In Matthew 5 is a Beatitude speaking about mourning, a quality of spirit the Lord has laid before us which is a key of the Kingdom. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Matthew 5:4.
In the preceding chapter we are told, And Jesus went about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of disease and all manner of sickness among the people. Matthew 4:23. When He came up on the mountain, He saw the multitudes and taught them principles of the Kingdom.
The Kingdom of God involves something more than we have known. It is something more than the rules and regulations of Mount Sinai or even the morality of the Christian Church: it involves something wrought in our spirit by God Himself. Consequently, when the Lord gave the Beatitudes He was speaking about the human spirit.
We are concerned about having a release from the things that are wrong in our spirits. There is a word coming from God in this day that is speaking to men’s spirits, a Living Word that is changing us, reconditioning us while we hear it. It is not a word that appeals to the intellect or even to the soulish emotions, but it comes in the force of the Holy Spirit to our spirit. How wonderful it was when the Lord’s disciples listened to Him saying, “Now you are clean through the word which I have spoken to you” (John 15:3), and, “My words are Spirit and they are life” (John 6:63). We are approaching a level of preaching, teaching, and ministering in which the words will be Spirit and life—a Living Word. To hear them will be to change. To be open to them will be to appropriate them.
We read in Luke 17:21, …the kingdom of God is within you. When will we ever learn that all the external things are illusions, and that which is within us is reality? The illusions will pass away and change, but God within us and what He does in our spirits and becomes in our spirits is that which is eternal. Jesus was talking about the human spirit when He said, Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
What does it mean to mourn? To mourn is to have a grieving of your spirit. It is synonymous with having an overwhelming yearning for God. Why do we mourn? Is Jesus speaking about those who bury a loved one, and then go home to look across an empty room and mourn and weep? Is it the wild mourning that comes as a mother looks down at a little casket? Is it the mourning of someone receiving a telegram of regrets for the one who has fallen in battle? Is it the kind of mourning that comes when you remember all the kindnesses and tendernesses as you stand at an open grave of your mother or your father? Is that the kind of mourning this Beatitude is talking about? No, for God and time itself give comforting and healing.
The mourning Jesus spoke of is that overwhelming quality in our spirit that God wants to be there. It is a grieving of spirit, an overwhelming yearning for God. It is a different mourning which is deep in the human spirit.
There is a joy and a rejoicing and a faith with which God is pleased, yet when He anticipates so much that is to come forth in us, He does not look upon our inadequacy, but our mourning over it. He sees us mourning because of our limitations of knowing Him and walking with Him. We know there could be something better. We yearn to know Him, to walk with Him more completely. We come into that deep, deep mourning over our limitations. He looks upon our hearts and sees us mourn because we are so limited in the way we have believed Him and appropriated His promises. We know it does not have to be that way, and we mourn for whatever perversity there is in our spirit that has not believed and appropriated. We mourn because we are limited in the flow of love and the ministry that we can give to people. We yearn to see something far beyond what we have been able to give.
Sometimes we mourn in the spirit for our slowness of heart to believe all that God has said and because of the slowness and the delay to our perfection. We see the delays in that which we know He wants to complete in our lives. And we are like those of the eighth chapter of Romans: …even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit the redemption of our body—knowing that all creation is groaning and in travail, waiting for us, waiting for that manifestation of the sons of God so that it can be loosed from its vanity and futility.
We mourn deeply when we see a brother’s or a sister’s hostility and those invisible walls that shut out the blessing of the Lord from them. We mourn for those that have no ears to hear. We feel the word of God with its burning fire within our bones, and we speak it, and for those who have no ears to hear it we mourn. We mourn for our sin, and even more we mourn for our fears that we cannot trust Him more. We mourn for those times when we have looked to ourselves and found our inadequacy instead of looking to Him to help us. We rejoice for what we see in ourselves that He has wrought, but we mourn when we look down deep within, a little moment that shatters us because we see the depth of our own hearts. We rejoice when we see what the Lord does in a brother, and we mourn in the moments when we see what is in his spirit coming through.
