Series: The Sermon on the Mount
Title: To Truly Hunger and Thirst
Text: Matthew 5:6
Welcome back to our series in the Sermon on the Mount. Let us begin this morning with the reading of our text and with prayer.
READ: Matthew 5:6
Last week, we began our message by discussing the value of “CONTEXT”.
If you remember, I made the point that context is the key to proper interpretation.
And within the Beatitudes there is a context which needs to be understood.
It would be easy to see the individual beatitudes as “Stand-Alone” statements.
In fact, that is the way most people view them.
They quote the Beatitudes individually to suit a particular occurrence.
But the reality is that they are not intended to stand alone.
Each one builds on the other to create a picture of the “BLESSED MAN”.
Illustration: “Dr. White and the Blessed Man” A few years ago, Dr. James White was in a debate on the subject of salvation with a Roman Catholic. In the lesson, Dr. White quoted Romans 4:8...
Romans 4:8 “Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”
A discussion ensued on the question, “Who is the blessed man?”
Who is the blessed man? - Well obviously in Paul’s view it is the man to whom the Lord will not count his sin.
But I want you to consider something.
When we ask the question, “Who is the blessed man?” we can also turn to the beatitudes.
You see, the beatitudes is NOT talking about many different types of people...
Its not that there will be SOME who are poor in spirit, and SOME who mourn, and SOME who are meek...
But the beatitudes have in view a BLESSED MAN who will encompass all of these attributes!
CONSIDER THE PROGRESSION:
The Poor in Spirit: This is the person who has recognized his spiritual destitution before God.
He recognizes his own spiritual poverty.
He believes the Word which tells him all his righteousnesses are as filthy rags.
This, in turn, leads to Mourning: A person who is then broken over his sin.
Only when a person realizes their spiritual destitution will they then see the real plight of their own condition.
And only then will they cry out in desperation.
This desperation then leads to Meekness: A true humility before God.
As we noted last week, the meek knows that he can do nothing under his own strength.
And this begins with salvation.
Salvation is not something we do for ourselves, or even that we aid God in accomplishing.
Salvation is 100% of God, and none of us.
And it takes a real meekness, a real humility, to recognize that.
So, as we have noted, there is a progression here...
There is not one “poor in spirit” man, and another “mourning” man, and yet another “meek” man.
No! There is only one man - the BLESSED MAN.
The man Paul says God will not count his sins against.
The man Jesus says is poor, mourning, and meek.
QUESTION: What then is the natural outgrowth of that spiritual humility?
ANSWER: A hunger and a thirst for righteousness.
This is where the fourth beatitude comes in.
A person has recognized their spiritual poverty, they have mourned their sin, and they are laid bare before God...
Now they HUNGER!
Now they THIRST!
For something which formerly they were absolutely devoid of: RIGHTEOUSNESS!
This morning I want to examine three things from this beatitude:
The Significance of Hunger and Thirst
The Type of Righteousness in View
The Meaning of Satisfied
The Significance of Hunger and Thirst
This is the first time in the beatitudes that Jesus has used two phrases to describe the character of the blessed.
So far, He has described them as “poor”, “mourning”, and “meek”
But these were all in their own individual beatitudes.
Here, in this one, He describes the person as BOTH hungering and thirsting.
So, what is the significance?
Jesus is here painting a picture which He wants to ensure his audience will understand.
Hunger and thirst are similar, but certainly they are different.
A person can live many days, even weeks, without food.
He may be hungry, and even famished, but he can live a while before succumbing to starvation.
But hydration is necessary, and dehydration can happen very quickly.
Within hours, in the right conditions, dehydration can set in.
And a person will not survive but a few days if he is without water to hydrate his body.
Jesus is using the realities of these two conditions, DEHYDRATION and STARVATION to picture the condition of the blessed man.
NOTE: Most of us would have trouble relating to this.
Illustration: “$.99 Cheeseburger” In our nation, we rarely see the type of hunger which Jesus is here describing.
I read this past week about workers who are enduring having been laid off during the government shutdown. One of the women interviewed said that she was having to decrease her spending on food, and rely on McDonald’s $.99 cheeseburgers.
