Well, this now will be the third sermon in this series on the Beatitudes. We find in verses three to verse 12, blessings, things that are blessed, happy are the people who what we have here describes them. Now, Lord spoke this in one memorable sermon, the entirety of which we call the Sermon on the Mount. We could, I'm sure, spend a year on the Sermon on the Mount. We're confining ourselves to the Beatitudes, and there's plenty enough in there to occupy our thought. We've seen the one who speaks is the Son of God, speaking with the authority that being the Son of God confers upon Him, and speaking to men, bringing the law, showing them the spiritual nature of the law, opening their eyes to the things that they had missed or had been falsely taught, and undoing the damage what previous teachers and generations of teachers had left them struggling with. And in the Beatitudes themselves, which of course are leading on to where our Lord contrasts teaching of the scribes and the Pharisees with what he then says, interpreting the Ten Commandments in a deeper and fuller way. Well, we see in the Beatitudes that these are not sort of compartmentalized things, as though each one just sort of stands on its own and has no relation to what went before it or what follows after it. No far from it, in a sense, they all blend together. that what one opens up and what it focuses upon immediately either assumes what's gone before or prepares us to accept as a logical extension what follows after it. And so one thing flows into the other. And what it's speaking about there is us, who we are, at heart. Not what we might put on by way of some kind of righteousness or some kind of Christian religion, but who we are at heart. Because nothing less than that satisfies God. There's no good faking it to ourselves and certainly no good faking it to God. He sees through it. And so in this, and it opens up with it, doesn't it? Here is the declaration making sense. And if we were following through the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, making sense of what is to follow and explaining it and developing it, because it's talking about who we are at heart, because the Pharisees and the scribes didn't cut it. Their righteousness, they would talk about that. And people would think they're mighty righteous. all the works that they did. Now, the Lord, of course, is shaking his head, saying they don't cut it. They do not have a righteousness that pleases God. You need something more than that if you're going to enter the kingdom of heaven. Let me tell you, that would have been a shock to the people. They would have been amazed at that. They would have thought they were automatic. They were shooing for heaven. And the Lord was saying they're not going to make it, actually. And so the people would be set inquiring, what is it that's needed? and realizing if they listen to the Beatitudes are right, that it's who you are in your heart. And there's a lot that's required. And it's required there of us and it's seeing something of this that brings us to Christ in the first place. We see that this is beyond us. This is a high, wonderful ethic. It's beyond us. And it's meant also to be for us as Christians to take this on board and wrestle with it and seek God for mercy. be able to be what is required of us at heart. And so today we're in verse four, blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. Blessed mourning, that's the title of the sermon, blessed mourning. And that sounds extraordinary, doesn't it? First heading then, a grief observed, grief observed. Well, who would choose grief? Who would choose mourning? There's a time to weep and a time to laugh. There's a time to mourn. There's a time to dance, as it says in Ecclesiastes. And I'm sure we would choose the joy and we choose the dance over the mourning and the weeping. And yet we are being brought here to actually see something, whatever mourning is, that has a different character to what we have when we mourn the loss of a loved one. Friends say, not all of you will know Mary, but we stand with her and her grief. And as a nation, indeed as nations, we stand together in the losses that have been sustained through wars, terrible evils that men, women have committed against other men and women and children, and have been horrified at those things. And today is something of a day in which we allow the horror of that to impact us. But scripture is full of grief, full of people mourning death, those who die. Abraham mourning for the loss of his wife, Sarah, feeling it, feeling it keenly. Jacob having to erect a pillar of stones where Rachel died. We think of David, Absalom. We might count him a wicked young man, but he was still David's son. Or how he wept for him, perhaps wept over much, discouraged the men who had risked their lives to save David's kingship against the uprising of Absalom. He had to change tack, but we felt for his grief, at least in measure. Why, and then we turned to John chapter 11. We'd find there, wouldn't we, that chapter much taken up. The Lord going to Lazarus, Lazarus who has fallen asleep, but I go to wake him. And the