Title: Happy are the Starved
Text: Matthew 5:6
Truth: The secret to a healthy spiritual life is a passion for God.
Aim: To incite desire for God more than anything else.
INTRODUCTION
The commercial break gives us insight into how Jesus taught spiritual lessons. Advertisers pay millions to put their slogans and images before us. They believe it is worth it. Why? Because it works. They know if they can get their slogan and image into our head it will influence our choices. It’s called buying real estate in our mind. They don’t have to present a persuasive case for why we need to buy their product. Carol and I saw a Nike commercial and Carol asked what was the point of the commercial. I told her I didn’t know, but at the end of the commercial was the Nike swoosh. That check mark is one of the most successful images in advertising in the world.
Advertisers have learned what Jesus knew 2,000 years ago: an image connected with an idea is a powerful means of influencing our view of the world. Madison Avenue has two deliberate actions as a part of their strategy. First, they suggest our world is incomplete without their product. Second, they give us that image over and over. Nike knows we won’t buy a pair of their sneakers after one commercial, but after a thousand the idea begins to influence our choice.
Jesus understood the power of an image connected with an idea. The cross, a mustard seed, a lamp on a stand, a pearl, and hunger and thirst are not only realities, but they are powerful images that reveal something even great about Christ and His purposes for our life. Like the advertisers, to get the full impact of the wealth of their meaning we need to bring them before us again and again. Of all the images Christ used to teach about himself the one that we experience every day is hunger and thirst. In fact, all of us will act on this image immediately after this service. We’re given this powerful image every day so that its truth will capture our choices each day. I suggest that the idea Jesus is teaching us through this image is that the secret to a healthy spiritual life is a passion for God.
A hunger and thirst for God naturally flows from one who recognizes his spiritual bankruptcy before God. That’s the first beatitude. When a person has mourned over his sin and repented, he will naturally turn to seek God. That’s the second beatitude. When a person submits to God, they want God. That’s the third beatitude. In fact there won’t be a hunger and thirst for God unless there is an acknowledgment of spiritual bankruptcy, a brokenness over sin and a surrendering to God.
I want you to notice two things from this verse: the condition to a healthy spiritual life and the consequences of a healthy spiritual life.
I. THE CONDITION TO A HEALTHY SPIRITUAL LIFE.
Some translations use the word “happy.” We’ve seen that is a poor exchange. Those who are blessed are generally profoundly happy; but blessedness cannot be reduced to happiness. In the Scriptures man can bless God and God can bless man. In that duality we get a clue as to what does blessing mean. To be blessed fundamentally means to be approved, to find approval. When man blesses God, he is approving God. Of course, he is not doing this in some condescending manner, but rather he is eulogizing God, praising God. When God blesses man, he is approving man; and that is always an act of condescension.
Since this is God’s universe there can be no higher “blessing” than to be approved by God. The beatitudes challenge us to consider whose blessing we are seeking. Is it more important to be approved by our family or colleagues, or is the most important desire to gain God’s approval? For those Christians that yearn to please God more than anyone else in their world, these beatitudes will be very encouraging to them.
The disciple that pleases God hungers and thirsts for righteousness. It is not that he wants to be a little more righteous. The intensity with which Jesus states this pictures desperation. He can’t get along without righteousness; it is as important to him as food and water.
The scholars say that the grammar of the original language expresses a hunger and thirst for the whole thing. In other words, this person doesn’t want a sandwich, he wants the whole loaf of bread. This describes the hunger we have when we say we are starving. Though few of us really know what that is like. Praise the Lord! This person is not asking for a sip of water; he wants the whole glass.
Do you have the hunger and thirst for Jesus you did when you were saved or maybe just a few years back? Paul said that it is possible; as our bodies grow weaker with age our spirit for Christ can grow stronger. Does that describe your Christian journey? Today, you are more desirous for God than you were in the past? That was true of Moses.
Moses’ first encounter with God was at a bush that was on fire, but it wasn’t consumed. He took off his shoes and got on his face before God. Later he sees God perform ten plagues on Egypt, and Moses leads Hebrews out of bondage without a shot being fired. Moses raised the rod of God into the air and saw the Red Sea split and a million plus people crossover on dry land. He saw the glory of God’s presence represented in a pillar of fire at night and a cloud during the day. He drank water that came from a flint rock and ate manna that came from heaven’s ovens. After all of that, do you know what Moses said to the Lord? “Lord, I know I’ve seen all those miracles but would you show me Your glory?” Now what a minute, Moses? I think you’ve seen enough, haven’t you? Not for Moses. His hunger and thirst for God were insatiable.