While I feel for her plight, and for all of the workers who are enduring the shutdown, I got to thinking: We live in a land wherein food is so plentiful that we sell hamburgers for less than one dollar. Albeit not a delicious, nor healthy burger, but a burger!
We have food all around us!
We throw away food by the bags full.
Anyone who has ever eaten at a buffet has seen people discard entire plates of food.
The same can be said for water.
We have so much fresh, clean water that we use it to keep our grass wet.
Could you imagine in some of these countries which have no clean water to drink watching a person take clean, drinkable water and spraying it out on the ground???
It would be ludicrous!
But, again, this is because most of us have never lived in those conditions.
Most of us - with possibly a few exceptions - have never really thirsted, and very rarely hungered.
Thus, when Jesus uses the terms “hungering” and “thirsting” it can be hard for us to mentally get a picture of what He is saying.
We think of hunger as a slight rumbling of the tummy between meals.
We think of thirst as a slight parched sensation when we have been working outside and forgotten to get a drink of water.
But when Jesus talks about hungering and thirsting, He is speaking to a people in a time when they truly understood what it meant.
To the first century person, hunger and thirst were real realities.
They did not have McDonalds and corner convenience stores.
They didn’t have Evian and Zephyrhills.
Their food and their water were always in demand.
And the fear of hunger and thirst were real realities.
QUOTE: Brian Schwertely “These are metaphors for a very strong desire; indeed a desire so strong and dedicated it is an obsession. We understand this point better when we consider these terms in their original cultural context... In the days of Jesus,...poverty was common and the standard of living was quite low. A common laborer made very little money and would eat meat with a meal, at best, only once a week. This situation describes times when crops were good. If the crops were poor or failed, people experienced real hunger; a hunger that we scarcely understand...
In the Middle East, water is a scarce commodity. If a man was on a journey and ran out of water, he would have to tough it out and suffer an excruciating thirst until he reached the next oasis, town, well or stream. In the hot, dusty climate of Israel with the hot summer sun upon his head, such a man would be obsessed with water. In his mind at that point everything would be relatively unimportant except water.
Therefore, as we contemplate this hunger and thirst, let us not confuse our moderate hunger as lunch approaches or our desire for iced tea on a hot summer afternoon with this kind of want. We are discussing the hunger of a starving man and the thirst of man who has run out of water in the desert.”
So, when Jesus said “hunger and thirst” he was attaching his words to realities which these people actually faced.
He was using these terms as synonyms for real “NEEDS”
In reality, He was using these as terms of DESPERATION.
TRANSITION STATEMENT:
Who is the blessed man???
He is the man who is desperate!!!
But for what?
The Type of Righteousness in View
There is actually a great deal of debate as to what type of righteousness was in view when Jesus spoke this beatitude.
To understand this, we have to understand that the Bible describes to us differing types of righteousness.
IMPUTED RIGHTEOUSNESS
To impute something means to “add it to one’s account”.
If I have $100 in my account, and you have $0, and I take the money from my account and put it into yours, that is an example of imputation.
And this is the transaction that occurred on the cross.
Our account was perfectly devoid of righteousness.
We had nothing in our account.
Conversely, Jesus’s account was perfectly filled with righteousness.
He not only never sinned, but He fulfilled every command.
Thus, on the cross when Jesus died, His account which was filled with righteousness was added to our account.
In this sense, we were made completely righteous in Him.
2 Corinthians 5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
This is the only righteousness which will make us fit for heaven.
It is the only righteousness which truly brings justification before God.
For justification is God’s declaration of our righteousness, which we receive by being “In Christ”
IMPLANTED RIGHTEOUSNESS
Imputed righteousness is known as “Justification”
Implanted righteousness is what we call “Sanctification”
Sanctification is the process whereby we are daily conformed to the image of Christ.
This is the RESULT of justification.
We come to Christ as poor in spirit, mourning over sin, and meek before God.
As a result, He saves our souls and gives us the gift of imputed righteousness - He declares us righteous because of the work of Christ.
But things do not stop there.
From that moment of conversion, a change happens in our souls.
We begin to desire His will and to follow His commands.
Our wants, our desires, our needs and our longings change.
We go from being children of wrath to being children of God.
