Before turning to our text, may I warmly
thank you all for your kind thoughts and
your prayers for us at this time.
My wife thought that my place was here
preaching the gospel this morning rather than being
at home with her, and though she is
not able to be here, I'm glad to
be given the grace of God to turn
to the only source of comfort, the comfort
that sustains us, and I believe will comfort
all those who pass through the valley of
the shadow of death.
Thank you for your prayers.
Well now, the word of the Lord this
morning is to be found in Matthew chapter
5 and verse 4.
I have given it the title blessedness through
brokenness, and that may be challenging to some.
You may even be tempted to think it
is impossible, but the speaker is not the
person in the pulpit.
The speaker is none other than the incarnate
Son of God, and he knows, and with
the authority that could only be his own,
he has gone on record, a record which
he has not revised over the period of
time, and this is what it says, blessed
are those who mourn, for they will be
comforted.
In our exposition of the first beatitude, you
remember we stressed that this series of sayings
needs to be taken as a whole.
I know it is possible for us, as
we are doing indeed, taking one beatitude at
a time and seeking to recognize the divine
truth in each one, but there is a
danger even in that, and that is the
danger of isolating any one beatitude from that
which goes before it and that which comes
after it, because we really have here something
that belongs together, a cluster of truths that
make one large truth.
The second beatitude grows out of the first,
and the third beatitude grows out and develops
from the second and so forth, so that
we really need to take some recognition of
the whole if we are rightly to appreciate
the part.
Now I can only say that this morning
and ask you to be mindful of this
as you follow in the scriptures and as
you meditate upon these things and seek to
learn what the Savior is really saying to
us.
We need to have the whole picture.
I remember as a boy in school seeing
a chalk artist coming in one day, and
he was a miracle man as far as
I was concerned, never being an artist, never
having been able to be one of these
immaculate people that could reproduce on paper, and
he came with his charcoal and he made
some deft strokes, he put one stroke there
and another here, you wonder what on earth
is the relationship between that up there and
this down here, and then he put a
third stroke somewhere else and a fourth and
still he couldn't see any sense, any rhyme,
any reason, but by the time he put
about eight or ten strokes you could see
the figure, the outline of something emerging, and
you see he knew what he was about.
Now we have something of that in the
Beatitudes.
Each Beatitude is a stroke of the pen
or of the charcoal if you like, but
our Lord has the whole in mind and
it is my prayer that I at any
rate and you with me will be able
to see in due course the whole picture
that we have here, describing how the Christian
life should emerge in our souls and the
shape such life should take as we develop
and as we mature, for we shall never
outgrow the Beatitudes.
In principle they should be emerging in every
born-again person.
They should be there in bloom, in flower.
We shall only know the glory of this
even when Jesus Christ returns in glory, not
before then.
And there is a blessedness that comes immediately
the moment we begin to enter in upon
this life, but the blessedness that Jesus promised,
though it develops with the years, will never
be concluded in time.
It is something that awaits the vision glorious
and that is why I can't be sad
this morning, neither can my wife, for our
dear mother has gone to be to see
the glory of the Lord.
And it is only at that moment that
the spirit is perfected and can enter into
the full joy of which Jesus speaks here.
The blessedness that begins in time with the
forgiveness of sins and the knowledge of the
Savior is a blessedness that is worked out
in the troughs of life and on the
mountaintops of life, but will ultimately only be
consummated when we see our blessed Lord Jesus
face to face.
But having the foretaste in this life gives
us the desire to know that which is
ahead.
Now the thing that is important here of
course to see in the Beatitudes is that
there is a sense in which the development
is a development downwards in terms of humiliation,
rather than upwards and away from a state
of humiliation.
This may sound quite incongruous at first, and
you may wonder how on earth can you
receive greater blessedness by being more and more
humbled, because these Beatitudes lead from being poor
in spirit to being persecuted for righteousness' sake.
You see it goes from one degree of
pain to another, and this is where you
end up.
You are suffering persecution not because of anything
in you, but for the sake of somebody
else outside of you.
Men of the world would say it goes
from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Indeed it doesn't start with the sublime.
It goes from the ridiculous to the incomparably
ridiculous.
The way up is down.
