Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) with what is called The Beatitudes. They are called that because of a rough transliteration of first the Greek makarios and then to the Latin beatus. Some Bibles use the word “happy” to begin each of these statements, but the word is best translated as “blessed”. Those who are blessed will generally be profoundly happy, but blessedness cannot be reduced to mere happiness. So what does blessed mean? To be “blessed” fundamentally means to be approved or to find approval. When man blesses God he is approving God. He is praising God. When God blesses man he is approving man. There is no higher blessing than to be approved of by God. So this week we are asking ourselves whose blessing matters most to us and whose blessing will we diligently seek as we look at these hard sayings,

The first beatitude has to deal with being poor in spirit. Poverty of Spirit is not financial destitution or material poverty. Poverty of spirit is the personal acknowledgment of spiritual bankruptcy. It is the confession before God that we are unworthy of him. It is the deepest form of repentance. It is a confession of man’s need for God due to our sin and rebellious nature. It is a humble admission that we are nothing without him. Poverty of spirit is not self-hatred. It is coming to God and realizing that we are not God. It is an honesty that we need someone outside of ourselves to save us. This is why the kingdom of heaven is for the poor in spirit. When we empty ourselves of any ability to do it ourselves that is when God works in us and through us. When we remove our self-delusions and see pour genuine poverty of spirit that is when we can enter into the kingdom of heaven here on this earth.

The second beatitude leads us to the blessedness that comes from when we mourn. Mourning is the emotional counterpart of being poor in spirit. We live in a world that thrives on laughter and pleasure. Life is all about having a good time and the world runs from the hard stuff. It teaches us to move from one high to another high. Our world does not in fact like mourners. Jesus comes to us and says, “Blessed are those who mourn…”. This does not mean that the Chrisitan is to be forever weepy. It means at an individual level, that this mourning is personal grief over personal sin. It is the mourning experienced by someone who has seen God and then sees their own soul and sees the depth of their sin. It is the mourning that comes from the realization that we cannot save ourselves in our own strength. Remember though that in this mourning there is a promised comfort for our souls. We are comforted when we come to the gospel and see that when we trust Jesus we know that he has paid for the sins and the debt that we have acquired. There is mourning on another level as well. A mourning that comes from seeing the brokenness and the sin in the world around us. Not a mourning that judges the sins of others, but a mourning that sees that we live in a fallen world and the effects of that in this life. Our weeping leads us to prayer. We pray boldly knowing that God can and oftentimes does comfort us in this life. Our ultimate comfort though comes when Jesus returns. He promises to wipe away all of our tears and make everything bad untrue.