Those Who Mourn

We view death of a loved one as a profound loss, and it is.  It is the loss of being able to express our love to that person and a loss of experiencing their love for us.  We experience something missing in our hearts, a piece is gone.  This is how God feels for us.  If we have experienced loss of a loved one, we have experienced the loss that God feels for us through our separation from him.  

However, we need to stop and take it a step further.  For God, our death is a reunion!  Our death is our passage back to God.  He is overjoyed to be reunited with us.  Therefore from God's point of view, death just means the end of our separation from Him.  It is a joyous occasion!  Thanks to Christ, death has been vanquished!

I Corinthians 15:54-57
“Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

For sin is the sting that results in death, and the law gives sin its power. But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ. 

 

Excerpt from Chapter 4: Being Mournful

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." (Matthew 5:4)

When we think of the word "mourn," we think of being sorrowful for a loved one who has passed on. The loss of a loved one can evoke great sorrow within us. Even if we believe that those we love are happy in heaven, we still experience a deep sadness for the loss of their presence. At times, we can feel inconsolable. This is an expression of our love for them. We want them with us. We want to experience their love for us. Even when they are gone, we often experience moments when we believe they are with us, and we believe we have experienced their love for us from beyond the grave. We are convinced they are still with us, and in a sense, they are, since they live in the eternal realm with God.

 

When Christ said that those who mourn shall be comforted, He meant those who mourn their own condition of being "dead in sin." Originally, when God created man, he was perfect. When Adam and Eve sinned, they were banished from paradise because, by their own free will, they rejected God and chose evil. They were punished by being removed from God's presence, no longer able to have fellowship with Him. Any of us in the same position would have done the same thing because God gave us the gift of free will. The proof is in the fact that we have sinned, and therefore, we, too, have rejected God. Not only are we subject to the temptations of evil through free will, but we are also separated from God. Realizing our fallen state causes us to sorrow because our sinful nature has separated us from God. We come to the realization that when we sin, we reject the love God has offered us. We discard the goodness in which He originally created us. As we become more and more aware of the magnitude of our loss and of the holiness and goodness of God, our humility increases. We realize how gracious and loving God is. We desire God’s love. We begin to mourn our separation from God and long for the day when we will be reunited with Him in heaven, just as we long for the day we will be reunited with our loved ones. Even though we are separated from God, we can still experience His love. We are still convinced that God is with us, and He is. He exists in the realm of the eternal and lives within us through the Holy Spirit.

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