The way into the glory of the blessedness
spoken of here is by way of the
suffering and the brokenness spelled out here.
And this may be bad news for us
this morning.
Many people want to get the joys of
the Lord immediately within their grasp, and they
go all out for joy.
You don't get joy that way, not the
real joy.
There are many preachers who do the same
thing.
Their preaching is aimed at providing kicks and
joys for people, and sometimes their churches are
full.
But I want to tell you that as
far as I understand the Scriptures, that's not
where real joy is found.
The real joy comes from having plumbed the
depths of poverty of spirit and of mourning
that makes us meek and hunger and thirst
after righteousness and produce purity of heart until
we become peacemakers and are persecuted for our
character.
And when nobody wants you, and everybody despises
you, that's where the joy of heaven in
all its glory comes into the soul to
be eclipsed, only if the word eclipse is
appropriate, by the ultimate joy of beholding our
Lord face to face.
So there is something here that confuses an
ordinary psychological approach.
There is something here that confuses the worldly
wise.
You see, the way up is down.
I remember hearing of the late Dr. F.
B.
Meyer, who was a Baptist pastor in England,
turn of the century, great man of God,
saying that his picture of the kingdom of
heaven and of spiritual growth was something akin
to what he had learned at home.
There were a number of children and his
mother didn't leave everything on the lower shelves
in the pantry, as they called it, where
the food was and any cookies and any
chocolates and any whatever.
She didn't leave very much on the lower
shelves because she didn't want them to be
able to reach everything.
The better things were on the higher shelves
that they couldn't reach.
So when they wanted some some candies, well
she would go in and she would bring
the bottle down and she would give them
what she thought was sufficient for them.
And he thought of the kingdom of heaven
and the spiritual growth like that.
When I'm big enough, I'll be able to
reach the top shelf and get as much
as I can.
And he said it was a tremendous crash
for him to realize it was the other
way around with God.
The better things are on the lower shelves.
You've got to kneel and be humbled and
be broken.
And the more broken you are, and the
more you learn to mourn for your own
sin and wickedness and perversity, the better things
you find in God's cupboard of grace.
It's true.
Blessed, says Jesus, are they that mourn, for
they shall be comforted.
Two things this morning.
One, the condition which is here described, the
condition of mourning, and then after that the
comfort which is here assured.
First of all, a few words about the
condition that is here described.
Blessed are they that mourn.
Now there are some negative statements that need
to be made to save any misunderstanding here.
First of all, Jesus is not referring particularly
to bereavement arising out of the loss of
a relative or a friend.
That's not what he has in mind here
in the first place.
It is true, of course, that such a
sorrowful experience can and sometimes does lead to
an enriched experience of God's grace and understanding
of his ways.
Some people only come to salvation and will
not think of eternal things until they face
the stark reality of their their nearest and
dearest lying motionless in a casket.
They only think of this life.
They never think of death.
They never think of judgment.
They never think of the ultimate.
Everything is in the here and now, and
it has to be.
They have to see their nearest and dearest
stripped of everything, unable to breathe, unable to
move, to be locked in a casket and
cast under the sod of earth.
And in that sense of hopelessness, some try
to God for mercy, and eternal things break
in, knock the door of the soul, and
something is heard there that is not otherwise
heard.
But that's not the universal experience.
There are many who pass through sorrow and
suffering, and they only get harder and harder
and angrier and angrier.
So that's not what Jesus is talking about.
He says, blessed are they that mourn in
the way he's talking about mourning.
They shall be comforted.
There are no exceptions here.
There are exceptions in mourning the loss of
a friend or a relative.
Neither is it conceivable that in using this
word Jesus should be referring to that sullen
type of disposition that always sees the darker
side of things, and always mourning.
I don't remember who it is, but some
writer that I might hazard a guess, but
I won't.
I remember somebody speaking about people who are
in his or her words as cooing doves,
always mourning, always grumbling, always grunting, always under
the cloud.
And there's a phrase that comes back to
me, I don't know where it comes from,
some of you might remember about some people
who are gluttons for wretchedness, and they're never
happy unless they're sad.
Now don't let's exaggerate, but you know I
think some people fall into that category.
They never see the sun shining, they only
see the little cloud that may be somewhere
in the sky that others don't see.
