Blessed are Those Who Mourn

Happy Sabbath! Thank you for the special music. I'm looking over at Nia, she's not there. She'll come back. Thank you. Thank you, each of you, for the beautiful special music. As we think about Ephesians 2, verse 10. You know, the famous sermon on the Mount, the famous sermon that Christ gave towards the beginning of His ministry. If you want to turn over there, we'll look at Matthew 5 and verse 4.

He shares many radical teachings, many radical teachings in this sermon. But none seem as radical to me as what he says in Matthew 5, verse 4. And let's, as I said, let's turn there and read that together. Probably one of the more difficult messages to understand. He says in Matthew 5, verse 4, Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Now the word for blessed here in Greek, you might have heard this before, is the Greek word, marcarios, marcarios, which Strong's dictionary defines as supremely blessed, fortunate, well-off, or happy. It's essentially the Greek word for happy. And the Phillips translation and the Young's literal translation translate this word blessed as happy. In other words, happy is He who mourns. And that is pretty radical and pretty difficult to understand, because if you're mourning, how can you be happy? But that's what he says, happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

How can we understand what this means? We're bombarded, it seems, at every angle with tragedy or unmet expectations. Many are very disappointed in government policies or national leaders. At different moments, we hear about different crises. Right now, the crises is the coronavirus. And will it spread?

And should we be concerned? In social media, we see all sorts of other people having all sorts of wonderful lives, and we wonder why we can't have that kind of wonderful experience that they're having. And in fact, now, research is beginning to show that the more you look at social media, the more depressed you'll become. And in fact, I came across an article by Anne Helen Peterson in Buzzfeed on January 5 of last year. The title of the article is, How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.

And it's a fairly thoughtful piece on why sometimes just doing basic errands, or just sort of keeping up with things of life can just be such a drag, and you just can't even like... It's an easy thing to do, but you just can't seem to do it. You just sort of have this feeling of burnout. Last November, I shared how the United States is unique among developed nations in terms of our life expectancy is actually going down.

And interestingly, just a few weeks ago, the latest statistics came out, and that four-year downward trend has actually been slightly reversed, a slight uptick, as drug-related deaths are actually now in decline, as some of the issues around some of these painkillers have been, and the overprescription and some of the corruption associated with that have been addressed. But, you know, the fact is all of these things tend to accumulate, and after a while we can become depressed, or we can see some form of escapism, and some sort of diversion from dealing with whatever sorrow, whatever grief, whatever mourning we might be feeling inside.

And yet, we read that blessed and happy are those people who mourn, for they shall be comforted. You don't need to turn there, but in Luke 19, 41, it says that Jesus wept for Jerusalem. And interestingly, we see that Jesus, Christ, and God the Father, they mourned. We have evidence of them mourning. We have the evidence of Jesus looking out over Jerusalem and mourning for the city.

Again, in John 11, verse 35, you don't need to turn there, but Jesus wept when He came into the house of Lazarus, and He saw all of the sadness and the grief associated with the death of that man.

And He wept. He wept with them. In Genesis 6, verse 6, it says that God grieved in His heart about the wickedness of human beings. So God grieves. Jesus Christ grieves. Do we weep? Do we hurt? Do we mourn for the tragedy that has become many people around us, our nation, our society, our friends, our family? Do we weep for the bad decisions we've made and we may make again when we're not close to our Creator?

What does it mean to mourn, and why would we be blessed if we mourn? I think the answer to this question, understanding how we can be happy in mourning, is important for those who are called today, because this is what Jesus teaches us. Because we need ways to not become overwhelmed in our mourning. We need ways of not reacting in counterproductive ways to the tragedies that are around us, the state of our world. And I mean our world in the sense of our world this big and our world that big. The title of today's message is, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn. And today we're going to look at three aspects of this.

We're going to talk about how God grieves and He expects us to grieve too. And how when we grieve, we will be comforted. The Scriptures around that. And finally, how we can move forward in grief and pain. Not moving necessarily out of the grief and pain, but moving forward in the grief and the pain.

And through these points, I hope we can integrate life's griefs into who we are as children of God. And that we can respond to God working in our lives, even in those griefs. And in fact, even because of those griefs. So let's start here by turning over to Genesis 6, verses 5 and 6. And let's talk first about how God mourns. And that we should mourn as well. Just as we saw, Jesus wept, as I mentioned in the introduction, over bad decisions and consequences of the sins of Jerusalem. So God grieves and he mourns.

