Good Grief
by James Lincoln on March 19, 2006
Last week we began to consider together the "Beatitudes" found in the opening verses of Jesus' most famous sermon, The Sermon on the Mount. The crowd on the mountainside would have been predominantly poor. In those days, Poverty was the rule and not the exception as it is in our culture. What does a person think about or do who has no health insurance, no retirement, no money for medical help and no government aid or social services? Many would have been sick or in poor health. Again, this was before people knew about bacteria. There was no hand soap, no aspirin, no vitamins, no penicillin or antibiotics. Disease and illness were rife in that culture. Also, their homeland was occupied by the Romans. This wasn't a well dressed, clean crowd of people wearing Eddie Bauer gortex jackets waiting for Jesus to say a few nice words of inspiration. They were frustrated, bitter and desperate. They wanted someone to do something to reverse the miserable conditions of their lives. If Jesus was the Messiah they expected Him to do just that.
They wanted a Jewish kingdom under the Davidic line to be the preeminent political power in the world; they wanted its worship life to be centered on the Temple and they wanted its economic life to make them make them financially prosperous. They wanted health, happiness, wealth and power. That's how they would have defined the word "blessed". It's how many today define it today. They thought Christ's coming meant that God was going to rule with a rod of iron. We have similar thoughts. If Jesus was reigning He would keep terrorists from hijacking planes and killing thousands of civilians. He would stop the greedy executives at Enron from destroying the lives of thousands of people by their theft and lies. He would stop genocidal maniacs like Milosevic and the murderers and rapists in Chad, Dufar, and Sudan from their abominations in Africa. He would make our lives and homes places of success and prosperity.
Here, Jesus promises a "blessed" life and the kingdom. However, the way He defined these things could not have contradicted more everything they expected.
Instead of establishing a political, economic revolution He gave them an invitation and some instruction about how to receive God's blessing. The word "blessed" means to enjoy the gladness, wisdom, wonder and certainty of God's approval and favor. By definition it's a relational term. You cannot bless yourself. It means to be on the receiving end of God's favor or approval. This isn't a list of ethical principles or self help positive thinking techniques to cope with life's difficulties. It's wisdom from God. It's wisdom from God about how we can live in harmony with Him and His purposes and His grace in the world. Jesus doesn't establish His kingdom (at least not yet) with a display of military, political and global power. He establishes His kingdom by converting the hearts and minds of men and women one person at a time. He establishes His kingdom by calling us to leave our own idea about how things ought to be and ought to be changed and to pick up His message about the world and ourselves.
POOR IN SPIRIT
And that message often goes against our assumptions about life. He says "Blessed, are those who are poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." You can enjoy the kingdom of heaven now. You can enjoy the security, wisdom, wonder of God's sovereign rule, power and tender mercies now regardless of your economic, political, ethnic or social status. But this blessedness is only available to those who are poor in spirit. They couldn't have imagined that someone was blessed who was poor. In that day poverty and sickness was a sign that God had not blessed you.
By "poor in spirit" He doesn't mean those who have little ambition, little desire to have or little drive to get or achieve. He means those who have recognized the poverty of the world's riches, whether they be tangible, gold, silver and gadgets or intangibles like influence, power and fame. The poor in spirit are those who understand that having all the world's stuff still leaves you poor, that is, in the essentials. What are the essentials? They are the ability to obey God, to glorify Him with your life, the ability to know His will; to know that God is for you and loves you, and to trust God with the conditions of your life. It means to turn from acting as if you were God to a humble recognition that, as sinners, you owe Him a debt you could never repay in a thousand lifetimes. Jesus says the kingdom of God can be a present reality for you but you must first recognize your poverty of spirit; your absolute dependence on the grace of His Son Jesus just as a beggar is dependent on the benevolence of another to survive. The kingdom is not for the proud, the able, the self-sufficient or those who think they are entitled. Instead, it's for those who know that they are undone, helpless and hopeless without the grace of God.
To be poor in spirit means to sense that our hearts are not as they should be; that our ambitions are not as they should be. That our behavior is not as it should be and that we are desperately needy for God's grace. It's the sense of these things because whether people sense them or not they're true of everyone. But not everyone recognizes this. Do you?
