Good Mourning (Matthew 5:4)

If you have your Bibles this evening, let's turn to Matthew chapter five.

So we're going through the Beatitudes.

The bee attitudes.

The bee attitudes.

And um, we looked at blessed are the poor in spirit for they

shall inherit the kingdom of God.

and then we're getting into, blessed are those who mourn this evening.

This sermon's title is called Good Morning.

gotta Do It.

Yeah.

good morning.

And, and so let me read the Beatitudes and uh, then we'll get started.

I'm gonna start in verse one of chapter five, seeing the crowds.

He went up onto the mountain and when he sat down, his disciples came to him

and he opened his mouth and taught them saying, blessed are the poor in spirit

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

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

Blessed are the meek.

For they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

What blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for

theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of

evil against you falsely on my account.

Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven for so they persecuted

the prophets who were be for you.

This is the word of the Lord.

My wife thought she was marrying Han Solo, but she ended up early

on marrying Luke Skywalker.

Let me explain.

Yes.

It wasn't too long after our marriage that we were at church all the time.

we were both helping, in the youth group in junior high, uh, down at a church

in Modesta But as became the weekly practice after we left Sunday night,

cleaning everything, some of the last people to leave, getting ready mentally

to get up early in the morning, to travel to the Bay Area for work on our drive,

it became like a worn piece of carpet.

this conversation that happened weekly, over and over, and

it went something like this.

Why don't they see my potential?

Why don't they see that if they just hired me?

It would fix all their problems.

Why doesn't God, like he chose David when he was young.

See this young, passionate kid for his kingdom and pick him.

Why doesn't, why is he stopping?

Why am I being overlooked?

Why am I being overseen?

And um, finally my wife was like, man, you're kind of a whiner,

in so many words, kind kindly endured for weeks and weeks and

months and months and months.

But there was a weeping that came out of that for me, a weeping of, longing.

A weeping of not having the thing that I thought that I needed that

would make my life fulfilling.

Or I had convinced myself deep down in my bones that God would get

the glory the best way this way.

And oh, why wasn't it happening?

And it crushed my soul.

It crushed my spirit to the point where I just wanted to give the whole thing.

there was another time in my life, years and years later, it would be

easy to say that it began in the moment when I was sitting on the edge of a

rented bed in a colorless hotel room off of Pikes Place in Seattle on a

cool, rainy, foggy Seattle night, the lightless hours of the Seattle night,

pushing at the thin honeycomb glass.

I sat there in a cheap thrift store bought button down, feeling the grainy

seams of my own personal familiar shame running under my fingertips.

It would be easy to say that's when I came to the end of myself, but the

truth is, I'd been inching toward that edge since I was a child.

Since my earliest memory of hearing a church bell echo across a parking lot

and feeling nothing but a cold, hope that something someone would answer back

most nights I was too tired to pray.

Most nights I lay on my back and watch the shadows on the

ceiling, multiply and collapse.

But on this particular night, I was outta distractions.

My phone was dead.

The mini fridge empty, and the only thing to do was face what?

I was left with myself.

A dry husk of religious ambition, a catalog of broken promises, a

black box recorder full of last chances and half-hearted apologies.

This night, surrounded by the white noise of neon and passing

traffic, I addressed my words to the ceiling and finally said, Jesus.

I said, my voice struggling to be anything other than a memory.

I don't have anything left to give you.

It was more of a resignation than a prayer.

The words splintered in my mouth, half bumbled as if I was embarrassed

to be heard, even by the indifferent ghost in the neighboring hotel rooms.

But as soon as I said it, the music of my failures begin to play in my head.

The years of striving to be good, the compulsive apologies

to people who didn't even care.

The endless confession in penance, the constant gnawing suspicion that

my heart was fundamentally not enough.

I built my entire life on the architecture of effort.

If I could just try harder, be better, do more, love, more, hate myself,

less than maybe, maybe I could close the gap, but the gap always widened.

And so in that cheap hotel room, 'cause that's all Stockton could afford, I

did what I'd been trained not to do.

I gave up, not just on myself.

But on the entire premise that I could ever be good enough to earn the affection

of a God who by all accounts, asked for wholeness and got scraps from me.

It was that at that moment, somewhere between the resignation and the silence

that I heard at the voice was not outside of me booming or celestial,

but inside a quiet current, moving through the marrow of my bones.

I'd read about the still small voice a hundred times growing up in church, but

I never expected it to sound like this.

Not thunder, but a hush.

The hush after a storm, not an earthquake, but a gentle settling of the world.

And here's what the voice said.

You guys have heard this story before.

If you fail every day, I love you.

There are no cliches, no platitudes, no conditions or contractual obligations.

No.

If you change, I love you, or you try harder.

I love you only if you fail every day.

I love you.

The words didn't erase my shame so much as they opened it up, let the

cold air in, and for the first time I could remember I felt something moving

inside the petrified forest of my chest.

The first thing I did was laugh, a bleak and voluntary chuckle because

the proposition was so foreign to me in my religious mind and heart.

I never once believed that God's affection could exist outside the

calculus of my successes and failures.

In every sermon, in every altar call, the underlying message

seemed to me to be always the same.

If you do, then you'll be loved.

But now sitting alone among the fossilized failures of my life, I was being told

because you are a loved, you can fail.

Hmm.

I wept, but the tears were different this time.

Not salt water regret or the acid of self recrimination, but

something warm, almost sweet.

Each sob felt less like a collapse and more like a release as if

my soul was finally exhaling.

After years of pretending it didn't need air, I wept until the corners

of the world brightened, and as dawn pressed against the bruised horizon,

I realized that I had been living in a grail scale universe my entire life.

Now the colors bled in the faint blue of the Seattle sky, the red of

the traffic lights blinking through the fog, the yellow gold glow of

the city awakening in the morning.

I had read that love makes all things new, but I had never

believed it until that moment.

The voice patient as weather repeated itself every day for the rest of my life.

When I stop and listen.

If you fail every day, I love you, and I wept, and I healed.

And fruit was planted in that moment and my life was never saying.

Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.

There are different kinds of mourning.

There's a kind of mourning that is self-focused, already

convinced of its idol.

Just need, it will weep to get it.

It will weep.

When it doesn't get it, it will weep when it has it and it's

not fulfilling and it destroys.

Yeah, but there is this kind of mourning that is talked about

here in the Sermon on the Mount.

The other is saving, healing, and flourishing.