In this case, we see how he mourned over the sins of individuals thousands of years before that. Genesis 6, verses 5 and 6, it says, Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

You can kind of imagine that today we have the Internet, and we have satellite, and we have cable news, and we have all sorts of mechanisms. And so it feels like it's like every kind of tragedy in the world. There's locusts in East Africa, and there's people dying of the coronavirus in China, and there's all sorts of issues going on in this country, and in Africa there's things.

But think about it, God had that sort of global perspective from the beginning. We've only begun to get that perspective in the last few decades, because if things were going on someplace in the world, we didn't hear about it. But now we hear about it all the time, and God saw, as it were, the entirety of the earth. And it says in verse 6, And the Lord was sorry, the Lord was sorry. The French Bible actually says he repented. He was sorry. He was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. God was grieved in his heart. God grieves. I think that emotion of grief, it is a God-given emotion. We're going to talk a little bit later about emotions and how those things can affect us. God was appalled by what man had become, and it was such a mess that he grieved over it, and he wondered what he was going to do, I think. And he decided, ultimately, that he would have to start over. Man left to his own devices with the kind of lifespan that he had, and the circumstances of the pre-flood world. God had to take radical action. And as much as we grieve about the state of the world, I don't think we can imagine how much God grieves. The empathy, the sympathy, the connection, the understanding of who we are. And so, too, we must grieve. And we see this explicitly described in Ezekiel 9. Let's go over to Ezekiel 9, verses 1-4. Let's see the instruction that was given to an angel here. And a distinction that God said that he needed to make as he went through Jerusalem. Ezekiel 9, verses 1-4. He says, Then he called out in my hearing with a loud voice, saying, Let those who have charge of the city draw near, each one with a deadly weapon in his hand. And we're going to understand that these are angels. Verse 2, And suddenly six men came from the direction of the upper gate, which faces north, each with his own battle axe in his hand. Now this is an instrument of death. This is an instrument of destruction. And one man among them was clothed with linen, and had a writer's inkhorn at his side. And they went in and stood before the bronze altar. Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub, where it had been, to the threshold of the temple. And he called to the man clothed with linen, who had the writer's inkhorn at his side. And this is what he said in verse 4, And the Lord said to him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and cry over all the abominations that are done within it. So here we're told that an angel is sent to go through Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of those who sighed and cried. And that means that there were people who were sighing and crying. They were grieving at the infidelity. They were grieving at the distortion of truth. They were grieving at the abominations, as it said, that were done within it. And this word abomination in Hebrew is the word toibah.

And it means something disgusting. Something disgusting, morally, an aberrance, idolatry. And when used with reference to God, this nuance of the word describes people, things, acts, relationships, or characteristics that are detestable. They're detestable to Him. The things that were going on in the city were detestable. They were detestable to Him, and they were detestable to people in the city as well. And they were grieving. They were sighing and crying over these things. And God wanted to call these people out and set them apart. We're going to see this concept of setting apart or appointing a little bit later. He wanted to set them apart and appoint them and mark them as people who were grieving. And in verse 5, the difference He's going to make with these people and the others, verse 5, it says to the others, He said in my hearing, Go after Him through the city and kill. Do not let your eyes spare nor have any pity. Those people that were not grieving, that were not touched in their hearts by what was going on in the city, perhaps their consciousness had been seared, perhaps they had been so lulled into acceptance, whatever it might be, these people were going to be destroyed.

And I hope that we too have this mark on our foreheads and that we sigh and cry. And that's heavy, right? Because we don't want to walk around constantly. And we're going to talk about what that means and how we work through grief and how we manage grief. But there is a time for grief and perhaps more time than what we realize that we need to work through our grief. Let's look over in Psalm 119. Psalm 119 and verse 133, we'll see here that David role modeled grief for us. And grief in a similar way that was described in Ezekiel. Psalm 119, verse 133 to 136.

It says here, direct my steps by your word and let not iniquity have dominion over me. He knew what he was capable of. And he says, don't let this iniquity have dominion over me. Redeem me from the oppression of man. And sometimes we feel oppressed by what's around us. We can feel this oppression around us. And he says, redeem me, save me, that I may keep your precepts.

