Senior Pastor Damein Schitter continues our Beatitudes series, preaching on the importance of both repentance and "lamentance" as seen in the broken-hearted honesty of the second Beatitude.
Hello everyone. This is Pastor Damian. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, orlando. At New City, we believe all of us need all of Jesus for all of life. For more resources, visit our website at NewCityOrlandocom. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2:Please stand for the prayer of illumination. I knew that one, Gracious God, you can say it with me. I'm sorry. Gracious God, by your spirit, kindle our hearts that we might be a hopeful people through your word. Keep us from growing weary, that we may not miss the glory of Christ's appearing. Even so, come quickly, O God, Amen.
Speaker 2:Today's scripture reading comes from Matthew 5, 1-12. Seeing the crowds, he went up to the mountain and when he sat down, his disciples came to him and he opened his mouth and taught them, saying Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you, when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets who were there before you. This is God's word. You may be seated.
Speaker 1:Thanks, raquel. One of the things I appreciate is that one of my, one of my, stated it's written down values, personal values is lighthearted depth. I think sometimes we take ourselves too seriously and there's a, there's a joy in Jesus where we can be more lighthearted, and yet there is a very important reality in which we're invited to depth. And so today we experienced both, and Raquel led us there right. So she came up and she and she lightheartedly acknowledged her mistake, and yet it was in the midst of true depth and and even mourning and sorrow as we sang songs of lament this morning. And if you're new to Christianity or you just need a reminder, both of these belong together A lightheartedness and brokenheartedness. They are seamless in the Christian life, and the ability to be flexible enough emotionally to experience both, even moment by moment, is true health and wholeness. And so thank you, even though you didn't try it, raquel, thank you for that. I appreciate it. Now, before I jump into the sermon, I do have a quick announcement that I saved for myself and because I'm excited, and that is. Many of you know that Jason Dunne recently passed his ordination exams. Yes, that's really good. Jason has been a part of New City longer than me. Basically from the beginning, and for several years now, he's been a ruling elder, which means he's been on our session and he was both nominated, elected in the congregation. But now that he is ordained, he will be a pastor and a teaching elder, which, although many of you were here when we you voted on Jason the first time, now we have to do it again, or I should say we get to do it again, because Jason is switching call from a ruling elder to a teaching elder and an associate pastor on staff. So what that means is next week, right after the service when I say right after, I basically mean 15 minutes we're going to have a congregational meeting in this room, one agenda item which is to call Jason as an associate pastor. So that's next week, right after the service. For those of you who are like well, how am I going to remember that? There's an email going out this afternoon to announce that congregational meeting, to remind you and to let everyone who, all the members who aren't here, that it is next week, the 25th. Okay, all right. So with that, let me remind you.
Speaker 1:We are in a series on the Beatitudes and today we're taking up the Beatitude. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Now, ben helped us, two weeks ago, see that the Beatitudes are descriptions and invitations of the good life as defined, importantly, by the reality of the kingdom of God. And so Jesus comes and invites his disciples, calls them out of the crowds onto the mountain as their rabbi, but also, in that setting, he would have been seen as their prophet and as their sage. And in this call, jesus is inviting disciples to follow a way of living that will lead to flourishing in the present life and in the life to come.
Speaker 1:Now, one of the things that's most important about anybody's philosophy of life, when they invite you to their vision of the good life, is to assess how that vision of the good life deals with suffering and brokenness. You always have to pay attention to that, and the reason is because all of us will continue, until Jesus returns, will continue to experience suffering and hardship. And so the question is how does your philosophy of the good life deal with that? There are different versions. Some philosophies of the good life explicitly or implicitly say we need to deny suffering, as though it actually doesn't exist. Some will say ignore it. Others will say merely reframe it, and some will say, run from it and if you can experience enough pleasure, maybe you'll forget about the suffering. But Jesus doesn't do any of those things. Jesus takes on suffering head on and integrally weaves suffering and hardship into his philosophy of the flourishing life, his invitation to the true wise life.