And the Bible is incredibly realistic and doesn't tell us how to avoid

weeping, but because weeping will come us all, how it cannot destroy

us, but actually make us better.

And actually in the process, further and flourish our joy, which is insane, which

we might have to even get into next week.

Next week, we'll look at the comfort part because that is crazy by itself.

Who's our comforter?

The Holy Spirit given to us.

Boom.

The more so I wanna look at this evening, three things.

the morning that saves, the morning that destroys, and the morning that transforms.

The morning that saves,

Matthew five, four.

And that is blessed are those who mourn for they shall be

comforted, the mourning that saves.

We've been going through the Sermon on the Mount, specifically the Beatitudes.

We conclude with many other Saint in history as we look at

the Sermon on the Mount as you read it, and it's high standards.

This is the conclusion that you should come to as you

read the Sermon on the Mount.

who will save me from the Sermon on the Mount as you read the Sermon on the Mount.

You know, Jesus says, oh, well be holy.

as I'm holy.

Okay?

um.

Over and over.

The standard is not mitigated and dumbed down so that you can jump over the bar.

It is so raised so high that even if you thought you could get through, he

opens up the inward world of your heart and you have no chance and no hope.

Who will save me from the Sermon on the Mount.

And one of the beautiful things about the Sermon on the Mount is

Jesus actually gives the gospel at the beginning of it and at the end.

And it's so amazing, because growing up I saw the Beatitudes as different

things, almost like a personality test.

You know, you take a personality test or you do the Enneagram, you come away

from the Sermon on the Mount, which, which beatitude are you drawn to?

Well, you're the meek one.

Well, you're the one who shows mercy or you're, and here's your promise, this is

kind of your personality in the church.

And guess what?

It's not that, and it took me forever to see it, but it is the gospel itself,

the string of pearls of salvation.

Think about it.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Nothing in my hands.

I bring only to your cross eye clinging.

The only need is what need.

I realize I'm spiritually bankrupt.

Blessed are those who mourn.

This is the next pearl and the string of pearls.

Not grieving because you've been busted, but because you realize you are busted.

So the tax collector who beat his chest and cried, God be merciful to me, the

sinner, and this man went away justified.

Blessed are the meek.

What is that?

That is strength under control.

Literally, the picture is of a bit bridled horse.

It is those who have given the reins of their life over to another.

Ooh, we're starting to see this beautiful transition.

Blessed are the merciful.

those who show mercy will be shown mercy right now.

We're starting to get out into the world the same grace and mercy that we receive.

It begins to spill out to the others that we are in relationship with.

And then he gives this amazing identity gospel statement,

blessed or the pure in heart.

And it's an identity statement that all mission flows out of.

We don't do things to get a pure heart, but because of the great exchange,

we're clothed in the purity of Christ that he won for us at the cross.

And every fruit fruitful thing flows from that.

abiding identity.

That he won for us.

He says in Ezekiel 36 that he ripped out the heart of stone and

he gives us our heart of flesh.

In second Corinthians five 17, he says, therefore, if anyone is

in Christ, he is in new creation.

The oldest passed away.

Behold the new has come, the peacemakers.

Alright, so now we're starting.

Now we're on mission.

those who go out and make peace, this is what we're told is our ministry.

It's a ministry of reconciliation.

In second Corinthians five, 18 to 20, all this is from God who through Christ

reconciled them to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation Peace.

The ultimate peacemaking, not, oh, don't be, I hate tempers and conflict.

No.

The real true conflict is the cosmic conflict between God and man, because

if two kingdoms try to occupy the same space, there's enmity and there is war.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

So he's given us the ministry of reconciliation.

And then as we go out and we are those peacemakers, guess what?

Not everybody's gonna love it.

And so he says, blessed are the persecuted.

There will be resistance to this message and to the citizens of heaven.

And we saw that the best way, this idea, this word blessed, one of the

best translations I've heard is, congratulations, your poor in spirit.

Congratulations your morning.

Finally,

congratulations.

You're churning the reins of your life over to the one who is good

and gentle and lowly in heart and will never yoke you with a burden

that is too heavy or too severe.

That's right.

Congratulations your morning.

Congratulations your morning.

How many years did it take?

My earliest interpretation of this beatitude was this.

God comes close to the bereave, the heartsick, the inconsolable, and pours

out this divine solace into that wound.

maybe in a loss.

And of course, there is comfort in this reading.

There is a balm for every widow's night and every mother's tears.

But as time passed, as I read and re-read and live beneath the shadow

of these words, a sense that the comfort Christ promises in the Sermon

on the Mount, and this verse in particular, is even deeper than that.

There is a mourning that outpaces even death.

The grief that rises from a place even deeper than the grave, the

ancient Greek, that flexible, subtle tongue gives us clues.

The verb of mourn in this passage is pungent and bitter.

Evoking, the wailing of the bereaved, a lamentation that shakes the bones

and leaves a stain on the soul.

It's not the little one tear going down the cheek that you see in

movies, but it is the wailing and the lamenting and the whole body sobbing.

This is not the polite sadness that one wears to a memorial, nor the passing

regret that flickers and dissipates like the fog with the sunrise.

Jesus.

A rabbi with the eyes of a prophet was calling forth the people who would know

the contours of their own depravity, not in the abstract, but in the full

throbbing reality of their own hearts.

He was not living or inviting us to a stoic acceptance, or

to the performance of grief.

He was prying open the chest and asking us to look directly at

what we would rather never see.

To mourn.

This sense of the beatitudes is to feel the whole weight of the world's fracture.

It is to stand on the edge of your own history, to gaze, unfortunately,

into the abyss of your failures.

The harsh word that bruised a child's spirit.

The secret resentment that calcified into hatred.

All the meanness and betrayals, large and small, that have threaded themselves

into the fabric of your history.

It is also to mourn the distance between what God made you for and

what you have made of yourself.

Jesus words carved deep.

The morning he names blessed is not self-pity, not a cultivated

melancholy, but the honest sorrow that springs from seeing yourself as

you truly are, as God sees you and not churning away in the face of it.

Alexander McLaren, the old Scottish preacher, brings us

out with a surgeon's clarity.

He says, the mourners whom Christ pronounces, blessed are

those who are poor in spirit.

The mourning is the emotion which follows upon that poverty.

Again, it's the links in that gospel chain and McLaren's reading.

There is a sequence of spiritual logic.

First comes the recognition of poverty.

The empty hands lifted toward God.

Then comes the grieving over what that Poverty means, the rendering of the

garments, the falling to the knees.

