Beatitudes: # 3

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

Quite frankly when we read Scripture it is quite easy to just glance over somethings. In our attempts to cross off daily Bible reading from our checklist, we have the tendency to miss some important things.  The Beatitudes are no exception. How many times have you read through the Gospel of Matthew, let alone the sermon on the mount and rushed thorugh the Beatitides? I admit, that I have done this. Not this week…

In our Bible classes this week we talked about mourning, patricularly what it means to mourn our spiritual poverty, our bankruptcy before God. This was an uncomfortable week. No one likes to talk about sin, let alone having to feel sorry, or deep regret our dirtiness. But, we did.

Mourning our destitution before God moves us to a place of accepting the reality of sin in our lives. Only when we come to the end of ourselves do we make room for God to meet us and begin his transformation of our lives. Something I tried to convey to our teens this week was the difference between saying your sorry, and deep regret for something. Most of the time it seems when we see people pray and ask for forgiveness in our churches we very rarely see someone express deep remorse for the disaster they have made in their lives. But, feeling something deep and moving seems to be precisley what Jesus wants from us. Only when we mourn what we’ve done and what we’ve become we are then able to be comforted. Jesus doesn’t call us to a deep regret and then leave us in our shame and grief, no he comforts us, and moves us beyond the need to do it ourselves to letting go, and letting God. May we all learn to mourn!