Repentance and Sin

In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, his second Beatitude describes the inner life of those who are happy in the Lord, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4) Here Jesus is trying to help us see that to receive the fullness of life and the comfort and healing God alone can give, we must first mourn or grieve our brokenness in sin without Him.   Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Our brokenness and sin can lead us in one of two directions.  First, it can lead us to an ungodly response, that is to work things out without Christ at the center.  That means placing the burden of change and healing on ourselves or looking for it in some other place. Some of those places are religion, self-help, or trying to find our fullness in life through another person. 

In our struggle with our own brokenness with the world around us, we can even point our finger at God and blame Him for what is going on inside us or this crazy world. In all of this, there is that great lie where we tell ourselves that either we can fix it or things are all not that bad.

But Christ is inviting us to another attitude and response to sin and brokenness–that is to turn to God for help.  This begins with humility, where we find the first beatitude, “Blessed are those who are poor in spirit.” 

But then it includes repentance and grief.  That grief or mourning will ultimately lead us to seek God for forgiveness, healing, and the comfort we need.   And so Jesus teaches us, “Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.”    The comfort here is from God Himself.

We all share this one common struggle:  there is something within us that is desperately broken and in need of repair.  We all sense that there is something terribly wrong with this world.  We know things need to change both in us and the world. The Apostle Paul expressed this in Romans 7:15, “I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”  

We all struggle to be better people.  We want somehow to change from what we are to become the person we want to be.  The question is: how? The Apostle answers that question a few verses later in Romans 7:24-25, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Here Paul is extending to us the good news of the gospel to bring comfort to the misery of the human predicament.  Conflict and dysfunction in families, poverty, racism, sickness, evil, injustice, crime, and the list goes on. The solution is not to be found in ourselves or others but in Jesus Christ alone. And though we mourn sin's predicament and the world around us, we become blessed or happy when turn from sin and turn to God for help. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”