Think back to the last time of real mourning in your life. Whatever the circumstances – a loss of a loved one, the loss of a dream – recall to mind the anguish of soul that you experienced.

At times of loss in my life, the Christian sympathy cards that were sent often quoted Matthew 5:4 – Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Now, the Bible certainly does offer comfort for those who know God in times of grief… but what is this verse talking about?

It would be hard to word this better than the explanation in the Jamieson, Fausset, Brown commentary:

This “mourning” must not be taken loosely for that feeling which is wrung from men under pressure of the ills of life, nor yet strictly for sorrow on account of committed sins. Evidently it is that entire feeling which the sense of our spiritual poverty begets; and so the second beatitude is but the complement of the first. The one is the intellectual, the other the emotional aspect of the same thing. It is poverty of spirit that says, “I am undone”; and it is the mourning which this causes that makes it break forth in the form of a lamentation–“Woe is me! for I am undone.” Hence this class are termed “mourners in Zion,” or, as we might express it, religious mourners, in sharp contrast with all other sorts (Isaiah 61:1-3, 66:2). Religion, according to the Bible, is neither a set of intellectual convictions nor a bundle of emotional feelings, but a compound of both, the former giving birth to the latter. Thus closely do the first two beatitudes cohere. The mourners shall be “comforted.” Even now they get beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Sowing in tears, they reap even here in joy. Still, all present comfort, even the best, is partial, interrupted, short-lived. But the days of our mourning shall soon be ended, and then God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes. Then, in the fullest sense, shall the mourners be “comforted.”

I love how they point out the way that these first two beatitudes tie together – when we are poor in spirit, we recognize the utter helplessness and hopelessness of our spiritual state as sinners in rebellion against a holy God. The mourning in our spirit is a result of truly acknowledging this fact, letting it sink in.

Isn’t it interesting how our culture tends to glorify being in rebellion? Either we pretend that we’re good people who don’t sin (despite evidence to the contrary), or we embrace our role as sinners and proudly make it our persona!

Those who are truly blessed, those who are truly His, will not only recognize the fact of their sin, they will be broken over it. They will mourn before Him and their hearts will cry out as Isaiah did, “Woe is me! I am ruined! I am a man of unclean lips!”

My question today is: how seriously do we take our sin? What do we do when God points out our sin to us through His Word, through a sermon, through a fellow believer? Do we brush it off as insignificant? Do we justify it and explain it away? Do we get defensive and angry? Do we embrace it with pride? Or do our hearts break, do we mourn, over the sin God points out to us in our lives?

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

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