Matthew 5:4 Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

1:35And so, what was the class? Well, it was a class taught by Dr. Lori Santos titled Psychology and the Good Life. At a place where you think that everyone would be happy, I mean, these people got into Yale after all. What we see here is the complete opposite. 25% of the undergraduate population signs up to take a class on the good life. I think one student who was interviewed for the story summed it up well, summed up the interest for the class well when she said that a lot of us are anxious, stressed, and unhappy.

2:2225% of the student body, and I'm sure more than that could relate with those feelings, but 25% signed up for this class. And while many of us would take issue with the picture of the good life that Dr. Lori Santos paints, I think the story highlights that the longing for happiness is something that we all have. We all desire to be happy and to have a rich and fulfilling life. The problem, though, is that just like these students at Yale, we have no idea what it means to be happy.

3:00Alone, where to find it. Our culture tells us that happiness is some kind of inner peace or some sense of contentment, maybe even excitement. And we often hear people giving advice to one another, saying, just do whatever makes you happy. You do you. At the end of the day, it seems like our culture is offering us a definition of happiness, which is, make it whatever you want it. Happiness is however you define it. And it seems that our definitions are always wrong, since so many can relate with this student who characterized herself and her fellow classmates as anxious, stressed, and unhappy.

3:46I think we can all relate. We live in a very anxious generation, a very anxious culture. And it's not just something outside the church, it's something that we face and is very real and true of us. Because in the church, we have just as many difficulties and challenges answering what is the good life, what is happiness. You might have had this experience when you're in a small group or a discussion and someone mentions the word happiness, we instantly pivot to, well, it doesn't matter, Jesus or God doesn't care, doesn't want us to be happy. It's all about joy.

4:19And in some sense, distinguishing between happiness and joy can be helpful with how our culture uses those words. Biblically, there's not much of a difference. In fact, obviously, there's no distinction between happiness or joy as the Bible speaks about both of those things. Well, coming into this culture where it seems like in the culture and in the church, we are confused about what happiness is, but we know we long for it and we desire it. Into this confusing situation, Jesus speaks the Beatitudes, showing us where the good life is found, showing us what it looks like to truly flourish right here and right now.

5:06In the Beatitudes, Jesus gives us nine statements about what the good life looks like. We saw the first one last week where Pastor Mark preached on blessed or happy or flourishing are the poor in spirit. And today we're going to be looking at the second Beatitude in verse 4. Blessed are those who mourn. The main point of our passage this morning, I think, the thing that Jesus desires for us to see and to grasp and to believe this morning is that for you and me, if we want to experience the good life, we must embrace mourning.

5:48If you want to experience the good life right here and right now, then Jesus is calling us to embrace mourning. Sermon is going to have three movements this morning. First, we're going to unpack this idea of the good life. What is that? What does that mean? And where do we see that? Where is that in Matthew 5, 4? Where is that in the Beatitudes? Then we're going to see what it means to mourn. And lastly, we're going to see how mourning leads to the good life. So, first, what is the good life?

6:28Verse 4, like all of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, begins blessed. While this translation might have made sense in 1611 with the original King James Version, today this word blessed or blessed carries just a very different connotation that can cause us to miss what Jesus is doing here. You see, for me and you today, when we use the word blessed, we commonly think of God actively blessing someone, right? Or blessing someone or something. We can pray for God to bless our food or bless our time with a friend.

7:11But that's not what's going on here. Jesus isn't pronouncing a blessing on those who are mourning, almost as in if you are mourning, then God is going to actively bless you in this way. That's not what Jesus is getting at here. What Jesus is doing is he is highlighting a state or A way of being in the world that leads to happiness, that leads to flourishing. He's painting a picture of the way of life, a way of being in the world that others will look at and will say, That person is flourishing.

