What do you want most in this life? According to Pew Research the top four things people say are most important in life are: Family, Health, Friends, and Financial Stability. Are those on your list of things you want badly? What about righteousness? That wasn’t in any of the polls. If we Christians were polled, and asked what we want most out of life, would righteousness be high on the list? Would it even be on the list? I ask because our verse today is Matthew 5:6, where Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
I want to tackle this verse with 2 thoughts: 1) A Godly Appetite, 2) God Alone Satisfies
A GODLY APPETITE
A godly appetite is a driving appetite. It drives you to God and to His righteousness. You hunger for Him. He makes you feel how necessary He is to you. Its like a survival thing – you can’t live without Him – which you can’t. You have to have Him to live.
This spiritual hungering and thirsting has a desperation to it. Turn with me to some passages so you can see:
- Psalm 42:1-2 says “Like a deer panting for streams of water, so my soul pants for you O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?”
- Or Psalm 63:1 where it says, “You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water.” Can you see that desperation in their hunger and thirst? Nothing else will do but God – the righteous God. “My heart and flesh cry out for the living God” Psalm 84:2 says.
- When someone is starving and thirsting there is only one thing on their mind, and they’ll do everything to satisfy that hunger and quench that thirst. “The appetite of the laborers works for them,” Proverbs 16:26 says, “their hunger drives them on.” A man’s hunger for righteousness will drive him to God, a woman’s thirst for God will drive her to God.
- Isaiah 26:9 says, “My soul yearns for you in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for you.”
Second, a godly appetite is an appetite for righteousness. Its not for “ministries” or “programs” or feel-good music, or serving, or going to church – although most of those things are good things. Its a driving hunger and a driving thirst for righteousness. I want to propose 3 ways people hunger and thirst for righteousness.
FIRST: Personal righteousness. They want righteousness for their own lives. You know who exemplified this? The Apostle Paul. Turn to Romans 7:14-25 with me. Paul’s looking in the mirror at himself. He’s not pointing his finger at others obsessively critical of how they aren’t righteous. He is painfully aware of the distance between the righteousness of Christ and how far short of it he actually lives. You know who else had hunger pangs for personal righteousness? David. He said in Psalm 19:13-14, “Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me. Then I will be blameless, innocent of great transgression.” Can you see the intense desire for personal righteousness?
SECOND: A righteous world. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness long intensely for the day when this world runs on righteousness. Second Peter 3:13 says, “But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.” Our lives in Christ right now in this world are like stars shining a light in the vast black sea of corruption of this world. And we long for and hunger for the coming day when the righteousness we stand for lights up the whole earth, and the whole earth runs on righteousness. Isaiah 26:9 says this about the future kingdom of righteousness on the earth, “When your judgments come upon the earth, the people of the world will learn righteousness.” Its not just a statement of fact, but Isaiah was stating a desire to see it! It is the hungering of the prophets, the thirsting of the apostles, the longing of all the saints, for the day when this earth is ruled by righteousness and runs righteously. This is the point of the Messiah ruling the nations with “an iron scepter.” Its a scepter that is unbending in righteousness.
Sometimes those famines however are God’s judgments. In other words, God causes spiritual famine. Turn to Amos 8:11-12…. Sometimes God judges a people for their persistent rebellion against Him and deprives them of His word! The landscape becomes overrun with the weeds of false teachers.
THIRD: God’s personal righteousness. The hunger and thirst for righteousness includes a hungering and thirsting to behold God’s righteousness. Psalm 27:4 says, “One thing I ask from the LORD, this only do I seek (hunger/thirst), that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the LORD (in his righteousness).” It will not be anything other than or less than beholding God in his glorious righteousness that will satisfy those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Like Psalm 17:15 says so potently, “As for me….when I awake (resurrected) I will be satisfied with seeing your face.”
A hunger for God’s righteousness would include a deep longing for his righteous judgments to come on the earth.
I want to see Jesus as Revelation 19:11 is described, “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With JUSTICE (righteousness) he judges and makes war.” I want to see the day when God’s perfect righteousness is on display as He judges this world through Christ, as Paul declared in Acts 17:31, “For God has set a day when He will judge the world with justice (righteousness) by the man He has appointed (Jesus).” I want to see that day!
I hunger and thirst for God’s righteous judgments to be carried out against all lawlessness and wickedness done upon the face of the earth. Like 2 Thessalonians 1, I long for the day when I will stand in the crowd of all those who are redeemed and who have been waiting and finally behold Jesus bring His righteous judgment on all His enemies, “on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed.”
I also hunger and thirst for the day we get to see Him rule over this earth in His glorious righteousness. Perhaps one of the best places to show you this is Christmas. Turn with me to Isaiah 9:6-7, one of the most famous Christmas verses. We love verse 6, but look at how it flows right into verse 7. The first half of verse 6 refers to Christ’s first coming. The rest of verse 6 and verse 7 describe his 2nd coming – still to come! Notice verse 7 “establishing and upholding [his government] with JUSTICE and RIGHTEOUSNESS…” Oh how we long to see this! Look at Isaiah 11:1-10 with me and just look at all the righteousness in these verses of Christ’s earthly kingdom that is coming….
GOD ALONE SATISFIES
The idea of hungering and thirsting for righteousness means you find that only God will satisfy that spiritual desire within you. All that is righteous is found with Him. Psalm 107:9 says, “God satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.”
Many people live in spiritual starvation and dehydration. Sometimes its their own fault – they chase all the wrong things. People can be lost and go to the wrong things with that desire: alcohol, drugs, sex, achievement, image and status, having to have the best or more possessions, being better than others, even getting very “spiritual” or “religious.” All of these can be ways people channel that spiritual hungering and thirsting that they’re trying to fill, all while they don’t recognize that true satisfaction comes from God. They don’t understand Psalm 36:8, “They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from the river of your delights.”
When did this start? In the Garden. The first sin in the Garden was a hungering – a hungering for the wrong thing, and losing sight of the fact that the Creator was their everything. It is no coincidence that that first sin was hungering that made them eat, which led to their separation from God, and now all of mankind that came from them hungers and thirsts spiritually UNTIL they turn to God – who alone fills that hungering and quenches that thirsting.
A long time ago, on a hot day, Jesus sat thirsty at a well. There was a woman who happened to be there also, and she retrieved a drink for him from that well. Then after he downed his water he proceeded to tell her in John 4 “Everyone who drinks from this well will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst again.”
Whats important that Jesus does with the woman is he explains the reason she is thirsty. She asks for this living water he is talking about and what does he do? He points out her sin. What is the point of that? Its this: finding true and lasting satisfaction spiritually requires you face your sin and own it before Jesus Christ.
God is not only the only satisfaction for our spiritual hunger and thirst, but God is also a God who invites us to come and find our true satisfaction in Him. Turn with me to Isaiah 55:1-2…
CONCLUSION:
What do you want most out of this life?
Lets have silent reflection on how the LORD may be using these words today…