It's always winter, and it's always night, and
it's always dark, and it's always miserable.
Jesus is not speaking about such, there's no
blessedness there.
Again it is not that deep sorrow which
comes when a person has been discovered in
the process of wrongdoing and exposed publicly.
That is a traumatic experience.
If you've been able to do something, and
you think you've got away with it, and
you've covered up so neatly after you, you
thought no one will know, no one will
know, and then God's Holy Spirit either convicts
you, and you have to take the mask
off, or somebody else does it, and exposes
you, and suddenly you really don't know which
way to turn.
You're absolutely confused.
You want the earth to open its jaws
and swallow you.
No, no, it's not that either.
That's a terrifying experience.
I have seen big strong men who could
face anything, unable to face life at that
point in time.
Jesus isn't speaking of that, nor can we
interpret Jesus' words as referring to the man
who has lost his earthly possessions, and who
sorrowfully sees himself now bereft of all things
he once held dear.
The mourning of our text is not the
grief of the tramp, who is as pleased
when he discovers a quarter in the gutter,
as you would be if you found a
gold mine in the garden.
It's not that kind of blessedness that we're
talking about here.
Let me make some positive statements.
The mourning of which Jesus speaks is spiritual,
and it arises out of the discovery and
the consequent painful realization that a man is
not right with God, and that's the first
beatitude, that is its burden.
Blessed are the poor, the bankrupt in spirit,
the person who's discovered that he can do
absolutely nothing to bring pardon of sin into
his soul.
He cannot make amends, he cannot atone, he
cannot have an offering to bring that will
wipe out the past, and change the present,
and change the future.
He cannot do it, she cannot do it,
and she's with her back against the wall,
or he's with his back against the wall,
and he just has to pledge bankruptcy.
I can do nothing, nothing in my hands
I bring.
Now this mourning grows out of that.
It's a development of that.
It's an expression of that, but taking you
still down further, deeper down into the valley
of humiliation.
Because you can do nothing, your sin hurts
you, worries you, harasses you, tears your own
heart and your own spirit to pieces.
You really don't know what to do, and
you begin to mourn.
You know what this is?
Jesus employed a word.
There are nine words, I believe, in the
word mourning.
Jesus chose the word which expresses the most
devastating kind of mourning imaginable.
A mourning that is deeply felt and excruciating
to experience.
As a matter of fact, it refers to
a lament of the spirit which simply cannot
be stifled.
You know, there are some things you can
stifle.
You can hold your tears back.
You can go through the day and you
don't tell anybody about it.
There are some things, there are some experiences,
and you can go through them like that.
You can keep things in check, but when
this comes, it knocks the roof off.
It's got to come out.
It's so deep, it's like a volcanic eruption
in the soul.
It has to come out.
God sees it and men will see the
fruit of it.
You cannot keep it to yourself.
Sooner or later, it's got to out.
Bunyan in his Pilgrim's Progress shows so much
wisdom, doesn't he, and understanding, and not the
least in this particular realm.
Speaking of the pilgrim, he says, I looked
and saw him open the book, that is
the Bible, and read therein.
And as he read, he wept and trembled,
and not being able any longer to contain,
he break out with a lamentable cry saying,
what shall I do?
Did you get that?
Not being able any longer to contain.
You know anything of that concerning your own
sin?
Your own sin.
Not other people's sin.
Not other people's.
Your own.
Oh, I find it easy to judge other
people, and I'm sure you do.
My friend, have you seen your own sin
in the light of God, that you've begun
to hate them, and recognize the curse they
deserve, and begin to mourn on account of
them?
That's what Jesus is getting at.
Not being able any longer to contain.
It's exactly the same verb as is used
in the Greek of the Old Testament, when
you remember the story of Jacob.
His brothers wanted to wanted to throw some
dust into Jacob's, I mean, his sons wanted
to throw some dust into Jacob's eyes, and
persuade him that his son Joseph had been
killed by wild beasts.
They of course had sold him into Egypt
for 20 pieces of silver.
But they weren't home, and we read, having
told this pitiful story, they brought a garment
that had been dipped in blood, and they
said this is Joseph's garment.
He must have been murdered by a wild
beast.