7:47That person is living the good life. Even this point here is missed in the sense that we call these things the Beatitudes, which they're called the Beatitudes because that comes from the Latin word for happy. Like these words have always been about what makes life happy. How can we live the happy or the good life? So, here in the Beatitudes, Jesus is talking about happiness, about what the good life looks like. Now, again, I know the word happiness can be challenging for us because in our culture, there's not a very standard definition of what happiness looks like, which is why I really appreciate the way that one pastor and commentator, Jonathan Pennington, has translated this passage where instead of using the word blessed or using the word happy, he recommends that we use the word flourishing. Just love that picture of flourishing, right? It takes us back to Psalm 1, where we see the tree that is blessed, the person that is blessed is like the tree that is flourishing, that is by streams of water that's bearing its fruit in season and out of season. That's the picture here. The picture here is of someone living the flourishing life, the fruitful life, the tree that is by streams of water.

9:09Here in the Beatitudes, Jesus is showing us the way of living in the world that results in flourishing. I think the ESV study Bible sums it up well when it says that blessed here means being in a state of well-being in relationship with God. Blessed here, he's highlighting being in a state of well-being, of flourishing in relationship with God. So here we can see that the Beatitudes are Jesus' answer to the universal question of how can I be truly happy. Jesus here is answering that question that all those students at Yale and you and I desire to know, and that is, how can we live the good life? How can we live a life that is flourishing and truly happy? But for you and for me and for all who are trusting in Jesus this morning, his answer isn't just one option among many. It's not just one option that we can pick and choose from. Because Jesus, as the source of all blessing, happiness, and flourishing, he is the one who created us and who designed us to live. And so Jesus' answer must be our answer because it is the only one that will act. Lead to the good life. Jesus' answer about what flourishing looks like is the only answer that will truly lead to flourishing. I think C.S. Lewis said this so helpfully, where he said that God designed the human to run on himself. God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from himself because it is not there. There is no such thing. If we truly want to live a happy life, we must find it in Jesus alone, because there is no such thing apart, there is no such thing, there is no good life apart from him. And so here in the Beatitudes, Jesus is showing us how we can be happy, truly happy, in its truest and deepest sense. But as we saw last week, and as we're going to see throughout this entire series, Jesus' vision of the good life isn't exactly what we think it would be. If we were drawing up our picture of what we think the good life would look like, it doesn't look exactly like the life Jesus paints. I mean, I don't know about you and me, but thinking about Pastor Mark's sermon last week, my vision of the good life doesn't have the word poor in it anywhere. And yet Jesus tells us that the good life, happiness, flourishing is found in being poor in spirit.

12:01So for you and me, who are so tempted to just fall into the trap that the American dream is the good life, Jesus here is casting a vision of the good life that looks very different. And so as we're going to continue to see in Matthew 5, 4, in God's kingdom, if we want to experience the good life, the blessed life that he talks about, we must embrace mourning. So to help us better understand Jesus' upside-down vision of the good life, let's dive back into Matthew 4 as we see what it means to mourn. Matthew 5, 4, Jesus continues, he says, Blessed are flourishing are those who mourn. The word mourn here is the same word used throughout the New Testament to highlight our grieving. Blessed are those who mourn or who grieve. And the Greek translations and the English translations are very similar. Mourning and grieving when Jesus is talking about here means exactly what you and I think of when we think of mourning and grieving. Instantly, pictures come to mind of someone grieving or mourning the loss of a loved one, or mourning or grieving the death of a dream. All the things in life that cause us to mourn or grieve, that is what Jesus is talking about here.

