourning Church’ (‘De Doleerende Kerk’). Do you know that that church did more to change Holland than any single force since the Reformation? First, a Christian University was founded, the Free University of Amsterdam. The new church joined with smaller churches in 1895. In 1905 a Christian prime minister was elected. Christian newspapers were published daily. Christian schools were built. The church grew rapidly. By 1940 it had 700,000 members. It produced some of the finest thinkers, theologians and statesmen that Holland has ever known. In addition to this, large numbers of missionaries were sent to Indonesia. The foundation was laid for the Indonesian church which up until recently was among the fastest growing in the world. This is what can happen when people mourn over sin and do something about it. Mourning brings change.
Are you mourning for Australia and the world today? Are you mourning over the crime, immorality and hate that surround us today? Christ mourned for Jerusalem. The Corinthians mourned for their sinful member. But what about those who do not mourn? Does the Bible have anything to say about them? Yes it does. In the ninth chapter of his prophecy Ezekiel records a vision. God calls to Himself seven men. One of them is clothed in linen and has a writing case in his hand. He is a clerk. The other six each have a weapon in their hand. They are executioners. God tells the clerk to put a mark on the foreheads of all those who had mourned over the sins of Jerusalem. Then He commands the other six to kill every person who does not have the mark whether that person be an old man, a young man, a girl, a woman, or a young child. They are not to spare. They are to slaughter all those who do not have the mark. Have you mourned over the sins around us? Do you have the mark?
Conclusion
The mark reappears again in Revelation 7 where it is placed on the foreheads of all the servants of God. Then in Revelation 14 we are finally told what the mark is it is the name of the Lamb, Jesus Christ, and God His Father. God has sealed His own for eternity and they will forever live with Him on Mt. Zion, the New Jerusalem, the capital of the heavenly kingdom. Do you have the mark?
If so, then what are perhaps the most beautiful words that have ever been written apply to you. They’re in Revelation 21:
‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, and I heard a great voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be with them; He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’
How blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted!
But let me ask you again: Do you have the mark?
AMEN