Only those who have abandoned the fantasy of goodness, who have let

false hopes die, are qualified for the blessing that follows their mourning.

Unlike the self-inflicted wounds of guilt, or the performance of remorse

The diagnosis is unsparing but not unkind.

It lays bare the truth that every honest heart already knows.

We are both made for glory and marked by ruin.

The beautific vision of the kingdom is not for those who steal themselves

against sorrow, but for those who allow themselves to be broken by it.

To be poor in spirit is to seed the disaster and give it a name, to mourn us,

to sit among the ashes and to weep for it.

When you at last, reach the end of your illusions, when you look in the mirror

and see, not a hero, but a beggar.

You are precisely where Christ wants you.

Luke 7 36 to 50.

I'm just gonna recount it.

this is one of my favorite passages in the entire Bible.

I mean, I've probably the most passage I've preached, There are moments

when a single house, a single table, contains all the world's weight.

Sometimes the architecture of life is nowhere more evident than in the

garment and arrangement of supper.

The guests, the host, the unspoken expectations, the gaps between

the plates and the hearts.

It was such an evening a gathering swollen with anticipation.

The air thick with both invitation and accusation.

When a Pharisee called Simon asked Jesus to dine Simon's

house was well constructed.

The walls whitewashed and straight, the floors swept to a near ceremonial shine.

He had done what was required of a man's, of his standing, provided a

meal, extended a hand Welcome the Rabbi whose tongues people wagged

about all throughout Galilee.

Yet he had done only what custom demanded and not a shekel Moore.

There was a calculation in his hospitality as if he were conducting an experiment

and waiting watchful for the reaction.

They reclined at table as was the custom.

Simon, his family, the other Pharisees, each draped in the linen of their

office, each measuring out their words, each watching the teacher with eyes

honed by years of debate and suspicion.

The meal had barely begun when a disturbance flashed at the

threshold, a woman watching from the margin she was known to the

crowd, though no one spoke her name.

Her story had leaked into the cracks of every house.

The debt she had incurred, the bed she had shared.

The way her laughter once peeled through the streets, now were

replaced by hush and stain.

Still, she entered.

She was neither invited nor wanted, and yet something in the set of her jaw.

The trembling of her hands, said she would not be denied.

She brought with her a small alabaster philas, its contents, precious

ointment purchased at great cost.

The kind of woman might save for her own burial or her wedding night,

but she was here neither to marry, nor to die, at least not in the usual sense.

She came to lay something down at the feet of the man whose

words didn't unsettled her.

Whose presence moved through the city like a storm at harvest.

the man at the table shifted bracing for scandal.

The woman did not flinch.

She fell to her knees a sound like a caught breath, escaping her lips.

She placed the flask on the cool stone, and then as if the dam of her pride

had finally broken, she began to weep.

Not the soft tears of piety nor the gentle weeping.

One reserves for funerals or weddings, but the shaking uncontainable

sobs of one who has reached her bottom and found only darkness.

The tears fell, splattering the rabbi's feet, dust caked and travel worn feet.

the host had neglected to wash her own hair.

Loosened from its pins became a veil.

She used it to mop up her tears, to polish what others would not touch.

She kissed his feet again and again.

Her lips trembling wet and desperate.

Then with trembling hands, she uncorked The flask had poured the ointment.

Its fragrance, instantly filling the small room.

Blooming over the roasted lamb and the oil lamps announcing itself above all else.

No one moved.

The silence was holy, and then it was broken.

Simon watched the scene unfold with a tightening of the mouth,

a slight narrowing of the eyes.

This is not how dinners in his house were supposed to go,

even with a notorious teacher.

Among the guests, he saw in her actions, not devotion, but indecency, he saw

in Jesus, not a prophet but a dupe or worse, a collaborator and her shame,

he did not say this out loud, but his thoughts radiated through the room as

loud in their own way as the woman sobs.

If he were a prophet, Simon thought truly a man of God.

He would know what kind of woman this is.

He would recoil, he would call down fire, at least rebuke her for the spectacle.

He would uphold the boundary between the holy and the profane

as any man worth assault would do.

But the Rabbi, as always seemed to carry a different map.

He turned to Simon, his voice.

Even almost gentle.

Simon, I have something to say to you.

The Pharisee's mouth twitched his tone clip just above

condescension say it, teacher.

And so the story unfolded.

Two men owe to creditor.

One a great sum.

The other far less neither could pay.

The creditor moved not by obligation, but by something almost reckless.

Forgave both debts, canceled them as if the slates were never scratched at all.

Simple.

But the implications jagged in the air, which of them will love him more?

The rabbi asked Simon's answer was hedge with caution, as if the question itself

probate, the one who was forgiven.

The larger debt, the teacher's eyes flash not with triumph, but with

an almost unbearable tenderness.

You've judged rightly, Simon.

Jesus looked up at Simon, then let his gaze linger on the woman.

The street glow spilling through the lattice to stripe, her bent back.

Her face red and slick with tears was illumined.

In the candlelight.

Jesus spoke first to Simon, but with the words aimed deliberately toward

the woman as if her trembling needed the full force of his attention.

Simon, do you truly see this woman not merely with your eyes, but with a heart

that weighs the worth of every soul?

Simon caught in the web of his own in hospitality shifted uncomfortably.

He glanced from the woman's dripping hair to the clay floor.

His fingers worrying the edge of his robe.

Jesus said, when I entered your home, his voice low and reverberate enough

to command the courtyard silence.

You offered me no water for my feet.

The dust of the road still clings to my skin.

You did not think to send even a servant with a basin,

but this woman who you judge.

Has washed my feet, not with well water, but with her tears.

Not with a linen cloth, but with their own hair.

Has any guest ever been received?

So tenderly in your house?

Simon felt the heat crawl up his neck around the table.

The other guest rabbis tradesman.

A few idle aristocrats shifted in place, eyes darting between Simon

and the woman, like spectators.

At a grotesque drama.

The woman did not look up, but her sobs previously suppressed, now shook

her shoulders with open intensity.

Jesus continue, and you gave me no kiss of greedy, no sign of friendship.

But from the moment I entered, she has kissed my feet again and again

as if to undo with each touch, the pain of her whole is estrangement.

Someone at the table, the merchant, or perhaps the physician

cleared his throat in discomfort.

No one else made a sound.

You did not anoint my head with oil, as is the custom of

the courtesy owed you a guest.

