Good morning and welcome to The Edge. My name is Brandi and we are so glad that you've joined us this morning. No matter where you are in your spiritual journey, you are free to explore and come and be in community with us. We're so happy that you're here.
In fact, if you're just joining us this is a great time, because just last week we started our new series called Blessed. If you didn't get the chance to check it out, go ahead and listen to last week's sermon because we're diving into, “What is the Blessed Life?” and we're basing it on what Jesus said the blessed life was when he made his declarations called The Beatitudes.
The Beatitudes are really the introduction or ‘the address’ to Jesus' most famous sermon, which is known as The Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount was very thematic with what Jesus' entire message of his ministry was — repent for the Kingdom of God was near. The Kingdom of God was near. People were receiving forgiveness, healing, restoration, salvation and redemption in the man Jesus. But I think it's so important that we don't really skip the whole scene because it might be tempting to imagine Jesus as this pastor who’s on a stage talking to a crowd or behind a camera or a teacher at a podium with his students, but that wasn't really the crowd at all.
Do you know the phrase, “People don't care what you know, until they know that you care?” Well trust me, this crowd that Jesus was talking about these beatitudes to, knew that he cared because he had just spent time with them physically healing them. In fact, we know who the crowd was made up of because in Matthew 4:24, it says:
24 News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them.
I mean really lock this in your brain. These are people that are having seizures and they're in severe pain. It talks about them being paralyzed and tormented with demon possession and he just healed these people. So they knew he cared — they knew he had something to offer. As he ascends up this mountain, this is the crowd that's following him.
Just before the first words of this sermon come out of his mouth, it says that he sat down. I just love that picture, because this idea of humility and the posture of the heart is what The Beatitudes are all about. In fact, The Beatitudes start with, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for they will inherit the Kingdom.” That's what Pastor Neil discussed last week and he depicted the word poor as to be totally impoverished. It was the picture of a beggar at the side of a road, having to rely on someone else's benevolence just to make it to the next day. He had nothing on his own only what someone else by extension would give to him.
So the idea of The Beatitudes is that we would know that in the same way we are spiritually impoverished. No one, the Bible says, not one person, is righteous on his own. This is why Jesus would die on the cross for us and he became sin so that we could, in exchange, become his righteousness. Without him we don't have a spiritual dime in our bank account of righteousness. And this is why it starts with being poor in spirit.
Also, we can't miss the fact that each and every one of these declarations starts with the same word. It starts with that word blessed and that word blessed means fortunate. Maybe not in the ways that we would think of as fortunate. As we'll learn, but it also means favored or well-off by extension. Oh boy, do they see that they were well-off and that we are well off by extension.
To be blessed also means to be happy. But it's a happiness that is the direct result of this fortunate benevolent handout. Of course we're speaking spiritually but today's beatitude comes next. Today's beatitude says this:
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
You know, it's very important to remember that these beatitudes they're all together, it's comprehensive, it's cumulative, so we have to keep it in context. Otherwise the verse “blessed are those who mourn” sounds more like an oxymoron or an impossibility. It can't possibly mean to be happy because you're sad. Blessed are those who mourn? But this is in the context of those who are spiritually impoverished. So what exactly would this person be mourning? This is the type of mourning. In fact, the word itself means to deeply grieve and lament. Lament in a way that leads to repentance.
Repentance is a pretty popular church word but if you don't know what it means, it really just means to change your direction — to change what you're doing. To truly mourn, as described in The Beatitudes, you are mourning your sin which separates you from God. It's the acknowledgement that you are not righteous on your own, that we can't be the good person we want to be outside of Jesus. And there is something to be mourned there, but it doesn't stop there. It's mourning in a way that turns us back to God. That is why it's blessed because then we will receive comfort and the word comfort meaning “come near.” So if you think about it, sin is what causes us to go away from God. The true mourning and lament that causes repentance turns us back toward God, meaning we come near to him. And that is where our true comfort lies.
In 2 Corinthians 7 Paul was writing to the Corinthian church addressing some sin that he had become aware of in that congregation. He actually told them that he was happy that they became sorrowful, which sounds harsh until you read on, it says “for you became sorrowful.” Well, it's actually the word mourn.
2 Corinthians 7:9-10
9 yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. 10 Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.
So yes, there is actually a sorrow that God intends. Just because we feel bad, doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. Maybe it's a sorrow or a mourning that God intended for us. Remember scripture tells us that God never intends to bring us harm.
So let's hear this another way. I want to read the same exact verse, but from The Message version. It's just a little bit different wording and I think it might help us understand even further. It says this:
10 Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets.
