Word of Salvation – Vol.43 No.20 - May 1998

 

Blessed Are Those Who Hunger and Thirst After Righteousness.

 

Sermon by Rev J.W.Westendorp on Matthew 5:6

Scripture Readings: Isaiah 55:1-7, James 2:14-26, Matthew 5:1-12

Suggested Songs:

BoW 360; 111a; 451; 148

 

Introduction:

Congregation,

In these Beatitudes we have some puzzling saying of Jesus.  At first glance they don’t seem to make much sense.  But turn with me to Luke 6 and you’ll notice that there they appear to make even less sense.  In Luke’s account of The Sermon on the Mount the Beatitudes seem even more puzzling.

They appear less spiritual... and much more physical and material.
Matthew 5 speaks of the poor in spirit... Luke 6 speaks simply of the poor.

In this fourth beatitude Luke does not talk about hungering and thirsting for righteousness.
Simply of people who are hungry.  Notice verse 21:
            Blessed are you who hunger now... for you will be satisfied.
And then to make sure we get the point a contrast is made in verse 25:
            Woe to you who are well fed now... for you will go hungry.

Does that sound as if Jesus is saying:  Blessed are the starving in India and in the Sudan...?  That sounds like nonsense and we wonder how Jesus could possibly say anything like that.

So we are left with trying to make sense out of it.
We could talk about God’s bias towards the needy.... and we do see that often in Scripture.  Or we could think about how “need” often drives people to God.
When all our resources are taken away... and all we have left is God alone.

Blessed are the hungry and thirsty.... those who no longer have any hope of helping themselves.  God especially invites people like that to Himself.

In the final analysis it seems that Luke must mean something like that too.
Because we know that hunger and thirst, in themselves, do not bring blessing or happiness.
Let’s see then what Jesus meant when He said:  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS for they will be filled.

A]        HUNGER & THIRST FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS AS THE WAY OF BLESSING.

1.         As we consider this beatitude we first need to understand what Jesus meant by ‘righteousness’.

Especially for our boys and girls ‘righteousness’ is a big word.  So what do we mean by it?  The easiest thing is just to leave off the last part of it.
            Righteousness has to do with what is RIGHT.

But that immediately introduces another question:  Right by whose standards?
            Your standard of right... or my standard of right?
            Or do we mean society’s standard of what is right...?
            And if so, which society?
            The society of liberal social engineers or conservative right-wingers?
When I read the papers I see mass confusion in society about the standards of what is right.

What Jesus is talking about, of course, is God’s standard of what is right.

So when Jesus speaks about hungering and thirsting after righteousness
He is talking about a deep-seated longing in our lives for what is holy and true and right.  Hungering and thirsting for righteousness... is yearning for God’s standards to be upheld.  It is a deep-seated desire for us to be sinless and to do God’s will which alone is right.

2.         Jesus says this because society’s big problem is that it repeatedly does the exact opposite.

All around us there is a hunger and thirst... NOT for what is right... but for what is not right.  There is a hungering and thirsting for unrighteousness.  Law and order is crucial social issue.  Movies glory in violence and brutality... because you’ve got to win the ratings race.  Books just have to be explicit and vulgar... because that’s what makes them sell well.

In some ways we live in a sick society that glories in unrighteousness... in evil.
Increasingly it is considered cool to be drunk... or stoned out of your brains....
            and it’s considered old fashioned to be a virgin and morally pure.
More and more we regard human life as something cheap and disposable...
            especially the life of the unborn... and the elderly who have passed their ‘use-by date’.
                        And who cares whether or not it is right...
                                    at least it is practical.

On top of all of that there is often a hungering and thirsting for evil especially in high places.  Business tycoons rip off their shareholders... and then live in luxury in Majorca.  Time and again we have seen corruption exposed in the police force.

Human nature freed of restraints always tends to hunger for unrighteousness.

But there is no blessing... and no happiness for such hunger.
In fact the very opposite is true.
Woe to those who hunger and thirst for UN-righteousness... for they will never be satisfied.  And we see that too in society... don’t we... and sometimes in our own lives too?
When a person does what is not right... indulges in evil....
            then it only leads to a greater hunger for more and more of the same.
                        Unrighteousness does not fill... it does not satisfy.

That’s why the movies become more and more violent.
            And the books and magazines more and more explicit and sleazy.
            Because hungering and thirsting for evil leaves people empty and unfulfilled.

Someone once said that this is precisely what hell is all about too.
Hunger and thirst... longing and desire... but with no hope of fulfilment.

3.         Over against that there are those in our society who are fed up with all of that.

There are folk who deplore unrighteousness and evil.
So they take a stand against the spread of pornography.
They uphold the ‘right to life’ principle.
These folk want to see God’s standards... God’s laws... maintained in our cities and towns.  They decry the permissiveness and moral laxity that are the order of the day in our culture.