Have you known the problem of trying to love and help someone, and you mourned because they had no ears to hear? Have you loved ones and relatives who are like that? Have you a husband or wife you have walked with and tried to reach for years who has no ears to hear? Do you mourn as you sit as strangers at the same dining table?
Have you ever mourned over a brother or sister’s hostility and not known how to break it?
Much of the mourning of our spirit has been for the fear we have seen in our spirit at times. Do you mourn over the fear that is in your heart? I have felt moments of helplessness when I looked at my own resources and did not look to His provision, and I mourn when I realize what a deadly thing it is to take your eyes off the Lord and look at the waves around you.
The Word of God tells us something so important: Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. This mourning is a reaction of a beautiful spirit toward God, but when resentment comes up, hostility and a judging spirit, that is not the spirit the Lord is talking about. He is speaking of the mourning of that spirit which is filled with love. …it thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth. I Corinthians 13:5, 6.
We can be resentful and we can judge, or with a heart of love we can look on a need and mourn. But it is not a mourning of despair, it is a mourning of faith. We grieve like a mother who bears down on the pain of her travail and knows that shortly a little red bundle will come out of her womb; a life will be born. It is the mourning and the cry of that which looks with faith and says, “Oh God, how long, how long until we are swallowed up in You?” When it hears that a brother has been overtaken in a trespass, it does not gloat or judge, it mourns. I am not as concerned about what sin a member falls into as I am concerned about what Paul said over the brother who had sinned: “Ye have not rather mourned” (I Corinthians 5). Oh, to think that this brother had to be set outside of Christ for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus! It was so unnecessary, if there had only been a church to mourn for him.
“Ye have not rather mourned” are the words Paul used (I Corinthians 5:2). What do you do when you are confronted with the evil which comes up of a brother’s flesh? Is there mourning in your spirit for him until he comes forth in God? Or are you indifferent?
“Oh, I don’t judge him!”
But do you mourn? Do you open your heart to love him? Are you concerned? Can you weep with those who weep? Mourn we must, but mourn for that lack of love. If it is not there, mourn for it, and if you cannot mourn, then mourn because there is no spirit of mourning in you. A walk with God today is something of spirit that is coming forth, and it belongs to the Kingdom. It is not another movement. It is requiring that you mourn so He might bless you.
How about it, young people, can you say good-bye to those of the world? Yet, don’t you mourn for them? Don’t you want them to find Christ? Don’t you yearn to see something in your own heart of love reach out to them? You cannot be indifferent, but you can mourn. Mourn, and He will help.
We mourn when we have not shown love. We do that in the natural. We watch the little children grow up. The breakfast table is always the busy time, but at night we lie awake and think, “How can I help them? What can I do for them? Those little feet have so far to go. Those little hands have so much to learn. There are so many things ready to devour them.” But the years pass quickly, and then you mourn for the things you wish you could have done.
Can a person end their life and mourn because they didn’t know how to give more? Do you feel that mourning deeply? We yearn that God will give us what we need, so we will not minister to His people and mourn that we did not reach them, we didn’t communicate to them, and we didn’t cause the word to flow to them as it could have.
Lord, let it not be a lack of love in us. We mourn, but we know that He will help, and He says, Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God…I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee… Isaiah 41:10
I realize that God has put certain people on the earth with a purpose, with a destiny for them to fulfill. By direct design of the Spirit of God they were born in this generation and they have come forth with a purpose. We open our heart to love them and help them. Some of them stumble around and are quite unworthy of the high calling that God has placed upon them. God brought them forth to do a work and to fulfill a work, and when they seem to fail we find something responding in our spirit not to judge them or to be exacting in our demands upon them, knowing the great pressure the enemy brings. But when they seem to come short of what God wants them to be and has called them to be, we mourn.
Do you mourn for those who Hebrews 11 tells are the great cloud of witnesses, those who all died in the faith, not having received the promises, yet they embraced them from afar? I have mourned because they without us will not be made perfect (verse 40). I know there is an experience reserved for those who have gone on before that they have not walked in. For the first time in the history of the world, we are hearing about, approaching, and ascending to a perfection of spirit.
