“Blessed are the Spiritual Mourners” (Part #3)

THE BEATITUDES: How to Be Truly Blessed Sermon Series

“Blessed are the Spiritual Mourners” (Part #3)

KEY PASSAGE: Matthew 5:4 (NASB)

Not everyone today worships the truth and living God. And so, as we conclude our praise and worship this morning, we are reminded that God’s work in our lives should produce worship from our lives. We pray that our church should be a worshipping community that assembles to praise God for His faithful acts of redemption on behalf of His people. The [very] first word in Psalm 111 is a command to “Praise the LORD.” I pray that the Holy Spirit will motivate us to Praise the LORD. And may praise and worship be a public declaration in our response to God’s goodness, grace, and mercy. . God bless you, and and you may have your seat. Thank you, Worship Band, for ushering us [again on this beautiful Sunday morning] into God’s presence.

TITHE and OFFERING

James 1:17 says, “Every good thing given, and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.” God wants to bless us spiritually, financially, and in many other ways. When we honor God with our tithes and offerings, it says to the world that God is first in our lives, and secondly, it helps the local church in so many ways. And one of the ways is to advance the work of God here on earth. I will invite our ushers to come up, and they will pass around the offering plates so we can collect our tithes and offerings. Worship band, please lead us in worship as we collect our tithe and offering.

WELCOME

Welcome [welcome everyone] to our Sunday Worship Service. Please go around the church and find some folks, greet them with love and passion, and tell them Jesus loves you. Our first-time visitors, please stand so we can see you. We also welcome all who join us online. Let's clap for our online viewers.

ANNOUNCEMENT

· Our Church Leadership Meeting is on Saturday (that will be this Saturday), September 21st, at noon.

· Night of Worship Service [is coming up] is on Friday, September 27th, at 6:00 p.m. Please join us for a night of Praise and Worship. These are times when we gather as a church and have extended times of music, singing, prayer, testimonies, and praise. There is no sermon or teaching time.

· Men’s Breakfast is on Saturday, September 28th, at 10:00 a.m.

· Marriage Checkup Workshop is on Friday, October 25th, at 6:00 p.m. and Saturday, October 26th, at 9:00 a.m. I want to remind all married couples that the spots are filling up, so please register for the marriage workshop if you can.

· Wednesday Night Bible Study Connect is at 7:00 p.m. Please join us on Wednesday night to STUDY THE WORD OF GOD.

· Also, our church corporate weekly prayer meeting is every Saturday at 8:00 a.m.

· Please complete the sermon survey sheet and return it to the usher and media team.

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION

Let us pray. And so, Father God, we commit the rest of this service to You, and I pray that the Holy Spirit come and teach us the Word of God. May Your Word, which we are about to hear through the Holy Spirit, give us hope. Give us a renewed heart and show us again that You specialize in giving grace to the imperfect and love us even in the depths of our mess and shortcomings. I pray that You bless the tithes and offerings so that our giving is used to advance the Kingdom of God. We thank You for Jesus Christ, who heals and redeems. Amen.

DECLARATION of FAITH in GOD

Let us stand and say the Declaration of Faith in God together.

SERMON INTRODUCTION

Every Sunday, far too many Christians come to church to get pumped up, fired up, and excited, only to discover they are losing something when they leave church on Sunday. Then, they return the following Sunday to get pumped up, only to discover they are losing something throughout the week because the real problem has not been addressed. The core problem these folks face has not been addressed and [resolved]. They have hidden the problem day after day, weeks after weeks, months after months, and years after years to get pumped up and fired up. .

For the past two Sundays, we have been preaching and teaching about the Beatitudes, designed to deal with real blessings. We explained that you can have a lot of stuff and not be blessed. You can drive a nice car and live in a new house and still not be blessed. You can have stuff and not be a blessing because there is no air [on the] inside. The inside is flawed, [imperfect] and damaged.

We have seen that blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who declare spiritual bankruptcy, who have been weaned from themselves, understanding that in them, that is in their flesh dwelled no good thing. These are folks who have declared their flesh to be imperfect, and they need a perfect and a righteous God. There is no capacity independently of God to please God. You will agree [with me] that we entirely depend on God to satisfy the demands of [a righteous and holy] God. Charles Spurgeon, a Baptist preacher who remains highly influential among Christians of various denominations, said, “As a church, we must love Jesus, or else we have lost our reason for existence.” Many people today are alive, but they have lost their reason for existence because they have rejected Jesus Christ, the Son of the living and true God.