The old man took it all in, he
didn't know any difference, and we read, Jacob
rent his clothes, and he put sackcloth upon
his loins, and he mourned for his son
many days.
It's a deep, deep mourning.
Some of the scholars put it in different
words.
Let me quote to you from one of
them.
Referring to this word, he says, a contemporary
Scots scholar, and he must be good if
he's Scots, don't you think?
It is the sorrow which pierces the heart,
this sorrow.
It is no gentle sentimental twilight sadness, in
which a man can languish and luxuriate, and
talk about to his friends.
It is a sorrow which is poignant, piercing,
and intense, indeed it will become visible.
It will be seen in a person's bearing,
on a person's face, and in a person's
tears.
It is the sorrow which a person is
bound to show to the world, and show
before God, because he cannot help doing so,
and it is most important that you and
I know something about it.
Richard Sibbes, the 17th century Puritan, describes it
in his quaint language.
Now this is 17th century language, to some
of you young people, with your modern lingo,
may think this a little bit strange.
I wasn't sure what word to use there.
Well now, this is how Richard Sibbes speaks
of it.
Mourning is the ringing or pinching of the
soul upon the apprehension of some evil present,
whether it be when a man finds that
absent which he desires, or that present which
he abhors.
Then the soul shrinks and contracts itself, and
is pinched and ringed, and this is that
which we call mourning.
Now this always comes to pass in poverty.
Such as is the poverty, such also is
the mourning.
And he goes on.
Whosoever hath sin must sometime mourn.
Let him take his time and place, whether
he will do it in this life or
in that which is to come.
Sin must have sorrow.
That is a ruled case.
And he that will not willingly mourn shall.
Now here is your quaint 17th century way
of saying it, but it's a very serious
issue.
He that will not willingly mourn shall, will
he or mill he, in another place.
Blessed are they that mourn.
If you prefer the words of John Stott,
familiar to many of you, he says that
the people mourning here are not mourning the
loss of a loved one, but those who
mourn the loss of their innocence, the loss
of their righteousness, the loss of their self
-respect before God.
It is not the sorrow of bereavement to
which Jesus refers, it's the sorrow of repentance.
And repentance is a prerequisite to salvation.
The summons of the New Testament is repent
and believe.
And the sorrow here is the sorrow and
anguish of a penitent soul.
Now this experience of mourning therefore is exactly
the same as that which Jesus elsewhere put
in different language, referred to in different language.
He said that when he would go away
from the disciples and ascend to the Father,
he would send to them the other paraclete,
the Holy Spirit.
And he said, I will send him to
you, and he, when he comes, he will
bring conviction to the world alike of sin,
of righteousness, and of judgment, John 16.8.
Now what does that mean?
Two things are involved there.
The Holy Spirit will first of all convince
people that they are wrong in relation to
three things, their sin, righteousness, and the fact
that judgment upon their sin has been executed
in Jesus Christ.
It was their sin that brought the judgment
of God upon him.
And the Holy Spirit will convince men and
women of that.
This convincing is largely on the level of
the mind and of the conscience.
But now there is something deeper here.
Not only convincing, the Holy Spirit will convict.
Convicting is different from convincing.
The word to convict really is a word
of the law courts.
It means this, a convicted person has been
charged in a court of law.
Not only has he been charged in a
court of law, he has been actually tried.
The trial is gone, and he's been found
guilty.
The Holy Spirit says the Lord Jesus will
come into the world, and he will convince
and he will convict men of sin, of
righteousness, and of judgment.
In other words, he will put the world,
he will put each sinner in the dark,
and he will convince him of his sin,
and he will convict.
He will bring a verdict of guilty.
Now that's where the mourning comes from.
It's when you know that God has put
you in the dark, and he knows every
word you have spoken, every thought you have
entertained, every deed you have done, everything you've
wanted to do and were unable to do
them.
All the sexual and immoral lusts of your
life, and all the sins of your career,
he knows them all.
He says you're guilty.
That's where mourning comes.
You know the remarkable thing is this, real
joy does not begin in the soul until
we have known that mourning.
For the simple reason that until we know
this mourning, we do not know the Holy
Spirit's work very deeply.
And real joy, real blessedness is the gift
of the Holy Spirit.
It's the fruit of the Spirit.