13:28It certainly includes all of those. Things. But as we dive further into Matthew 5:4, we're going to see that this picture of mourning that Jesus has in mind here isn't just talking about the normal things that we grieve in life, but it is much deeper. It is much bigger than that. I think the key to help us see this deeper sense of mourning that Jesus has in mind for us is it can be helpful for us to know and to see the importance of Isaiah 61 as a backdrop for the Beatitudes and really for the whole Sermon in the Mount in particular, the importance of the passage of Isaiah 61 behind the Beatitudes. If you were to go home later today and read Isaiah 61 and then read the Beatitudes, you would see a lot of similarities as Jesus is picking up words and phrases and themes from Isaiah 61 and he's picking them up and he's explaining that this promise of restoration that you see in Isaiah 61 that the servant is going to bring, that is this picture of the good life that I'm painting for you. In fact, all of Matthew's gospel has Isaiah just as a rich backdrop from the very beginning to the end of it. But to help us get a sense of this mourning and comfort that Jesus is talking about in Matthew 5, 4, I want you to follow along as I read the first three verses from Isaiah 61. In Isaiah 61, Jesus is speaking. Or Isaiah 61, we read, The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me. And here, this me is the servant. This me is Jesus. It says, The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison door to those who are bound, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, to grant to those who mourn in Zion, to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit, that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified. Did you see that there, this repetition of mourning three times in these two verses here? Jesus, the servant of the Lord, promises to comfort and to care for all of those who are mourning. Now, here in Isaiah 61, what are the people mourning? Well, here we see that they are mourning the presence and the effects of sin in their own lives.

16:30In the lives of those around them. This is particularly true in their situation, as Isaiah 61 was written to a people who are in exile. And as we saw time and time again in Jeremiah, exile wasn't pretty. It wasn't like the people were simply relocated from the comfort of their own homes and moved to another comfortable existence in another city. No, exile meant forced removal, untold number of death and loss, oppression by the Babylonians. The people would have faced food scarcity and constantly been on guard, knowing that they were strangers in a foreign land. That is the mourning that Isaiah 61 is talking about. But it's not just these physical sufferings, because there were very real spiritual sufferings that the people were mourning. The Israelites would have been separated from their homeland, would have been separated from their reminders and the presence of God. For the exiles in Israel, or in Egypt, or the exiles from Israel in Babylon, exile would have meant the absence of God from their day-to-day life. All of their reminders of God's presence with them were gone, and they would have lived constantly aware that life was not as it should be. Be. As they looked around, it would have been reminder after reminder that things were not as they should be, and so they would have been filled with mourning, with grief for all of the negative consequences of their sin. And it was in this period of exile that the phrase, this idea of those who mourn, it became identified also with those who were waiting the fulfillment of God's promise of restoration. Those who mourn came to mean not only those who were suffering, who were dealing with the losses and the hard things in life, but those who mourn came to be those who were also not just experiencing the hard things, but those who were looking forward to and who were longing for restoration. Those who were mourning were those who were looking to the day when this servant of the Lord would come, when he would right all wrongs, and when he would begin to reverse the curse and undo all the effects of sin in our world. So here in Matthew 5:4, when Jesus says, Blessed or flourishing are those who mourn, he's speaking not only to those who are grieving the real losses in our life, but he's speaking to those who are actively longing for God to make everything sad come untrue. He's speaking about those. Who see the effects of sin in their own life and in the lives of those they love in this world, and who see the effects of sin all around us and who cry out just like we did in our prayer of lament this morning, and who see the brokenness and who cry out, How long, O Lord? Those are the ones who mourn that Jesus is talking about. Those who mourn are the ones who see and lament the tragedy, the injustice, the evil, the sin, and the death in the world all around us, and who long to see everything made new.

20:12Those who mourn are those who are grieving the effects of sin in their life and then the world around us, and those who are longing for Jesus to come and to make all things right. So, having seen what it means to mourn, let's now answer our last question. The question you've probably been wondering all morning, and that is, how does mourning lead to the good life? This just doesn't make sense to you and me. How in the world is flourishing, how in the world is happiness found in mourning? Well, we find the answer to that in the second part of Matthew 5:4. Here again, what Jesus says. Jesus says, Blessed are those who mourn for or because.

