Hungry and Thirsty for Righteousness

What do Men Really Want? That was the catchy title of a recent article in Leadership Journal. The NY Daily News claims to know the answer to that question. A news item that appeared just this week says…

The man of the 90’s will focus more on relationships, share greater household responsibilities, and will demand more quality leisure time, says a new survey. The study, dubbed Man Track, was commissioned by Playboy magazine and based on interviews by the Roper Organization. The findings, says Roper veep Tom Miller, indicate:

“There is a new pleasure principle in America and American men have embodied it wholeheartedly.”

What could this mean? Men will be doing more shopping in the 90’s, Miller theorizes, shopping for VCR’s, sports equipment and other toys. The bottom line? Playboy, the granddaddy of the male mags, is going to help 90’s men feel good about indulging themselves.

I find that pretty depressing! Not to mention insulting! Playboy magazine, in all seriousness, is telling us that the anwer to an empty life is to buy a new VCR. But Jesus recommends a radically different approach.

We’ve been looking at the Beatitudes in Matthew 5. Jesus gives us a series of short, pithy statements about life. The things that he tells us there are the polar opposite of the way we think. Jesus tells us what it’s going to take to become one of his followers, a part of his group, a member of his kingdom.

The first thing he tells us is that, if we want to be part of the kingdom of heaven, we’re going to have to realize that we are spiritually impoverished people. When it comes to goodness and righteousness and holiness and purity - all of the things it takes to get into heaven - we are absolutely flat broke. We don’t have a thing to our name. We are without assets. We’re talking spiritual chapter 11 bankruptcy. That’s what it means to be poor in spirit. So if we’re ever going to get into his kingdom, somebody else is going to have to pay our admission for us. We can’t do it ourselves. And that somebody else is Jesus Christ.

The thing that makes us bankrupt, of course, is sin. And we need to recognize that fact. We need to realize that sin has so wrapped it tentacles around our lives that it affects everything that we do. The person who comes to grips with the fact that he is a sinner in the sight of God will be the person who mourns. Until you come to that place, you cannot be comforted by God. If you don’t realize that you’re sick, how can the doctor heal you?

When God helps you to see yourself as you really are - a sinner who is spiritually bankrupt in His sight - that begins to change the way you think about yourself. And when you begin to think of yourself differently, you begin to relate to others differently. You become meek. You no longer seek to defend yourself, and your reputation. You no longer look out for #1.

We need to understand what Jesus is saying in these first three beatitudes. He’s saying that if you become poor in spirit, if you become one who mourns over your own sinfulness, if you become meek in your dealings with others, it is only because God’s Spirit is at work in your life. You cannot accomplish any of these things on your own, because only the Spirit of God can give you victory over your own pride. And pride is your enemy. Pride is what stands between you and these beatitudes. Your pride is like a Saddam Hussein who dominates you, who terrorizes you, who makes you serve him. And only God’s Spirit can defeat your pride. But when that happens, you’re ready for the fourth beatitude.

In the fourth beatitude, Jesus speaks of your approach to life itself. What are you living for? What do you really want out of life? What’s your agenda? If, through the grace of God, you have become a citizen of His kingdom, now you are ready to pursue God’s agenda not your own. You begin to want to do what is right, not what is self-serving. You want to do God’s will, not your own.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

To be righteous is simply to be right with God. So to want righteousness is to want whatever pleases God. A citizen of the kingdom of heaven is a person who wants righteousness. But how bad does he want it?

Jesus said “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for it.”

Perhaps you have had days when you have been so busy that you’ve skipped lunch. And when evening comes, and you start thinking about supper, you say to yourself “Boy, am I hungry!” Or perhaps you’ve been working out over at Jack Lalannes and you’ve really worked up a thirst. So you go over to the Coke machine and you get yourself a soda. Boy does that first sip ever taste good! That is how we experience “hungry and thirsty” in our culture.

But we don’t know what it really means to be hungry or thirsty. The words that Jesus uses here for hungry and thirsty mean dying of starvation, or dying of thirst. The people that Jesus was talking to knew exactly what he meant. In the time of Jesus, most people in Israel were not very well off. There were rich folks, to be sure, but they were few and far between. Most people were of extremely humble means and they had to work long and hard to scratch out a living.

