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.
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