When the Prodigal son was hungry he sought to satisfy his hunger with the husks fed to the hogs. But when he began to starve is when he decided to go back to his father.
The starting point in all achievement is desire. Weak desire brings weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat. The key to will power is want power. People who want something badly enough can usually find the will power to achieve it. Apathy isn’t a state of mind; it is a state of the heart. Just look at the word. It’s formed with the prefix “a,” which means “without.” The root word is pathos, passion. No love. Apathetic people are not people who don’t know; they are people who don’t care. They have lost their hunger and thirst.
When we understand what Jesus is saying about the condition necessary to blessing it will lead to deep soul searching. What means more to you than anything else? You have to have this. It occupies much of your thought life, it is the building block of your self-worth, and you sacrifice other things to have it. If you don’t get it something is missing in your life?
We are filled with hungers and thirsts that are greater than an empty stomach. There are many legitimate hungers: there is the hunger for truth, love, knowledge, belonging, expression, justice, imagination, significance and many more. Some of our pursuits may meet these desires. Getting an education may meet the hunger for knowledge. Romance may bring a sense of belonging, and accomplishments meet the need for significance. But Jesus is saying that these longings point to a deeper longing that will produce a blessed life.
What is it that we can’t get along without? Righteousness. Isn’t that a little disappointing? What is this righteousness that we are starved to have?
The Bible speaks of righteousness in three ways. There is positional, public and pure righteousness. Positional righteousness refers to our relationship to God based on our relationship with Jesus Christ. When a sinner repents of his sin and surrenders to Jesus as his God he goes from being separated from God to being a child of God. Everything has been made right between him and God because of the saving work of Jesus Christ.
Public righteousness refers to the will and standards of God being practiced in society. God wants society to be just and merciful. God wants people to live at peace with one another. Christians work to see that laws and social standards reflect God’s will. That’s public righteousness.
Pure righteousness refers to the individual Christian living a holy life, a life of purity. This is to live a life being set free from the power of sin. They want to be set free from selfishness and empowered to live selflessly like Jesus. They want to be free from revenge taking and be big-hearted people of forgiveness like Jesus. They want to stop disbelieving God and start growing in faith in God. Sin and its consequences are progressively being removed from their lives.
Is Jesus telling us in this beatitude we are to be parched for positional, public and purity of righteousness? I think that is part of it. But one way to understand what Jesus means is to see how He uses the word in the context of the Sermon on the Mount.
I believe the context teaches us that the righteousness we are to seek is the person of Jesus Christ. Look at v. 10-11. The reason Christian’s are persecuted is because of righteous living and identification with Jesus.
Once more, here is the distinction between Christianity and all other religions. At the heart of every religion there is a major figure. With Buddhism it is Buddha. With Islam there is Mohammed. With Hinduism it is Krishna. And with Christianity it is Jesus Christ. That’s where the comparison ends. If you ask adherents of these other faiths where do you find salvation, they point to a way of living. A Muslim will not point you to Mohammed. He will point you to the Koran. It is not Buddha who delivers you, it is his “Noble Truths” that instruct you.
By contrast, Jesus not only taught the truth, He said He was the Truth. He didn’t just point the way to salvation; He said He was the Way to salvation. That’s why for a Christian it is not a way of living, it is first relating to the person of Jesus Christ.
What I am saying is a blessed life is found when we are passionate about knowing Jesus Christ.
C.S. Lewis pictured this craving for God and our resistance to it in an episode from The Silver Chair. The lion represents Christ and Jill represents us.
When Jill stopped, she found she was dreadfully thirsty…She listened carefully and felt almost sure she heard the sound of running water.
Jill…looked around her very carefully. There was no sign of the Lion; so she plucked up her courage to …look for running water.
…she came to an open glade and saw the stream, bright as glass…[A]lthough the sight of the water made her feel ten times thirstier than before, she didn’t rush forward and drink. She stood still as if she had been turned to stone, with her mouth wide open. And she had a very good reason: just this side of the stream lay the Lion…
“Are you thirsty?” said the Lion.
“I’m dying of thirst,” said Jill.
“Then drink,” said the Lion.
“May I—could I—would you mind going away while I do?” said Jill.
The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.
The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.
“Will you promise not to—do anything to me, if I do come?” said Jill.
“I make no promise,” said the Lion.
Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer.
“Do you eat girls?” she said.
“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion.
“I dare not come and drink,” said Jill.
“Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion.
“Oh, dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”
“There is no other stream,” said the Lion.
I am speaking to some who are thirsty for God. Maybe there are some here and you are not interested in just a sip. You want the whole glass. What grace He has bestowed on you this morning. This passage beckons you to come to Him and be filled. Don’t let fear turn you away. You will only go away thirsty.