Make your face shine upon your servant and teach me your statutes. Rivers of water run down from my eyes because men do not keep your law. He's weeping. He's crying. He's grieving because he sees what's around him. And he's asking that he would be saved from it as well. We are to grieve. God grieved. Jesus Christ wept. We're told in a prophecy of in time that the people there would be marked for their grief, would be appointed for their grief. David role modeled grief. And Jesus said, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. So we are to grieve. Grieving is part of what we are appointed to do. And there are lots of things to grieve. And we need to work through that. And so this brings us to our second point, which is as we mourn, God does comfort us. He does comfort us. With all this mourning and grief, it's hard to imagine how we would be comforted. But this is why I believe God inspired the prophet Isaiah to write what he wrote in Isaiah 61.

So let's go to Isaiah 61. Let's read about God's comfort for those who mourn. Isaiah 61 is famous because Jesus quoted Isaiah 61 at the beginning of his ministry. And he famously cut off right in the middle of verse 2. But let's start in verse 1 and read what Jesus read there in the synagogue.

And this is where he stopped at that moment when he was introducing himself and what he was doing there.

And he handed the scroll back. But let's continue because a lot of times we'll stop there and we'll say, well, you know, the rest is a prophecy for the future. But I think we'll see that there's a present tense in Isaiah 61. And the day of vengeance of our God to comfort all who mourn.

And then it says in verse 3, to console those who mourn in Zion. To console. The word for console actually means to a point. And if you have a New King James Version, you can see there's a little superscript 1. It's in my Bible. And it says a point.

And I don't think there's a repetition here where it says to comfort all who mourn and then to console those who mourn in Zion. He's trying to get across another concept, which is that those who are comforted, those who are appointed to mourn, exist.

We are identified by our grief, by our pain, by our suffering. We are appointed. We are identified. And what does Isaiah say after he promises to comfort and to appoint those who mourn in Zion? He says to give them beauty for ashes.

He says to give them beauty for ashes. And this is a little bit hard for us to understand. It sounds poetic, but it's a little bit hard to understand. In Hebrew, it's actually a play on words. You might have heard that. It's a play on words of pyr and ephir. So it is a very poetic way of saying literally that he would give us an ornamental headdress. Now, for guys, that's not something that we might be excited about. But if you think about ladies when a lady would wear a tiara, when you wear a tiara, it is a very special occasion.

It's an occasion where there is great joy and celebration. Somebody is well-dressed and groomed and has prepared and walks forward with a crown on their head. That's what a tiara is, right? And that's what he's describing. He's saying that for those who are appointed, for those who mourn, they will be comforted. And they will be comforted in a way as if they're going to a great celebration. And they're so excited to be in that celebration, and there's anticipation.

And they're going to be given this beautiful occasion to rejoice. And then it says, the oil of joy for mourning. The oil of joy. And this is a perfumed ointment which was poured out for guests at a banquet. Now, you know, for us, oil is not quite as precious. Sometimes we don't think about oil. But even today, there are some essential oils which are incredibly expensive.

If you look at one website called luxatic.com, it describes the most expensive essential oil costs over $2,200 an ounce. $2,200 for an essential oil. And it's been known for a very, very long time to address all sorts of things. And people will buy these, you know, they'll literally spend $10,000 for a bottle of essential oil. Because of its healing properties. Because of how it can support health and immunity and so forth. You know, my wife is a massage therapist. And years ago, she was treating a terminal cancer patient.

And he and his wife asked her to come to the hospital. And if you've ever been in a cancer ward or in certain areas of a hospital, there's a certain smell that can permeate some of those locations. They do the best they can. They keep it very clean and sterile. But there's nonetheless a smell. And she brought with her an essential oil. And in this place of pain and mourning and suffering, I think he died maybe the next day or shortly afterwards, she opened up this oil and it just filled the corridors.

And doctors, what is that? What is that? It's so powerful. It's what God is going to give to those who mourn. This powerful oil that just fills the room with fragrance and with healing. And then he says, a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. And I think anything describes our world today, it is heaviness. It's just a heaviness. It's just a weight and you just kind of feel it on your shoulders. And he says that he will give a garment of praise for a spirit of heaviness.

And instead of this heaviness, we get this garment. And you know, in Revelation 19 verse 8, you don't have to turn there, it says that to the bride of Christ, that we will be given this fine linen, clean and bright, this fine linen. And we will be dressed this way. And this, you know, again, if you, maybe some of the men may appreciate that you get a new suit and you feel really good in this suit and you just feel healthier and well.

