The First Step in Celebrating Divine Grace
Mourning Leads to Celebration
It’s good to mourn, it’s healthy to be sad, and it’s appropriate to groan. Something is wrong with us—something is missing in our hearts and our understanding of life—if we are able to look around and look inside and not grieve. You don’t have to look very far to see that we live, work, and relate in a world that has been twisted and bent by sin, so much so that it doesn’t function at all in the way God intended. The sin-scarred condition of the world is obvious in your home, your neighborhood, and your church. We see it in government, politics, business, education, entertainment, and the Internet.
Journey to the Cross
Paul David Tripp
Through this 40-day Lenten devotional, best-selling author Paul David Tripp invites readers to find freedom from the world as they experience the Savior more fully, celebrate him more deeply, and follow him more faithfully.
Mourning does something wonderful to you. The sad realities that cause you to mourn also cause you to cry out for the help, rescue, forgiveness, and deliverance of a Redeemer. Jesus said that if you mourn, you will be comforted. He’s not talking about the comfort of elevated feelings. He’s talking about the comfort of the presence and grace of a Redeemer who meets you in your mourning, hears your cries for help, comes to you in saving mercy, and wraps arms of eternal love around you. It’s the comfort of knowing that you’re forgiven, being restored, now living in a reconciled relationship with the One who made you, and now living with your destiny secured. Mourning sin—past, present, and future—is the first step in seeking and celebrating the divine grace that is the hope of everyone whose heart has been made able to see by that very same grace.
This article is adapted from Journey to the Cross: A 40-Day Lenten Devotional.
Related Articles
10 Key Bible Verses on Death and Resurrection
God’s Word paints a picture of a future when death will be swallowed up in Christ’s victory on the cross and where believers will live eternally with him.
There are lots of people who are never really confronted by the wretchedness of their own hearts.
4 Reasons We Neglect the Resurrection
The cross is the basis by which we can be forgiven. Because the cross is literally crucial, it sometimes overshadows the resurrection.
It Wasn’t Just Jesus That Died on Good Friday
The death of Jesus was the end of the priesthood. There was simply no need for an imperfect priest once the perfect priest had come.
