09 May Devotional Thought – Divine Dissatisfaction
“Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted.” Matthew 5:4
Does Jesus mean that those who sorrow most will be the most blessed? No doubt this was a strange and foreign thought to fall on the ears of His disciples. They believed that the only kind of blessing was that which came from the world and was evidenced by being clothed in purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day. They thought that a man who was stricken with sorrow must be smitten and afflicted by God. So, it must have been a very surprising and startling thing to hear Jesus say, “Blessed are those who mourn…”.
What then is the kind of mourning that the Master is speaking of in this verse? It is worldly unrest. It is the inability to be content with the things of this life. Jesus says that our very unrest is itself an indication of our position; it shows that we are above our surroundings.
Why do I starve in the midst of the pig’s pods? It is because they are pig’s pods. They were made for creatures that are lower than I. If they had been my natural food I wouldn’t starve, because the pigs don’t hunger when they are in the trough. It is because my home is higher that I am can not be satisfied by the things of this world. It is because the far country is so far from my nature that I am in want whenever I wander there.
My famine is my greatest comfort. It is the promise of my immortality. It says that this world does not exhaust the powers of my being because it can not even measure up to their current requirements. It says to me that my wishes outrun my abilities, pointing to the fact that they will be enlarged in eternity. The famine is the shoot; it predicts the blooming of new blossoms from the soil of my soul. It points out that there are treasures buried deep in this world that await another light to reveal them. My spiritual unrest is a promise of summer’s approach.
I thank Jesus for His divine dissatisfaction! His peace comes out of dispeace. The unrest He brings is a harbinger of a higher and holy calm. Like the fluttering of little wings that come within sight of the nest, my blessed hope comes from the sight of Him.
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