If you trust and follow Jesus, He'll exchange your poverty for the riches of His grace. And that's a treasure beyond counting. He will give you the record of His righteousness as a gift and He'll take on himself the penalty for your sins. What a relief. I first heard that message when I was seventeen. I had never heard such liberating and wondrous good news. It was so great I didn't know how it could fit into my heart.
But Jesus says this glad grace is only for those who are poor in spirit. If you are puffed up with pride and counting on the record of your good deeds to make you approved before God you'll never see His kingdom. Jesus once said, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick"...he said, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners" (Mk.2:17).
William Carrey who translated the Bible into six languages had this engraved on his gravestone, "A wretched, poor, and helpless worm..." underneath that it read, "On God's kind Arms I fall." What about you? Where do you fall?
David wrote, "The sacrifices acceptable to God is a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, o God You will not despise" ( Ps. 51:17)
"My prayer is not that you'll find the secret of your productivity, usefulness and gladness in the pleasures of self-esteem and self congratulations but rather in the power of His sovereign grace and God's tender mercies." - John Piper
So, blessed are the poor in spirit. Theirs, says Jesus, is the kingdom now.
"Blessed are they who mourn for they shall be comforted." (5:4)
Now, look at the second beatitude. He says, "Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted." Notice the change in tense here. "They shall be comforted." These words would've been enormously confusing. We don't usually speak of people who are blessed as those who mourn. Those two things just didn't fit together. And in our culture they don't fit at all. In the American way of life there is a constant effort to escape the reality of sorrow and grief. We don't want it. Advertisers have persuaded us that we don't deserve any sorrow or grief. They say that what we deserve is a break or the good life. Of course, there's little evidence that we really do deserve either, but if we hear it enough we began to think we are entitled to a life without serious suffering. However, to mourn in order to be blessed seems contradictory not only to our well being but contradictory to faith in Jesus. So, some have interpreted Christianity as the power of positive thought. They interpret sadness and sorrow as a failure of faith and a bad example. They say,
"If I am saved and going to heaven and I enjoy all the blessings of God's love then there's no emotional room for mourning or for grief or for sorrow." So, when mourning, grief and sorrow come crashing into us because of the circumstances of life we can feel as if somehow our faith in Jesus is losing its hold on us. If we are sorrowful we might think that we are betraying the God who saved us. After all, we should be happy. Paul says, "Rejoice and again I say rejoice."
Look, Jesus has made us glad and given us a joy unspeakable. He isn't calling us here to be miserable, moping around like sad sacks for Jesus. He doesn't want us to be overcome, depressed and done in by a sense of dread or doom or a sorrow without hope.
But beloved, our faith is not one dimensional. Jesus calls us to the joy of our faith but he doesn't call us to live in denial about sad and grievous realities of life. He's not calling us to live this bubbly, happy go lucky life where we make of our faith some psychological technique that denies negative and grievous realities. Look, our faith is a faith that enables us to face sorrow and grief head on for what it really is. It's precisely because we have faith that we can face the sorrow of this world. Our faith gives us a way to do it with hope. It gives us the resources of God and heaven to be comforted in the presence of the sorrow and bring comfort to others.
To always be happy and up and bubbly is not only unreal and phony it's a betrayal of the truth. It flies in the face of a reality you and I live every day. It's not good to use our faith in God to deny reality that is all around us. I'm afraid that Christian worship today is becoming exclusively celebration with virtually no place for lament, grief or sorrow. The faith is marketed by the pleasant and the appealing. Sorrow and sadness is neither so it doesn't sell. And so it's removed as a part of public worship. When was the last time you went to church and you grieved and lamented deeply over you own sin or the sins of the community? When was the last time you and I grieved deeply over our failure of love or our failure to get along peaceably with each other or the failure of a nation to protect its most vulnerable members of the society? I can complain about these things and find plenty of faults with others but do our hearts really grieve over them? Or do we build a wall up and attempt to insulate ourselves from such deep emotion? This word Jesus uses for "mourn" is the strongest of the nine verbs used for mourning in the New Testament. Jesus tells us not only that there is an appropriate place for sorrow and sadness among God's people but that it is also a doorway to our blessedness.
