Two Kingdoms: Week 3

Well, good morning, let's try that again. Good morning, so

glad that you're here on our spring Ford Sunday. You know,

this is typically my least favorite Sunday of the year,

and most years I just feel like coming out here

and saying, good morning, here's your sermon. You know, I'm

usually tired and we're I slept good last night. I

hope you had a good night to sleep last night

and you're ready to receive from the Lord. I want

to give a special shout out to all those people

who were here Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday for Dessert Theater. Yeah,

God bless you. I know that was a big, big

commitment this week and just it was awesome and it

was a wonderful opportunity for our church just to come

together and encourage each other. Well, today we are continuing

our second week in the Beatitudes, and we're learning what

does it mean to live like in the upside down

world and the alternate reality of the Kingdom of God.

Let's pray and prepare our hearts to receive God's word today. God,

we give you prayse today we thank you for the

opportunity to be in your word. God, you are faithful

and you are good. Help us today to align our

life with your word. In Jesus' name, Amen, if you

live long enough, here's the reality. Your heart is going

to break. It's going to happen every one of us. Someday,

a good portion of us will experience that moment where

we are in the hospital hallway and we receive that

news that we never thought we would receive. Some of

us will be sitting at the edge of a casket

with our hearts broken down that we'll never be able

to speak to that loved one ever again. Some of

us will experience that loss that comes with years of

pursuing a dream and then it just collapses. And the

Bible has a word for that. See, it's in these

moments that that something inside of us just cracks open.

It just cracks open. We're overwhelmed. The Bible has a

word for that. It's called mourning. And we try to

avoid it. I try to avoid it. We chase comfort, stability, happiness,

as we should. But Jesus says something shocking about those

who mourn. He says, blessed are those who mourn? Now?

How could sorrow O mourning ever be blessed? Now to

understand that we have to understand what Jesus means by mourning.

And here's what we're gonna discover together this morning. Mourning

in the hands of God actually becomes a doorway to comfort.

Mourning in the hands of God is actually a doorway

in the comfort. And I don't know about you, but

I've seen mourning up close my grandfather when I was fifteen,

when he passed away unexpectedly. My grandmother that whole day,

all she could say was oh my God, Oh my Lord,

Oh my God, Oh my Lord. She couldn't say anything else.

She was in complete shock, an instant mourning. Matter of fact,

we had to call a doctor to get her on

some meds just so she could make it through that evening.

A couple of days after that, I was staying with

her for a few days and we were out to

go get groceries and we were at this huge intersection

and Ma'ama took off with the vehicle and instead of

staying in her lane, she actually swerved over and headed

right into oncoming traffic, and I had to grab a hold.

At fifteen years old, I had to grab a hold

of steering wheel and pull us into our lane and

she didn't even realize what was happening. See, she was

so filled with grief that she didn't even know where

she was at. That's morning. I've also been to funerals

that would absolutely break your heart. One funeral, and I've

shared this before with a nine year old daughter, when

they went to close the father's casket, she runs up

and she jumps on the casket and starts screaming, Daddy,

don't go, Daddy, don't go. And you can imagine being

in that room where all a sudden, the room fell silent,

and then together as a room, we started to weep.

That's mourning, and everyone knew what they were witnessing. They

were witnessing a broken heart, and mourning is a natural

response to loss. And Jesus says something shocking. He says,

in his kingdom, the blessed are those who mourn. How

can you be someone who mourns and be called the blessed?

Is counterintuitive, But let's remember we're talking about the Kingdom

of God, where it's the upside down reality of God's way,

And that leads us to our big idea today. We

really kind of have two big ideas today. The first

one is this God comforts those wounded by life, and

the second idea is and he pours grace on those

broken over sin. God comforts those wounded by life, but

he pours grace on those who are broken over the sin.

Out to understand what Jesus means, we have to understand

what this word more means. And the first thing we

need to recognize is there's two types of mourning. Two

sources of mourning. One is the brokenness over life, and

that's where we experience loss, grief, illness, death, dreams fall apart.