And now here Jesus pronounces a special benediction on people like that.
Blessed are those who swim against the current of our trendy and politically correct society.
Blessed are those who are prepared to be different and oppose our permissive culture.

Here is a beatitude for all those who long for God’s laws of right and wrong to be upheld.
Jesus says that true satisfaction comes in the way of struggling to do right.
            A sense of fulfilment lies in working to fit in with God’s laws.

The book of Proverbs has something similar to say.  It says:
            Righteousness exalts the nation... but sin is a reproach to the people.

This teaching of Jesus is also reinforced by the lessons of history.
Pagan Rome gradually deteriorated in the cesspool of its own filth.
Unrighteousness led to a constant hunger for more and more of the same.
’Till the nation became obsessed with its gladiators and its arenas.
            A nation, rotten to the core... and its destruction inevitably came.
            In contrast nations that promoted righteousness were strong and vibrant.

Hungering and thirsting for evil brings only greater evil.

Hungering and thirsting for righteousness brings true satisfaction.

And this morning Jesus pronounces His blessing on that.

B]        HUNGERING & THIRSTING FOR THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF JESUS.

1.         But let me backtrack a little and ask whether this beatitude always works this way.

Is it not so that sometimes there is a hunger for righteousness that is NOT filled?
Okay...!  The world is not satisfied because it hungers for unrighteousness.
But it seems that some hungering for righteousness is not satisfied either.
There can be a hunger for God’s standard of righteousness that is not being filled.

Here I think of the Pharisees... and of the apostle Paul earlier in his life.  Or think of the Reformer, Martin Luther, when he was still struggling as a monk in his monastery.

And there are still people like that today.

Maybe in your life there has been some of this struggling for righteousness that is futile and empty.  I’m talking about a wrong kind of searching for righteousness.

To illustrate what I mean, please turn in your Bible to Philippians 3.
There the apostle Paul is looking back to a time before his conversion.
He itemises what he had going for him as a Pharisee.
Philippians 3:4(b) - 6:
            If anyone thinks he has reason to put confidence in the flesh, I have more:
            circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin,
            a Hebrew of Hebrews: in regard to the law, a Pharisee, as for zeal, persecuting the church....
(and then please note this)
            as for legalistic righteousness, faultless!

Paul hungered and thirsted for righteousness... he was always busy with it.  There was a sense he even felt he had arrived... faultless righteousness!  Yet he was not satisfied... and not filled.

The same was true of Martin Luther.
He climbed an endless flight of stone steps on his knees in Rome.
Every individual law he struggled to keep.... all to try and find righteousness.
But he was hungering and thirsting for righteousness in a wrong way.

Paul later saw his mistake... he speaks of it in verse 9 of Philippians 3.

He says that he later counted all that righteousness as just so much garbage.  Stronger: “as sewage!”
Because it is possible to hunger and thirst for righteousness in a wrong way:
            To struggle for righteousness in order to win God’s favour.  Righteousness...
            To score points with God.... and that brings no satisfaction... no filling of the emptiness.

2.         That reminds us that in this beatitude we first need to go back to the gospel.

That’s where we have to start... with the reminder that righteousness is first of all a GIFT.  Righteousness is not first of all something we achieve by our efforts.
            As if we will eventually get there if only we hunger and thirst for it enough.
            No!  Righteousness is first of all the righteousness of the Kingdom.

Righteousness that comes through being cleansed by Jesus – as shown in Baptism today.  Gospel righteousness...!  That’s the gift of God through Jesus Christ.

            And if we could find satisfaction in that area by our hunger and our thirst
            then the death of Jesus would not have been needed for you and me.

It was because God freely gave Paul the righteousness that Jesus earned...
that Paul later called his own attempted righteousness as rubbish...  as sewage.

God gives righteousness to all who believe in the doing, the dying and the victory of Jesus Christ.  This is what you need in your life to find true satisfaction and fulfilment.  This has to be your staring point... righteousness that God gives you as His gift.

The problem is that many people are genuinely concerned about the moral values of our society.
They see so many things that are wrong and that they know ought to be different.
The see unrighteousness... and deep down they sense that God demands righteousness.
Yet in their struggles for what is right they are not being filled.
That battle for right is a struggle that leaves them empty.

We who have problems with our world and who want to deal with it first need to come to Jesus.  We must not spend our money on what does not satisfy... nor our effort on what is not bread.  We must first of all hunger and thirst for a righteousness that does NOT come by our effort.

So we need to come to the Lord and buy without money and without price.
You need the righteousness of Jesus that He won for you on the cross of Calvary.
If you don’t think you have that yet... come and talk to me about it after the service.
            Because only from that perspective can we in a satisfying way struggle for what is right.
            Only in that way can we deal properly with righteousness in other areas of life.