But she here, Jesus Je did the now overturned, alabaster jar, shining dly

amid the crumbs and the spilled wine.

She has poured perfume on my feet.

It is her prize.

The sum of her earnings, the only thing she possesses of value and she spent

it not on herself, but in this act of love, as we find out from history,

it would be the tool of her trade.

She was a prostitute in the town and so couldn't always

make it to the shower in time.

And so a little drip of that would make her smell good and alluring once again.

And she takes the tool of her trade, her very way to earn, and she breaks

it in front of the master saying, all I am, all I have is in your hands.

It's yours.

At that word love.

The woman's weeping.

Still for a heartbeat, she dared.

Look up at Jesus, her eyes swollen, her face, streaked and raw.

There was no condemnation in his gaze.

Only a fierce inexplicable mercy as if he saw not her history.

Hmm, but her hope.

Therefore, I tell you plainly Simon, her sins, which are many, he paused

and the phrase hung in the air, honest as the grime on her cheeks

are forgiven for she loved much, but he who is forgiven, little loves.

Little, the words were not a rebuke, but a diagnosis spoken with the

gentle firmness of a doctor exposing a wound so it could finally heal.

Simon recoiled stung and yet unable to muster the certainty

of his earlier judgment.

The woman fur her part let out a strangle to exhale as if some invisible

cord about her chest had been severed around the tables the murmurs began.

Who is this who even forgives sins?

The question was not rhetorical, but electric with its own

dangerous possibility.

Jesus leaned forward his expression, soft expression, softening with

what can only be called joy.

Your sins are forgiven.

He said, speaking now directly to the woman, and you would've thought

the entire universe had been reduced to this one trembling moment that

all the laws of nature had bent in to bear witness to her rebirth.

Simon missed it right.

Because what was the point of the story?

Not Simon.

You sinned a little bit and she sinned greatly.

It's that Simon, you're blind to the fact that you have sinned.

You are the one who actually owes more, and you're religious blindness.

You both need rescue.

You both have no way to pay.

And if you could recognize how great a payment Christ made on your behalf

for your rescue and your redemption, what you see as an outrageous sign

of devotion is the normal response to the redemption and grace that I give

the morning.

another one.

Uh, Luke 18, nine to 14, all along the road up to Jerusalem.

religious leaders had trailed in his wake keeping careful record of his

every infraction, and they're the ones who's heard the story first from Jesus.

And he said to them, let me tell you what happens to a soul that's

convinced of its own sanctity.

There were two men, both of them familiar characters in the city.

The first of Pharisee, a man, not only of position, but of reputation.

His laces tied with careful knots and his beard oiled white as a dove's.

Wings walked to the temple in daylight at the hour when the courts

were full, and the air shimmered with the voices of petition and

praised the second less welcome than polite company was a tax collector.

He wore his shame like a second tunic.

He kept to the alleyways, avoided the eyes of neighbors and

ducked the sneers of the market.

Women who spat at his passing.

The Pharisee made his way up to the temple steps with measured

confidence, each stride as deliberate as his recitation of the law.

He paused by the treasury where the coinage of widows and day

laborers sang their meager song and he let out his own offering.

Heavy musical, and multiple spill out in the side of all heads.

Turned some no and approval.

The Pharisee smiled.

Not noticing the tax collector had slipped along the outer wall, staying

beneath the carved lentils, decorated with the lilies and pomegranates.

They both made their way to the inner court.

The Pharisee chose a spot near the front where the light fell best on

his golden embroidered robe, and the scent of incense was strong.

He stood feet apart, hands held high, and begin to pray in a voice

just above the hush of the others.

Holy Father, I give thanks that I'm not as the other men are.

I do not steal.

I do not cheat.

I do not visit the harlots who haunt the colon aids.

I fast, not once, but twice each week.

A bar higher than the law requires.

May I point out to you, God, I give you with gladness a 10th of

everything that passes through my hand.

I keep myself clean and those who see me especially know that I'm right with you.

Especially he added glancing over his shoulder.

I thank you that I'm not like this tax collector skulking in the shadows.

Yes, I know what he is.

A traitor, A Roman's dog, a man who eats unclean food and takes the bread

from the mouths of his own countrymen.

But I Lord had never soiled my garments with the world.

One of the scariest things about that prayer is he, thanks God.

He's like, God, you did this in me.

You made me this awesome person.

You made me this, this awesome, righteous, kind of person.

it's you who did it.

Behind him passed the marble pillars and near the lattice work that

separated the from the people.

The tax collector was a shadow among shadows.

He pressed himself against the walls of hoping the stone might

swallow him up, let him vanish from the gaze of both God and men.

No one heard him at first, but if you drew near, you would smell the salt

of his tears and see how his fists were clenched against his breast.

He could not look up.

He could not muster even a proper prayer.

His only words were choked and hoarse.

God have mercy on me.

God, see what I am.

Have mercy.

I'm unworthy.

I'm a sinner, and I know it.

He stayed like that.

And when the prayers ended and the shofar blew, he waited until the

temple was nearly empty before he left.

Jesus looked around at the people at the self satisfied, at the desperate,

at the ones who had given up on ever being welcome in holy places.

And he said, I tell you the truth.

It was not the Pharisee who left the temple justified, but the

tax collector, the man who boasts of his goodness is blind to the

distance between his heart and God.

The man who knows his need for mercy finds the door to God's

own heart thrown, wide open.

The crowd was silent.

Some of the religious leaders, squirmed and bristled, but the others, the

poor, the outcast, the ones who had nothing but battered hope, went home

with an odd swelling inside their rib cages, A sensation that felt for the

first time in years like hope itself.

This is what Jesus meant when he said, B.

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

B, blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.

The tax collector's poverty was not of coin but of spirit.

He came to God with empty hands as and was filled.

It was the same lesson he taught wherever he went, that God's favor did not rest on

the perfect performance of the law, but on the broken heart that longed for healing.

It was not the self-righteous who would inherit the kingdom, but those who mourn

their failure to be what they ought.

Those who longed for mercy more than recognition the crowd, especially

the ones who had been written off as hopeless cases heard a door opening

where they had always only seen walls.

Now, the world didn't automatically change that day.

The Romans still ruled from their forts.

The temple still echoed with the prayers of the righteous

and the tears of the desperate.

But in the olive groves and alleyways and the hearts, the bruised and

battered of those who mourn the seeds of a different kind of kingdom

were already breaking ground.