SERMON EXPOSITION

Blessed are those who recognize their spiritual inadequacy. Blessed are those who recognize insufficient funds in their account based on their resources and human capacity. That leads us to the second Beatitude. Matthew 5, we come to the second Beatitude in verse 4, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” This is the natural outgrowth of Beatitude Number One. For example, if you go to the bank and find out your bank account is depleted (you have no money in your bank account), it will make you sad and and maybe make you want to cry. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”Because that will lead to mourning, Jesus will give one of those upside-down statements here. He is going to say, “Blessed are the sorrowful.” Blessed are the depressed.

You and I live in a generation where laughter is emphasized, fun is promoted, and happiness and enjoyment are everything you need to know, dream about, and think about. That is the essence of the day that we live in today. But according to Matthew 4:5 of the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, God did not pronounce a blessing on folks laughing and having fun but on those [who are] crying, sorrowful, and weeping. The word “mourn” means “internal anguish or internal agony.” We all want to escape agony, pain, and suffering, like running from a thunderstorm or a bad situation that turns your world upside down.

But Jesus says in the Beatitudes that if you ever learn to cry right, mourn, and be sad on the inside, He says, [Watch this] You are on your way to a spiritual blessing.

I know most of you here today won’t get this. And [what] I am about to say you won't get it on television, and it won’t be the most popular view. But the question on the floor this morning is: Do you want to be truly blessed because Jesus says true blessing comes to those who are mourners? What does He mean? What does Jesus want me to cry about? Why does God want me to be sad? Let me help you out.

You don’t have to open your Bible there, but 2 Corinthians chapter 7 breaks it down a bit further for us when we read verses 8 and 10—beginning at verse 8. Paul says, “For though I caused you sorrow by my letter, I do not regret it; though I did regret it—for I see that that letter caused you sorrow, though only for a while. I now rejoice, not that you were made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance, for you were made sorrowful according to the will of God so that you might not suffer loss in anything through us. For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death.”

Please notice, verse 10 [says] that sorrow, according to God’s will, produces repentance without regret, which leads to salvation. In these three verses I read, Paul talks about a sorrow in the will of God, not a sorrow in the world. He is talking about a sorrow that leads to repentance. Paul is talking about sorrow related to the presence of sin in the believer's life. He is talking about sin that caused sorrow. A sin that grieves the heart of God.

Sin, whether at the personal or corporate level, produces spiritual, emotional, or financial bankruptcy in a person’s life. Such bankruptcy [we are told] also produces mourning. The good news for believers is that the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God [Watch This] brings God’s blessing to comfort and relieve us.

Blessed are those [who are] sad over the presence of sin operating in their lives. Blessed are those who are sorry to the point of going to God and repenting because of the presence of sin in their lives. Let me put it another way: not blessed are those who never learn to cry over the presence of sin in their lives. [Worldly] sorrow is sorrow that is tied to consequences.

That is, even a non-Christian doesn’t want to get caught. A non-Christian doesn’t want the negative repercussions of going to jail, [or] the negative consequences of disease, or the negative repercussions that come from bad decisions. The Bible is talking about sorrow tied to consequences. Jesus makes a connection to sorrow, which is tied to cause.. In other words, you are not only sorrowful for the consequences, but [you are] also sorrowful because [Watch This] you have broken the heart of God in your sin, [in my sin] – we have broken the heart of God. Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

You see, what should cause a believer pain when it comes to sin is that they have hurt God’s heart. We must understand something about God – one of God’s chief attributes or characteristics is that God is holy. God is separate and distinct, and the Bible says sin separates us from God and that He will not hear our prayer, according to Isaiah 59:2.

SERMON ILLUSTRATION

Sin to God is like garbage to us. No one in this church wants to be around garbage or the smell of garbage. You would be unhappy to hang out with garbage because garbage has a strong, unpleasant smell. Garbage is unacceptable, and the waste management company takes out our garbage every week. We want our homes [to be] cleaned because we don’t want to hang out or hang around garbage. The same principle applies to God when sin operates in a believer’s life. They ask God, [who is] holy and sanctified, to hang out with the garbage.

Blessed is not the one who is comfortable in the garbage but who is sick, who mourns, who cries, who is in inner anguish over the garbage operating in their lives.

We have a big problem today: people are making excuses for their sins. Folks procrastinate when dealing with sin in their lives. Jesus says, “Blessed are those who mourn over their sin.” Blessed are those who mourn over their wickedness. Even though we are Christians and we still sin against God, we should hate the presence of sin in our lives.

When you watch the Passion of Christ movie, [there is one scene that is] captivating and will grab your attention the most. And that is the teardrop that came down when Jesus bore the sins of the world on the cross. In my mind and view, this scene reveals God’s heart at having to crucify His Son for my sins and your sins [and for the sins of this world].

