When your dog loses its appetite you know that it has got a problem. You had better make an appointment with the vet. When a baby suddenly does not want to drink you know that you have a problem. Make an appointment with the doctor! When a Christian loses their appetite for God you have a problem. They need to schedule an appointment with their divine physician. The Scottish preacher Thomas Guthrie once said, “if you find yourself loving any pleasure better than your prayers, any book better than the Bible, any house better than the house of God, any table better than the Lord’s Table, any person better than Christ, any indulgence better than the hope of heaven – take alarm! This morning we come to the fourth beatitude.
BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO HUNGER AND THIRST FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS
When Jesus first spoke about hungering and thirsting, he was talking to people who understood these words. We have very little appreciation for real hunger and genuine thirst. If we are hungry, we raid the fridge. That is not hunger but peckishness!! When we are thirsty, we go to the tap and pour a glass of water. In NT times many people lived close to the border line between hunger and starvation. In Jesus’ day water was a precious commodity. Life had to be planned around the availability of water to stay alive. Genuine thirst drives people mad. In Psalm 63:1 David says; O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water. Think about the apostle Paul. Here was a man who had a number of visions, beginning with his conversion on the road to Damascus. He had another vision of a man from Macedonia pleading for help and a further encounter with Christ at Corinth (Acts 18:9-10). His greatest spiritual experience is recorded in 2 Corinthians 12 where he was caught up to the third heaven and heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell. If anyone could sit back on their laurels it would have been Paul. But what was the great desire of Paul’s heart? In Philippians 3:10 he says, I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. This is a picture of a man who is hungering and thirsting for righteousness. The scriptures use this word righteousness in two senses. The first way that it is used is to refer to the righteousness of Jesus Christ that is imputed to the person who puts their faith in Jesus Christ. In Romans 1:17 we read, for in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” A person who has Christ’s righteousness imputed to them stand before God just as if they had never sinned. To put it another way they stand before God as though they had always obeyed. The second way in which the scriptures use this word righteousness is to refer to our own personal sanctification. Which of these two forms of righteousness does Jesus have in mind. Unquestionably the second! Let us see how this word righteousness is used elsewhere in chapter 5. In vrs 20 he says, for I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. What follows are six illustrations of surpassing righteousness. This the righteousness that we must hunger and thirst for. It is this righteousness for which Robert Murray M’ Cheyne used to pray; “Lord make me as holy on earth as it is possible for a redeemed sinner to be.”
FOR THEY WILL BE FILLED
This word “filled” is an interesting word in the Greek language. The word is used in Revelation 19:21 to refer to the birds of the air feasting on the flesh of the enemies of Christ on the day of his coming. So, when Jesus says that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled he means that they will be filled to the maximum – gorged. In Psalm 107:9 we read that God, satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things. I have two brothers and when we were growing up my mother always had a heavy hand when dishing up our food. She believed in fattening us up. Even after we were married whenever we visited my parents you never left without feeling full. Afrikaans people like to say “ons het onself duk geeet.” No room for more. To this day when it is my turn to cook and dish up Sue will look at the helping of food on her plate and say “you have got your mother’s hand again.” There is of course a paradox in this verse. We hunger for righteousness and are filled but immediately we hunger all the more. It is the same with righteousness. We hunger and are filled. The filling is so sweet and so rich that we want more. Let me change the image slightly. Here is a successful high jumper. They leap higher and higher and then at one competition they break the world record. You can see them leap up from the mat at the back. Their hands are raised. It is a moment of sheer exhilaration. Do they then take of their spikes and retire? No! They raise the bar another notch and then another. It is the same with hungering for righteousness. We are filled and it is wonderful but that merely increases our desire to raise the notch higher. How are our hunger levels today?