And so Jesus taught not just with words, but with the whole shape of

his life, that comfort belonged to those who wept forgiveness to those

who confessed and belonging to the ones who thought themselves lost.

The mourning that saves is not that I got busted, but realizing that I am busted.

Not an abstract.

Jesus died on the cross, is some moral example, a good deed done.

But the perfect, beautiful, spotless, unblemished lamb of God took my place and

took my hideous dead of sin upon himself.

I can't tell you the number of times I've sat as a pastor and counseled

men who have cheated on their wives.

And it's like, it doesn't phase 'em.

They hate it.

They hate the consequences of being found out and caught, and

they want to do whatever it takes.

They'll go to the to come meet five times a week if it is, but it's

only because of the consequences.

I remember one man brought a letter from his daughter that his daughter

wrote to me or wrote to him just saying, I think you're the worst person I've

ever known because of his abuse and threats and violence against the family.

And he said, oh, you gotta read this.

This is crazy.

Just half-hearted, chuckled about it.

And as I started reading, I started weeping.

I started crying and I'm like, I've, what are you, how can you even

sit here right now in this moment?

Heard a story about, uh, AA and um.

Somebody was going around the room and sharing, and there was somebody new

there, or he'd been there for a while, but it was the first time he opened up

and they said, will you finally share?

And he talked about how he, in the winter in a place where it's cold,

it was in an old truck with his daughter who was about six, five or

six, and he stopped off at the bar, said, I'll get, I'll be right back.

I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna get one drink.

it goes to midnight.

He's in there for seven hours and his girl gets hyperthermia and she loses

her hearing, for the rest of her life.

And he sat there and he just said, ah, it's so crazy.

He, I found, yeah, I can't believe I did that.

And the guy who led the meeting was so outraged.

He got up and he kicked the guy's chair over and started yelling at him and

saying, how dare you be so callous?

That was your daughter.

You were put here to protect.

And finally he broke into tears, ran, and he was healed.

So hard for our prideful hearts unless God intervenes to open

our eyes to the true gap that is between mortality and infinity.

Between holiness and sinfulness.

And thank God, congratulations.

If you mourn.

congratulations if you mourn and weep, but that's not all there is.

There is a mourning that destroys this one's pretty quick, yet

not all mourning is holy.

There exist in evil kind of grief, a self consuming poison sorrow.

Paul writes of it in second Corinthians seven 10.

He says, for godly grief produces repentance That leads

to salvation without regret.

Whereas worldly grief produces death or worldly sorrow produces death.

There is a morning that is pretty early destructive, gnawing

at the soul that festers into bitterness and breeds only regret.

Grief can either be the crucible in which God transforms and heals the soul or the

acid that dissolves it into futility.

Scripture is full of such cautionary tales.

King Saul, when confronted with his sin, offered up a tour

of tears and breast beating.

Yet his grief never turned him back to God.

It was a self-interested anguish.

A hollow performance before others, not a true repentance that heals Judases sct.

When the enormity of his betrayal crashed down on him, he wept and

despaired and threw the blood money at the temple priest, but his

morning closed in on itself like the night, and he fled the light.

Sorrow did not bring him to grace, but to a violent, final, silent despair.

Nowhere is this destructive form of mourning, more vivid than

the story of Ahab and Nabal.

If you remember Ahab and Jezebel, first Kings chapter 21, Ahab was a

1 Kings 21 · chapter mention

really bad king, and it was during the time of Elijah, and Elijah was

constantly calling him out and um, he could not escape Elijah, but the king

of Samaria, Ahab possessed palaces and armies in every comfort of power.

Yet his heart was so shrunken by self-pity and envy that a single denial sent him

spiraling into a pout worthy of a child.

He was the first pow pout fish.

If you have little kids, you know, Naboth, a humble farmer, tended his

family's vineyard on the edge of Jezreel, uh, land passed down for generations.

Ahab coveted the vineyard for himself.

He offered payment even a better vineyard.

He tried in the language of deals and contracts to purchase what

was never his to buy, but Naboth answered them with quiet dignity.

So help me, God.

I'd never sell the family farm to you, is what he says Ahab returned

to his palace, not as a king who had heard, the just refusal of a loyal

subject, but as a petulant child.

And a black mood scripture says, sulking over nab and je the T words.

The scripture paints in vivid strokes.

He went to bed, stepped his face in his pillow, and refused to eat.

Ahab sorrow was not for any real loss, but for the thwarting of his own desires.

Ah.

It's like me on that Sunday night.

Why don't they see me?

I'm the answer.

It's the idolatry.

It's the epi theia where we can take a good thing and make it the ultimate thing,

and then it becomes a destructive thing.

It's the thing I require to make me happy.

The bottom line at the bottom of my heart,

this is not a grief as transformation, but grief is wrought.

Ab sorrow is not for any real loss, but for the thwarting of his own desire.

And this smallness, his soul shriver, the the king lay in darkness utterly

consumed by the one thing denied him blind to the abundance that surrounded him.

Evil morning is always like this.

It churns our vision inward.

It shades every disappointment and the color of personal injury.

It is a morning that resents a sadness that demands the universe

revolve around our appetites.

It's the primal envy that will not be satisfied until it eats

the world and then it eats itself.

It cannot receive comfort because it is already decided that nothing is enough.

Jezebel Ahab's wife entered the scene with her own brand of ruthlessness.

The plot she devised was cunning as it was monstrous.

Jezebel wrote letters in Ahab's name, sealed them with his ring, and

sent them to the elders of Jezreel.

She orchestrated a mock trial, bribed false witnesses, and had

nuff condemned and executed on trumped up charges of blasphemy.

The vineyard thus unencumbered by its rightful owner, was delivered

into the hands of the king.

Mourning had given way to murder.

Jealousy had become injustice.

And even then, Ahab's evil mourning was not satisfied.

He walked the stolen land, surveying his new position, all the while oblivious or

pretending to be oblivious to the cost.

The prophet Elijah met him there delivering God's judgment.

Have you killed and taken possession?

And the place where the dog licked up, the blood of NAB dogs will lick your blood.

Even yours.

There was no comfort for Ahab, no redemption in the mourning

that never turns to God.

Only the promise of further loss.

Evil mourning breeds a legacy of regret.

In the end, Ahab's line was cut off.

His name became a by word for wickedness, and the land he coveted was haunted

by the memory of the innocent blood.

Blessed are those who mourn, yes, but only those whose mourning

cracks the hard shell of pride and allows the mercy of God to flow in.