And maybe, you know, women, you know, there's a dress that you're buying, you bought for a special occasion, maybe it's a wedding or some very special moment. And you put on this dress and you just, you feel better. And that's what's being described here, that this person who is mourning is receiving this garment and they just feel better. And there's this oil of joy and there's this, there's this crown on the person's head.

And there's just this special moment that they're able to experience and they're able to feel. And it continues that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified, that we represent Jesus Christ, we represent God the Father, and that this beauty and this and this joy and this feeling of well-being is just permeating our very being. And we represent God in that process. Continuing in verse 4, they says, and they and they shall rebuild the old ruins.

And now now he's talking about this future time that they would rebuild the old ruins and they shall raise up the former desolations and they shall repair the ruined cities, the desolation of many generations. With this energy, with this power, with this renewed sense of well-being, there is this creative power that will go and that we as God's people will do these things. Stranger shall stand and feed your fox and the sons of the foreigners shall be your plowman and your vine dresser.

And you shall be named the priests of the Lord. Men shall call you the servants of our God, and you shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory you shall boast. Instead of your shame, you shall have double honor. And instead of confusion, they shall rejoice in their portion. Therefore, in their land they shall possess double. Everlasting joy shall be theirs. And this passage ends with this phrase, everlasting joy shall be theirs. This is the great hope that God wants us to keep in our hearts today.

This is a comfort that we receive, a comfort from a future joy and a comfort from knowing that God has this in store for us. And that He will give us this oil of joy. He will give us this beauty for ashes. He will give us this garment of praise.

But it's not just a future hope. There's a present tense here. If you skip down to verse 10, this is the response then to all of these things. He says, I will greatly rejoice in the Lord. My soul shall be joyful in my God. For He has clothed me with the garment of salvation. He has covered me with the robe of righteousness. As a bridegroom decks himself with ornaments and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. He invokes this sense of a wedding feast, the most joyous day of anyone's life. He invokes this and this is the feeling that we can have, that we can have today. This is present tense.

This is what He wants us to feel and He wants us to be comforted by. He offers this out to us to say, imagine your wedding day. This is what you will feel and what you can feel and that you can greatly rejoice. You are set apart. You are appointed because you mourn, because you mourn and you grieve as I grieve.

At this point, I want to bring in some modern research on this topic. In an article on the online journal Courts by Ephraim Livni, he has an interesting title. This is from March 1, 2019. He writes in this article, he titles, Want to be happy? Embrace being miserable.

That's the title. If you want to be happy, embrace being miserable. I want to quote from this article because I think it's really what mankind is beginning to understand about this radical teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.

He says, Brooke Bastian, a social psychologist at the University of Melbourne School of Psychology Sciences in Australia, argues in a 2018 paper that trying too hard to be happy yields the opposite result.

People who are deeply invested in the idea of achieving happiness are more likely to obsess over failure and negative feelings. Because they are unavoidable, excuse me, because these, that is, these negative feelings, are unavoidable in any life, the high expectations create more stress that leads to increased negativity.

Happiness is a good thing, but setting it up as something to be achieved tends to fail, he told Time Magazine. Our work shows that it changes how people respond to their negative emotions and experiences, leading them to feel worse about these and to ruminate on them even more.

So as we try harder to be happy, we actually become more negative and unhappy.

The fact is, I'm continuing to quote, the fact is that you have to consider misery and discomfort in any existential calculation. That is, it exists in your life and it cannot go away.

These are essential elements of being. A lot of things don't go right. The best relationships involve pain. The greatest jobs are also tedious. Nothing can be fun all the time, and some stuff that ends up enjoyable may seem dreadful while you're doing it.

Pretending otherwise, expecting a steady sense of pleasure and satisfaction only compounds suffering. Expecting to be satisfied, expecting a steady stream of good things, he says, only compounds suffering.

Continuing to quote, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman explains, happiness arises unexpectedly. It can't be planned or pursued. We can only make room for it, but can never master it.

Under certain circumstances, due to some mysterious alchemy of time and space, we feel happy. Briefly, but not necessarily where or when you'd most expect this emotion. People don't feel especially happy at family celebrations or holidays or at work or on vacation, as research has shown. Instead, people feel happy when they are suddenly laughing with friends or colleagues or kids, or enjoying a moment of beauty or peace that sneaks up on them. And the act of pursuit of happiness can create stress, which often forecloses the possibilities of pleasure. I thought that was such an interesting insight, that as we pursue happiness more, we just end up becoming more miserable.

