PREVIOUS SERMON  (sorted accordingly,starting from recent )

At the beginning of this section on the second beatitude we said that Lord Jesus’ words, ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted’ as seen in Matthew 5:4, seem somewhat strange and are difficult to understand. How can someone who mourns be happy? Now we are ready to explore this more: God’s comfort cannot fully reach us until we are real people. Real people of God do have the characteristics, attitude and mindset of the Lord Jesus Christ in all issues of life on earth. Those who pretend they are not hurting when in reality they are; make it difficult (perhaps even impossible) for God to pour His comfort into their lives. Their pretence forms a barrier which God who respects human freedom will not break down. Facing and being willing to feel the negative emotions of loss, such as grief, sorrow or hurt, may not be something that excites us, but it is essential if we are to experience the emotional, mental and spiritual health we were made to enjoy. When we are willing to feel hurt, acknowledge our emotions, and ask for God’s help, then something glorious and transformative happens –we experience deep in our souls the incredibly powerful and all-embracing comfort of the presence of Lord Jesus Christ. This is why God doesn’t want us to pretend, He wants us to express our hurt, our grief, our sorrow and ask for His help, so that by His mercy He will intervene in our issues through His grace to help and to save us in whatever situation we are in. After a lifetime of dealing with people and their problems, I can tell you that the most positive people on earth are those who have opened themselves up to Lord Jesus with complete honesty and sincerity, having told Him how hurt they are, and have had the experience of those hurts being healed by His love. They have then become what someone has called ‘wounded healers’. Having been healed themselves by the Lord Jesus; they have gone out to heal others. Great sorrow when it is expressed to the Lord Jesus can lead to great contentment when we decide to surrender ourselves to be real and allow the comfort of God to fully infuse us.

Remember that when you talk of emotion, your emotion is like a box that contains such things as anger, excessive happiness or gladness, jealousy, envy, hatred etc; so these are the things in your character and attitude that you need to take control of so that they are not used for your detriment. An emotion is a feeling such as happiness, love, fear, anger, or hatred, which can be caused by the situation that you are in or the people you are with. The words of Lord Jesus’ second beatitude; ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted’ as seen in Matt. 5:4, contains a truth with which today’s social scientists would concur. Most psychologists and psychiatrists agree that being aware of our emotions is one of the first steps towards experiencing good mental, emotional and spiritual health. You see, whenever we are unwilling to face and feel a negative emotion it implies that we are not in charge of it but that it is in charge of us. God doesn’t want us to be mastered and controlled by our emotions but rather when our emotions come up, the Lord God Almighty expects us to draw upon His resources contained in His Holy Spirit so that we are able to live life well, sound and in line with His Will for creating us. In the Church I have come across some who say that if you are feeling overwhelmed or in low spirits and downcast then you should pretend that you are happy and contented-its well we say whereas it is not well in reality. In time, they claim, the disruptive feelings will disappear and will be replaced by a sense of joy. But Christians are people for whom pretence is totally unacceptable. So why do we pretend saying it is well when it is not? When our stomachs are churning with grief, sorrow or hurt, instead of pretending that we are not feeling the pain, we can come before God with a prayer something like this: ‘Lord, right now I am hurting so much I do not think I can endure it. I feel like screaming, running away or even hitting someone. [Yes, be honest.] I don’t want to feel like this, Lord, but I do. Thank You for loving me as I am. Help me now to handle my feelings, this part of my emotion in a way that glorifies You and honours Your name.’ In this way you have not denied your emotions but have opened them up to the Father and asked for His help. Being real, sincere and honest in His presence is part of the mourning process that the Lord Jesus is talking about in this Beatitude. It has worked for me and you will find out it will also work for you too if you open up to the Lord Jesus because He wants to know how you feel. So always pour out your mind to Him but realize He commands respect and reverend in your approach to Him.