The second kind of mourning, which maybe I'll be introducing

to some of you today, is that brokenness inside of us.

This is the pain calls by our own sin. Now,

both kinds of morning break our hearts. Both kinds of

mourning are designed to drive us towards God, and Jesus

says in both cases, here's what happens. In both cases,

whether your mourning is due to phase this world or

because of your sin, here's what it says. That God

will meet with you personally in your mourning. You will

be comforted, they will become the blessed. So here's what

we're gonna do. We're gonna first of all. Today we're

gonna start with the first type of morning, and that's

the morning where we experience laws from this world. You

know that loss of illness, death, broken dreams, and by

the way, life is full of reasons to mourn. The

Bible never pretends otherwise. Matter of fact, history itself is

a story of tears. If you study history, you understand

that history is a story of tears. And I hate

to break it to you, but our future, the world

history that has yet to unfold, will be full of

tears as well. Matter of fact, Jesus warn about the

future until he comes back. He says nations are gonna

rise against nation. There will be famines and earthquakes. See,

we live in a broken world. And what does a

broken world do? It produces broken hearts. Now, there's a

lot going on between us and several nations right now,

and I'm sure you've watched the videos just as I have.

Last weekend, I was watching one video in particular, and

at that time they had no idea where the bomb

came from or anything like that, And so I'm trying

to figure out what's going on. I'm trying to catch

up with everything, just so I'm in the know, and

then I see this clip of that girls' school that

got blown up, and when I turned the volume on,

I heard those mothers screaming. And my reaction was simply

this to put my phone down and then to put

my head down on my kitchen table and just mourn.

Now here's the thing. I don't care what country you're

from or what your politics are. Some things should break

your heart and there's more sorrow to come on all sides.

Just in this last year in our own congregation, we

experienced the Bryant family who has taken from us tragically.

And you know what, those of us who served with them,

who knew them, that led us into a season of mourning.

And here's the thing. It would be easier to ignore

these moments that break our heart. We try not to

talk about them. We get into our lobby out here

and we try to talk about almost anything else besides

the sad things. But the reality is pain is pain.

Loss is real, whether you're ignored or not. And morning

gives us two options. You have two options when it

comes to morning. One you can go to the world

and say, world, fix this. He'll this numbness. And here's

what the world will offer the world will actually offer

you escapism. You can escape that pain. You don't have

to experience that mourning. And here's what offers you. It

will offer to numb you often or really to get

your attention in another area. But often it offers you drugs, addictions, anger, bitterness.

You know, a lot of people like to take their

brokenness and they turn it into hatred towards somebody or

something else, and that hatred, all of a sudden becomes

a coping mechanism. Some people isolate. We'll do anything we

can to try to combat our grief and mourning. Yet

God offers something different. And here's what God offers. The

Bible says, what God offers those of us who mourn,

who are rocked by this world, those of us who

gets shook up by life, God offers himself. He offers himself.

A matter of fact. C. S. Lewis says this. He says,

God whispers to us and our pleasures, speaks in our

conscious but shouts in our pain. See pain gets our attention.

Co Idaman and those seasons of morning often draw our

hearts toward God. When life breaks us, we become deeply

aware of our need for God. And see loss strips

away all the illusions that we have that we're actually

in control of our life. For those of you who

love control, loss shatters that illusion. See grief humbles us

and it drives us towards God. And Jesus says, blessed

are those who warned, for they will be comforted. So

how will they become comfortable? Here's what you gotta understand.

You gotta understand that we're comforted. We see it somewhere else,

the same base word in John fourteen, and it's the

word paracletas. The word paracletus means technically the one who

will come alongside of you. But in our theology we

understand that Jesus was talking about the Holy Spirit, the

spirit of God who's gonna walk beside you and comfort you.

And so when we moreage, God actually offers himself, He

offers himself in his spirit to come walk besides you,

walk along with you in your pain. What a Psalm

thirty four Love You guys know this. The Lord is

close to who the brokenhearted, and some of you know

this personally. You bury someone you love, You've lost that dream,

that marriage, that future that you could have had that

grief is real. But Jesus promises if we bring our

sorrow to God and we will be comforted personally by him.