They without us will not be made perfect. I mourn for those …of whom the world was not worthy… Hebrews 11:38. I know how nobly they walked—what martyrs, what saints, what suffering, what sacrifice—they lived and died in ways that would be beyond what we could comprehend, and they are waiting for God’s end-time company to come forth. Hebrews 12 says we are come unto Mount Zion—to the spirits of just men made perfect (verses 22, 23).
A new day is opening up to move forward and do a work for God in this hour. There will be action, yet we will be shifting to another level and come into a tremendous experience, not of soul searching, but of spirit purifying. The remnant will go through a baptism of spiritual fire. God will sit and judge, refining all the sons of Levi as silver is refined in the fire, and then shall they offer unto the Lord a pure offering as in the days of old (Malachi 3:3, 4).
For our worship to be pure, our spirits have to be refined and made pure. Is it in your spirit to cry unto the Lord, “O Lord, purify me; take the things out of my spirit that are wrong; take out the perverse thing that is in my spirit O God, I will mourn before you”? Then you will be comforted.
A mourning is in our hearts because of the frustration of restrictions that are not Scriptural, that are not of God. We see a new day dawning on the world for God’s remnant to find Him and walk with Him. The frustration is so great over restrictions we find in our walk—overdue deliverances, answers to prayer, and promises God has given—and we cry, “How long, how long, O God?” Yet we know it is not His fault; it is not the reluctance of God any longer. It is something in our own spirit, and we ought to mourn for it.
A mourning comes up in our hearts when we know that unless God takes care of that which is within the human spirit, churches will come forth only a little level higher. God forbid! Oh, God forbid that we bring forth another Ishmael! Let there not be another generation in which we walk in something short.
Mourn! Mourn! Don’t worry about getting through this circumstance or that. It is not the alliances, restrictions, or relationships you have to worry about; it is the limitations on your own spirit, because that is where they were born. The deliverances are overdue.
Oh, so far to go yet! We have so much to do, so much that He has destined. We must not miss it.
Within us is a deep grieving of spirit, a silent mourning of heart, and if we could only voice it, a loud wail and a shriek would fill the whole earth and go up to heaven itself, saying, “O God, loose Your servants. Comfort those of us who mourn. For the prophecy was written in Isaiah 61 that God would comfort all those that mourn in Zion and give us beauty for ashes.” Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
If only people’s spirits were perfected, that they might really know what is before them! Usually if they do not hear just the word they want they get upset. God will not give you a word just to keep you from getting your feelings hurt. He will give it to you when your spirit is ready to get it. You will sit with an open heart to God, poor in spirit, broken before the Lord, and mourning until the day that God wants to give you that word. And when He gives it, you will mourn, because in your unworthiness you must be able to grasp it in a way that you have not. If you have mourning in your heart, the grieving in your spirit, that overwhelming yearning after God, there is a blessing for you. God is going to comfort you.
Set yourself to pray and seek the Lord if you want this quality of mourning in your spirit. It will keep you from the failures, mistakes, and limitations. For the seed of every failure is in the human spirit, not in the flesh. It is the flesh that gives it an occasion, but if it were not in your spirit, you could not fall.
Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God. II Corinthians 7:1. That perfect deliverance is ours.
There is nothing worse, Lord, than that we should be unfeeling. Let our hearts beat like Your heart. O God, give us a little of Your love, the love so great that You gave Your Son for us. O Father, help us. Bring us into what You have for us. Put within us that which mourns and strives, that grieving of our spirit, that overwhelming yearning after You, Lord. Help us to shake off these limitations.
God is going to help us come into the purifying of our spirit. Cry unto the Lord to be poor in spirit, and mourn, until you not only understand it, but it is a reality in you. He will help you and the purifying will come.
I know that you feel, “O Lord, if You could just do this in me.” But He is doing it right now. When the Lord looked down upon all those disciples who were not conditioned or prepared, but they loved the Lord, He loved them and said, Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.
God grant that this word will be effective in your life from this moment, whether it be just a little grieving of heart or the depth of mourning before the Lord. Let it be a reality in your spirit, because it is necessary. This is not a movement for you to get on the bandwagon and say, “This is the coming thing.” It is actually coming to Mount Zion and to the spirits of just men made perfect.