disciples thought, well, if he sleeps, he will get better. And the Lord had to tell them he's dead and I'm going to raise him. And so he does, but not before he's wept, wept as he saw Mary weeping and the Jews who were with her weeping. And as he went to see where they had laid him, so he groaned in his spirit. A lord mourning the loss of people, loved ones no longer there. But whereas people sometimes don't recover from that grief, at least not in a healthy way, move on in their grief, and any number of people go to consult mediums to try to kind of converse with those they've lost. talk with people, and they're trying to talk to their mother or their father, and not got over the loss that they resort to such false and wrong and dangerous things. But here, it's talking about something spiritual. It's not saying something trivial to us as, oh, well, in your morning there, well, lighten up. There's a times a week. There is a time for grief, not saying that, but it is saying spiritually that there is a place and it follows on from what it means to be poor in spirit. It follows on from thinking of ourselves in our, in our sinfulness. before a great God, not staying with that, but also recognizing that God meets with those who are poor in spirit, that he comes with help for them. That's what the cross is, help for those poor in spirit, nothing in themselves to bring to God to please him. And the morning, if you like, that we have here, is where we mourn what sin has done, what it's taken away from us. The losses that you and I have incurred because of sin. What we might have been, could have been, should have been, but are not because of sin. Not in ourselves, but other people. What they might have been, but for the effects of sin. What has robbed them of, stolen away from them, left them bereft of? And then we take it further. We say, oh, what nations, what they have lost, what through sinfulness on a kind of national scale, bad traits, bad culture, pride, evil kinds of nationalisms, wrong interpretations of religions and what God might require. and how those have played out so, so badly. Yes, and taken away not only from the nation itself. No nation has benefited from having a tyrant. No nation has benefited from having a great kind of military machine that just crashes everything in its wake. or not, as the case of Russia at the present might be. But no nation has benefited from that. And certainly those nations that are at the receiving end of that kind of treatment, they don't benefit from that. So we mourn what sin has done. We look at it, not charitably, but we look at it in the cold light of day. We look at ourselves and we assess the damage. We look at other people. families, children, assess the damage. We look at our nation and we assess the damage. Well, we look at the world and we assess the damage there. Now, of course, it's not to say that this sums up the entirety of Christian experience and the attitude to say, no, it doesn't. It doesn't sum up the entirety of Christian experience. And so you stay with this because if you've read the text to write that it says they should be comforted. There's something good in that. They're good things. The Bible says that there are good things. Tells us of good things. It tells us to rejoice in verse 12. And it talks about good things in the Sermon on the Mount, chapter seven and verse 11. The Holy Spirit is going to bring good things. So this is not, as it were, encapsulating everything. ever in scripture, you're comparing scripture with scripture. And so here what we were thinking about last Lord's Day evening, Ephesians chapter one and the closing section, great hopes we have of heaven and the glorious inheritance, God's riches in the saints and the power, exceeding greatness of the power that works toward us who believe. very positive things. I hope you found them that way. That's what they are. And that hasn't somehow been negated by this, or as if that negates what we're developing this morning in our thinking. It's both. The Christian life It's a very full life. Christ didn't promise shallowness. I've come that you might have life, have it to the full. And this is what it means. This is the fullness of life. And it's not some stupid vacuous joy or some kind of miserable depression. It's not those things. That's not what the world thinks. And sadly, often what Christians think it's about. It's not. It's much deeper, much richer than that. The second heading somewhat already have anticipated. Some fundamental conclusions, all right? Some fundamental conclusions. And so when he talks about mourning and blessedness in it, this isn't some divine cruel joke. This isn't as if God is offering us something so kind of unrealistic that it's a bit of a cruel joke on us. He's not saying that. He's offering something here and promising us something here that is very, very real. And we miss it really at our spiritual peril and certainly the benefit to our soul. No, it's not as if we are to think sort of negatively about what we're reading here. that there are negative things that we have to conclude about ourselves and things that are uncomfortable