SERMON EXPLANATION

God had to shed a tear that caused an earthquake when He looked at His son dying on the cross for our sins in our place because that is what sin does. It makes God grieve. Well, if God is living in you and sin makes God cry when sin is operating in us, we should be crying along with God. So, if God is crying and we are still laughing and having fun, we don’t experience what God is experiencing if He is living inside us. If God is crying, and we are not feeling it, it means we have drifted so far from God’s presence we don’t feel what He feels, hurt where He hurts, think as He thinks, and become accustomed to this world. He says, and that is the loss of blessing. Why? Because that is the loss of fellowship with God. 1 John 1:5 says, “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.”

In the Bible, there is much crying over sin. Jesus looked over Jerusalem, and the Bible says, “He wept.” [Luke 19:41] Ezekiel chapter 9 verse 4 says, “That the godly weep over sin.” This verse reveals God’s heart toward sin. In 2 Corinthians 12:21, Paul says, “I mourn over the sin in the Corinthian church because you were sinning and not repenting, and this church made me cry.” Paul said about himself, “Oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death, this contaminated flesh.” He could only scream out. Daniel wept and cried out about the sin of Israel and his [own] sin. Isaiah said in Isaiah 6:5, “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips.”

People who are close to God [I am talking about folks who have an intimate relationship with God] mourn over their sins. So, if my sin is not hurting me because I have hurt God, it is because I am not close to God. I can assure you that God is weeping inside over our sins. Why is God weeping over our sins? Because He sent His Son, Jesus, to die for our sins. John 1:29 says, “Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”

We are told in the Bible that folks would tear their clothes and sit in sackcloth and ashes when they came to the realization of how badly they have sinned against God. In Psalm 119, verse 136, the Psalmist says, “My eyes shed tears because people don’t keep God’s law.” It says, “When I see all the sin around me, I cry.” Let me ask you [a question]: Do you cry when you sin against God? James 4 says, “Let your laughter be turned to mourning.” Turn your laughter into sorrow. Let me tell you some secrets about church service. You see, at every church service, you shouldn’t be shouting, jumping, stomping your feet, and dancing. At every church service, you shouldn’t be flipping the pews.

That kind of worship has its place, and I encourage you to dance, sing, shout, and praise God. [But] When the subject is dealing with your sin, the fun should stop, and you should mourn and grieve. I should be mourning and hurting because I have [hurt] God because of my sin. Far too many Christians today have turned the church into a filling station. Pump me up, and don’t look for the nail. We don’t hear people say church service was excellent and exciting today because it made me cry over my sin. It made me come face to face with the sin in my life.

You don’t hear folks say I wept like a baby today in church because the sermon brought my sin to light. You don’t hear that anymore. But according to the beatitudes, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Blessed is a man or woman who is sad over their sin and failure. Ecclesiastes chapter 7 verse 2, “A funeral is better than a party.” He says a funeral is better than a party because, at a funeral, you get to think about what matters. You get to think about life. You see when you go to a party, you hide what matters. All you think about at a party is having fun and a good time. [Watch this] At a funeral, you got to think about life; you got to think about death. You have to think about eternity. You have to think about life after death. According to Matthew 5, verse 4, there is no blessing if there is no mourning.

Psalm 32 talks about the joy of forgiveness of one’s sins. In verses 3 and 4, David said, “When I kept silent, my bones grew old, Through my groaning all day. For day and night, Your hand was heavy upon me.” He said I had to live in this restless state as long as I wouldn’t deal with it, but when I dealt with the sin in my life, everything turned away.

Blessed are they who recognize their sin, [realize they] hurt God with it, and [they] seek to confess and repent of it to have fellowship with God, who brings real blessing. In 2 Peter 3:18, the Bible says, “We are to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” How do you know if you are growing in grace? Let me give you the simple answer: the rise in your understanding and feeling of sin. You know you are growing in grace when you are more sensitive to the presence of sin in your life. Why? Because the grace of God was given to us to teach us to deny ungodliness.

So, as your understanding [sensitivity] to sin rises, your knowledge and experience of God’s grace also increase with it. Many of us Christians today are not experiencing more of God’s grace because we are not growing in grace, as proven by our lack of sensitivity to the presence of sin in our lives.

Psalm 126, verses 5 and 6, says, “If we sow in tears, we are going to reap in joy.” Isaiah 61:2 and 3 says, “We’re going to have gladness instead of mourning.” The word comfort comes from a Greek word that means to come alongside and help where God lifts the burden of life and wipes the tears so that we are comforted. Almost everyone here today has a comforter on their bed. A comforter is designed to keep you warm during the cold nights. A comforter is designed to make you comfortable when you get into your bed. [Watch This] God is saying to you and me that for those who mourn, I wrap them in My comforter so that they get the comfort of My presence. It is like a parent who has to spank a child for disobeying, and then he wraps his arm or her arms around that child and tells them how much they love that child. I know it hurts to mourn, but it is going to be a blessing when I wrap myself around you.

