Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father help us today, to see ourselves through His eyes. Father, we to slowly and too rarely look at our inner being from your perspective. How easily we dismiss the importance of Spirit-led self-examination! Help us today, to see you and ourselves through you. May we be deeply moved and grieved by the sin that remains within us, and our failure to reject it and fight it. Help us, Father. In the powerful name of Jesus, by the guiding of the Spirit, bless our efforts to see ourselves rightly, through your eyes. Amen.
Your Morning Song: "I Am Yours" by Needtobreathe
Your Morning Scripture: Matthew 5:4
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
...
This verse always seemed a bit odd to me. Reading it quickly left me with this vague sense of God blessing those who cried about something, which didn't seem right. Maybe it was mourning about really bad stuff like death and pain and betrayal.
It is never wise to read the Bible briskly, at a skim, thinking the it will do anything other than leave you with vague impressions of what you read that better reflect your own opinions than God's actual Word.
You don't have to turn it into a graduate study every time you open your Bible, but just read with care. Look less for your own opinion, and more for the answer to this simple question, "What is God saying here?" Answer this question and then allow feelings to follow God's direction.
The verse above is a great example of this. Read quickly and by itself, out of context, our opinions will interpret it for us. But in the larger context, Jesus has withdrawn up onto the mountainside, and has begun to teach those who were interested enough to follow Him.
He is describing to them what a citizen of God's Kingdom is like. And each verse from 5:3 to 5:11 use the phrase "blessed are." This phrase does two things. First, it is a general, gentle reminder, that to belong to God's Kingdom is to be blessed. And there is no other way to be generally, wholly blessed. But to each verse, there is then a specific way in which that blessedness, that richness of being and existing, is explained. A similar idea would be to look generally at a beautiful diamond on display, and then be allowed to pick it up and examine each exquisite cut, each sparkling face and facet of each and every masterful cut of the stone.
God's Kingdom is this way, and so are His people. Jesus is laying out the inner landscape of God's People here in 5:3-5:12, revealing the beauty of God's Work in them and God's external, loving responses to their internal, humble attitudes.
Let's try this concept out on the verse above.
Blessed are those who mourn.
Mourning here does not apply to any and all sadness. But in the citizen of the kingdom of God, in God's children who are humble in the their heart of hearts, they will respond to their own sin with mourning. The child of God is heartbroken by their sin.
I am disappointed in my own callousness to my own sin. And as I've gotten older, I've learned to mourn and to grieve at my own sin so much more deeply than I ever have before. Apart from God's help I am hopeless and helpless. Even saved from the power of sin to kill me and drag me away from God forever, the horrible presence of sin remains within me.
As a child of God who still yet wars with the sin within me, though the victory is won, I must mourn.
If I am this way, if my inner being is marked by this right response to my sin, what then? How does God respond to His children when they mourn their sin? Does He mock us? Does He ignore us? Does He condemn us? No. No. No.
He comforts us.
He comforts us with the truth. That He can help us, that He will help us, to be free from our sin once and forever, and also more and more every day.
The Child of God will mourn sin. It will break our hearts, and God will tend to us graciously and lovingly, comforting us as we turn to Him daily, repenting for the presence of sin that remains.
What Christian can be haughty and proud, and also mourning their own sin? What Christian can condemn others for sin, and also mourning their own?
The right view and right response to our sin is an antiseptic against arrogance amongst God's Children. And as we rightly mourn our wrongs, God will comfort us.
Not because we deserve it. But because He loves us.
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