Introduction
sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, that those who mourn are blessed, so it’s important to understand why. Mourning means you recognize the most important reality in the human existence, sin. Mourning means you have been hit by the weight of what it has done to you and to everyone you know. Mourning says you have considered the devastating fact that life right here, right now, is one big spiritual war. Mourning means that you have come to realize, as you get up in the morning, that once again you will be greeted with a catalog of temptations. Mourning means you know that there really are spiritual enemies out there meaning to do you harm. Mourning results when you confess that there are places where your heart still wanders. But mourning does something wonderful to you. The sad realities that cause you to mourn also cause you to cry out for the help, rescue, forgiveness, and deliverance of a Redeemer. Jesus said that if you mourn, you will be comforted. He’s not talking about the comfort of elevated feelings. He’s talking about the comfort of the presence and grace of a Redeemer, who meets you in your mourning, hears your cries for help, comes to you in saving mercy, and wraps arms of eternal love around you. It’s the comfort of knowing that you’re forgiven, being restored, now living in a reconciled relationship with the one who made you, and now living with your destiny secure. Mourning sin—past, present, and future—is the first step in seeking and celebrating the divine grace that is the hope of every- one whose heart has been made able to see by that very same grace. So it is right and beneficial to take a season of the year to reevaluate, recalibrate, and have the values of our hearts clarified
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