Matthew 5:4

Matthew 5:4

(with Luke 6:21)

I. In all mourning, be it for the dead or for the living, or for what worldly loss or calamity it may, there is hid, as it were, a beginning and seed of blessedness. If instead of putting it from us as an unwelcome visitor, we will meekly sit at its feet to hear its voice, it will fetch forth from its dark bosom the very consolations of God. It is not difficult to understand how this should be so: (1) All real mourning makes the heart softer and the spirit humbler; (2) it preaches sin and calls to repentance.

II. When a sinner has become, in the words of the first blessing, "poor in spirit," he has not exhausted, by a great deal, the feelings proper to an adequate view of his whole condition before God. He has, in truth, taken in but one side of his condition, and that its lower and earthward side. In proportion as the light of hope dawns, the soul is able to entertain another view of its own state. Set free in any measure from the pressure of sin upon himself, as ruinous to his own prospects a man can the better enter into its intrinsic evil as against God; its wrongness and the stain it leaves, its full burden of shameful and sorrowful heinousness in the sight of the jealous and Holy One. This is the second stage of experience; the deeper, nobler mourning which survives the anguish of the first anxiety, and settles into an abiding frame of spiritual life.

III. The hour of repentance does not stand alone. To a spiritual man there is pain in the mere presence of sin. A Christian carries within him what may make all his days a time of heaviness. Sin within us and without is a fact too central, too omnipresent, and too depressing ever to let the Christian escape from beneath its shadow. He is a man who has learnt neither to forget nor to despise the dark side of life; for he has opened himself with Christ to the curse, and bent with Christ to the cross. Yet in this mourning one is blessed. To do this brings a man into the fellowship with the sorrowing Christ, and thus within the region of Christ's own comforts. It is comfort, too, which will grow at last to perfect bliss. The sources of mourning will be dried up when sin is for ever dead; and the source of comfort will be reached when God is at last enjoyed.

J. Oswald Dykes, The Beatitudes of the Kingdom,p. 45.

References: Matthew 5:4. Bishop Barry, Cheltenham College Sermons,p. 97; J. Oswald Dykes, The Manifesto of the King,p. 47; Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 229.