What does it mean to mourn?
Well, I have a friend that calls it emptiness. It's disconnectedness or a sudden dropping out of the center of your life of that which gives you a sense of place, fulfillment and meaning. It's when something is ripped away from you whether it be a dream, a person, and expectation a hope or a circumstance. Now, Jesus doesn't say explicitly here what the nature or source of the sorrow is.
But, He can't be saying that the mere fact of grief makes one blessed. Ahab, like a spoiled two year old kid, was grieved when he couldn't have Naboth's vineyard (1Kings 21:4). Ammon was grieved when he couldn't have his half-sister Tamar (2Sam.13:2). Some grief isn't good and in some way everyone grieves. Jesus is saying something more than that we all grieve and in the course of time we recover. No, Jesus is here talking about the kingdom of God. He mentions the kingdom twice in the beatitudes and nine times in the sermon. If there was one theme of the Sermon on the Mount it would have to be the kingdom. This mourning has something here to do with the coming or knowing God's kingdom.
But wouldn't the knowledge of God's kingdom be about rejoicing and celebration? What does mourning have to do with the kingdom? If God's kingdom would be preeminent in the world; if Israel would be bigger than Rome, this would be a pleasant anticipation. Health, wealth and power would be Israel's; what in the world would they need to mourn about?
However, if they knew their Bibles they would've known that their sin against God was what caused them to forfeit the kingdom. Their history was well documented. Israel was promised a kingdom but she had been unfaithful to God. They had broken the covenant and therefore they had forfeited their claim on God's blessing. Somehow this would have to be dealt with. Perhaps they were hoping that it could be overlooked. However, because God is just it couldn't be.
A just God would honor the good people, clean up the not so good and he would wipe out the bad. But, here's the problem. Who is good? And the best way I can describe the psychology of the day is to say that there was whole lot of finger pointing and blaming going on. The Sadducees pointed their fingers at the Pharisees. The Pharisees returned the favor and the people of the land liked to blame their religious leaders for their hypocrisy and compromise. And everyone blamed the Romans and their idolatry for their troubles. There was lots of blame and finger pointing. Let me ask you this. How much of your thinking is dominated by finger pointing and blaming? We can become occupied with blaming the Republicans, Democrats, the rich, the liberals, the conservatives, the government, the system, Hollywood, the schools, big business, and more. Now some of this is righteous indignation. However, it's just incredibly easy to be occupied blaming others. Jesus says that there will be no kingdom without genuine mourning.
What kind of grief is He talking about? It's a grief that is described in Ezekiel 9:3. Nebuchadnezzar had already conquered the nation and taken a whole group of Jews with him back to Babylon. The judgment of God was about to fall on Jerusalem and the Temple which was the last remaining evidence of the favor of God for his people. It was about to be destroyed and reduced to dust. They had sinned grievously setting up Ashera poles in the Temple and engaging in temple prostitution. So he says, in Ezek 9:3-4:
"Now the glory of the God of Israel went up from above the cherubim, where it had been, and moved to the threshold of the temple. Then the LORD called to the man clothed in linen who had the writing kit at his side and said to him, "Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it."
Ah...Those who mourned over the sins of the city would be saved from God's judgment.
Who was good? No one. "No one does good." (Rom.3:12) The saved were not the good ones. They were those who mourned and grieved over their own sin and the sin of the nation. It was the sins of the nation that brought the people under the judgment of God. What Jesus is calling for here is the same thing God was calling for in Jerusalem in the days of Nebuchadnezzar. He's looking for people who grieve over their own sins and grieve over the sins of all. David knew a similar kind of sorrow in Ps 119:136, he says, "Streams of tears flow from my eyes, for your law is not obeyed. " Can you imagine weeping over the fact that God's law is not honored or obeyed? Sometimes I build up a wall in my heart that just says. "Hey, if they want to destroy themselves let 'em do it. No skin off my nose. I've got my own problems." But not so with Ezekiel, Daniel, Ezra or Nehemiah; and praise God that Jesus didn't think this way.