You know, a lot of us kind of put some

people on a pedestal and we don't think about how

they suffer. A lot of us have heard of Billy Graham.

Graham is considered maybe the greatest evangelists of all time,

maybe him or D. L. Moody and Billy Graham led

hundreds of crusades, maybe thousands, but almost at every single

one of his crusades, thousands of people came to Christ.

He wrote books, he was on television. This guy, it

seemed like he was just anointed and touched and the

hand of God was upon him his whole life. At

ninety four, his wife of over sixty some years, Ruth,

passed away, and for the first time in decades, he

was alone, and his friends talked about how they would

come over and he would often be sitting there staring

out the window, and he said, I miss the conversations,

I miss just having breakfast with her, I miss just

sitting together. And he was in this incredible grief and

this incredible sorrow in those moments. But here's a guy

who literally he stood up before thousands upon thousands of

people and experienced the anointing that handed God over and

over and over. He got to see the miracles of God,

unlike Pribbly any of us will ever even come close

to seeing. And then he says something interesting. He said,

it's in these moments that I'm all alone and I'm

grieving that I feel the closest of God, and like

I ever have before. This guy preaches, thousands of people

come to Christ. That would blow our minds if we

were the ones who offered salvation and experienced that. But

he says, the moment that I felt the presence of

God the most was in my pain, in my loneliness. See,

when we moren God offers himself to us. And here's

what we need to understand. God does not remove our sorrow.

Most of the time he steps into it. See our

good God comforts those winned by life. Now, here's what

I want to do for the rest of the message.

All right, we just discussed the surface level of that passage.

The surface level of that passage is very simple. Those

who mourn, they're comforted by God himself. Now, as we

dig deeper and go past the surface level of this

passage and we get into some more Greek. We understand

that Jesus was pointing to something a little deeper as well. Okay,

here we go again. Jesus's blessed those we mourn for

they will be comforted. Now Jesus again he's speaking about

something a little bit deeper here. This word for mourning,

and the Greek is the word pentheo. This word pentheo,

it means it represents mourning for your sin. It's a

deep grievance over the sin you have. And you might say,

all right, what's the big deal. Let me tell you

something about the Christian world today. The Christian world, for

the most part, have become numb to their sins. The

pool puts up today preach so much grace, grace, grace, grace, grace,

that that the typical Christian says, well, yeah, yeah, yeah,

we all sin, we all mess up, and we don't

grieve our sin. We don't mourn our sin. Our hearts

are not broken over our sins. A lot of us

who grew up connected to the Catholic Church, this was

something that was kind of taught because you would go

to a priest, and a priest would say to you,

your sins are absolved. Someone else took care of your sins,

and so you never learned to mourn your sin, to

grieve deeply that you've offended a holy God. But Jesus

here says, blessed if you want to become the blessed,

those who are blessed in My kingdom are the ones

who mourn their sin. Paul explains it when he says,

for god sorrow brings repentance that actually leads to salvation.

I want to stop here. Last week we talked about this,

this humility, this being poor in this spirit, this is

a doorway into the Kingdom. So for us to come

to Christ, we first must humble ourselves, recognize that we

need God desperately, so we become poor in the spirit.

But also to continue into that relationship with God, we

first have to realize we have sin and we can't

fix it on our own. And so blessed are those

who mourn their sin. He goes on to say, for

godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation, that leaves

no regret, But worldly sorrow actually brings death. Now I'm

gonna talk about the two differences here. Okay, there's worldly

sorrow and then there is godly sorrow. Worldly sorrow just

regrets the consequences. I got caught, I'm in trouble. I

lost my job, my girlfriend broke up, my marriage is

over because I did something that you regret your consequences,

but godly sorrow actually grieves your sin. I'm gonna compare

two stories for you this morning, one that shows worldly

sorrow and one that shows godly sorrow. The worldly sorrow

story we find in the Old Testament where God comes

to Saul and he says, Saul, here's what I'm gonna do.