That happiness just sneaks up on us, as we're doing other things.

Years ago, I worked a year at a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, Thailand, teaching English to Buddhist monks. And I spent a lot of time with the monks, and I learned a lot about Buddhism. And they understand this principle. It was often said this way.

After you are happy, you must be sad. And they said that all the time. I just like that in that sort of simple language. But actually, research is showing that that's more and more the case.

In fact, the Bible teaches this. Let's go over to Ecclesiastes 7, verse 2. This concept of pursuing happiness is really a false narrative. It's a trap. It's just a trap.

Ecclesiastes 7, verse 2 to 4 says here, It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting. What a downer of a scripture, right?

I always thought, what is that all about? But let's keep reading.

We have to understand this is just the nature of life. This is just the nature of what we are right now. Verse 3, Sorrow is better than laughter.

Isn't that interesting? Again, we'll look at a couple other quotes around that from modern research.

This is what we just saw. Fools chase after happiness, and all they end up becoming is more sad. But wise people recognize that happiness is not something that you go out and seek. It's something that you can't master. It just sort of sneaks up on you. Suddenly you're laughing. Suddenly you're having fun. But there are some things we can do, we'll see, to put ourselves in those types of situations.

And so this is the support. This is the instruction. As we mourn, we will be comforted. Surely the wise, it says here, is in the house of mourning. Because the light fan knows that God will comfort. God will guide. God will direct. So how do we move forward in grief and in pain?

Let's turn over to, this is the third point, how we move forward in grief and pain. Let's go over to 2 Corinthians 7 verse 10.

2 Corinthians 7 verse 10. We looked at the Scripture a month ago or so when we were talking about confession and repentance.

But I think it's interesting here because there is a distinction in the type of grief that we have. Because there is something called godly sorrow. And that's what we're talking about today, is godly sorrow. 2 Corinthians 7 verse 10. It says, For godly sorrow produces repentance to salvation, not to be regretted, but the sorrow of the world produces death. And so there's different types of grief.

There's different types of sorrow. There's different types of mourning and weeping. And what we're talking about today is godly sorrow, which leads to repentance, which produces contemplation and self-reflection and meditation and an ability to learn and grow and adapt and develop resilience and all sorts of things that we need to be able to sort of cope with what's around us. That's what godly sorrow produces. Whereas the sorrow of the world produces death. Worldly sorrow is about just pity and wallowing in depression and being alone and all these types of things. Our mourning is focused on what David described as a mourning for the lawlessness of society, mourning for the impact of that lawlessness on ourselves, the impact of what that causes us to become if we allow it. The potential for bitterness, the potential for anger, the potential for blame, the potential for hurt that we might cause others. That's what worldly sorrow or godly sorrow leads to.

Let's look over in Romans 8 verse 18.

Again, how do we move forward in this? We understand that this godly sorrow, it produces repentance. It produces self-reflection and meditation. That's what we gain as we go through grief, as we go through pain. Romans 8 verse 18, For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. Suffering is a part of our lives. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope. Because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. That's us. That's the comfort. That's the hope. That's the future that we all look forward to, that we are being prepared for now.

Verse 22, For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. And not only this creation, but we also, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. We groan. For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope. For why does one still hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, then we eagerly wait for it with perseverance. Scripture says that we groan. We are in pain. When you groan, it is pain. That's why you groan. It hurts.

And sometimes it's our own making, and sometimes it's through no fault of our own. And sometimes it's not even us. It's somebody close to us, and we hurt for them. We feel that pain. But it says we wait in perseverance. We suffer. We have pain. We have hurt. And God says that is the nature of our present state. That's what it says.

And even my modern psychology says this, as I was describing. It's existential. And it's something that has to be worked into our thinking. In a TED Talk in November 2017 by Susan David titled, The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage, she shares and she talks about the fact that in our pursuit of life and happiness, we talk about the need to be positive all the time.

As if sadness and grief were negative emotions to avoid at all costs. And the message we get is just be positive. We put positivity and the pursuit of happiness on a pedestal. And this often leads people to regard emotions like grief, fear, anger, as what we call negative emotions.

