A Series on the Beatitudes
(Click
on the link below to read the verses.)
Matthew 5:4; 2 Corinthians 1:3-11
[In this series, we will be looking at the Beatitudes from the perspective that Jesus came to establish his kingdom. And in order to do that, he needed to set new expectations; to let his followers know that his was not a political kingdom, but a spiritual one; to teach them what it means to bring in his kingdom; what it means to turn the world upside down.]
4 Blessed
are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted. NIV
During my
sophomore year of college, I had a roommate who owned a canary named Snead. As
canaries do, Snead sang morning, noon and night. Except, one day when we returned
from class, he wasn’t. In fact, Snead wasn’t breathing.
Being the
sensitive, compassionate, mature college students that we were, we decided to
have a funeral service. It started in our dorm room, followed by a processional
down the hall, including a “priest” with “holy water” and official mourners. We
ended in the courtyard of the girls’ dorm for the actual burial.
Snead had been carefully laid in an Old Spice wooden gift box with Kleenex gently lining the inside. He was then laid on top of a royal blue bath towel spread across a ten foot long wooden shelf from our closet. It was a fitting memorial for our friend Snead.
Of course,
there are times when mourning is no laughing matter.
As he did with the
first beatitude, Eugene Peterson paraphrased the second one in a way that you
can easily understand and relate to.
4 “You’re
blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you
be embraced by the One most dear to you. MSG
We mourned the
passing of Snead that night… kind of. But when someone has truly lost “what is most dear to you”, the mourning
goes deep. It hurts so much that only tears can adequately express the depth of
your pain. And when you hurt like that, you need to “be embraced by the One most dear to you”.
Paul wrote to the
Corinthians about the pain and grief and mourning that he experienced, as well
as the comfort that he received and the lessons learned
3 Praise
be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of
compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who
comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any
trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. NIV
8b We
were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we
despaired of life itself. 9 Indeed, we felt we had
received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on
ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. NIV
I have three
questions for you and for me. What have you lost that was most dear to you;
that hurt deep; that brought you to your knees? What did you learn from your
losses? How did it help you to help others?
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