21:01They will be comforted. Blessed are those who mourn, because they will be comforted. It's here in the second half of the verse that we see why Jesus is able to say that mourning leads to the good life, and that is because those who mourn will be comforted. Here we see that according to Jesus' view of the good life, in this post-Genesis 3 world where the effects of sin are all around us, it is not those who never suffer loss or tragedy. It's not those who are insulated and protected from the hard things in life because of their wealth or their privilege who are comforted. No, they will not receive God's comfort. Instead, as Luke tells us in his version of the Beatitudes in Luke 6, that those who laugh now, they will receive God's judgment. That those who laugh and are filled with joy now, they will weep and mourn on that day. But today, for those who grieve and who mourn, who see the brokenness in the world all around us, and who long for Jesus to make it right, they will be comforted. You will be comforted, both now.

22:31And fully on that glorious day when Jesus returns. This is why Jesus can say that those who mourn are blessed. They are in a state of well-being. This is true because they will be the recipients of divine comfort. Because in God's upside-down kingdom, mourning is the vehicle of God's comfort. I mean, this makes sense, right? If you are not mourning, then you don't need comfort. Someone who's full doesn't need food, and someone who isn't grieving doesn't need comfort. But for those of us who are trusting in Jesus, as we experience the real-life effects of sin and brokenness in our lives and as it leads to mourning, Jesus promises us that we will be comforted. In Scripture, we see that God comforts us in many, many different ways. And I just want to highlight three ways that God comforts us, three ways that in the midst of our mourning, right here and right now, that God wants to comfort our hearts and our souls. First, we see that God comforts us in Scripture. In Psalm 119, David writes, When I think of your rules from of old, that's God's word. He says, I take comfort, O Lord. As David faced trial after trial, as he wept and as he mourned over the suffering that he was facing, he turned to God's word and it comforted his soul. I don't know about you, but I know for me in the midst of challenging situations, in the midst of loss and grief and mourning, sometimes Scripture is the last thing that I want to turn to. Sometimes it can be the hardest thing to do, is to open up our word. But here, God wants us to see that in the midst of the challenging and difficult situations of life, those times when we are mourning, God wants to use his word to be a means of grace in our life that we might find much comfort as the Spirit just ministers God's word. So this morning, if you find yourself mourning and grieving, I just want to encourage you to camp out in the Psalms. Psalms like Psalm 13 that we read this morning. Just can't, I mean, more than half of the Psalms are Psalms of lament. They are giving us words to say and pray and cry in the midst of the brokenness that we experience in our lives and as we see the brokenness in our world. So turn to Scripture and receive comfort there. Spend time with Jesus in the Gospels. As you see why he was truly a man of sorrows, acquainted with our griefs, as you walk with Jesus through the gospels, you can see how he can relate with those who mourn, because he was one who mourned. So God comforts us through his word, but he also comforts us through his people. He comforts us through one another. Think in one of my favorite passages, one that has shaped my counseling or my care philosophy, probably more than any other passage. In 2 Corinthians 1, Paul writes, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction or all our suffering, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. See that there? He says, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction. Sisters and brothers, God wants to use you to be a means of comfort to one another. No matter what you've gone through, no matter what your sister or brother is facing, you can be a means of God's comfort to each other.