that we have to address within our own hearts. But it's taking what mourning means, the sense of loss, giving it there a spiritual connotation, a spiritual context, and actually then point us on to joy, to comfort, to a reality. It is a call to go deeper. If the serpent on the mountain is anything, it's a call to go deeper. It's to go beyond the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes, to go beyond them. If you'd look in Matthew 6 and their prayer life, or their almsgiving, or their fasting, to go beyond that. Your righteousness has got to exceed that, the kind of inner life that you are living out. has got to go beyond them. And later in Matthew 5, the commandments and how you understand them, how you apply them, it's got to go deeper. It's got to go further. It's got to extend into more. It's got to be an inquiry deeper within because the level of understanding that up until then, perhaps God had winked at. He winked at no more. is alongside the greater expectation, the greater help, that there is a greater measure of spiritual power, greater measure of spiritual help, and that goes alongside the fact that you have the final answer to sin, where here is the comfort for those who mourn, here is the blessedness of the kingdom of heaven for those poor in spirit, that you have Christ. We have speaking to us here the very one who fulfills the Lord, who obeys it to the letter and in the spirit of it, and who takes the perfection of that obedience to the cross to die for what is the curse of the law, that everyone that doesn't continue in the things of the law, they should die. So he dies on behalf of people who have not kept the law, ourselves, and comes back from the dead to impart spiritual power to help us now live what the law is asking of us, and here, In the Beatitudes, right at the beginning, headline, go deeper. Call to go deeper. For in Christian testimony, doctrine, there is simplicity and there is profundity. There is everything. There is enough, well, for anybody, anybody who has ears to hear, to believe, and to be converted, wow, cross, what it means, why really in a sense so comprehensible. It's sin that robs it of its comprehensibility because in fact it's so so straightforward. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. And yet then there's profundity isn't there and what scripture is asking us to do in a way to take ourselves a bit apart to not just carry ourselves forward, whatever we were in our unconverted state, and just sort of settle for that, or not even bother to ask ourselves questions about that. What have we imported into the kingdom of heaven? What are we carrying still with us? And it's asking us to have a look at that. not to seal it off, not to make it a kind of, we don't ask that sort of question anymore, not to be as we're almost strangers to ourselves, but to look and to ask, what has sin done to me? What has it done before I was a Christian? What's it done since I was a Christian? What habits, what ways, what ways of approaching things, ways I read the Bible actually wrong? I need correction. I need development. Why so often? It's feelings, isn't it? People are after feelings. They want feelings. They don't want these feelings, by the way, do they? They don't want to mourn, for the most part. People say, I don't want that. Thank you. Let's have it cheerful. Let's brighten this up. Let's make a big sound and have a band there. And, you know, let's get on with it that way. And it's so superficial. Can I say that? So, so superficial. And the church suffers to this day. The legacy, the trivialization of spiritual things is as brought us low. And it's not helped us as individuals. It's certainly not helped the church and her teaching and her doctrine. And feelings, well, can we not say that actually that's the world? This is the world's thing. This is what it's about. You want to see and read about people who are taken up with feelings. Why? You just read the stuff out there. What's in the culture? It's all, all of it. It's about your feelings. And where do those feelings come from? Well, there's a good question. Do we know? Do sinful people understand their sinful hearts and how deceptive they are? No, they don't. They actually haven't got a clue. They may go for help from counsellors, therapists, you name it, whoever. And they're the blind often, leading the blind. And both of them, in a sense, are falling into a ditch. And to dwell upon those feelings leaves us forever strangers to ourselves, that we haven't gone deeper. We haven't investigated further. We haven't found, as it were, those keys to actually move on beyond that and become more of what we're meant to be here in the Beatitudes and to move more smoothly, if you like, into being merciful people and peacemakers and having purity of heart and being meek and willingly so. We're missing the moment. And too often, the idea is that you sort of clothe yourself in a sort of superficial joy, some jollying up of the Christian message and a trivialization of it, which shows I'm afraid. And it's not as if I'm talking here and never had been in that sort of situation myself, as