Speaker 1:John Calvin said that most people hold to the erroneous belief that the happy person, or we could say the flourishing or blessed person, is one who is free from annoyance, attains all he wishes and leads a joyful and easy life. And some of us are like, yeah, what else would happiness be, what else would flourishing be? But in fact, the reason that we can think that, the reason we can even trick ourselves into thinking that, is that we live in a modern world of pleasure, worshiping self-gratification, and it's really truly hard for us, as modern people to square our shoulders to the serious issues of life in a way where we can remain grounded and honest. Because the reality is is, if we try to skirt suffering and hardship in any other way, then to somehow see it as integral to the flourishing life. In this current world that continues to be plagued by the effects of sin, we can never flourish now, in other words, if we don't have a true grasp on reality, we can never begin to experience the wholeness that Jesus has said. We can begin experiencing now and will fully experience when his kingdom comes. We have to be honest, we have to square our shoulders to the world as it is, not to the world as we wish it were.
Speaker 1:So the invitation of these Beatitudes is, as Ben told us, an invitation to wholeness and flourishing. And Ben pointed out that until we recognize our poverty of spirit, we cannot join Jesus in the flourishing life. In other words, what I would say is that until we recognize our poverty of spirit, that is to say that we are bankrupt before God, it's nearly impossible to be truly honest. And the reason is is because until the jig is up, that is to say until you realize there is no more hope for you before God unless you cast yourself on his mercy, you're like bankruptcy. Right, you think about a person in debt and they're trying, and they're trying, and they're trying. When do they know the jig is up? When they declare bankruptcy In the first Beatitude, jesus invites us to a spiritual bankruptcy, and then, only then, can we truly give up the false front, the false self and the false life, because we recognize that we are now free, in declaring bankruptcy, to cast ourselves on the mercy of God.
Speaker 1:This is where Jesus starts the flourishing life, and that should make sense to us at some level, because wisdom and wholeness requires ruthless honesty with ourselves. The so-called wisdom of this age, of course, would tell us otherwise. The wisdom of this age would say no, no, here's the deal is that you get to not only define yourself, you get to control the narrative of your life. You get to control the narrative of the world. You can spin it, shape it, recreate it however you like, but what Jesus is inviting us into, among other things in the Beatitudes, is he's inviting us to the bedrock of change. The bedrock of change in the flourishing life is that we are brokenheartedly honest with who we are. You see, there's a beauty in a person who, from their poverty of spirit, engages brokenhearted honesty about the brokenness of themselves and the world.
Speaker 1:I had a friend one time tell me this story that when he was a little boy, he and his brother loved going to the county fair and his grandparents took them to the county fair and his brother loved buying this massive bag of buttered popcorn, and so his grandparents bought him the bag of buttered popcorn. He brings it home and his parents tell him to keep it in the pantry. But in fact, the first night he snuck it into his room and hid it under his bed and nobody knew. Three or four nights go by and one night, close to midnight, they hear this blood-curdling scream and he gets up and his parents get up and they run into his brother's room and they flip on the lights and he's standing on his bed doing this, just getting something off of his body, and what they saw was an infestation of ants. You see, what he had been doing is he had hid the popcorn under the bed and every night he would wake up at some point and reach under the bed and grab a handful of this popcorn and start to eat it. Well, this night he reached under and when he put his hand in the bag, all of these ants started crawling up his arm. The infestation was so bad, you see, the jig was up, he could no longer hide it and, in broken-hearted honesty, he had to say this is what I did.