27:00As I was reading through this, I was just helpfully reminded and kind of corrected in my own heart as to the way that I can think about when I can and when I can't comfort someone. I don't know about you, but for me, so often I can kind of just stop myself from being a means of comfort thinking, I've never gone through what that person's gone through. I see someone facing the death of a loved one, and I've never really had someone very close to me die in that situation, so I feel like I can't really be a means of comfort to that person. Or maybe you can think of another situation where you've just said, like, I've never gone through that. I don't think I can be a means of comfort to them. But here, Paul, here, God is showing us that we can comfort others in any affliction because it is our shared experience of the comfort of God that enables us to be a means of comfort to one another, not our shared experience of suffering or affliction. Now, obviously, if you have gone through something that someone else has also experienced, there is a sense in which you can relate and you have that you too moment where you've gone through what they've gone through and you can perhaps sympathize in ways that I can't. But none of us are off the hook here from being a means of comfort to someone else, no matter what they've gone through, no matter what they're going through. Because as we see here in 2 Corinthians 1, it's our shared comfort. That enables us to be a means of comfort to others, not our shared suffering. So, God comforts us through His Word and through His people, but most significantly, the most prominent way that God comforts us in Scripture, that we see in Scripture that He comforts us, is through His direct and personal comfort for you and for me. As we see in 2 Corinthians 1, God is the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our affliction. He uses means from time to time, but He Himself is directly and personally desires and comforts us. Throughout the Bible, we see a number of metaphors that God uses to help us picture, to help us understand how He relates to us, what His comfort looks like. In Psalm 23, He gives us this picture of a shepherd with his sheep. And in the same way, that the presence of a shepherd was meant to be much comfort to the sheep, God's presence with you and me is meant to give us much comfort as it reminds us of the security and the safety that we have when He is with us and when we are near to Him. In Isaiah 66, God compares Himself to a mother comforting her child. Surely there aren't many better pictures of God. Comfort than this, than to just picture the way a mother just lovingly and tenderly comforts her child. That is the picture that God wants us to have of Him towards us as we think about the ways that He comforts us. The same way a mother comforts her child is the same way that God comforts you and me. In John 14, Jesus tells us that He will send us the Holy Spirit, who He calls our Comforter. For all who are trusting in Jesus, you have the God of all comfort indwelling you right now, desiring to minister the hope, the help, and the healing of the gospel to you in the midst of whatever suffering, affliction, or mourning that you are experiencing right now, or that you will experience in our sin-filled and broken world. All who mourn will experience God's comfort in these ways right now. But all of human history is pointing forward to that future day when God will provide the ultimate comfort that all of our broken hearts long for. Hear how John describes this comfort that God will bring in Revelation 7:17. Viewing this picture of that day when Jesus received the breast. Returns, John says, for the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

31:53On the day when Jesus returns, he will wipe away every tear from our eyes. Sisters and brothers, this is simply profound. Do you see the intimacy and the closeness of this statement? Christ will personally, intimately draw near. He will come close and will personally wipe away the tears from your eyes. In my life, there have only been five people whose tears I have wiped away from their eyes. Donna and all of my children. That's the picture and the comfort that God wants us to sense. That nearness, that when someone close to you is crying, is mourning, is grieving, and someone comes close to. To wipe away the tears from their eyes. That is what God will do for you and for me. He will come close. We will be recipients of his comfort fully on that day.

33:19I mean, John could have just said, God will make all tears disappear. That the tear ducts will just be dried up. But that's not what he says. He says that he will come close to wipe away the tears from your eyes. If you find yourself grieving this morning, know that one day the God of all comfort will draw near to wipe away the tears from your eyes. Allow your mourning and grieving to direct your hearts to that day when Jesus returns to right all wrongs, to draw near, when he will come close to your tear-stained cheeks and he will wipe them dry forever. This is the good life that Jesus is inviting us to experience. This is why Jesus can say, Blessed or happy are those who are mourning, because they will be comforted.