I surely have. It actually makes you not self-aware and not God-aware. are not really able to access the depths of spiritual power and resource and the opportunities to change that are here on offer in the Beatitudes. It's too superficial. It's too, well, we call it happy clappy, don't we there? And okay, that, it's that. And it misses the moment. It stops us being serious. It does say, doesn't it? Be earnest and repent. That's what the later scenes were told. Be earnest and repent. shuts us off from that. But of course, you can go to the opposite extreme. And you can think, ah, mourning. Then we must affect, yes, affect a kind of depressive negativity. So that's what's being looked for here. Well, that's no more that than it is some superficial joy that we are to aim at if we truly want to be comforted. Both of them wrong turnings. I'm generalizing here. That's this idea of some superficial adding of some sort of woe and some solemnity that isn't real, that doesn't actually couple up with anything of depth and substance. But still you find when you sort of scratch beneath the surface, there are all kinds of troubles in folk who can affect that sort of thing. No, it's a deeper view. Deeper view of God, isn't it? Somewhere in there. We've got to have a deeper view of God, what holiness is, what it's meant to look like and sound like, what its texture is, and to move, as the Lord does here, holiness out of just a kind of easy, kind of almost a believism, an easy obedience. Do this, do that, kind of list of rules and regulations. I can do that. Oh, I managed that. Oh, I can stop doing that. That's mission accomplished. and fooling us into thinking that we've found something which we actually haven't. And somewhere within it, we need to believe in God's judgment. We need to believe that he's serious about what he's saying about the afterlife, about the insufficiency of works and the insufficiency of whatever we can generate from within ourselves as a kind of hole in us in inverted commas. We need to see that we're dealing with somebody far more glorious than that. and all the general trivialization, the way in which God's glory has been brought low and kind of reconfigured, and as if we just dismiss all of that and have a happy, happy time. It's not gonna get as far, and indeed, the history of the church today suggests that very fact. We need the view of God. We need to understand Him better, and the things which He has said about Himself. We can look and even think, ah, there are things, even there we might look at ourselves and think, well, it's going well there, isn't it? Oh, what beautiful places and beautiful country and everything. But actually, there's a war going on. There's a war going on. And even if it's not fought with guns and bullets and rockets and such things, they're being fought by men and women in their enmity against God. And so we recognize that. We recognize it in ourselves. We recognise this in our culture, towns, cities, villages. Perhaps we hoped too much. Perhaps we hoped too much that human nature, without the help of God's Spirit, without having been converted, without the Holy Spirit reigning and suppressing and dealing with the things that still churn away there, that more could be accomplished. We look now, do we not, at our towns and our cities, and well, I've lived a few years now myself, I guess I have, and I look back at the places that I saw in my late teens or in my twenties, and I don't know, hopes that I had these places could improve and that people could live better, more spiritually, love God, love their neighbour, and they don't, and they're worse. And the times require us to mourn for that. mourn for those losses. When we think of our nation, and well, we marked the day a month or so back, when it is thought that the 10 millionth baby be aborted in the United Kingdom since the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act had taken place. It was estimated, I don't know how they got there, mentioned it before in the pulpit. Don't sink in though, 10 million, 10 million. We're talking the size of London and more, aren't we here? And that number of children there have not seen the light of day. We don't like to think, do we, about the processes that go along with it. We just question whether we are a civilized country in the way that we can deal with unborn children, children in the womb, and can handle them in that way. We're ashamed. of this effort to stop people offering to young women often there in their confusion and difficulty a helping hand. Say don't do it, it's not the answer even to your need. You'll feel the guilt of it, you will, it'll be there, it'll stay with you and you'll struggle with that. I know Christians who in their unconverted time had an abortion and Well, of course they're forgiven, but there's still the mourning and the sense of what sin did, that they allowed a precious, precious life to be removed from them. It stays. And we take cognizance of that. We think about that. We take that on board. We take on board the fact that so, so many children have seen the breakdown of the marriage, partnership even, between