Speaker 1:You know, that's what all of us, for some reason, have to come to so often to be broken-hearted and honest with ourselves and others, we think that we are in control. But sometimes it takes a major moral failure or an embarrassment, sometimes maybe the loss of a job, the loss of a relationship. But no matter what it takes, we always need God's grace to accept the invitation of true, broken-hearted honesty. Or in the words of this Beatitude blessed are those who mourn because they will be comforted. So today, this three-word summary Ben gave us in the first week for this Beatitude was broken-hearted honesty. And so what I want to do today is show us how Jesus is inviting us all to a life of broken-hearted honesty.
Speaker 1:And then there are two parts of broken-hearted honesty. Okay, one is the invitation to repent and the other is the invitation to lament. But before we get into repentance, let me ask what kind of mourning are we talking about here? John Stott, in his commentary, helpfully says after he explores the use of mourning in the New Testament, he says quote it's not the sorrow of bereavement to which Christ refers, but the sorrow of repentance. So in other words, there's a type of mourning that is right and true and displayed in our own lives and in the Bible. Of bereavement, you think of the loss of a loved one and you think the bereavement of wailing. That is related, but it's not core, to what Jesus is inviting us to.
Speaker 1:It's that of repentance and, if I could add a word, it's not only invitation to repentance but also lamentance. And that's not a real word, but today it's going to be. Today. It's kind of like this Google Docs, microsoft Word Sometimes when you say a word it doesn't know, it has a red squiggly line. Now, for me, since I'm a below average speller, it's almost always true that I need to right click and select the proper spelling. In fact, when I teach with a whiteboard, I tell all of the people in the room if you ever I'm sorry when you see a misspelled word, you have the my permission to come up without saying anything, grab a red marker and put a red squiggly line underneath it. That's totally fine. You can do that, and students do. But today, when I put lamentance into Google Docs, I right clicked it and said add as word. You can do that too. So forget what I said about squaring your shoulders to reality. I'm inviting you now, today, to think that lamentance is a real word and I will continue to use it.
Speaker 1:The invitation of broken hearted honesty is an invitation to repentance and lamentance. Now, what do I mean by the invitation to repent? Here's the thing about when you become honest with yourselves and before God, what happens is that you begin to feel a sense of freedom that you didn't feel and couldn't have felt if, in fact, you didn't bring yourself to true honesty, one of the things that, if you've been walking with Jesus at all, if you haven't come to accept this reality, you eventually will, and that is it is true that the Christian life is a life of repentance. It is a constant turning away from sin to Jesus. Another way to say that is, the Christian life is a life of broken hearted honesty, to be broken over your own sin and to turn to Jesus. This is one of the reasons actually why in our membership interview so we just mentioned our membership class Belong community is coming up and in the membership interviews which, if you choose to become a member of New City, we'll sit with you in elder and your community leader, if you're in a community, and maybe a deacon or a deaconess, and we'll sit with you and we'll talk to you about your story and how you came to know Jesus.
Speaker 1:And if I'm sitting in your interview, one of the questions that I promise you, I will ask, I'll say when was the last time you repented and asked for forgiveness from someone not in your family? And when I do that, it's not like gotcha, it's just an invitation to realize. Almost never does someone have an answer. And the reality is that the Christian life should be filled with answers like that to that question, because the Christian life is one of broken hearted honesty that not only in principle are we constantly needing to ask for forgiveness because of our failure, but rather we actually engage it, we actually turn from our sin and ask for forgiveness. And then I often will say if you can't think of an example, think about a coworker, just think about all the time we spend at work and all the time that we have opportunity to model repentance, to model an upside down kingdom, and we fail to do so. And so the reality is that the Christian life is one of increasingly embracing broken hearted honesty that's displayed in repentance.
Speaker 1:Now, the reason that we don't do it often is because repentance is always painful at first, but it's not only painful, it's the path to true flourishing. Repentance is both painful, and yet it's the first step in the path to true flourishing, the path we must always return to. And the reality is that when we see Jesus for who he is, we know that he can handle knowing our sins and our struggles and our secrets. But what he won't tolerate is when we pretend that they don't exist, because Jesus calls for complete honesty and self-disclosure always. If you want wholeness in a relationship, there will at some point be self-disclosure, there will be repentance, there will be coming clean because the jig is up at some point. The question is, how long do we want to put it off?
