Blessed are those that mourn

“Blessed are those that mourn for they shall be comforted” Mathew 5:4

By Hayley Boud

Blessed are those that mourn.  It doesn’t sound like a blessing.  When we mourn we are more than sad.  Mourning is something very difficult.  It is extremely hard.  You lose your peace, you don’t feel like eating or doing anything, you lose your motivation.  We usually mourn because we have lost something very important to us.  How can that be a blessing? 

We should mourn when we sin or see sin in others.  When we fall into temptation, we should feel that it is difficult like losing something important because we have lost the most important thing of all, our relationship with Jesus.  We also lose our relationship with others, our reputation, our opportunity to share Jesus and maybe even lose the souls of others. 

This should make us lose our peace and makes us feel sad and not feel like eating.  When we let God down and others down, we should feel that sadness of losing something important to us.  That feeling is a blessing because at that moment, we have true repentance and we can be comforted because Jesus can now remove the sin from us.  We can be comforted knowing that when we repent, Jesus’ blood can clean us and we can get back what we lost and no longer lose it again.

When we repent we make a decision to never go back to the same temptation and by doing that we can be comforted knowing that our relationship with God is restored.  It can also restore our relationship with people and our reputation.  However, we should know that sometimes we lose things for good when we sin.  For example, we can lose the souls of those around us because of our bad example.  E.g. the Anglican minister who was really mean to me.  This made me think that I would never, ever go to an Anglican church.  Had I not been a Christian I would have been put off Christ all together.  This lady would have lost a soul.

Let’s feel that sadness in our hearts for lost souls so that we can be a good testimony and not lose our reputation.  Very often once our reputation is lost, it is lost forever.  This should make us mourn and then we can be comforted by Jesus knowing that He can work through us to save souls so long as we make that decision not to fall into temptation.  If we sin, we should feel the burden of our sin and the consequences of our sin so that we can truly repent and then we can be comforted knowing that Jesus purifies us and He wipes the slate clean.