There is no blessing and grief that breeds only self-pity or

in pain that hardens the soul.

There's no healing and envy.

No comfort and tears of resentment.

Only the morning that yields to God brokenhearted, honest and open

is the seed bed of true comfort.

Abs story is a warning to us all.

When we encounter sorrow, do we let it turn us inward?

Feeding a narrative of self-importance and wounded entitlement, or do we allow

it to open us outward to the possibility of humility, repentance, and grace.

The measure of our mourning is not the depth of our emotion, but the

direction it ultimately takes us.

The measure of our mourning is not the depth of our emotion, but the

direction it ultimately takes us.

Jezebel's kind of comfort.

Swift, violent and unscrupulous is the world's way of dealing with pain,

but it ends in greater devastation.

True comfort.

The comfort promise by Jesus comes only through the honest grief that

faces our own sin, seeks God's mercy and is willing to let go of what we

thought we could not live without then.

And only then do we find ourselves blessed, not with vineyards or

riches, but with the presence of God himself, who wipes away every

tear and gives beauty for ashes.

Ahab's, dark morning left unredeemed set in motion.

A tragedy that echoed for generations.

But just like everything else in the gospel, the way we begin

is also the way we continue.

So the way into the kingdom, the mourning, ah, the, the

congratulations, you're mourn.

God also gives us tears as the Christian, in fact, maybe more

so as a follower of Christ.

Let me close by reading Psalm 1 26, when the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion.

We were like those who dream.

Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy

and they sang among the nations.

The Lord has done great things for them.

The Lord has done great things for us.

We are glad restore our fortunes.

Oh Lord.

Like the streams of the neb, those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy.

He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing shall come home with shouts

of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.

Psalm 1 26.

In all its brevity is a meditation on the mystery of human sorrow as a

field in which future joy is sown.

He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow will return with songs

of joy carrying sheaves With him.

It's proceeding.

Verse five reads, those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.

This is not as we're often tempted to assume a trite spiritual aism meant

to paper over the depth of desolation.

No, the text is less of a comfort than a summons.

If you are weeping, it's asking what will you do with your tears?

That in the end is the question the Psalm raises, and it is the question that hounds

every honest soul to the very threshold of faith giving that mourning is inevitable.

How exactly then shall we mourn?

don't Waste Your Sorrows.

The notion of sorrow is something that can be wasted as both bracing and liberating.

It means your grief has a latent energy.

It can be spent or invested or squandered.

If you treat your tears solely as a private currency for the purchase of

self-pity, they will only impoverish you.

But if you sow them, if you let them water the ground of your soul and the lives of

those around you, they become the means by which your future self will sing.

What are you doing with your tears?

What are you doing with your tears?

Culturally, we're tutored to see tears as a kind of weakness or a personal liability

to be expeditiously mopped up, or at the very least, managed the workplace.

The classroom, the sanctuary.

Each has its own unwritten protocols for how much sadness

can be displayed and for how long.

Even in the church, the place ostensibly most at home with lament, we are inclined

to speed toward resurrection toward the joy in the morning without lingering long

in the honest Soden, midnight of despair.

But the psalmist indeed, the whole tradition of the biblical lament

puts a different question before us.

What if your tears were not an obstacle to growth, but the very

water that made it possible.

I think of the woman at Jesus' feet or the tax man slumped in the

shadows, whose whole prayer was a river of quiet, helpless distress.

God give mercy.

Forgive me the sinner.

That prayer rung from the heart of grief yielded a harvest of righteousness

while the sterile tearless performance of the Pharisee yielded nothing at all.

So again, what are you doing with your tears?

The biblical witnesses?

Clear sorrow is not an end in itself, but a necessary prelude to joy.

It is the dark, wet place where the seeds germinate, the furrow

into which the future is poured.

The question for us is not whether we will grieve, but how

will we do so when it comes.

Will we let our tears evaporate into bitterness or self-pity, or will we

gather them up, take them out into the fields of our lives and sow them in hope

that God will do what only God can do.

Turning mourning into dancing, ashes into beauty and sorrow into gladness.

That's a life of faith that's following Jesus, right?

It's a life that takes you both into the heights of joy and the depths of sorrow.

Often in the same season, sometimes the same hour you will if you walk

with God, live a life that is both full of rejoicing and weeping.

Let me show you what I mean.

Look at the text, the Psalmist's own experience.

These people, the ones singing the song, are not numbed against

suffering by their faith.

They're not immune from pain.

In fact, faith has made them even more alive to it.

They have just come through are per and are perhaps still trembling from

a shattering world up ending or.

Deal.

They've been carried away into exile and they've returned finally against all

odds to their homeland, and the shock of it is almost too much to take in.

Listen to their words.

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who

dreamed, we couldn't believe it.

It was too much to dare and even hope.

It is not just we rejoiced, it's, we hardly dared believe it was real.

There is a wonder, and it is light, a kind of emotional vertigo.

Our mouth will fill with joy, our tongues with songs of joy.

There it is joy, but not the mild or polite kind, This is a joy that cracks

open your ribs and leaves you reeling.

Joy is so big you can't even fit it inside your chest.

It's explosive, riotous, uncontainable.

This is what happens when God says something so radical, so unlikely

that the only appropriate response is awe, but don't stop reading.

That's verses one to three.

The very next breath is a gasp, restore our fortunes.

The Lord like the streams of the negi.

Do you see the shift?

The song returns from exaltation, depleting from

laughter to a river of tears.

The people who were just a moment ago, the very picture of happiness are now

desperate for rescue, parched and spent.

The Negev is the wilderness a place where water is a rumor, where life is

fragile and hope feels like a mirage?

To say make us like the streams and the negev is to admit, we're dying of thirst.

We are lost.

We need you to do something as shocking, as impossible, as springing rivers from

a bone dry desert verses four to six are not about triumph, but about pain.

They're the kind of sorrow that makes you plant your face in your hands and sob

the kind that leaves you raw and expose.

Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.

Do you feel the weight of that?

The hope is real, but so is the suffering.

There's no attempt to minimize or explain away the agony.

It is named and honored and given its place in this world, says the psalmist.

You will have both joy and sorrow, laughter and lament,

deliverance and distress.

And here's the point that's so easy to miss.

This is not a defect of the spiritual life.

It's not a failure of faith.

It's the way things are meant to be, at least on this side of eternity.

Faith does not flatten our feelings or erase the ache of living

in a battered, broken world.

If anything, faith makes us feel more.