Speaker 1:For you know, in marital counseling, when there's been betrayal of some type in a relationship, the path to reconciliation always includes a session or sessions on what is called full disclosure, and that is to say, the spouse that has committed the sin of betrayal comes before the other spouse and lays it all bare in repentance and asks for forgiveness. In this session, everything in brokenhearted honesty is put on the table and acknowledged. In this instance, and in all instances of sin and repentance, honesty about our sins becomes the path, not the obstacle to relationship. So often we are so acutely aware of the pain of brokenhearted acknowledgement of our sin in our relationship. We think that being fully honest will actually be an obstacle to reconciliation when in fact it is the path to reconciliation, it is the way. And so when Jesus calls us to mourning, to brokenhearted honesty, because we will be comforted, he's calling us to the path of full disclosure and repentance so that he himself can come and comfort us in our sin by offering us his forgiveness.
Speaker 1:Does that not sound like flourishing to you? Or does hiding sound like flourishing? Or does pretending sound like flourishing? Or does presuming sound like flourishing? No, flourishing. The whole life in this world, transformed by the kingdom and the spirit of God, is one of brokenhearted honesty with our sin. This is why the invitation to repent is an invitation to freedom and flourishing.
Speaker 1:True comfort does not come from hiding or ignoring, not half truths or half lies, but rather full disclosure and brokenheartedness. But before we move on to lament, I wanna say this to be as clear as I possibly can this mourning or this brokenhearted honesty is a recognition of our sin and a turning from it. Or we call that repentance. That's true, but here's the important thing, we can't get this wrong. A turning to what? A repentance is turning to what. It is turning away from sin. But what are you turning to?
Speaker 1:Sometimes, I think we can view repentance as a turning from our sin to a commitment to try harder and doing better. This time I'll try harder. This time I'll do better. This time I was so brokenhearted that I absolutely won't do this again. We're turning away into our effort, we're turning away into our own strength, we're turning away into a new and fresh commitment. Yes, we need a new and fresh commitment. Yes, brokenhearted honesty leads us into a re-engagement of what true flourishing is.
Speaker 1:All those things are true, but the key to repentance is not a turning to anything except first, the mercy and grace of God in Jesus Christ. So brokenhearted honesty and repentance that corresponds to it, hear me, is not turning to trying harder, it's turning to Jesus, it's casting yourself on Him, because your effort will never comfort you, your new resolve will never comfort you. Only Jesus in His mercy will comfort you. So if you do not turn in repentance to Him, you're not engaging the promise of this beatitude. You will not be comforted now and you will not be comforted in the future. But if, in your repentance, you turn to Jesus and cast yourself on Him, you will be comforted now and fully when he comes again. And so, when we repent and turn to Jesus and brokenhearted honesty. We cast ourselves on His grace. And this is the comfort we receive, true comfort, not merely the psychological comfort of unburdening ourselves of the secret and committing to try harder. That's not the comfort. It may feel good, but it's not the comfort Jesus is offering. He's offering Himself the true comfort of forgiveness and righteousness. That is only a gift. So, first, the invitation to brokenhearted honesty in this beatitude is that of the invitation to repent, and I want you to know that if you have trusted Jesus, you are in union with Him, which means you can never be separated from Him, ever, ever. Well, what about this sin? No, what about that sin? No, turning to Jesus in faith puts you in union with Him that will never be separated. And the reason that matters is because it allows us, like in a covenant relationship, to live with ruthless honesty before Him, but also with hope and energy and certainty. This is the invitation in this beatitude, particularly in repentance. But it's not only an invitation to repent, it's also an invitation to lament.