their mum and their dad. And it's gone. No fault divorce, which has come in, has only speeded that. We understand from the rates of divorce and we feel the sadness of that. And we can't imagine, as parents often do when they divorce, that the children will be okay, but they're not okay. And the schools at the moment, we can tell you from our own experience, have more troubled children they've ever had, have more difficulties helping children who have just suffered so grievously. And again, we have to bracket in with that and how the lockdown only made it worse. Children were in such unhappy, unhappy homes, shut in with unhappy, unhappy parents. And they're carrying the burden of it. And it's there and you can see it. And we grieve. When we think of young people who are being lied to over transgenderism, So here is the answer to troubled minds. We don't kind of underestimate or show no sympathy for young people who do have troubled minds. We can only too well understand how they have troubled minds, because the nation has left God behind. God has now, in some sense, I fear, left us behind. There are children, young people, mutilating themselves. doing horrible things to their bodies, doing such damage, harming themselves, and doing it with the help of people who really should be ashamed of themselves, and groups and organizations that you could name, I'm sure, who have got such an evil track record, and really should be ashamed of themselves. And yet there they are, and promising such help and hope for young people, And yes, we find the suicide rates among young people, particularly young women, I think, shockingly high. And we find a number of people who have gone through this process being promised some freedom, some deliverance from there. They're in a turmoil. And looking back, and realising they were lied to, and finding no relief. In fact, if anything, deep, deep regret, deep, deep sadness of what is now irrecoverable damage that is done perhaps in late teens or even earlier, or in their twenties, and it can't now be recovered. And we feel, don't we, for them, and we grieve. And as we look within our nation's life, and one could just, Quote in Jeremiah chapter 19, I think this is how the Lord feels on this, just verses four and five, which says, because they have forsaken me and made this an alien place, because they burned incense in it to other gods who neither they, their fathers, nor the kings of Judah have known. And to fill this place with the blood of the innocents, they've also built the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings to Baal. I did not command or speak in order to come into my mind. That's what they did. That's what they did then. That's what they're doing still. And we may not have exactly the high places of Baal, and exactly the kinds of burnings of suns and fire for burnt offerings to Baal. We're burning up our children at the moment to other gods and false ideologies and evil people who put evil ideas into the public domain and offer help and freedom, which is actually bringing bondage and misery. And we mourn. So my third heading there is a time to weep. A time to weep. Read the book of Lamentations. Well, you'll find it there. the Prophet Jeremiah weeping, weeping for what Jerusalem had done to itself, all the damage of her sin, weeping for the consequences of it, the people, and the damage, and the sorrow, and the losses. And so we would capture something of that loss. And it's a loss also in ourselves, our own self-centeredness, our own false spiritual hopes, and how we might have lived in an expectation of something that just simply wasn't there. Placing energy and time and effort into hopes of some revival that never came, or some idea that if we so-so got our doctrine right, then revival would just follow, which many, many within our circles believed. And it didn't happen. And I think a lot of energy, time was lost in those hopes. So we consign them to the dust and we look beyond them. And we look instead to God, not a hope that we have, not some idea that we have, and recognize that it is a time to weep. Allowing our sins of omission to come and to rebuke us. Allowing the state of our nation. People just don't listen. don't listen. It's Remembrance Sunday, there's a lot to remember, a lot to think about, but no, they haven't turned up for that, have they just? Folk haven't come, and didn't think about the Queen's death, didn't think about COVID, economic crisis, I don't see any huge kind of turning point, they're just not listening. And we grieve over that, their losses, what they're losing. What are they going to miss in eternity because they didn't see this the day of their visitation? But here's the thing. Now we dwelt upon these things and there's solemn things. I didn't choose the remembrance day for this sermon. It just so happened. And here we are and reflecting on solemn things. But there is a blessedness in this, a blessedness. There is actually deliverance. There is help. There is mercy. There's such reflections, which are really in the end only thinking God's thoughts after him, only coming to share his perspective and