I gotta get this out

I have the luxury of reading through my senior pastor's sermons before he preaches them. I do this cause I put his PowerPoint presentations together for Sunday. As I sit down to work on it right now, my mind floods with thoughts and questions. At this point, I don't know what he is going to preach so this is not a reaction to his sermon that I am about to read. I guess I am just getting myself ready for it. Sometimes I work on his sermons and go: "what the . . . ?" and I wonder how it's going to work for Sunday. But then it does. God speaks with Rick (as opposed to 'through' Rick. That thought is another blog) and people hear from God, are challenged/encouraged/changed and then I wonder why I was so skeptical. But anyway, I write now to process thoughts:

First you need to know that my senior pastor is preaching through the book of Matthew. Right now we are on the "beatitudes". The particular verse or topic is from Matt 5:4 - "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."

My thoughts and questions are these: is this sermon really complicated - the sermon on the mount I mean? Like, how long did Jesus take to say all that? 5 minutes? Did Matthew just record the jist of it or word for word? I ask this cause I am curious why we pastors like to preach a whole sermon on one verse. A whole 40 minute sermon on a phrase that took Jesus maybe 5 seconds to say (oh, to know Greek). We'll see what Sunday brings.

And what does this particular verse mean? Blessed are people who mourn the death of loved ones, the loss of a job, their spiritual depravity? How can we be sure? We'll see what Sunday brings.

And what does 'blessed' mean? In this case - that the mourner will receive comfort? I guess that is good. I would like comfort when I mourn. We'll see what Sunday brings.

And if this mourning will refer to mourning our spiritual depravity (I pretty much know this is the direction he is going) then you cannot surely say that "Christians must morn their spiritual depravity to be followers of Christ." Right? Cause my thinking is that Jesus isn't exhorting Christians to be poor, mournful, hunger and thirst for righteousness etc. But that those who do these things will be blessed accordingly. Like, when Jesus says, "blessed are the poor", he is not saying, "you must go and be poor." If we read the text that way, then surely we must know that Jesus isn't saying "you must mourn." Rather, those that do mourn will receive the blessing of comfort. And if you ask me to explain that, I cannot. God's peace and comfort is beyond explanation although it is not beyond my experience.

I am really hoping that I do not receive a guilt trip along these lines: "we are spiritually depraved. We are sinful. We need to wallow in our sin. Waaa waa waa." There is truth in there, absolutely, but I would rather respond more like this: God, I love you and I love what your son did for me. In spending all this time with you, I realize how holy you are and how unholy I am. In fact, the more time I spend with you, the greater the contrast becomes. I'm soooo sorry for ______ (insert sin here). I am in such need of cleansing. I am in such need of your forgiveness. I want to turn from my sin and know your healing touch. Yeah, I do struggle with sin and thatis what I mourn. In fact I hate this sin and the fact that I do it. I want to be rid of it but I don't think I can. God I need you. I would love right now your comfort. That is more my heart cry.

We'll see what Sunday brings.