What did Lord Jesus mean when He said ‘the pure in heart will see God’ as seen in Matthew 5:8 “Blessed (happy, enviably fortunate, and spiritually prosperous –possessing the happiness produced by the experience of God’s favour and especially conditioned by the revelation of His grace, regardless of their outward conditions) are the pure in heart, for they shall see God! [Ps. 24:3, 4].” Many believe that this refers to the future where–we will see God when we reach heaven. Tennyson expressed this thought in his famous lines: I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar: But in my opinion, Lord Jesus had in mind not just seeing God when we get to heaven but seeing Him in the here and now. Seeing God, I believe, means having a God –consciousness –seeing Him with the eye of faith and seeing Him in everything He has created and seeing Him in the sacrifice of His coequal Son for man. Let me put it in another way: not to see God is to be in the position of Schopenhauer, the position of philosopher and being an apostle of pessimism, who concluded there was no key in His hand to unlock the meaning of life. Late one night a policeman found him lying on a park bench, and thinking he was homeless asked, ‘Who are you?’ Schopenhauer replied, ‘I wish I Knew’. We don’t know who we are until we know whose we are, and those who do not know God find it hard to see any purpose in living. For them life has few threads of meaning running through it. Christians see God in a way no one else can. They see Him in nature, in the events of history, in their daily experience, in the pages of the Bible, in all the glories that comes from the sacrifice of His coequal Son on the cross for man and so on. Do you know all the glories that come from the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ? Seeing God is being aware of Him, seeing His acceptance, comprehending what it means to be forgiven and made anew; Raymond Cramer puts it beautifully when he says: “To the pure in heart seeing God is like viewing a stained–glass window from the inside rather than the outside.”

When the Holy Spirit indwells you, love, joy, gladness, peace, patience which is the ability to have a good or even temper and to forbear, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness which is meekness and humility, self control which is the ability to restrain yourself over certain things are some of the attributes which the Holy Spirit will develop in you and then your character and behavioural pattern will change from bad tendencies to good tendencies displaying themselves in your relational ties with your fellow humans and you find out that once you begin to follow or allow these divine attributes in everything you do it is very hard for you to offend in the Laws and the Ordinances, in reality, as your life is transformed by the Holy Spirit you now begin to face facts and reality as you now feel more for others. Last week we talked about the defence of denial, that tendencies of not owning up to reality through deadness to feelings and reality which is lack of facing facts –the blocking of negative emotions such as lacking sensitivity to mournfulness by seeking for reasons or rights rather than acting in love, affection or benevolence. But now we need to look at another way in which we can inhibit or deaden our spiritual sensitivity. There are many who do not deny their emotions but give expression to them in ways that are harmful (such as bad or dangerous temper) to the personality. For instance, some teach that when a negative feeling, such as anger, rises within you and reaches explosion point, the best thing to do is to release that emotion by punching a pillow or getting alone and screaming out the feelings. Though that gives a form of release, studies show that it can also increase anger and hostility. It is not considered a long-term solution, and expressing negative feelings in this way alone is unlikely to provide resolution because you can only do this where you still have some control or restraint but what about in a situation when everything happened spontaneously and explosion point attained before you knew it? In today’s passage we read that part of the fruit of the Spirit is self-control. Christians in whom the Spirit of God dwells have the capacity, or are supposed to have the capacity if really the indwelling is indeed there, should they allow themselves, to deal with an unacceptable emotion without doing damage to their own spiritual life or, for that matter, someone else’s. The Spirit’s purpose is to help mould us to live effectively. When a difficult emotion arises within us which, if it continues, is likely to inhibit our spiritual sensitivity, then a helpful approach is not to pretend it doesn’t exist but to acknowledge it exists and present it before God asking Him for His help to enable us exercise self-control. However, it is important that we do not dump or vent out that emotion onto another person, which most people do. You do not necessarily need to express an emotion to deal with it effectively, but it is important to acknowledge it. We can, take it to God, give it into His hands. He will help us understand and save us from our emotions. These things or attributes are not easy to cultivate, it takes a realistic endeavour on the side of the individual to study and be an embodiment of the word of God so that you don’t stumble on it, with willingness to allowing yourself by making efforts to live God’s word in the midst of your fellow humans bearing in mind that unlike the Jew or the Gentiles, for you the word of God which is Christ crucified is true power and wisdom as seen in 1 Corth. 1:23-24 ‘’We preach Christ (the Messiah) crucified, [preaching which] to the Jews is a scandal and an offensive stumbling block [that springs a snare or trap], and to the Gentiles it is absurd and utterly unphilosophical nonsense. But to those who are called, whether Jew or Gentile, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God’’. When you begin to live and practice these attributes called the fruit of the Spirit, people will tend to take advantage of you, creating bottle-necks for you here and there just to cast aspersions on you and have occasions to throw or mud-slings on your God, avoid and defend the best you can in honesty and truth and leave the rest to God. In most cases the turns that issues may assume will appear as if God has forsaken you, such as the innocent becoming the guilty, no, just keep your cool and take things the way they come and try to guide your life the best you can in the path of truth, let your yes be yes and your no be no; God willing you and God will be vindicated in your life time or after but it is ‘the after’ which many people do not want because they may no longer be alive to witness the vindication but remember you are not the one to be vindicated but God, so whether the vindication happened in your life time or not has no significance, after all in that of the Lord God Jesus Christ, His vindication came after they have killed Him and that vindication is still ongoing spreading everywhere! That is God for you and how He wants His thing, all things are for His good pleasure, and always have this in mind so that you don’t serve God with regrets or frustrations due to your lack of knowledge!