being willing to part with cherished ideas and cherished hopes, allowing ourselves to survey a nation in ruins and allowing it to touch us and affect us. But there is blessedness. It's as if heaven says, They're getting it. They're seeing it. We can work with such people. We can work in such people. We can send help for such, and we can comfort them. Because if they see less and less in this world, they'll see more and more in heaven. They'll cherish the promises of God more. And they'll be comforted by the facts, and is this not so? That if you're a Christian today, oh, what a blessed, blessed state you and I are in. What a transformation has happened to you and to me. What a difference now for us that we have God for us, not against us. That we've actually now got the tools, the understanding, we can apply our minds and our wills to the kind of change that is needed. that we can be sober-minded and realistic, but that we can also entertain actually considerable hopes that now, perhaps, that exceeding greatness of that power, well, that has more easy access and influence to your and my heart, to change us thoroughly and deeply within, to bring us, yes, into this call to go deeper, because if we go deeper, we find more of God, and we'll find less and less of ourselves. We will find that we're getting it, seeing his perspective, putting that on who we are, and then looking beyond it. Well, to see that actually Christ has died for individuals who can mourn for what they are and what sin has done, and who as Christians can still mourn for it. see the damage of it and see how well in so many ways we are deformed by sin and have had something taken away from us by sin, that we're not who we could be. But now perhaps we can begin that journey more precisely, more nearly, to get near to what God holds out for us here, that comfort. that we can spend our time better, not frittering away energy. You have a kind of system, so much energy gets lost to heat, just heat. And it just sort of loses any usefulness. What it can do within the system, it's gone, evaporated away. Well, if you can conserve that energy that's lost to heat and make it work within, why is so much there in the Christian life, the better it would be for us. But you and I, actually, as Christians, have been saved from this futility of the world. We've been saved from it. And we don't sort of hold there, as it were, some superior position. Do you know what it does? It actually makes us more sympathetic to that world. When we are more aware of what sin's done to us, we can see what it's doing to them. And we're not here in judgmentalism, as if, ah, we've seen it. You haven't. Poor you. but rather yes, poor you, you don't see it. And we're praying that you will see it. And we'll go out into the open air and we will plead again with people that they will see it and give glory to God and want to have the same deliverance that we've had, the same being rescued from darkness and judgment and condemnation, not only in eternity, but here as well. living with that chaotic meanings, life that is really the lot of the non-Christian. We've been saved from that and we can rejoice in that, in our God, because you and I didn't work this out, I can tell you that. It was God's Spirit did the working out and we then saw what the maths were and added up rightly. We hadn't a clue before that. No different, no different from any other. And had it not been for that intervention over whatever period of time that found you and found me, we would still be there. And that's why we look with sympathy. And that's why we try to actually act with sympathy and not hold ourselves away from and aloof from. It would be so easy to, as it were, proverbially kind of bring up the drawbridge and say, go away world. So far from us, we've lost capacity to care for you. So easy to do that, but not for those who truly do mourn and who want to be comforted. And one of the greatest comforts is that God shows us, yes, you have me. Yes, you have the kingdom of heaven. Yes, you have all that my son did, and it's counting for you now and always. Yes, you have the Holy Spirit, and he's not here today, gone tomorrow. He's here, and he wants to do a lot more than we've seen him do within the depth of our soul. But that is a reason for hope, actually, a reason for joy. It's a reason for hope for the future of us as a church. It's a reason for hope for you and me as Christians trying to make our way through this evil, evil world. Well, may God help us so to do that we won't underestimate the power of sin, but we won't underestimate the power of the cross, that our Lord Jesus Christ shed blood, that we've been saved actually from the wrong kind of mourning to the right kind of mourning. True spiritual grief that is actually a pathway to true spiritual joy and to our becoming more an open book to our God. he can say I can work with such people as this and I can show them the secret of my covenant and I can make my home with them and fill their hearts even in this cold and evil age with joy and warmth as they make their pilgrimage through. May God so help us to know. Blessed morning.