Speaker 1:We talk about lament frequently. Here at New City, we sang a lot of songs corresponding with lament. Today, even the keys of the songs, of course, felt lament-ish. Well, this is good and right, because in so doing we're squaring our shoulders to reality as it is In the Christian faith. Somehow Jesus can be welcomed at parties. In the gospels the life of the party. Everyone wants to met their parties. Lighthearted, I just imagine.
Speaker 1:Funny Jesus tells some jokes. Even in his parables he says that he's gentle and lowly in heart, which can be translated he's accessible. He doesn't take himself seriously in the way that the other religious people did. There's a lightheartedness in Jesus that we see, and yet there's a deep, deep sorrow when he experiences the brokenness of the world, when he sees the sin of Jerusalem, when he weeps at the tomb of Lazarus as we know, he's about to raise Lazarus. So, yes, there is this heartache or mourning and bereavement, but more than that, there's a heartache and brokenness over the brokenness of the world. He calls out, he cries out over the brokenness of the world that causes things like death and sorrow. And so when we begin to see Jesus in this way, knowing that one day he will fully bring his kingdom and all tears will be wiped away, but we live in the in-between. We see the world in a very specific way now, not one of cynicism in the brokenness, not one of self-righteousness, but one of brokenhearted honesty.
Speaker 1:Philosopher Nicholas Volterstorf says this when reflecting on this beatitude. He asks who are the mourners? And he says the mourners are those who have caught a glimpse of God's new day, who ache with all their being for that day's coming and who break out into tears when confronted with its absence. The mourners are aching visionaries. I love that the mourners are aching visionaries, people who have experienced the comfort of God and the right relationship in faith and repentance and then look out to all that is still missing in the world as it relates to what will be when God's kingdom comes fully. And once we catch that vision, we can't see the world the same. And in brokenhearted honesty we have to acknowledge things are not as they're meant to be. We can't close our eyes to it, we can't bury our heads in the sand, but we have to in some way look at the world in brokenhearted honesty and lament when we see the wickedness and the brokenness all around us. And the reason is because biblical love and action for our neighbor starts with lament, when we see with the eyes of love and the gap between the kingdom that's already in, the kingdom that's not yet to come. We ache because of love, we ache and we lament, which then moves us to write action, and we'll get to that in a couple of weeks, in a beatitude later on.
Speaker 1:But I want to share an example of a person I know who experienced this brokenheartedness because of a vision of the world they were captured with in college. So they found this person. He found himself at Princeton University and became a Christian there and all of a sudden begin to look around and, admittedly, maybe with some self-righteousness, but also just with a new found vision of the world, saw that he actually was not a cul-de-sac of this privilege, but he wanted to be a conduit of this privilege and opportunity he had in this training, in these new networks. And so he decided that he was going to join a non-profit and he moved to a majority world context in the developing world, where many people didn't have clean water and the basic amenities that we might find in a developing context or developed context, and for several reasons, after being there two or three years, he seemed like he really had engaged a sense of calling based on lament in his life for these poor people materially in the developing world.
Speaker 1:He actually had to leave and come back to the United States. It wasn't his choice. He had to come back to the United States and for a few months he tried to get a job at some similar non-profit and he couldn't. He couldn't find a job and so he had to take a job in middle to upper management at a for-profit company overseeing 1,500 employees, most of which were on a factory floor, and he was overseeing the systems engineering efficiency, essentially, of these 1,500 employees. Now, to you and I, many of us are like wow, that sounds like a good promotion from a developing context to this. And he hated it Because he thought what good can I do for the world, with all of its brokenness, here in the United States with this really nice paycheck and 1,500 people? So that's not me filling in. This is what he thought, okay. So now you see the context. So he's there for a year, year and a half, and someone encourages him to get, truly get to know the employees on the floor. And so he does.