For example, they seldom ate meat. They lived much closer to the borderline of hunger than we do today. As a matter of fact, one of the signs that you were rich was that you were fat. A fat man was envied. His fatness meant that he was successful, that he was well-off. I understand that this is still true in China today. Fatness is a desirable characteristic.

So people in Jesus’ day knew better than we do what it meant to be hungry. They didn’t have refrigerators and freezers, they couldn’t stockpile food the way that we do, and their diet was very limited.

And they also knew what it meant to be thirsty. They didn’t have running water. They couldn’t just go over to the tap and turn it on to get a drink. If you wanted water, you had to find a well somewhere. Then you had to find a container to put the water in.

Israel is a hot, dry place most of the time. So you can picture these people, working out in the fields, or in their workshops. They sweated for long hours and they really got thirsty, but it wasn’t very easy for them to get a drink. This, by the way, is why the Bible often speaks of spiritual life in terms of water. There are lots of water illustrations in the Bible - pictures of springs, and rivers, and cisterns. This is because water, to the people, was something very precious. It was something they longed for practically all of the time.

Hunger and thirst were ever-present appetites for those people. They felt these things every day of their lives. And Jesus says to us “That’s how you should feel about righteousness.”

How much do you want to be right with God? Do you want it as much as a starving man wants food? Do you yearn for it as much as a man dying of thirst yearns for water? Until you do, until you want righteousness that much, you will never be satisfied with life.

There’s a real paradox here, just as there is in the other beatitudes. You cannot be satisfied with life, you cannot have a full life, unless you are aware of your lack of fullness.

Now the world approaches this whole question of having a satisfying life from a totally different angle. The world says that we should hunger and thirst after happiness. We should look for pleasure. We should make the pusuit of fullness the number one item on our agenda.

But Jesus says happiness is never something you can seek directly; it is always something that results from seeking something else. Happiness, or satisfaction, or fullness, or blessedness is always a by-product. If you put happiness in the place of righteousness, you’ll never get it.

But the world searches and searches for satisfaction, and never finds it, because they are looking in the wrong place. Jeremiah said that the people were storing their water in broken cisterns. A man named William Law wrote: “All that is in the world are only so many empty cups, and it does not matter which you take or how many you take, there is no quenching your thirst out of empty cups.”

This is what the whole book of Ecclesiastes is about. Empty cups. The writer of that book tried to find satisfaction and meaning in life through experiencing the best that life had to offer. He tried pleasure. That didn’t work. He tried money. That didn’t work. He tried power and fame. That didn’t work. He tried education and knowledge. That didn’t work. He tried the simple life. Even that didn’t work. And he concluded that you cannot find the meaning of life by looking for it. You can spend your whole life looking for meaning and it will elude you. You can only find meaning if you stop looking for it, and start looking for God. And you find God in the Word of God. That’s where He reveals Himself.

Isaiah 55:1-2 Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.

Do you remember the story of the Prodigal Son? When he was hungry, he got down on his hands and knees in the mud and ate the corn-husks with the pigs. But it wasn’t until he was starving that he turned to his Father.

Jesus said “Blessed are you if you have a spirit that is starving for God’s will to be done.” Then you will be satisfied. The word means full, satiated.

Abraham Lincoln was a man who trusted God. He led this nation through the greatest crisis it ever faced. Although the pressure on him must have been terrible, Lincoln always persevered. He never buckled under. He conducted himself with a quiet dignity that was as rare in political life then as it is now.

Lincoln was faced on many occasions early in the war with the virtual insubordination of some of his top generals. Yet he never lashed out at them. He patiently but firmly corrected them. Like Moses, he was meek, but he wasn’t weak.

Toward the end of his life, Lincoln seems to have walked even closer with God. Just a few days before he was assassinated, he was reading his Bible. One of his aides noticed, and asked what he was reading. “I’ve been reading the Beatitudes,” the President answered quietly and humbly, “and I find that of all the blessings therein recorded, I can lay claim to but one - Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”

What are you hungry and thirsty for? What do you want more than anything else in the world? How you answer that question will determine whether you will ever be happy in life.

Jesus said “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled.”