Ezra, Nehemiah and Daniel were wealthy and effective. They were not mourning out of self pity. However, they knew that it was sin that separated people from their God. Read their prayers. They mourn, weep and confess sins they had not personally committed. They felt a corporate solidarity and responsibility with others who sinned in ways they hadn't. And they grieved over the sin and consequences that fell on their brothers and the world.
Jesus is saying that the blessed both see and feel the reality of a great loss as a result of sin in their own lives, families, church, communities and nation. Jesus says it's precisely those who see and feel this loss that are blessed because it's in their broken heartedness over the reality of sin and its destructive consequences they stand open to receive God's blessings and His encouragements, His assurance and tender mercies.
Beloved, there is a temptation to justify our own behavior, become occupied with blaming others, to surround ourselves with the images of our successes and insulate ourselves from the pangs of sin and the troubles of the world and so not be bothered by it all. May God not let us go there. If we do not find the grace to mourn this is how we will become.
"They shall be comforted."
Lastly, Jesus says that "they shall be comforted." This comfort comes in a number of ways. Notice that it doesn't come by escaping sorrow but as a comfort for the sorrow. In 2 Cor. 7:10 Paul said, "The sorrow that is according to God's will (Godly sorrow) brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret,... but worldly sorrow brings death." I hope that you know that this is a great comfort!
A Sorrow that leads to Repentance, Salvation and No Regrets
The sorrow that Jesus is speaking of is a sorrow that leads to repentance. It's not merely a bad feeling. God is not interested in making you feel bad so that you can feel bad. It's a sorrow that brings comfort because it's a sorrow that leads to the hope and assurance that with God's help and grace we can change. It's mourning with great hope.
This grief or sorrow that is given us by the Holy Spirit as He opens our eyes to the sin in our hearts and in the lives of those around us leads to a deepened love for God, a greater amazement at His forgiving and sustaining grace and a deeper hunger to follow after him. This grief leads to salvation and there are, beloved, no regrets with this grief. To live with no regrets and salvation is great comfort! Because the grief that comes to a believer from the Spirit of God comes to us with the hope of forgiveness, repentance, restoration and salvation. Who would regret that? Here's how you can know when your sorrow or grief is from the devil. It only comes with guilt shame, death and hopelessness.
Worldly sorrow or grief leads to regret over lost dreams, lost goods and lost pleasures. And we feel empty and we become bitter as we feel that God has impoverished our lives rather than enriching us. Godly repentance is the kind of change within us that turns us to God and gives us hope in God. Hope for ourselves now and for tomorrow.
A FUTURE COMFORT
Not only can this comfort offer a good measure of hope here and now, the comfort Jesus is promising is also the comfort of the future when He will come back and put all things to rights and wipe away every tear.
"For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus....For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God and the dead in Christ shall rise. Then we who are alive ...shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these things." 1Thess4:13ff
Why encourage one another with these words? Because beloved there is much sorrow and sadness in our world as we wait His return.
Of course, Jesus is the ultimate example of pure Godly grief. He mourned and died - not for His sins - but for ours. He wept and grieved for us. He didn't leave heaven because he sinned. He left Heaven because he loved us and the Father so much. Surely our griefs He Himself bore and our sorrows He carried. He was crushed for our iniquities He was pierced for our transgressions. But don't ever forget that he was comforted. "For the joy set before him he endured the cross and the shame" Heb.12:2. For the joy that was set before Him. It's the joy that He will come back and reveal how every sorrow or grief you have endured has been designed to make you more like Him. How important is it to you that Jesus is coming back again? When he does he will set all things to rights. Jesus knows the temperature that separates the dross from the gold and it will not be one degree too hot or too cold. Your faith is being purified and refined as fine gold. We are not promised complete comfort now. We must wait. And there is a certain amount of grieving as we do. But it will be worth it all when we see Jesus.
When was the last time that we grieved in our prayers over our sin and the sin of Newberg, Ladd Hill or Wilsonville? May the grace of God bring godly sorrow and repentance to our hearts.