C]        THE ONGOING STRUGGLE FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS IN ALL OF LIFE.

1.         At this point we could, of course, make a big mistake that many Christians have made in the past.

That we talk about this righteousness of Christ that God freely gives the believer...!  And that we don’t go any further.  It would be very easy for us to say:
Okay... because I have been given the righteousness of Jesus I am now right with God.

In God’s sight I am now as righteousness as God’s own Son... that’s the gospel!
So my hunger for righteousness is now satisfied... my thirst quenched.  End of story!

Well, it doesn’t work that way...!
There is another sense in which our hungering and thirsting is NOT filled.
At least... NOT YET...!

Here I (again) need to remind you of what The Beatitudes are.
They are a description of the Christian... what a Christian is... or should be.

Sure... Christians are people who have been declared righteous by God... and in that sense filled.

But that also changes them.
They are now people with a special hunger and thirst for ongoing righteousness.
Christians want to see more and more of the righteousness of Jesus in their own life.
They want to see the outworking of it.... the reality of it in all areas of their life.

Righteousness now becomes a passion in the life of the Christian.
Because we are becoming more and more like Jesus... the Righteous One.
He had a passion for righteousness in every area of life.
So we too hunger and thirst for more and more of it.
In this beatitude Jesus is saying:  that is the nature of a Christian.

2.         The problem is that (in a way) the believer is really two people rolled into one.

Or if you like: there are two identities inside of us... there’s the sinner and there’s the saint.
On the one hand you are a saint... you already possess the righteousness of Jesus.
On the other hand you are a sinner... you fail your Lord every day again.
            You know... and I know that there is a great deal that is not yet right.
            In moments when unrighteousness wins out, we particularly hunger for what is right.

Some of us here have trouble controlling our tongue... there is unrighteousness in our words.

Others of us have a problem with sinful anger... there is a lack of righteousness in our attitude.

Others have problems with the unrighteousness of giving in to sexual temptation.

Still others have habits that are wrong and sinful and you want to get rid of them.

So we do indeed as believers have righteousness in Jesus as God’s gift to us.  But now we keep on striving for the outworking of that righteousness in all areas of our lives.  In our relationships... and in our behaviour... in our homes... and at the office.

So let me ask you what your attitude is to these things.
Do you feel fairly comfortable with the problems and negative things in your life?
Do you just ignore them?
Do you say:  Well, they are not really all that important?
Or: Well, that’s just the way I am!
Or are these matters that you struggle with and battle over almost daily?

Let me remind you that Jesus speaks here of hunger and thirst.
And hunger and thirst are not QUIET, peaceful emotions.
They are usually raging emotions: 
            A parching thirst... the hunger of a beggar in India.
So if the righteousness of Jesus that God has already given us means anything at all...
            then there will be a passionate longing to see it worked out more and more in our lives.
There will be a desire for what is right in every area of our behaviour and in all our relationships.

Because it is still true for the Christian...
            that only as we hunger and thirst for righteousness will we be filled.
Deep down in the heart of every Christian there ought to be a yearning...
            ...a longing for that time when sin will be completely ended in our lives.
And that will happen when Jesus comes... then we will indeed be filled.

3.         At this point I want to come back once more to the bigger picture.

Righteousness is not just a private matter... an issue involving our own personal piety.  We as saints live in an unrighteous society... and we long for rightness in our society and in our city.  We yearn for everything to submit in obedience to God.
We long for all people and all institutions to hold to the law of God in obedience.

In fact, God demands of us that we also work for that.

Because right after the beatitudes Jesus goes on to speak of His people
as the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

In other words, we who know Christ and His righteousness cannot and may not give up on this world.
We should strive to see the standards of the Kingdom applied in our homes and in our offices.
In our shops and our factories.... in our schools and in our government.

We should stand up and speak up... for justice and integrity... for honesty and fairness.
How often have you done that?
When did you last ring a talk-back show or write a letter to the papers or speak to a workmate?

I’m not saying that’s easy... often we don’t even know where to start.
It will call for a lot of work and sacrifice.  It may even mean persecution by others.
Because others will feel that we are trying to impose our moral standards on them.

But we cannot hunger and thirst after righteousness only in our own lives
without also thirsting for that in the world in which we live.
            God calls us to that.
            And to that end He has given us the righteousness of His Son.

As we work for what is right in this world we also help prepare for that great day of Jesus’ coming.
On that day this beatitude will be fulfilled in the fullest possible way.
Jesus will come and put an end to all unrighteousness and all evil in this world.
Revelation 21 pictures it for us in all its perfection and glory.
On that day we will be perfectly satisfied, filled forever with all the righteousness of God.

Amen.