I think of that scripture we read about the heart of stone and the heart of flesh.

What's it saying?

It's saying, man, we existed for ourselves.

We are numb to other people's problems and complaints because

man, I just care about me and mine.

I gotta take care of what's right in front of me.

And when he gives us a heart of flesh, it opens this whole new realm to God's

heart, to what he feels, to what he sees, his tenderness and gentleness,

how he's moved with compassion.

It makes us feel more, think about it.

It sharpens our hunger for justice.

It intensifies our longing for healing.

I love prayer meetings where we just like heard the news and somebody

just prays, come quickly, Lord Jesus.

And it's like a begging, plea, heal, help where there's no other possibility.

What is that?

But a.

Aligning our heart with God's heart heightens both the sweetness of joy

and the bitterness of disappointment.

You'll never be less human for walking with God.

You'll be more so Your laughter will be deeper, but so will your tears be.

Let's be honest, most of us want a life where the ratio of rejoicing

to weeping maybe is like 90 10.

That's mine.

We like our stories to be mostly happy with a couple manageable setbacks

thrown in for character development.

You know it's a good screenplay.

We want our testimonies to be tales of steady improvement with a neat little bow

at the end, but the Psalmist knows better.

The Psalmist knows that you can live through one miracle.

A rescue so profound that all the nations notice and still wake up

the next day in fresh trouble, in need of deliverance all over again.

This is the life of faith, a life of awe and agony.

Rescue and relapse, feasting and famine, joy and weeping.

Why is this?

Because we do not follow an abstraction or, or somebody 2000 years ago,

who was just a good moral teacher giving us the 10 steps to improve

our marriages or get to heaven.

Not a sanitized paragon of disaffected virtue, but rather one himself

was both a rejoice and a weeper.

A mourner as well as a singer, one who collapsed the binary inside

himself, and both dignified and modeled the faith that knows the

full reach of the emotional life.

If either there was a calling card, a first impression, think about it,

a statement of intent, it was the inaugural miracle at Cana Jesus,

not content to silently observe or stand apart and dignified asceticism.

He chooses as his very first public act, the intervention into a faltering party

to make a lame party a great party.

The manufacturer of a sudden superabundance of excellent wine, the

rescue of a social embarrassment through a lavish, unnecessary act of festivity.

Cana, that obscure village provided the stage for a miracle that was not

on its face, a rescue from death, a reversal of disease, the conquering

of the natural law, but a subtle, almost mischievous elevation of joy.

The text does not depict Jesus as stoic guest, but as the very author

of the Merriment, the Bringer of Festival Joy, the architect of

communal delight, that he would choose such an act to manifest his glory.

John two 11 is not only instructive, but profoundly subversive of what

we might imagine glory to be.

It's as if he says at the outset, I come to bring festival joy to repair

not only the cosmic rift, but the little cracks in human togetherness.

The microfractures and the fragile crystal of ordinary happiness, but it

is a short road from Cana to Gethsemane.

As he even said, woman, my hour has not yet come as he's at the

wedding, thinking about his future wedding and what he would have to do.

To win a bride going to the cross and then rising from the dead.

There is in the gospel a persistent undertow of pain, a shadow that lengthens

as the narrative progresses, and the one who was first revealed as a party host

is soon disclosed as a man of sorrows.

You read through the New Testament with careful and un jaundice eye, you

will see that the emotional vocabulary used of Jesus is often weighted towards

the aching, the bereft, the heartsick.

He has moved with compassion.

He groans, he weeps.

He's troubled.

He laments.

He is to borrow from the prophet.

A man of sorrows acquainted with grief.

He knows the taste of it, the scent, the way it gets under your fingernails and

stains, your voice, the same hands that broke bread and poured wine at parties.

Also clenched in righteous anger at the temple, also lifted

the face of the bereaved, also pressed against his own chest.

In agony, there is in Jesus the full spectrum and there is no

shortcuts through the valley.

If you walk his road, your life will be at times a wedding feast and at

times a funeral, procession, sometimes both, sometimes on the same day.

If you follow Jesus, you inherit not a life of unbroken gladness or

endless suffering, but a braided, doubled, oscillating story of both.

You will throw parties and you'll weep at graves.

You will dance and you will collapse in prayer, you will be

in your better moments of mixture.

Never a monolith.

But the most astonishing part, the secret hiding in plain sight, is that for

Jesus, joy and sorrow are not simply two alternating states, but are interwoven,

compounding generative of each other.

You see this most clearly in Hebrews 12, where it said, where the joy set

before him, he endured the cross.

It's not that he endured the cross and then was rewarded with joy.

It was that the endurance of the cross was itself some mysterious way,

energized by joy, infected with it.

They're not two adjacent things, but simultaneously the joy was not

deferred, but braided into a suffering.

We're conditioned to think in terms of sequence.

First pain, then pleasure, first crossed then crown, but the life

of Jesus, and therefore the life of faith for the life of the Christian.

The two exist together, refracting each other.

You are not made for monotone.

You're made for the whole symphony, the fugue, the swelling, and the

receding, and the minor and the major, the slow movement and the finale.

the faith Jesus invites us into as large enough for the whole range, for

festival joy and for the dark night of the soul, for everything in between.

In Psalm 30, verse five, you have this famous verse, weeping Mayer for the night.

But Joy comes in the morning this brilliant by all his books.

Derrick Kidner says that you see many times in the Old Testament,

many times in the Bible.

He says, if you're a believer, what this is saying is sorrow gives way to joy.

You may have sorrow, but if you believe in him, in the end, you'll have joy.

Sorrow is temporary.

Joy is permanent.

Sorrow gives way to joy.

He says you're going to find that in many places, weeping May Terry for the

night, but joy comes in the morning.

But he says the New Testament gives us something more amazing,

more profound, more shocking.

He says The New Testament goes beyond the Old Testament 'cause the New

Testament does not just say, for a believer that sorrow gives way to joy.

The New Testament goes so far as to say the most odd and most radical thing.

And that's, that sorrow produces joy for the Christian in the gospel.

Through the gospel, through Jesus Christ, sorrow produces joy.

What now?

The classic place where that's mentioned though it's in many places,

second Corinthians four 17, where Paul says, for our light and momentary

afflictions are achieving an internal weight of glory, which far outweighs

them old and the old King James.

It's that it produces.

It doesn't just say sorrows will give way to joy.

The sorrows are producing joy.

They're creating the joy.

They're achieving the joy.

This is amazing.

look at Jesus Christ, he was the man of incredible sorrows.