I'm done with a Malakite. They're evil, they're not gonna turn.

And here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna wipe them

out of history. They're gonna be done for. And Saul,

I want you to be the one to make sure

that happens. So here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna

wipe out that whole nation. You're gonna let no one

stay alive. You're even gonna take all the animals. And

there was no negotiation. I was a command from God.

Because this was judgment on these people. God declared a

jehad on them because of their sin, total war, total annihilation.

The things go well, Saul has a great victory, and

so Samuel the prophet comes to greet Saul, and all

of a sudden, same he was a little concerned because

he hears something in his in his ears, and he

comes and he says, you know what, uh, you know

what is this bleeding of sheep in my ears? What

is this lowing of cattle? Now? When he says this

is Saul, Saul has an opportunity to say, you know what,

I didn't finish the job that God called me to do.

We'll take care of it instead. What does he do?

He gives an excuse, He says this, he blames it.

He says, the soldiers brought them from the Malachites. They

spared the best sheep and cattle, and here's what we're

gonna do. We're gonna sacrifice. It's a God. So he

acted like he was gonna do something wonderful. So he

was gonna bless God through his disobedience. Do you hear that, God,

I disobeyed you, But you're gonna love this. God is

not to be fooled, and then with some more investigation,

it finds out that King of Gog, their king, was

still alive, and most scholars agree that the reason he

kept him alive was because typically whenever one king conquered

another king and they would bring this king back to

their homeland, it was a cause for a celebration of

parade in honor of the conquering king. It was about status,

it was about reputation, it was about glory. So Samuel

confronts him and says, you know what, again, you have

done evil. You have sin in God's eyes. And so

finally Saul Greece and he says this. He says, yeah,

you're right, I have sin. But then we see his

real heart here. He says, please honor me. He says, yeah,

I have sinned. Polease honor me before the elders of

the people of Israel. In other words, don't go out

there and tell them all that I have sinned against God.

And God's disappointed. In other words, he has some regret,

but he's not repentance, and his sorrow was not in

dishonor in God.

He was afraid to lose faith, to be embarrassed in

front of his people. And that's the difference between worldly

sorrow and godly sorrow. Worldly sorrow says I'm sorry I

got caught. Godly sorrow says God, I've broken your heart.

When you sin, do you grieve that you broke God's heart?

Or do you analyze it, justify it, shake it off?

How do you respond to the sin in your life?

See Jesus says that people who mourn that they and

those are truly green, they're sin. These are gonna be

the blessed people. And here's why. It's because they actually

receive His Holy Spirit. They're comforted by the comforter, the

Holy Spirit. See, when a heart finally breaks over sins,

that is the moment that grace rushes in. When your

heart breaks over sin, grace rushes in. And let me

show you a seed of true godly repentance. And a

lot of you are very familiar with this story. David

got a little bit older, became famous, conquered, and he

was the man in the springtime when the kings went

off to battle. He stayed at home and then he

looked out one night and he saw a beautiful woman bathing.

He said, who is she? And he said, man that's

your buddy, your eyah's wife. You know, youryah who fights

in your army for you. There's warning number one. He says,

bring her to me, brought her over as sex that night,

he thinks it's over. Then he receives word I'm pregnant.

And now he realizes there might be some consequences to

his sin. And so the first thing he does is

he tries to cover it up. Why because at first

he's just sorry about the consequences. So the first thing

he does is he brings your ryah home and says,

hopefully you're right, will hang out here for a couple

of days, and he'll go sleep with his wife. He'll

come back nine months later, think it's his baby. Your

riot doesn't do it, He says, how can I sleep

with her when all my friends are out there fighting

in this war. And so David says, you know what

we're gonna do. We're gonna get him drunk and hopefully

he'll go over. In this drunkenness, he will sleep with

his wife. But you're uh, camps out on the doorsteps

of the house, doesn't go in, he doesn't have sex

with her. So now David's like, all right, I've tried

everything here. Finally, David goes to Joe Abb his head general,

and says, put him on the front of the battle

line when the battle gets heavy, pull the people back

a little bit to make sure he dies. And actually

it was your Riah who carried this, this note with

the king's stamp on it, and the king had him murdered.