That must be avoided. And it leads to what she calls the tyranny of positivity. Everybody's got to be positive. Everybody's got to be positive. Well, you know, there's times when we're not going to be positive. We are not called to live in denial of our pains and of our grief. But God says, be angry and sin not.

And blessed are those who mourn. In other words, accept the reality of those things as part of our human experience.

The real positivity comes from the hope that we read in Isaiah 61 and the reality of that today, that God is present in our grief. He's present in our pain.

I think when people fail to realize and recognize and accept suffering and the normal quote unquote negative emotions, we call them negative emotions. Well, they're just emotions that come with this.

I think we end up acting out on those emotions. We end up having those emotions drive us because we feel bad.

And Susan David points out in her TED Talk that emotions are only data points. They are not directives. That's a quote from her TED Talk. They are data points, not directives.

So if we're feeling pain because of something, that's real. That's a data point. It's not a directive to go do something. It's just a data point. Why am I feeling this way? Why am I feeling this pain? Why am I grieving?

And we work through those data points. We must act according to Godly principles that we claim to believe in. We must act according to the hope of salvation in Isaiah 61 and the comfort that we receive from God's calling.

And the process we go through is a process of recognition, of grief, and pain, and suffering, and all these things are part of our lives.

And that is a difficult thought to get in our minds sometimes because we reject those things. We reject those things as negative and something is going to tear us down. But there is a Godly sorrow. There is a command. And there is a promise that, blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Now let's look at an example as to how Paul addressed this issue of comforting and mourning. Let's go to 1 Thessalonians 4.

Again, this is just a tangible strategy, I think, that we can employ as we work through grief, as we work through pain.

We see how Paul assumes things in this, things that we should consider. He says, in 1 Thessalonians 4.13, he says, So again, there's nothing wrong with sorrowing. We just don't need to sorrow like those who have no hope. We sorrow as if we have hope.

And so he then goes on to share the hope of the resurrection. He then goes on to share the details about what God revealed to him in Scripture.

And he talks about, you know, verse 16, And so he's sharing this hope of the resurrection. And in verse 18, he concludes the discussion by saying, Therefore comfort one another with these words. Share this. If somebody's not here today, go tell them about this.

Share this. Comfort one another with these words. We comfort one another with God's truth.

Being comforted means being connected. It means being honest. It means looking at the promises and sharing those promises one with another.

You know, there's a reason that Hebrews 10 verse 25 says that we should not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another and so much so as you see the day approaching. We need to be integrated into the body of Christ because when we're integrated into the body of Christ, we're receiving God's Spirit projected from our brothers and sisters through their words of comfort, through their words of truth as they have read Scripture.

We need to receive the word preached, obviously in the format here that we're having, and to ask questions and to engage. And this is how we comfort one another. This is how we comfort ourselves through grief.

Being alone, staying home, trying to work these things out on our own is only going to lead to unnecessary suffering and dare I say ungodly self-pity.

Being alone is not the answer. And yet, that's when often we don't want to be with someone because we feel so bad and we just like, I can't be up to talking to anybody. I feel so bad.

But that's the red flag symbol that something's wrong. So wrong. And it's time to come into and be with our brothers and sisters and receive that comfort.

Verse 18, therefore comfort one another with these words. If we can't receive the words, if we're not in the environment to be comforted, we cannot be comforted.

And it is going to be unnecessarily difficult for us.

So that is a simple strategy that we can share, that we can think about as we move through grief. I've covered just a few points today, not a lot of points.

Let's turn over in conclusion to Revelation 21 and verse 4. Part of the reason that this promise in Revelation 21 verse 4 is so powerful is because it acknowledges the reality of what it is today that we live.

Revelation 21 verse 4, it says, God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, and there shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.

The former things are what we live today. Sorrow, pain, suffering, it is existential to our human condition. It is why we pray for God's kingdom.

And as we acknowledge it, and as we seek God's direction as we work through it, we will be comforted. We have those promises, as we read in Isaiah 61.

Godly sorrow is necessary. We must and we should mourn, weep, sigh, cry. But our sorrow has meaning, and it has purpose, and it is God's will.

And it will be accomplished in our lives because it will lead us to the place where God wants us to be. And that's the trust and the confidence that we have to have in God, that He is taking us to a place where He wants us to be.

That we might be instruments in His hands today and in God's kingdom. Grief is real, but comfort is there, and that is the radical teaching of Jesus Christ, the Sermon on the Mount. God guide us to mourn and to be comforted.