After our
need for air, no need is more essential for life than our need for food and
water. We cannot let these needs go unmet for long before we start to have
serious problems. We also plan much of our lives around meeting these needs.
Your daily schedule probably revolves around meal times. Every time we plan
some kind of special event at church, we must either plan to provide a meal or
plan to avoid mealtimes so that you can take care of that need on your own. Or
think about planning a vacation—if you’re driving, you plan your route and your
travel time to make sure that you’re near a town when mealtimes roll around.
Otherwise, you plan ahead and take food with you.
Imagine if
we gave the same kind of concern to obeying God. Imagine if we woke up every
day and thought, “How am I going to plan to obey God today?” You and I have
never lived a day in which we didn’t think about eating and drinking, because
they are needs; they are necessary for survival. Imagine if we thought of
obeying God as being necessary for our survival.
That’s the
kind of attitude and passion for obedience that Jesus praises in the next
Beatitude—“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they
shall be satisfied (Matt 5:6).” The Lord uses the metaphor of a physical need
to encourage us to have a spiritual appetite. Let’s look at the two parts of
this verse.
“BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO HUNGER AND THIRST FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS…”
To truly
appreciate this metaphor, we have to travel back in time for a minute. The way
that we meet our need for food and water today is vastly different than it was
for the people in first-century Israel who heard Jesus speak these words. Few
of us have ever experienced a life-threatening hunger or thirst. Most of us
have far more than enough to eat and far more than enough to drink, and we have
very easy access to food and water, but life was very different back then.
Imagine
waking up one day as a person in first-century Israel. To meet your family’s
need for water that day, you would have to take a bucket and go down to the
river—or more likely to the local well—and haul water back to your home.
Perhaps you would make that trip a couple of times, depending on the size of your
family. Don’t forget that parasites in that water could kill you, so you may
have to build a fire and boil some of it before you could drink it.
By then, it
would be time to get to work cooking food, because after all, you have to do
everything yourself. If you want to make bread, you have to grind the flour. If
you want to eat chicken, you have to butcher it and prepare it yourself. For at
least one member of the household, then, cooking would have been a virtually
continuous occupation.
So for
those who heard Jesus speak these words, hunger and thirst were typically a
much more urgent need than what we experience most of the time. We can afford
to let our need for food and water be almost an afterthought because we can
easily run to Subway and have food and drink in front of us in a matter of
minutes. But for the first-century Jew, meeting those needs required a great
deal of thought, planning, and effort, and their daily reality was far closer
to the line between starvation and survival. Author William Barclay put it well when he wrote, “the hunger which
this beatitude describes is no…hunger which could be satisfied with a
mid-morning snack; the thirst of which it speaks is no thirst which could be
quenched with a cup of coffee or an iced drink. It is the hunger of someone who
is starving for food, and the thirst of someone who will die unless given
something to drink.”1
Hopefully
now we have a sense of the urgency and intensity in these words “hunger and
thirst.” But what is “righteousness?” What is this thing that we’re supposed to
long for with such intensity? A basic definition of righteousness would be
“that which meets God’s standards.” When the Bible talks about our
righteousness, it describes it from two angles.
First,
there is our position of righteousness. This angle refers to our standing
before God in light of His commands. To be righteous in this sense means that
no case can be made against me in light of God’s commands. This position of
righteousness is what we refer to when we use words like conversion, being
saved, being born again, being forgiven, or accepting Christ (if you know the
big, fancy theological word, this is justification).
Let me
illustrate what I mean. If you looked right now at the laws of the state of
Kansas and then examined my life, you could not bring any charges against me or
make any case against me because I haven’t broken any laws. That means I am
righteous in the eyes of the state of Kansas; I have met the state’s standards
for a law-abiding citizen.
Now I must
confess that it hasn’t always been that way. I have received some speeding
tickets in my day, and at those times I have broken the law. In those
instances, I did not meet the standards for a law-abiding citizen and I had to
pay a fine, but once I did, the case against me was closed and I again became
righteous in the eyes of the state of Kansas.
Now
according to Scripture, when we receive the gift of salvation from God, He
treats us as being righteous in light of His law or commands because He accepts
the sacrifice that Jesus made for us as the payment of the fine (so to speak)
for all of our sins. This reality is described well in 2 Corinthians 5:21,
which says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him
we might become the righteousness of God.” Don’t miss what this verse is
saying. Even though Jesus had never committed a sin, God treated Him like a
sinner when He was on the cross. He took our punishment in that moment so that
now, after we accept Christ, God can treat us like righteous people, even
though we don’t deserve that status simply on the basis of our own lives. So,
because Jesus took what we deserved from God, we receive what He deserves from
God—that is our position of righteousness.
But the
Bible then goes on to describe righteousness from the angle of our practice of
righteousness. This angle refers to our efforts to live in obedience to God’s
commands. After we are saved and we receive that position of righteousness as a
gift, we can then actually obey God’s commands through the power of the Holy
Spirit. This practice of righteousness is what we refer to when we use words
like discipleship, walking with Christ, growing in Christ (or sanctification).
