April 28

For Those Who Mourn

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
—Matthew 5:4

Scripture reading: 1 Corinthians 15:51-57; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

People get a wrong idea of mourning. In Switzerland, they have a day set apart to take wreaths to graves. I questioned the people’s ignorance and said, “Why are you spending time around the graves? The people you love are not there. All that taking of flowers to the graves is not faith at all. Those who died in Christ are gone to be with Him, ‘which,’ Paul said, ‘is far better’ (Phil. 1:23).”

My wife once said to me, “Watch me when I’m preaching. I get so near to heaven when I’m preaching that someday I’ll be off.” One night she was preaching, and when she had finished, off she went. I was going to Glasgow and had said goodbye to her before she went to the meeting. As I was leaving the house, the doctor and policeman met me at the door and told me that she had fallen dead at the church door. I knew she had gotten what she wanted. I could not weep, but I was in tongues, praising the Lord. Humanly, she was everything to me; but I could not mourn on natural lines, and I just laughed in the Spirit. The house was soon filled with people. The doctor said, “She is dead, and we can do no more for her.” I went up to her lifeless corpse and commanded death to give her up, and she came back to me for a moment. Then God said to me, “She is Mine; her work is done.” I knew what He meant.

They laid her in the coffin, and I brought my sons and my daughter into the room and said, “Is she there?” They said, “No, Father.” I said, “We will cover her up.” If you go mourning the loss of loved ones who have gone to be with Christ — I say this to you out of love — you have never had the revelation of what Paul spoke of when he showed us that it is better to go than to stay. (See 2 Corinthians 5:8.) We read this in Scripture, but the trouble is that people will not believe it. When you believe God, you will say, “Whatever it is, it is all right. If You want to take the one I love, it is all right, Lord.”

But the mourning that Jesus spoke of in Matthew 5 is a mourning in the Spirit. God will bring you to a place where things must be changed, and there is a mourning, an unutterable groaning until God comes. Jesus mourned over Jerusalem. He saw the conditions; He saw the unbelief; He saw the end of those who closed their ears to the Gospel. But God gave a promise that He would see “the labor of His soul, and be satisfied” (Isa. 53:11) and that He would “see His seed” (v. 10).

What happened on the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem was a promise of what would be the results of His travail, to be multiplied a billionfold all down the ages in all the world. And as we enter in the Spirit into travail over conditions that are wrong, such mourning will always bring results for God, and our joy will be complete in the satisfaction that is thereby brought to Christ.

Thought for today: Faith removes all tears of self-pity.

Smith Wigglesworth Devotional: 365 Day Devotional
By Whitaker House

Smith Wigglesworth was a man who took God at his word, and God used his faith as a model for others. Explore these daily truths from Scripture and the writings of the Apostle of Faith, and you’ll quench your spiritual thirst, conquer defeating fears, be an effective soul winner, and see impossibilities turn into realities. 558 pages.

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Smith Wigglesworth Devotional