34:31In our mourning, God seeks to comfort us. And so that is why in our morning, we can be happy, we can be flourishing, we can be in a good state of place, we can flourish, because it is only when we mourn that we are positioning ourselves to receive the comfort of God. If you're here this morning and you are longing for that comfort, if you are here this morning and you are just aware of the brokenness in your life and in the world because of sin, if you're here and you are not trusting in Jesus, I just want to tell you that the good news of the gospel is that because of Jesus, you can experience God's comfort this morning. This comfort that we just saw can be yours because in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, he paid the penalty for all of our sin to restore us to a right relationship with him, where we can experience this good life, this truly happy life, where in the midst of the sadness and the grief, we can experience God's comfort. So this morning, if you are just aware of the brokenness around you, if you are longing for comfort, I invite you to turn to Jesus. Experience the comfort that he longs to give. And brothers and sisters, here, for those of you who are trusting in Christ, just having seen why we should want to embrace mourning. As countercultural as that sounds, I just want to just briefly highlight a few ways that we can embrace mourning in our lives. I just want to highlight a few practices that we can enter into to cultivate mourning in our hearts that we might experience God's comfort. I think a first practice, one way I would encourage all of you, would just be to come to worship regularly. I know in some sense I'm preaching to the choir right now since you all are here, but in our monthly services, like we did today, we have a prayer of lament, just like we did this morning. And these are opportunities, these are things that we intentionally do on a month in and month out basis to remind ourselves of the brokenness in our lives, of the brokenness in the world around us, that we might be positioned to see our need for God's comfort and to receive his comfort. As I mentioned earlier, again, I just want to encourage you, if you want to grow in mourning, to spend time in the Psalms. Spend time in the Psalms, and you will have eyes to see the brokenness in your life and the brokenness all around you. And then you will see the nearness and the comfort of God.

37:18Another way that we can embrace mourning is to draw near to those who are going through hard and challenging situations. So often we have a don't ask. Asked, don't tell policy on the hard and bad things in our lives. But this approach to don't ask, don't tell, it just fails to see the ways that God wants to use us to be a means of comfort in other people's lives and use others to be a means of comfort in our own life. So instead of don't ask, don't tell, let's be a church body that leans in, that leans into these situations. Let's ask one another, what has been discouraging for you lately? Let's ask our brothers and sisters, what tragedies have you experienced in your life? Let's ask, what are you mourning and grieving right now? And how can I help? How can I pray? And as we do this, we are imitating Jesus, who grieved and mourned with others in their brokenness. Jesus, the one who is our sympathetic and our empathetic high priest right now. So we want to draw near to those who are suffering, and we want to pray for those who are mourning and grieving. We want to co-suffer with them.

38:43As we find out what is causing others to grieve, we want to pray for them in their grief and just ask, how can I best pray for you and be a means of grace? And as Pastor Chris prayed for a number of those in our church this morning, we have no lack of people in our church who are. Mourning and who are grieving right now. Think of the Nisa Myers, the Pembleton family, the Bricker family, the Morgan family in New Jersey, and many others on our church care list. We are a body full of mourning and grieving people. So let's be a body that draws near and that prays for one another.

39:21And lastly, let's just lament the sin and suffering that we see in the world. I mean, anytime you're watching the news or reading the news online or in the paper, and you see yet another example of the presence and the effects of sin in the world, of all of the ways that things are not the way they're supposed to be, whether that's abuse and oppression that we see, whether it's disease or disasters, wars and genocide, the list just goes on. As we see all the examples of the way that things are not the way they're supposed to be, let us just cry out to God to come quickly. Let's cry out to God to come to return, to make all rights wrong, to make everything sad come untrue. And as we do these things, as we do many others like them, we will be positioning ourselves to experience the good life as defined by Jesus. Because as we've seen, it is those who embrace mourning who experience the good life, receiving God's comfort. Let's pray.

40:36O God of all comfort, we come before you this morning, grateful that your word doesn't seek to hide, minimize, pretend there is no mourning or grieving. But Jesus, you speak directly to our experiences of mourning and grieving. You speak to them with words of hope, words of comfort. Spirit of God, I pray that you would meet all those mourning this morning. May they, even right now, be very aware of the comfort that you desire to give them as a mother comforts her child.

41:31Spirit, help us to be a body that desires to be a means of your comfort to one another. We have eyes to see those hurting around us in the ways that you might want to use us. Oh, Spirit of God, give us the faith to believe what we have heard this morning and the grace to live in the good of it. Amen. Thank you for listening to the sermon audio. From New Life Baptist Church in College Station, Texas. For more information or to support our ministry, visit us online at newlifecs.net.