This angle
is described well in 2 Timothy 2:22, when Paul tells Timothy—who is already
saved—to “flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and
peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.” So Timothy,
who has the position of righteousness before God, is challenged to live out
that righteousness in his life.
I believe
this second angle on righteousness is what Jesus had in mind in this Beatitude.
We who are forgiven by God and empowered by the Holy Spirit should hunger and
thirst to live in a way that meets God’s standards. The desire to obey God
should create hunger pangs in our soul that will not subside until we have met
the desire. The Lord pronounces a blessing upon those who have this desire by
saying, “they shall be satisfied.”
“…FOR THEY SHALL BE SATISFIED.”
I don’t
think its difficult to understand what Jesus means here. Those who hunger and
thirst for righteousness will receive what they desire—approval from God that
they have lived by His standards. We can have this knowledge today as we live
for the Lord, but it will be most evident when we stand before Jesus to hear
His assessment of our lives. The New Testament makes it very clear that each
one of us will be assessed or judged by the Lord Jesus to receive either reward
or rebuke from Him (or quite possible some of each!). 2 Corinthians 5:10
states, “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each
one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or
evil.”
1
Corinthians 3 talks about building on the foundation we have in Jesus Christ,
and it states, “each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose
it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of
work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation
survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will
suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire (1 Cor
3:13-15). As one pastor has put it, there
are going to be some smoky Christians in Heaven! When you are evaluated by
Christ, do you want to come out smelling like roses, or smelling like you were
standing too close to the campfire?
If I want
to avoid seeing my life’s work for God go up in smoke, I need to hunger and
thirst for righteousness. I must have an arresting passion to obey God that
will not leave me alone until I have addressed it. Obeying God cannot be an
afterthought in my life, just like food and water could not be an afterthought
for the people who heard Jesus speak these words.
Along this
line, I think the scenario I raised earlier is most appropriate—imagine if we
woke up every day and thought, “How am I going to plan to obey God today?” I
have this appetite to obey God that just won’t leave me alone—how am I going
satisfy it? Now when you envision this scenario, you can easily become
overwhelmed. Just think of how many commands there are in the New Testament!
Here’s what I want you to do—I want you to use this question (How am I going to
plan to obey God today?) and simply focus on the commands that present you with
the greatest struggle. Focus on the area where you have the most obvious need
for growth.
Its
probably not difficult for any of us to pinpoint our area of greatest struggle.
Once you’ve settled on that, look up the commands in the Bible that deal with
that particular issue, and then let that become—for right now at least—your
primary focus. When you ask yourself, “How am I going to plan to obey God
today?” make your planning specific to that issue, because here’s what’s going
to happen—as you grow in that area, your growth will bear fruit in all areas of
your life. A rising tide raises ALL of
the boats in the dock, doesn’t it? Well, there’s a very similar effect that
takes place when you grow spiritually.
Its kind of
like learning how to play a musical instrument. When you learn how to play an
instrument—say the piano, for instance—there are times when you will spend most
of your practice time focusing on just one song. On one level, that may seem
silly; after all, after you’ve put out all that time and effort, you will still
only know how to play one song. But here’s what you discover—when you start to
look at other songs, they are easier for you to play. You discover that your
fingers are stronger and more flexible. All of the progress you made in that
one song now carries over into many other songs.
Spiritual
growth is very similar. When you learn to walk closely with God in one area of
your life, it will create a ripple effect that spreads into other areas of your
life. That’s why Paul talked about the fruit
of the Spirit in Galatians 5 rather than the fruits. Have you ever noticed that? Paul says “the fruit (singular)
of the Spirit is…” We would expect some kind of singular after that, wouldn’t
we? But Paul goes on to list nine character traits—love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
The reason
for this is that all of these traits are tied together. If you grow in love,
you will also see growth in the area of self-control. If you grow in patience,
you will also see growth in the area of gentleness. You will never find a
loving person who completely lacks kindness, or a patient person who completely
lacks self-control. These traits fit together, and as you grow in one, you will
see some growth in the others as well.
So please
don’t feel overwhelmed when you think about having a passion to obey God that
is like an essential need for survival. I’m not saying this is easy, because we
have the Devil and our own sinful desires working against us, but we don’t need
to make it more complicated than it really is. A pebble only hits the surface of a lake in one place, but the ripples
that it creates can be far-reaching.
Start today
with a narrow focus on growing, and when the difficulties and temptations do
come, we have the promise of approval from Jesus to carry us along. It will be
worth it in the long run to remain faithful to Him. Let us pray now for the
faith to believe that!
Notes:
1. William Barclay, The
Gospel of Matthew, vol. 1, The New Daily Study Bible (Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox, 2001), 115.
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