Speaker 1:And you see, one of the things that he was tasked with was figuring out the turnover. How do we lessen the turnover on the floor of this factory so that we can stop the bleeding financially, because it costs a lot of money to keep hiring people and to train them and so on, and so for a while, he tried to throw a lot of really cool business school solutions. This is what he said that he heard, listening to podcasts for a year and not a whole lot of success. So then eventually he started meeting the people and walking the floor and getting to know them, and as he heard their story, what he realized was something that he had never seen before, and that is the scheduling of these full-time employees that were hourly.
Speaker 1:There was a monthly algorithm that scheduled people on two-week rotations, and this was a 24-hour-a-day factory, which meant that the algorithm was essentially booking people to work week one all nights and then week two all days, and then it might switch, but it might stay the same, and so there was no order to it, and so these employees were at the mercy of an algorithm that was inhumane. They were trying to live their life and raise their families as working poor, essentially On a schedule that one week they were gone at night and the next week and not sleeping, they were sleeping during the day, and the next week they had to switch and they couldn't get used to it and what he heard. Stories he heard of people who ended up almost losing marriages over this, people who hadn't seen their kids in a month because they couldn't line up their schedule because it kept flipping and switching. And he felt his heart start to break and he began to lament not only inhumanity but the foolishness and potentially injustice of not seeing these people as human beings but only cogs in a machine that can be scheduled whenever they want. If the machine's on, then I guess we could put a person there.
Speaker 1:And his heart began to break and he began to lament the reality. And he couldn't unsee it. And then he then committed and decided took him six months to redesign For 1,500 employees. This was a lot of work To redesign this fundamental, both unplanned but also important piece of this scheduling software. He had to redesign the whole thing Out of his lament. It moved him to action and to this day people now get to choose if they're going to work nights or days, whatever is best for them, and if they do have to switch, it's under a long period of time and they know well in advance so they can begin to make a transition from nights and days.
Speaker 1:And as he reflected on this he thought, this vision I got of the kingdom of God at Princeton in my discipleship that led me to the developing world that I thought was only there. God retrained me to have, we would say, brokenhearted honesty, to mourn and lament over this reality, because he loved these people and he loved this vision of the kingdom of God and it moved him to action. You see, this is the way that we can lament, but lament moves us to love. Love and lament are integrally connected and it moves us into a life of love. Kelly Capic says if we never lament, then it is legitimate to wonder if we have ever truly loved. And so, you see, what we have is a vision of brokenhearted honesty that looks at ourself and our brokenness and also the brokenness in the world. So we repent over our own brokenness and lament over the brokenness in the world. Not only do we have a vision, but we have permission from God to lay before him our complaints and brokenness, both personally and for the world. And we see this in the Psalms, for example. You've heard us say this many times Over half the Psalms are Psalms of lament, where David or the psalmist, pours out his complaint, his desires, in brokenhearted honesty before God, both his own sin, as we saw in Psalm 51, as we sang it today, but also in the sin in the world around him, the brokenness that he sees, the seeming flourishing of the wicked Lord why do the wicked flourish in the righteous suffer? And there's a lament show me your heart and bring your justice. So we lament in the world as we see, with eyes of love, based on this vision of the kingdom. But we also lament the brokenness of our lives, because not all brokenness in our lives is caused by our own sin. And we lament.
Speaker 1:In his book Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, pete's Gazero explores the importance of lament in our lives, and he says this From Genesis to Revelation, the scriptures invite us to integrate seasons of grief and sadness as a central aspect of the spiritual life. To reject these seasons is to live only half of life and to live a spirituality marked by unreality. And if an authentic spiritual life is anything, it is an absolute commitment to reality, not an escape from it. You know, when we recognize the disappointment in our life, sometimes, oftentimes, caused by things that are outside of our control, the suffering that seems to come from outside of us, we have a choice we can either bury it. We can ignore it or we can face it, and one of the things that this Beatitude does is it invites us into a way of vision, of facing it, of lamenting, of crying out to God. Where are you? Are you there? Think of Psalm 88 that we sang earlier. Where are you? I don't experience you. You feel so far away from me.