It's a byproduct.
You see, that's why the world is not
getting joy.
They're paying any price for it.
They're going anywhere for it.
They're doing anything for it, but they don't
get it.
When they think they've got it and take
it home, there have been holes in the
bucket, and the bucket can't contain it.
And they've got to go out again and
back to the same old places, do the
same old things.
You know, but the real joy of which
Jesus speaks, blessedness that goes on into eternity,
you see, it is derived here in the
valley of humiliation and brokenness.
There is no other way.
There's no shortcut into it.
You try it, you'll miss the blessedness Jesus
speaks in all its width and depth and
height and glory.
John Newton, it's amazing how soon John Newton
became a theologian after he became a Christian.
One of the things that he discovered, and
I think it shook him because he wrote
about it, was the fact that in the
Christian life, this mourning and this rejoicing seemed
to go on together.
And somebody said to him, don't talk so
much about mourning, talk more about rejoicing.
Now, he did rejoice.
You'll read his hymns, and I don't think
you'll find anybody ascending higher.
But he discovered that the two things go
on almost together.
And then he said this to the person
who spoke to him, you say you are
more disposed to cry miserere than hallelujah.
Why not both of them together?
When the treble is praise and heart humiliation
the bass, the melody is pleasant and the
harmony is good.
Good old John Newton.
The treble and the bass, they go together
and the harmony is good.
And of course, is not this the experience
of men in the New Testament?
Is not this the experience of the apostles?
I hear the apostle Paul going down to
the depths, oh wretched man that I am,
who shall deliver me from the body of
this death?
I'm carrying a corpse around with me, he
says, and it's smelly.
And I want to get rid of it.
It's the corpse of the old nature.
And I can't do the things I want
to do.
And then he rejoices.
I thank my God, he says, through Jesus
Christ our Lord.
But you go on into chapter 8, and
you'll find that he's still talking about the
same kind of thing.
But you see, they're sandwiched together in Christian
and in human experience.
God has arranged it so.
And the deeper your sense of sorrow for
sin, the deeper your rejoicing will ultimately be.
They have most joy and pleasure in the
presence of God, who experience most pain in
the presence of sin.
And you cannot change the order.
To me, one of the saddest things about
the church today is this, there's so little
pain because of sin.
We almost tend to criticize the world and
what is happening in the world, just like
the non-Christian politician.
I'm not speaking of all politicians, I'm speaking
of the non-Christian.
We don't see what's behind it all, the
fallenness of man, the ruin of the image
of God in man, and the misuse of
life and of all the gifts of God.
We don't see the real spiritual tragedy.
We miss it all.
We're not pained by it, even in the
church of Jesus Christ.
We've got our doctrine, we say we believe
it, but we don't seem to react as
if we believed it.
When last did you lose a tear because
of your own sin?
Have you ever lost a night's sleep because
of your condition of soul?
Brothers and sisters, this is really something shocking
in my experience and yours, if this is
true.
I must hurry.
What do we do if we don't know
any such experience of pain, of mourning?
Oh, come back to the New Testament as
quick as you can, and come to the
heart of it, come to the cross of
our Lord Jesus.
If nothing else breaks your heart, that should.
That's what your sin is capable of doing
to God.
Now, Jesus is not here in the flesh
and you can't crucify him today, but if
God became incarnate in the 20th century, my
friends, the verdict of the Bible would seem
to be this.
Men would do exactly the same with him
as they did 2,000 years ago.
It is in your sin and mine to
do exactly that, and if that doesn't bring
repentance, nothing else will.
There is a poem by Christina Rossetti.
I don't know how many of you read
poetry.
I don't read much, though I love poetry.
I don't have time for some reason or
other, but I came across this and I
thought, really, it has a punch in its
last line which is very magnificent, and that's
why I quote it to you.
She writes, she was a Christian, of course.
Am I a stone and not a sheep
that I can stand, O Christ, beneath thy
cross and number drop by drop thy blood's
slow loss?
And yet not we, not so those women
loved who with exceeding grief lamented thee, not
so fallen Peter weeping bitterly, not so the
sun and moon which hid their faces in
a starless sky, a horror of great darkness
at broad noon.