He was in pain, he was rejected, he was tortured, he was killed.

He sorrowed like no one has ever sorrowed, but his sorrows

didn't just give way to joy.

His sorrows produced the joy.

His sorrows produced the glory.

It's not the light and momentary affliction that he endured because

his was not light and momentary.

But the eternal God experienced something on the cross of infinity and internality.

If it's true, then there must be some way which that pattern remains with us.

The only place in the Old Testament is brought out here in Psalm 1 26.

It doesn't just say, don't worry, weeping may Terry for the night,

but joy comes in the morning.

What does it say?

Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.

The tears are watering something, the tears are producing something.

The tears are not just giving weighted joy.

The tears are producing joy, and what's so incredible is the little word will twice.

He says, those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.

he who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow will return this is what we do know.

He says, if you keep us in times of weeping, there will be joy.

It may be the fast kind, it may be the slow kind.

It may be the sudden water course of the desert flood, or it may

be that all we're doing to is.

Painstakingly slow, and we're just slowly irrigating, thelander with our tears.

But we will have sheaths.

There will be harvest.

There will be answer.

Every tear will be wiped from our eye.

There will be sheaths and may be fast.

It may be slow.

Don't waste your sorrows.

If you sow in tears, you will reap.

It will happen.

Joy will be the final note in your life.

It'll be the final word in your life.

Well, the question is how?

How could that be?

How is it possible?

How is it possible that the joy and the sorrow are weaved together?

Gospel joy produces deeper sorrow, but gospel sorrow produces deeper joy.

Number one, because I'm fully seen and fully loved because God says over my

life, if you fail every day, I love you.

I can look at myself realistically.

I could take the mask off all my hunting for approval that I've spent

my life trying to get and to earn the attaboys in my life, man, because I'm

approved by before the court of heaven.

'cause I'm clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

Man, there is a humility that can come into my life because

it wasn't anything I did.

What did I bring?

Failure.

That's what I brought.

And he brought love and he brought righteousness, and he brought grace.

And he never stops, and he keeps pouring it out every day.

And his mercies are new every morning.

And he keeps giving and giving and giving and giving.

And that produces this humbleness to face the world and to face other

people, to face others who are jacked up, who've used you and abused

you, and stabbed you in the back.

It changes everything.

I hate sin, man.

I hate it.

I used to hate it for the consequences

I had this guy, who came and visited, I'm wrapping, and he stayed at my parents'.

I was a kid and he, I was cooking french toast.

And he kept saying two more.

it started out funny, two more, two more French toast.

He must have gone through like two loaves of bread and I was there for

like an hour and 20 minutes cooking and by the end he was just like, two more.

I was just like so frustrated and so over this human being, eating all our

food, you know, just like, I mean, I'd never seen anybody eat so much.

For me, I think about that and I think, man, I've taken off the grave clothes.

I've stepped into the robe of righteousness.

And man, when I go back to the grave, it's like me saying, Hey, Jesus.

Two more.

Two more.

See, I used to hate it because I was caught and there were

consequences are inherent in sin.

Sin is something that self-destructs, it's the.

It just comes apart, right?

And so if you engage in it, you're gonna come apart too, right?

But see Christ on the cross who, for the joy set before him, who I believe is you

and me, and right relationship with him, he's looking at you and me restored.

He's looking at you and me, is our names written in heaven?

And he's leaning into the cross and during the shame.

And I just, it's so helpful to me because it's like, if I go back to the grave,

I'm just like, I know I'm covered.

I know my sin is as far as the east is from the west, but it's like,

you know what, that wasn't enough.

Two more.

Jesus,

that's the godly sorrow that Paul's talking about, that holy like view

of the beautiful Jesus, on the cross.

Awesome.

But then think it's the sorrow of repentance that produces joy

that you've never had before.

Teshuva.

It's that word that means come home.

Why?

Because every time we realize as God reveals something in our lives

who the sunset free is free indeed.

He doesn't want us divided and.

Having the Epit Theia, the things that we orchestrate and say,

well, yes God, but this too why.

And once he gets rid of that, it exposes that idol in our life.

What are we?

We're free.

We're so free.

Because that's a bad master.

It can never do anything but destroy us.

Even the best things, a best marriage on its best day.

If that is the ultimate value in your life, it will destroy you only as good.

And he liberates and sets us free.

We often ask, why me

in the middle of pain and suffering.

But our why me is reframed as you begin to see Jesus himself on the cross, And

you notice perhaps for the first time that Jesus himself cries out, why me though?

Not in words exactly like that, but in my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

It's not a rhetorical question, but a how pressed from the depths of abandonment,

a cry that echoes through eternity.

And I've looked into this, I've studied it.

I, there's mystery to it.

God doesn't unbe become God in that moment, but there is a pattern that

the writers are setting up in the narrative, and that's that everywhere

Jesus calls, godfather every single time until the cross where he cries out, my

God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And in some ways beyond mystery.

the son loses the father in that moment as the sin substitute taking on my

sin so that I could gain a father.

So that I could be brought back and welcomed home.

I don't get it.

I don't understand it, but I love him for it.

Mm-hmm.

And what happens to our, why me is swallowed up in his, why me?

Because there wasn't the answer.

He had to go into death.

He had to take the sting, he did go down.

He was the payment.

He had to be swallowed up in the grave for three days and then rise in victory.

But that's the worst thing in the universe that ever can happen.

That became the best thing in the universe that ever happened.

And so our why mes can get swallowed up because he who did not spare his own

son, but gave him up for us all how?

Also not freely give us all things.

And guys, the story of what he's gonna do with your tears, there's

nothing wasted that's sown.

There's nothing wasted.

Like even the nights that you don't even remember anymore, the heartbreaks, those

will be brought up when it says he's gonna wipe every tear from your eyes.

Psalm says that he keeps your tears in his bottle.

What that means is.

From the time you were a kid and you don't even have memories when you

scraped your knees on your big wheel to the bully pushing you off the

jungle gym at the playground to someone backstabbing you and taking your job

or whatever it might be, the pain that agony man, he's gonna take the tear out.

Those nail scarred hands as he wipes it from your eye, you'll be healed

and all that joy will come from.

And it's like having a bad dream and a nightmare.

And you wake up, and your wife's still there.

She's not dead.

Like the dream said, you're more happy because of what you just went through.

And so too, having will be even more joyous in the fact because

God will turn every sorrow.

Into that joy.

Let me pray for us.