You remember one of our songs: Onye Nwe Anyi, anyi n’ario gi zitere anyi amamihe Gi amamihe di anyi nkpa! Prophet Hosea lamented that God’s children are destroyed for lack of wisdom and knowledge of God. We have learnt the importance of facing truth and reality in life. Today we are looking at honesty-Honesty is a facet of moral character that connotes positive and virtuous attributes such as integrity, truthfulness, straightforwardness, including straightforwardness of conduct, along with the absence of lying, cheating, theft, cunning, deception, etc. All of these attributes is very much lacking in people especially in Africa which is where an average African is different from the people of Europe and the America including some other developed countries where good morals plays a vital role in their every day conducts as a people. Honesty also involves being trustworthy, loyal, fairness, and sincerity in life on earth. Honesty promotes authenticity. Honesty is a reflection of your own thoughts and feelings. Are we truly honest to ourselves talk less of God? As we continue exploring why, in order to experience good emotional, mental and spiritual health, we need not be afraid to face negative emotions that may, from time to time arise within us. This is the first step in the process of mourning. During a counselling session with a woman who I felt was repressing or trying to forcefully put down and subdue her emotions, I made mention of the second beatitude: ‘’4Blessed and enviably happy [with a [a] happiness produced by the experience of God’s favour and especially conditioned by the revelation of His matchless grace] are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted!’’ as seen in Matthew 5:4. On hearing me mention this Bible passage She reacted by saying; ‘I have always had great problems with that beatitude because I never feel sorrow or grief, or any of those negative emotions you talk about in the beatitude. I am happy all the time. I don’t feel the need to mourn over anything.’ As we talked, it became clear to me that this woman certainly did have negative emotions, but was unwilling to acknowledge them. Her marriage was a troubled one which by reality ought to be giving her great concern, yet when I asked her how she felt about the fact that her husband paid her no attention she replied: ‘The Lord wants me to love my husband, doesn’t He?’ Notice what happened: I asked for a feeling response and what I got was a rational response. Rational response concerns using reason or logic in thinking out problems based on rules and processes, the capacity to be agreeable to reason. On the other hand feeling response concerns emotion, affection, sentiment, passion or love to a person, thing or situation. Do you now understand that there are people who want to have a reason why they will do a thing and there are people irrespective of whether they are at fault or not, will go miles out of love, passion, emotion, affection or out of a deep seated concern for the one they love and cherish to plead for peace to reign! The fact is that today people no longer actually love or cherish people! Are you such a person who love and cherish or you are one that will not move for reconciliation unless there is a reason for you to do so? You can now see why the woman does not mourn, because she feels there is no reason for her to do so and as such she fools herself with a happiness that is not real, a pretended happiness whereas in reality she is dying and crying inside! After several weeks of intense counselling, this lady realized that she was avoiding facing reality. The problem wasn’t so much that she couldn’t admit to her emotions but that she did not want to do so may be out pride or right. Many of us are like that! She was afraid to feel any negative emotions, such as grief, sorrow, sadness or regret, or mourn and her claim to always being happy was unauthentic, not real. It was a happiness achieved by means of denial, which is not the kind of happiness Lord Jesus wants us to have. However, it was a good moment both for her and for me when she came out from behind her defensiveness or right claiming and was then able to rise to a new level of honesty in her life.