I, only I, yet give not war but
seek thy sheep, true shepherd of the flock,
and here's the punch, greater than Moses turn
and look once more and smite a rock.
You've got it, haven't you?
Moses lifted his hand and he smote the
rock in the wilderness and water gushed out
of it.
Now she turns to the Lord Jesus and
she says, you greater than Moses lift your
hand and from the rock of my heart
bring out the tears of remorse, strike the
rock.
Just a word about the comfort which is
here assured, they shall be comforted.
You see the distress of the morning envisaged
here is not the end of God's purposes.
Now we've got to see that, we've got
to recognize that or it wouldn't make sense.
The end is not the morning, the morning
is a means to an end, the cause
of the morning is to lead us beyond
the morning itself.
The end is the blessedness.
We must be careful lest we charge God
Almighty, lest we charge the divine physician with
greater carelessness than we would describe to our
human physicians.
No self-respecting physician would inflict pain upon
his patient without having a healing end in
view.
You think God would?
Out on your life.
The humbling experience of morning is a necessity
in the healing of the soul, but it
is meant to lead beyond itself and to
produce something that nothing else can produce, even
in the hand of God, but mourning.
And what is the discovery?
It is this, Jesus puts it, for they
shall be comforted.
Now I said to you earlier on that
Jesus chose a word for mourning which is
one of the strongest that you could possibly
use, if not the strongest.
I think he does the same kind of
thing here when he speaks of being comforted.
The comfort is no less potent than the
experience of mourning, no less deep and real.
Actually, Jesus used a word here which comes
from the same base as the name he
gave to the Holy Spirit when he was
introducing the Holy Spirit to his disciples.
You remember he said that when I go
to the Father, when I ascend, I'm going
to send to you, as he said, another
paracletos, another paraclete, translated in some of your
Bibles as comforter, or counselor, or advocate, and
there are many other words, many other terms
that could possibly bring out some aspect of
it and therefore appear in some of our
translations.
Well that's the word.
Now what Jesus said is this, if I
may, if I may transliterate the Greek verb,
it's like this, blessed are they that mourn
for they shall be paracleted.
What does the word paraclete really mean?
It means this, it refers to someone coming
alongside of you to keep you company.
Oh but that's not the main thing, that's
precious in itself, just to keep you company.
But he comes alongside of you to take
your part, to plead your cause, as an
advocate in the court of law, to plead
for you where pleading is necessary and to
take you out of your misery and out
of your experience into the larger experience of
peace and joy and so forth.
Oh blessed be the name of God.
That's the blessedness.
It is when a man is mourning for
his sin, when a woman is broken-hearted
because of sin, there is someone who comes
down into the valley of tears, the valley
of acorn, and makes it a door of
hope.
And that one is none other than God,
Father, Son, or Holy Spirit.
It's the Father who often did it in
the New Testament, in the Old Testament, who
brought David out of the pit and the
miry clay.
Oh he was paracleted.
He says the Father did it.
Who brought Job out of that desert land
into which he had gone and where he
was being broken and ruled the day in
which he was born?
Who brought him out?
The paraclete, God the Father.
Who brought Peter back from his spiritual wilderness
having denied his Lord three times with cursings
and oaths?
Who brought him back from that experience of
weeping bitterly as a man lost and forlorn?
Oh the paraclete brought him back, but the
paraclete was the Son there.
The Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit,
it matters not who, but it's only God
can bring a man or a woman out
of the miry clay, out of the depths
of despair, out of this experience of mourning,
into the wealth of his infinite love.
My dear friends, how many of us are
there this morning?
I pray some of us are, if we've
never made out peace with God before.
You say it's a terrible thing to pray
for for anyone?
Well yes, unless the words of Jesus are
true.
But if it means that you can only
find eternal comfort and eternal blessedness and eternal
salvation in the valley of brokenness, my friend,
it's the best thing that you can pray
for yourself.
Can I give you an illustration?
I don't know whether I've ever mentioned this
here before.
I could have.
Forgive me if I have.
Old age is creeping up with me and
I'm forgetting.
In one of our mid-Wales area counties,
the farmers, most of them breed sheep, mountain
sheep.
There came into this county a policeman who
was going to live in the area and
police the area.
