Turn with me, please, to the Gospel of Matthew chapter 5, verse 4. Blessed, happy, fortunate.

And in the Greek is what? Macarius. Say it with me. Happy are those who mourned.

Now, at first glance, you've got to scratch your head and he shake your head and say, wait a minute, Michael.

How can that be?

How can be happy?

Are they unhappy?

It doesn't make sense.

First, I need to stop here and explain something.

The word mourning here, or grieving, is not, let me repeat this, it is not the kind of mourning

and grieving that we all experience when we lose our loved ones.

That's not what he's talking about.

I'm going to come to that in details.

It is not even the mourning over financial losses, and I know that can happen. It is not even

mourning over a loss of a relationship, a breakup of a relationship, in marriage or elsewhere.

We saw in the last message when he said,

Blessed, happy, Macarius are those who are poor in spirit. He's now talking about those

who don't pray and don't read the Bible or feel poor in the spirit. No, no, no. Blessed are

those who feel empty without Jesus. Blessed are they when they feel

that's so incapable of saving themselves. That is the first step to your blessing. These are blessed

because God gives them himself. God gives them His heaven. God gives them eternal joy. The second step in the superstructure,

we call the beatitudes. You're going to find that mourning is the extension of being poor in spirit.

It's the extension of being broken on the inside. Mourning takes

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