The condition for a healthy spiritual life is a passion for God. When the condition is met then there are consequences.
II. THE CONSEQUENCES OF A HEALTHY SPIRITUAL LIFE.
Jesus says this person will be filled. It means fully satisfied. He doesn’t get just a taste of bread but the whole loaf. He doesn’t get just a sip of water He gets the whole bucket. The original word was used to describe fattening cattle.
This is written in the passive tense, which means it is not something we do. It is something that God does. It is limited to those who hunger and thirst for Christ. Our responsibility is not to pursue satisfaction but the Savior. The by-product of a growing relationship with Christ is being content.
Hunger and thirst are written in the present tense, which describes a continuing, on-going activity. Just like physical hunger and thirst can be satisfied, if you are healthy it will break out anew. In fact, as I demonstrated with Moses and the Prodigal son it will break out with greater intensity. As long as you feed it it will grow until it is fully met in God’s presence.
Raquel Welch was one of Hollywood’s most famous beauties. She said:
I’d acquired everything I wanted yet I was totally miserable. I thought it peculiar that I’d obtained everything I wanted as a child: wealth, fame, accomplishment in my career. I had beautiful children, a lifestyle that seemed terrific, yet I was totally miserably unhappy. I found it frightening that one could acquire all these things and still be so miserable.
She got what she hungered for and was not blessed or satisfied. Christians are tempted just like everyone else to take our eye off the ball and think that our happiness is in our career. That’s why Christian’s will put time for God into their careers. What happens when an economic downturn or forced retirement brings it to an end? We need the reminder that what we are really hungering and thirsting for will only be ultimately met in Jesus Christ.
Nicholas Herman worked in the food service industry. He was a short-order cook and bottle-washer. But he became deeply dissatisfied with his life; he worried chronically about himself, even whether or not he was saved.
One day Nick was looking at a tree, and the same truth struck him that struck the psalmist so long ago: the secret of the life of a tree is that it remains rooted in something other and deeper than itself. He decided to make his life an experiment in what he called a “habitual, silent, secret conversation of the soul with God.”
He is known today by the new name given to him by his friends: Brother Lawrence. He remained obscure throughout his life. He never got voted pope. He never got close to becoming the CEO of his organization. He stayed in the kitchen. But the people around him found that rivers of living water flowed out of him that made them want to know God the way he did. “The good brother found God everywhere,” one of them wrote, “as much while he was repairing shoes as while he was praying with the community.” After Lawrence died, his friends put together a book of his letters and conversations. It is called Practicing the Presence of God and is thought, apart from the Bible, to be the most widely read book of the last four centuries. This monastic short-order cook has probably out-sold novelist John Grisham and Tom Clancey and J.K. Rowling put together.
A Hollywood starlet who had every desire of this world satisfied and she doesn’t fell blessed. A monk who didn’t own the clothes on his back but he lived such an attractive life people collected his letters to put in a book and people have made that book popular for four hundred years. His one ambition was to know the presence of Christ.
Sometimes a commercial will seek to get you to act immediately by saying, “This offer is good today.” It happened to Samuel when he was a little boy. This is available to any child. This offer was made out on a hillside in a backwater country like Judea. It can happen in little Baptist church in Norman, Oklahoma. A mother raising small children can know this filling. So can working folks and retired folks. It can happen to anyone, anywhere and at anytime. This offer is good today. If you are hungry or thirsty that’s good. You can be filled. Come to Jesus.
PRAYER
INVITATION
This Book is not about the desire of people to be with God. The Bible is about God’s desire to be with you. The most frequent promise in the Bible is not “I forgive you.” It is “I will be with you.”
In my home I don’t have pictures of Presidents or Billy Graham. But I do have pictures of my daughters and son-in-laws and grandkids. I’ve got the grandkids on the refrigerator. As Paul Burleson reminded us your picture is on God’s refrigerator.
He so wanted to be with you that He left heaven to come to earth as a man. He so wanted you to be with Him He died on the cross for your sin and rose from the dead as proof that you can be forgiven. But you must desire and repent of sin. You must accept Him as your God. If you want to be with Him, He already wants to be with you.
Christian, do you remember the story of the two sisters Martha and Mary? Mary was listening to Jesus teach and Martha was busy getting dinner fixed. Do you remember why Martha wasn’t listening to Jesus but instead was busy fixing potato salad? The Bible says she was “distracted.” Have any distracted saints shown up this morning? Has the Spirit used this message to remind you what is the “necessary thing?” I invite you to the altar to bow at the feet of Jesus and ask Him fill your real hunger.