Speaker 1:And picking up on this theme, pete's Gazero also says when our pain and grief goes unexpressed or unfelt, it gets buried alive, and some of you, you've gotten really good at burying it alive. You're so efficient and effective at digging the grave to dump your sorrow and pain in and then quickly covering it up. I know what that's like too, and so often we do it in the darkness of night, so no one sees us, so no one tries to invite us to consider a different way, but Jesus invites us to a new way. Pete's Gazero goes on. He says as a result, we lose access to the depth and range of feelings given to us by God, and our emotional lives are compressed into a tightly constricted box. Some of us I would say, elaborating on that have either been told or come to understand that some emotions are okay and some are not. Some are good and some are bad. The bad ones can be suppressed and somehow the good ones can be expressed. But because we're a whole people, you can't just turn the volume down on one and expect the volume to remain up on the others. When you turn one down, they're all affected. Pete goes on to say eventually, the feelings we bury claw their way back up through the earth of our lives and manifest in symptoms such as depression, anxiety, emptiness and loneliness.
Speaker 1:So those who mourn, I would say those who live in broken hearted honesty, need to experience both repentance and lamentance. We have to repent and lament. But here's the thing. Before I move on to the final point, I just want to say many of us have only been discipled with repentance and not lament, only been called to repent and not lament. And when we experience depression or anxiety or fear, we think the only whole mature response is repentance. But sometimes it's lamentance. You're going to remember this. Sometimes we're called to repent, yes, and sometimes we're called to lament and, in broken hearted honesty, pour out our complaints. And you know, for me, so often and when you see this in Psalms often lament ends up leading to a type of repentance. That's true. But some of you today need to hear that that angst that you feel, the discouragement and anxiety that you feel the path forward is lament. Now, sometimes, in our own discipleship, we can try to pit these things together, that is, repentance of our sin and lamenting brokenness in the world, as though the Bible cares more about one or the other or that the Bible primarily speaks of one or the other. But there's a synergy of both of these things, and that's my last point. The synergy of both, that is, repent and lament, the synergy of both.
Speaker 1:Author and theologian. Henry Nowan rightly says that the degree to which we grieve our own losses in those in the world is in direct proportion to the depth and quality of the compassion we can offer to others. In other words, we want to be deep people who can offer compassion when we see brokenness in those others and in the world around us. But he rightly says that we can only offer compassion in the degree that we grieve our own losses and mourn in broken hearted honesty, as Jesus calls us to.
Speaker 1:This week I was corresponding back and forth via text on Friday with Ben about the sermon, asking him some questions, and he sent me this really insightful text as we were exploring this together, and he put it this way. He said Repent and lament have a synergistic relationship when they flow from the poverty of spirit, which is what we talked about last week. He said Repenting for my own evil turns my heart toward sufferers, and lamenting the evil outside causes me to inspect my own logs. You see, what he's saying is that this synergistic relationship means that when I'm acutely aware of my own personal brokenness and repent, it then softens my heart towards the brokenness of others in the world. So, rather than responding with self-righteous judgment or cynicism or anger, I might respond with tenderness and curiosity, lament and compassion. But also, while I'm looking to the world with lament and compassion, there are times when it will cause me then to inspect the log in my own eye, not merely the spec in others. So the synergy between the two, so the call to broken hearted honesty, has to include repentance and lamentence.
Speaker 1:Now, in a moment actually, I think now we can go and put up the slide. I want to show you a two by two. So this two by two is meant to show how both an awareness of our personal brokenness and repentance and an awareness in systemic or cultural brokenness and lamentence how they go together. So this is from my friend, missy Wallace, and it's in a book called the Missionary Disciple, published by Redeemer City to City. So if you know how a two by two works, you always want to be in the top right always, and you never want to be in the bottom left. It's the worst always. So if you look on the left, you have awareness of broken systems and on the bottom here you have awareness of personal brokenness. So let's start at the bottom left.