Now David thinks it's all over. And guess what David does.

And in the midst of thinking it's all over, think

he got away that he actually brings baths sheeba into

his house. Now here's the interesting thing about that. When

he brings baths sheepe into his house, guess what the

community thinks. Oh, David brought this poor old widow, this

pregnant lady into his house. David's such a good guy,

good guy, good king, wonderful man. He actually looks like

an awesome guy at this moment. But God again, let's

look at the last verse of that chapter. It says

the thing David had done displeased the lord. And here's

where the story shifts. Nathan comes to David, and he

to make this long story shorter, he helps David understand

that David you have sinned against the Holy God. And

see something happens here when David moves past, trying to

cover his sin, moves past, trying to hold himself off

from the consequences. When he finally finally gets alone with

a representative of God, he realizes that he has sinned

against the Holy God. And now David is broken over this,

and David experiences godly sorrow. Matter of fact, what was

I say? He wrote this a little bit later about

his sin. He says, for I know my transgressions, and

my sin is always before me. David, at this point,

he's not protecting his image. He's mourning his sin. And see,

when we see our sin clearly, we grieve it, we

hate it, we bring it to God. And David mourn

his sins so deeply, so deeply. He hated that he

had done this evil thing, and he says, God, I

don't want to ever sin again. God, I want to

have a heart that hates sin. But this heart's messed up.

And so he asked God, God, will you give me

a new heart? He says, creating me your pure heart,

O God. And Jesus says, these are the people who

are blessed because that same spirit that convicts us is

the same spirit that we receive when we're broken by

that sin. All right, I'm gonna close up now, And

as I close up, I just want to ask the

question we talked about at the beginning. Those who mourn

the things that happen to them in this life, you

go to God. He will meet you there himself, those

whose sin. If you will mourn your sin, God, God

will give you his spirit, He will cleanse, He can

give you a new holt arts. But we haven't looked

at how does God respond to our brokenness. We actually

have a picture of that when you go to Luke fifteen.

A son comes to his dad and he says to

his dad, Dad, I want all of my inheritance and

I want to go live my own life. And in

that culture, to ask your dad for inheritance was like

to say I wish you were dead. Surprisingly, his dad

gives him his inheritance. He goes off and guess what

he does he does want probably any dumb young man

would do. With a ton of money. He finds some prostitutes,

has plenty of alcohol, gathers a big group of friends

around him, and he just parties. I mean, this guy

parties and parties and parties until he's out of money.

And when he's out of money, guess who leaves the prostitutes,

the drinks, and his friends. No one there to bail

him out. A famine hits the land. He's broke and

the only thing he could do is find a job

working on a farm. And Jews were not supposed to

work with pigs, but he starts working with pigs and

he gets to the point. The Bible says that he

came to his senses. He came to his senses one

day and he realized, Man, my father's servants. They eat

better than I do, they do better than I do.

And so he starts thinking to hisself, here's what I'm

gonna do. I'm gonna go back to my dad, and

I'm just gonna tell him Dad, I'm not worthy of you,

and Dad, I'm not worthy of you. Can I just

be one of your workers? And here's a cool thing

about the scripture. It says that that on his way back,

he keeps rehearsing it and rehearsing it and rehearsing it

and rehearsing it. But when his father saw him from

far off what does his father do? And his father

and his story represents our father. Before he can get

his sentence out, runs to him. Their father runs to him.

He says, bring my boy a new robe, a new ring,

new shoes, and let's have a big party today. And

I love, I absolutely love this passage. And he says this.

He says, my son was dead and he is alive again.