You go to the doctor, and you tell the doctor what is wrong with you because you are in pain, and you want the doctor to make you feel better so the pain can go away. You want the doctor to comfort you; you want him to turn that thing around. Blessed are those in spiritual pain because of sin who, leading to repentance, invite God to comfort them.

When the prodigal son came home, his father comforted him. He said, “I have sinned.” The Father said, “It is okay, son. Let me get the robe, let me get the ring, let me get the sandals, and let’s have a party.” His father comforted him because he faced his sin and was sorrowful after he returned to his father. The father threw a party for him. And if you don’t recognize the impact and effect of sin on your relationship with God. You will not see the power of God manifesting in your life. Your prayer will not be answered. There will be no peace in your life. You will live in depression if you fail to recognize and deal with the sin in your life. We need that inner agony that leads to true repentance tied to the sin in our lives.

Far too many Christians are walking around as saints, talking about “I am all right,” [bless] the Lord, "Oh my soul and all that is within me,” [bless] His holy name, saying God is good [and all the time God is good], and His promises are yea and amen. God is looking down from heaven, saying don’t talk about getting your praise [on] until you first deal with the sin in your life.

This means we have to learn how to cry to God, how to mourn, and how to be sorrowful. And that raises a question: How do we become mourners? Our hearts are too cold and too hard. We have been in sin for too long. We have been away too long and don’t want to pretend to cry to God.

We want this experience to be real so we can get absolute comfort from God. And it is not there because maybe you have been away from God too long. I don’t know much about cooking, but when a lump of meat is not tender, it needs to be tenderized. There are a couple of ways to do this. The first way is to season the meat and let it sit so that the seasoning gets into it and softens it over time so that the meat becomes tender because it is hanging out with the right stuff for this extended amount of time.

Many Christians today have been away from God’s presence for too long, and their hearts need to be seasoned with the right kind of seasoning. Why, you say, how do I get my heart seasoned? You have to hang out at the cross. There is only one place that can soften the hard heart. You have to hang out at the cross. The cross has to become your hangout place. You have to spend time around Calvary. Why do you spend time around Calvary? Because that is why Jesus died. Jesus died for our sins. The Bible says Jesus was wounded for our transgression.

Paul says, “Don’t you ever leave the cross?” He says, “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless, I live; yet not I; [it is Christ who] lives in me. The life which I now live I live by faith for the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” When believers stop hanging around the cross, they lose the seasoning, and their hearts get hard {and stiff]. As long as you only remember that Jesus died 2,000 years ago for you so that one day in the future you can go to heaven, you have skipped the cross. The cross is supposed to be a way of life for every believer. That is why we take communion. We take communion so that we are reminded of the cross. Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of Me.”

Don’t forget the cross; don’t forget Jesus. Don’t forget why Jesus died. Don’t forget why Jesus rose from the grave. Don’t lose sight of the cross because your heart will harden if you do. If you and I would hang out around the cross more [and more], we would find God softening our hearts so that we can respond to Him because our hearts would no longer be hardened. If you lose sight of the cross, your heart will be hard like a rock. We need to return to the cross. I need to return to the cross. You need to return to the cross. Each of us must return to the cross so that the heart stays soft, the meat stays tender, and the meat does not get hardened.

FAITH APPEAL, CALL to ACTION and ALTAR CALL

“Blessed are they that mourn, for they will be comforted.” Would you stand to your feet? If you need comfort right now, please come up so we can pray with you. If you need comfort because you are tired of making God cry, please come up so we can pray for you. You are a believer, and you are on your way to heaven, but God is weeping inside because you have had worldly sorrow but not godly sorrow.

Well, maybe you are not even sure you are a believer, that you have accepted Jesus into your heart, and that you want to make things right with God by accepting His Son Jesus and be truly blessed by God. You say I am willing to deal with my sin and call it what God calls it. God invites you to be a mourner and to come with a broken spirit, realizing you bring nothing but reach out for God’s mercy and grace, provided through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, who paid the punishment for your sins. Please come up so I can pray for you. You are tired of how life has been going for a long time. God has a comforter that is enough for the whole world, and [He] wants to comfort us. Please come up so I can pray for you.

BENEDICTION

Let’s pray. Father, thank You for our time today with You at the church. It has been a great day, and we “Thank You” for that. This is such a rich spiritual truth that it is compelling and convincing but also challenges us and calls us to action. May the Holy Spirit help us to understand what was preached today. Thank You again for Your Word; I pray that You seal it in our hearts, and may You soften every hard heart. Manifest it as we live for Your glory in Christ’s name. Amen.

God bless you. We will see you next week at 10:30 a.m.