Speaker 1:If a person has a low view or a low awareness of their own personal brokenness and a low awareness of brokenness in the world, it's all self-focus and it's not real Christianity, it's nominal Christianity. Okay, now let's go to the top left. We go from the bottom left to the top left. Let's say a person has a high view of personal brokenness but a low view of their awareness of the systemic brokenness in the world. They're just going to focus on ethics and evangelism, which isn't bad, but that's it Only ethics and evangelism. Because they lack, they have an impoverished view of the brokenness in the world around them. That comes to an embodiment, oftentimes in systems and organizations.
Speaker 1:Okay, now let's go to the bottom right. Let's say that you have a high view in your awareness of broken systems and sin in the world, but you have a low awareness of the importance of personal brokenness, that you have sinned against a holy God and that you are part of the problem, because all systems are made up of people and if the system is broken it's emerged from a bunch of sinful people. But if you ignore that part and you only look at broken systems, your focus is going to be only on social impact. That's it and that's going to be the answer to everything. But here it is we're going to the top right because you always want to be in the top right on two by two.
Speaker 1:If we embrace the teaching of the Bible and we have a high view of personal brokenness and that is to say, an awareness and a high awareness of broken systems in the world that need to be lamented, we end up bringing core teachings of the scripture Genesis Revelation together, because what we do is we refuse to settle for the either or vision of personal or systemic brokenness, but rather and I'm quoting Missy now we must embrace a biblical understanding of the both and Through this comprehensive understanding of brokenness we can unleash the cultural mandate and seek to create flourishing in the world by our agency. We can embrace the great commission to go out and make disciples through evangelism and discipleship. We can embrace the great commandments to love God and love others, because our loving God and loving others will actually square its shoulders to the entire picture, simple humanity and a broken world. And finally, we can embrace the great requirement in Micah 6 to do justice and love mercy, and we won't see personal brokenness, the need for sin and repentance, and societal brokenness, the need for lamentance. We won't see those at odds with one another. We actually will see the scriptural teaching of both.
Speaker 1:And so, in conclusion, what I would say, the invitation that Jesus gives us, with a corresponding promise of comfort, is the invitation to brokenhearted honesty about the sin in us and the sin around us. What it does is, it captures our imagination, it gives us a vision of God's kingdom, his kingdom that's already come and his kingdom will willfully come. And so I'll end with this is the promise, and all of these Beatitudes, in this case those who mourn, will be comforted. Is it now or is it later? And the answer is yes, it is now and in fullness later.
Speaker 1:Let's pray, father, I ask that you would come now and give us eyes to see, capture our imaginations with this vision of your kingdom that now, and the already not yet where we live, will express itself in a brokenhearted honesty about our own sin and the sin in the world and the ways we contribute to it.
Speaker 1:Would you increase our awareness of our brokenness, would you give us a deep confidence that the path to reconciliation and flourishing in relationship is a path of repentance, and would you also open our eyes to see the brokenness in the world that we would lament out of love and longing, in this visionary ache that Nicholas Walterstorff shows us, that we would then look around us with the compassionate eyes of Jesus and lament, and that that would move us out of into loving action for the sake of others?
Speaker 1:Holy Spirit, we thank you that you are the one who brings about this change, and we pray these things in your name, jesus, amen. All right, last time I preached, I did the same thing, so now it's my opportunity to invite us, as we always do, to a time of reflection on what we just heard, and so what I wanna invite you to now is where might consider this, where might Jesus be inviting you to brokenhearted honesty this morning? Is it to full disclosure of a secret pet sin? Or simply a disposition towards someone of bitterness? Or today, maybe Jesus is inviting you to a deeper awareness of the brokenness in the world and he's calling you to lament, reflect on what you just heard, and I'm gonna give you a few moments to ask him and listen, and then respond in prayer. I'll give you a few moments of silence.