He was lost, but now he is found. All is forgiven,

all is clean. About a year and a half ago,

I was redoing my kitchenette from downstairs, and it had

maybe thirty years of different paint on it, and I

realize I can't just paint over this. I need to

strip it down. So I went out to Low's and

bought all this stuff and I got it all set

up on these sea horses and then saw horses, and

I got it all set up, and I start to

take off the top layers and then I have the

you know the thing that goes m what's that called

a sander? Yeah, if you need something done in your house,

I'll let you know somebody can help. So I take

this sander and I take forever on it because I'm

standing off all these layers. But I also don't want

to bruise the wood or scuff the wood. And finally,

when it's all done, it's beautiful. And I didn't even

know the wood looked like this because they've been painted

over so many times. The wood has so many beautiful designs.

And then I went out and I went through all

this painful process of layer after layer of remaking it

until it was beautiful and it was new. And see,

this is what the Holy Spirit does. Is when we

come to him, we brain this heart that's messed up,

that has all this jump that has been piled on

it for years, and all this sin and all these

these pain and the consequences, all these things that we've

been holding deep in our heart, and the Holy Spirit says,

I'm gonna make you new. Matter of fact, we see

where uh Paul, He says this. He talks about how

we are a new creation in Christ, and Second Corinthians.

He says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new

creation has come, the old has gone the newest. Here

when we grieve our sins, we become blessed because God

meets us and he comforts us, he cleanses us, and

he makes us new. Now here's what we're gonna do today.

We haven't done anything like this before, but as you

walked in today, you received a index card, and here's

what I want you to do. You're gonna take that

index card. Can I have that extra index card? Please?

And what we're gonna do is I want you to

think about two different types of morning today. The first

type of morning, if you're here today and your life's

been blown up because of some circumstance of life, that's

the morning we're focusing on for you today. And I

just want you to take some time here in a

moment to write down that situation. Okay, then we'll talk

about it here in a couple of minutes. If life

has not rocked you, here's what I've because of a circumstance.

I want you to take time to write down. And

trust me, there's people next to you. You probably want

to write in code. But if there's sins that you're

struggling with right now that you've been struggling with, I

want you to write at least three of those down one, two,

or three. If you're not dealing and struggling with sin,

I would encourage you to go back and think through

walk of Christ and think through maybe three of the

worst sins you've committed. And here's what I want you

to do. We're gonna take a minute and just do

that exercise. Okay, So let's take a moment, let's go

before the Lord, and let's do a little bit of work.

It's all play. Nobody's too cool for school today, all right,

let's get to work. M Okay. If you've if what

you wrote down was the life circumstance, over this next

moment or so, I'm going to ask you to ask

God to enter into your pain. If it's sin that

you chose to wrote down today, I want you to

take a moment to talk to God about this. I

want you to take a moment to grieve your sin,

to repent from your sin, to realize and ask God

to help you to hate that sin. So let's just

take a moment now and go before the Lord. A

sense the presence of God meeting you where you're at today.

And here's what I want you to do. If you

wrote down a circumstance that you're mourning, I want you

to go ahead and circle what you wrote down there

and next to it, write the word presence and This

will signify to you that God is surrounding your pain

with his presence today. If you wrote down the sins

over the first sin, I want you to actually write

over it the word grace, the second sin, write over

at the word mercy in the third sin, or however

many sins you wrote, write the word love over it.

Because when we come to the Father and we grieve

our sins, we receive his spirit and we receive grace, mercy,

and love. And this leads us into a time where

we are about ready to take communion together. And when

we take communion, we always bring ourselves before the Lord

and ask the Lord to search our heart. And if

there's a sin or something else that we have not

confessed today, it's a time again just to speak to

the Lord. So let's just take a moment in the

Lord's presence and let the Lord just draw you near.

And what we're gonna do now, the servers are gonna

come down, and the usher is gonna get ready, and

the ushers are going to dismiss you by your row.

So please wait for the ushers to dismiss you. Then

when you come down and take communion, please go back

to your seat by using the alter aisles. And let's

remember why we take communion. Jesus on that Thursday night

held up the bread and he said to his disciples,

this represents my body, which is given for you, will

be broken for you. And then he grabs a hold

of wine, and he says, this wine represents the blood

of the Covenant, my blood poured out for you and

for many, for the forgiveness of sins. And so let

us go into this moment of communion, remembering what cry

has done for us on the cross.