And of course, he was a city lad,
knew very little about the country, certainly nothing
about sheep, just that they were sheep and
wool grew on their backs.
One day he was out on his bicycle
and he saw that the sheep of a
certain farmer had fallen over a cliff and
was caught on a ledge no larger, I
understand, than this pulpit, this pulpit.
And he saw the sheep precariously poised there
and there was a drop of about 300
to 400 feet below.
He jumped on his bike and he went
to the farm and he told the farmer
off that he was not looking after his
cattle, not looking after his sheep.
The farmer said, what's the matter?
What's the matter, man?
He said, well, he said, there's a sheep
of yours.
I know it's your field.
He says, I know they're your sheep.
This sheep is down on the ledge, he
says, and it's only got two or three
steps to go and it'll be, it'll be
dead.
All right, says the old man to him,
you go your way, I'll see to that,
that's my business.
He says, I'll look after the sheep.
Three days later, the policeman was back again
and he thought he'd look over to see
what had happened to the sheep.
But the sheep were still there and if
he got mad the first time, he got
more than mad the second time, I tell
you.
And you know, with all officialdom written across
his face, he went up to the old
farmer and he, this time, held no punches
back and he put him in the pit
before he had a chance to say anything.
The old man squared back at him.
My boy, he said, before you come around
here, you need to learn a few things
about sheep.
Now he said, shut your mouth and let
me talk to you.
And he did.
The old farmer said to him, how did
you expect me to save that sheep?
I've no ladder, he says, that can stretch
400 feet up to that ledge.
And if I put the bottom of a
ladder long enough anywhere down there, he says,
it's, there's so much gravel there, it would
have sunk and it would have slipped.
I couldn't have got to the sheep that
way.
There's only one way to save it.
I have to come down from above and
somebody has to dangle me on a rope
and hold the rope above.
And what do you think the sheep would
do if the sheep saw my two feet
coming over its head?
Well, I'll tell you, he says, you don't
know.
I'll tell you.
The sheep would just jump over the precipice
to its own undoing.
So he said, you know what I have
to do?
Now, he says, hold your breath.
I have to let it starve and I
have to leave it there in its pain
and in its misery until I judge that
it hasn't got enough strength left to move
to its own doom.
And then he says, I'll get two strong
men and I'll go down by a rope.
And they'll let me down and she won't
be able to run away from me.
And I'll be able to put my arms
around her and I'll get another rope and
we'll take her off.
Have you got the point?
You know why Jesus, you know why a
loving heavenly father has to let some of
us get to the end of our tether?
Because we'll run away from him.
If he came sooner, we don't want him.
And so he's got to let us come
to the depths and plumb the depths.
But blessed are they that mourn and can
do nothing about it and are like the
sheep, incapable of leaping to our own doom
and disaster.
Then we welcome the grace of God.
They that are whole have no need of
a physician.
Tell him to keep away, go next door.
I don't need you.
But in this condition of soul, the Savior
is welcome.
My friend, if you do not know what
this is, I'm going to ask you this
morning to do something.
Not visibly, nor audibly, but in your soul.
Pray God to give you the view of
yourself that he has of you.
Now, I won't make you comfortable.
I don't care who you are.
It doesn't make me comfortable.
Pray that you will see your own soul
and your own life just as God sees
it and cause you to mourn.
For it is only out of that condition
that the meek is born and the pure
of heart and the man who seeks for
righteousness and who is capable of becoming in
due course the salt of the earth and
the light of the world and a man
who can entertain and build by the grace
of God the kind of ethical superstructure that
this sermon on the mount will later speak
of.
Blessed mourningness, it sounds outrageous, but it's true.
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall
be comforted.
Let us pray.
Lord, our God and our Father, we thank
you for your holy namesake that you do
come into our lives, and you come into
our lives particularly when the situation is ripe
and when we deeply mourn our sad condition
so as to welcome your coming.
Grant to each one of us gathered here
this morning this experience.
Grant us, O Lord, we pray, to exemplify
before your throne that we mourn for our
sin, and may we make the great discovery
that you by your Holy Spirit have joy
to give and blessedness to impart that cannot
be contained in its entirety by this body,
but can only be brought to complete fruition
and consummation out of the body in our
new bodies when at last we behold your
face.
Hear us through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.