Radical Living - Part 004: Blessed Comfort

 Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted. (Matthew 5:4, NKJV).

Radical Living - Part 004: Blessed Comfort

Godly sorrow is another aspect of mourning that leads to blessing. A Christian, when (not if) he or she sins is to confess that sin to God, repent (turn away from that sin) and receive the comfort of being forgiven, exactly as instructed in 1 John: If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9, NKJV). Mourning over our own sin then, is another way that God spurs us to do precisely that, and the result is comfort and cleansing.

This is good news and makes this kind of grief one of the key differentiators between regret or remorse, and repentance. Judas regretted his betrayal of Christ and hung himself with his own prideful remorse, as much as with the rope that cinched his neck, and his lack of godly sorrow brought him to eternal perdition. Peter mourned his betrayal of Christ,and grieved over it not from wounded pride, but from the sincere realization that he had failed the One who loved Him enough to die in His place.  Ultimately that led to Peter's eternal comfort.

Individuals who do not mourn, either from apathy, ignorance of their true condition, or hardness of heart, can never receive the comfort from God that follows as naturally day follows night. In fact, so much does our God and Father desire to comfort that He proclaims His intent to the fallen world unmistakably in the verses below:

“Comfort, yes, comfort My people!” Says your God. (Isaiah 40:1, NKJV).  

To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, And the day of vengeance of our God; To comfort all who mourn, (Isaiah 61:2, NKJV).

These are the cries from the very heart of God through the prophet Isaiah to His people even in the midst of their apostasy. Though they deserved and would receive judgment, His love longed to be their Comforter, and promised that after the trials there would be comfort.

Now may the God of patience and comfort grant you to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus, (Romans 15:5, NKJV). 

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. (2 Corinthians 1:3, 4, NKJV).

These passages echo the same declaration in the New Testament through the Apostle Paul, but now emphasized to the degree that it becomes part of how He wants us to know Him: as the God of Comfort.

Ultimately, this comfort becomes a Christian's permanent possession through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, Who takes up residence within each and every child of God, and is forever known as THE Comforter.

But the key is first to mourn as God mourns, for without that first step, solace cannot and will not be sought.

While it may seem counterintuitive to the world that mourning is a good thing, in the Kingdom of Heaven, and in light of the truth of our fallen condition, it must make perfect sense to a heart softened and recreated by God. It is one of the key spiritual principles of walking this world as a follower of the Lord Christ.

Radical Living - Part 003: Blessed Grief

Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted. (Matthew 5:4, NKJV).

Radical Living - Part 003: Blessed Grief

Have you ever studied someone who should be sad and isn't? I don't mean a brave act of "stiff upper lip" camouflaging underlying sadness, or someone a few cards shy of a full deck. I mean someone who is truly not grieving when the circumstances clearly call for it, and shows no sign of being effected. It is creepy because beings in human skin should act like humans.

We are created in God's image.  That includes the ability to feel emotion. That gift has been perverted by sin, of course, but the intent behind it is pure and good and differentiates human beings from rocks or worms. Once regenerated by the Holy Spirit at the moment of salvation, our innate ability to feel has been reset, fixed. While far from perfect (everything is this side of death), we are now capable of feeling in some small way like God Himself does. We may find ourselves heartbroken over things that previously weren't even on our personal radar screens. We begin grieving over not only our own losses, but for the tragic consequences of life in a fallen world generally. And because we now have an intuitive understanding of how things SHOULD be, we mourn deeply over how things really ARE.

Look, God feels. That is one the most astounding revelations in Scripture, and why any other so-called religion that envisions God as an impersonal force is hopelessly childish. We love because God is love. We have personhood and emotion because God is a Person who has emotion. And looking at the world around us, and the despair-filled existence of life on earth, even comfortable life with all basic provisions available, we mourn. And in mourning over the things over which God also mourns we are shown to be His children, filled with His Spirit and being conformed into the image of His Son, day by day.

I hear people all the time trumpeting how good life is (balanced of course by a vast army of complainers), and while I can agree that life often has a sufficiency of joy and contentment to enable us to get by and to give us a taste of how things should and will be when the Lord returns, I cannot ignore the current big picture. Christ does not want us to. He wants us to have His heart. And the more we draw near to Him through prayer and fellowship and investment in His word, the more of His heart He gives us.  And that heart is overflowing with both immeasurable love and profound grief. He cried at Lazarus's tomb. He wept over Jerusalem. He was a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. God had to suffer an excruciating public execution to make our redemption possible. That He did so is a joy beyond words to express. That he HAD to is "groaning which cannot be uttered", a divine testament to how mournful things truly are.

Christ-followers are blessed as we become more like Him for so many reasons, but the one in view here is simply this - mourning over life in this world now is a prerequisite for joy in the world to come. Seeing the truth of the human condition in the light of Christ is a safeguard, a cure, for the eternally fatal disease of holding onto the things of this world too tightly. There are many reasons to grieve: our own sin, the horrible consequences of sin throughout history including that most grievous of sin's allies, death. And mourning is painful, but the alternative, reptilian self-absorption and scaly selfishness, is infinitely worse because it means you don't know Him, and most likely never will.