2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
The NEW that has come is our desire to be conformed to Christ.
This desire leads to a lifelong process of seeking righteousness.
We call this process SANCTIFICATION.
So the question is: Which type of righteousness does Jesus have in view here when He says we are to hunger and thirst for righteousness?
Imputed righteousness or implanted righteousness?
And the answer is... YES.
It seems obvious that Jesus has in view here BOTH types of righteousness because one CANNOT BE SEPARATED from the other.
You cannot be justified without also then beginning the process of sanctification.
Likewise you cannot be going through the process of sanctification without first being justified.
Though these two must be understood distinctly, they do not exist apart from one another.
They are inextricably linked... they cannot be separated.
As a result, when Jesus says that the Blessed Man is hungering and thirsting for righteousness, we mustn’t try to separate whether He is referring to the righteousness of justification or sanctification, but rather understand that both flow from the same fountainhead.
This brings us to the last thing we need to understand...
The Meaning of Satisfied (or Filled)
Just like righteousness has the double reality of the one time declaration of our justification and the continuous reality of our sanctification, so too does this promise of being satisfied or “FILLED”.
Upon understanding our spiritual poverty, our mournful heart falls meekly before God and realizes the utter desperation of our situation.
And in that moment, God demonstrates His love to us by filling our empty account with the righteousness of Christ.
We who were utterly destitute have now become the richest of all, having in our account the merits of Christ.
In this sense, all of the righteousness we will ever need to be right before God has already been done.
Christ is our true righteousness.
Yet, this does not mean that we continue to live as we lived before.
Paul contemplates this question in Romans 6.
Romans 6:1-2 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?
We who have come to Christ have died to sin.
And now we live as ones who yearn to be conformed to His image.
In fact, this is what God has predestined for us...
Romans 8:29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
Thus, while we experience the reality of a righteousness which we have been given, we also experience the reality of our lives becoming more and more conformed to the righteousness which we have been called to.
We HUNGER AND THIRST for actual righteousness before God, and it is given to us fully in Christ... and thus we are filled.
We also HUNGER AND THIRST for practical righteousness in this world, and it is given to us in the process of being conformed to Christ... and we are filled day by day.
NOTE: This is why Jesus said, to the woman at the well, when we drink of the water which He provides, we will NEVER THIRST AGAIN! (John 4:14)
CONCLUSION: There is an important reality which I think we all must consider from this beatitude.
As we have noted time and again, the beatitudes are not individual people, but the expression of the one “Blessed Man”.
They are a picture of conversion.
He begins by understanding his spiritual poverty.
He mourns over his sin.
He is humbled before God.
And then a miracle happens... He is BORN AGAIN.
But pastor, it doesn’t say anything about a new birth here.
I would argue that it does.
Because the Bible is clear that prior to our new birth, we are DEAD in sin.
And beloved, dead men do not hunger, or do they thirst.
Dead men crave nothing.
And the spiritually dead man does not crave righteousness.
Only the man who has been made alive in Christ can crave righteousness.
As a result, this hunger and thirst are synonymous with the new birth.
Illustration: Hope’s Birth and Desire for a Breast
When Jen was pregnant with Hope, we went to a breastfeeding class. In the class, they told us that when a baby is born, they naturally will search for the breast of the mother.
I found it hard to believe that a baby, which is so helpless, would reach out on its own. I figured you would have to coax the child to accept it.
Low and behold, when Hope was born, they laid her on Jennifer’s chest, and she instinctively began to search and reach for her mother’s natural source of nourishment.
Beloved, this is a picture of what the new birth is like.
Prior to being born again, we are dead in our sins.
But when we are born again, we reach for that which before we did not even know we were lacking.
We crave the righteousness which only God can provide.
Is that you?
Do you crave to be conformed to the image of Christ?
If not, you can be confident you have not yet been born again.
For the new birth results in satisfaction in the righteousness of Christ, and a longing for conformation to Him.
If that describes you, I pray for your commitment to that conformation.
And if it doesn’t describe you, then I pray God would show you your need for Him, your poverty of spirit, that you would mourn over your sin and humble yourself before Him, so that you would crave the everlasting nourishment of what only He can provide...
True righteousness.