So there is a godly type of sorrow and that is the mourning that The Beatitudes are talking about. The godly type of sorrow says, “I'm aware of my sin.” But because we have the Holy Spirit otherwise known as the comforter, the Holy Spirit's job is to make us aware of the sin so that we can confess it, be forgiven and come right back to God.
See the idea of this course correction is not just because God is a strict God and wants you to act in a certain way. His number one desire — his pure joy — is to have his children with him, engaging in a close relationship with him. That is the sorrow of sin — it separates.
So how can you tell the difference if your sin awareness is driven by the Holy Spirit or if it's a toying of the devil? Because it really could be either. Well, here's your biggest clue: the Holy Spirit is also translated as our advocate, our comforter, our come-near, our God come-near. So when the Holy Spirit makes us aware of sin, he's doing it so that we can repent and come back to our heavenly Father. Isn't that a beautiful picture.
The devil will do a similar thing in the beginning. He will make us aware of our sin, but because of pride and his desire to keep us away from God, he is known as the accuser. In fact that's why it says worldly distress drives us away from God because when we are prideful we couldn't possibly be more away from God. Let me ask you, when you become aware of your sin, are you letting it drive you back to God through the channel of mourning, lamenting and repentance, or are you allowing the devil to simply accuse you and in pride try to rectify it or justify it just on your own? Because that's not what we're meant to do.
None of us are good enough or strong enough to take care of the sin issue on our own. That's the bad news, but the good news is Jesus was, and he did. The invitation for the Holy Spirit, the comforter, the nearness of God and the life that leads to salvation is for absolutely everyone.
When I think about the difference between the godly sorrow and the worldly sorrow, it reminds me of a show that Neil and I just started watching. I somehow got roped into watching the new Netflix series Cobra Kai. If you don't know about it, it's this spinoff of the ‘80s movie, Karate Kid. It's kind of this, where are they now? I think the whole reason we're into it is because if you were a child of the ‘80s, it's like this nostalgic experience, taking it back to your childhood because it has most of the same exact characters. It shows you what they ended up doing with their life. Well, the main character, he was a rebel, he was a bully and you get into his life and of course he's hurting people because he was a hurt person himself.
You start identifying with them as a character and you're rooting for them and all this, but there is a particular plot line and it has to do with him and his teenage son that he's coming back in contact with. The teenage son doesn't really want much to do with him because he was an absent father. There is this particular scene and it was just locked in my brain as I was working on this sermon. I think it's in season one toward the beginning and he's standing in a parking lot and he's looking at this little boy and his father laughing, talking and enjoying breakfast in a diner. And the look on his face as he's watching this dad interact with his young boy just being near him and being engaged in his life — you could just see the regret. You could see the sorrow just wash all over him. And of course as all Netflix series do, that's right where it ends and you don't really know where he's going with it.
I'm not all the way through the series. So I don't really know where he's going to take this but I thought, you know, that's a really good picture of becoming aware of sin and how it's affected, not just you, but how it's hurt other people around you and the damage that it's caused in your life. There's sorrow and there's grief when there's awareness of that sin but the key is what are we going to do with it? Is it going to drive us to change, to repentance, to seek forgiveness? Or is it going to cause us to be prideful, to be bitter, to be stuck in our ways and to just go on and punish ourselves or seek comfort in the temporary ways that the world offers?
Listen, Satan cannot take the Holy Spirit — the advocate, the comforter — from you if you have accepted Jesus Christ as your savior. Make no mistake, what we do with our sin when we are made aware of it, will greatly affect our spiritual faith journey and our fruitfulness. Blessed are those who mourn, who repent and lament for they will receive comfort, the Holy Spirit, bringing them back into the arms of the Father.
You want to live the blessed life, a life with no spiritual regrets? You want to exchange the mourning for dancing? Then let the Holy Spirit do his job and keep bringing you back to the arms of the Father, because you are his greatest joy.
We've been concluding our series, as you're in these house churches, with some questions for you to discuss with each other. If you're on your own there are some questions for you to consider, so that you can dive in and explore what this message really meant for you.
The first question (and it's a great one to ask with any message you hear): what is your personal takeaway from today's message? God wants to communicate something just to you. If there was something that stuck out in a good or a bad way, explore that.
The second is: when you become aware of your sin, what is your typical tendency? Is your tendency to let it drive you to repentance and back to God, or is your tendency to be shameful or prideful and drive away from God? Do you normally hear the advocate's voice or the accuser's voice?
Then the third question is: why do you think that repentance — the whole turning it around the whole, not doing it anymore, the whole course correction — Why do you think the repentance piece is essential to this idea of mourning our sin?