The Ingredients of Happiness
Part 4: Matt 5:6 ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled’.
Pastor Charles Price
Let me read to you Matthew Chapter 5, the first 6 verses.
“Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them saying:
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled’”
If you have been here in recent weeks, you will know that we have begun to look at these eight beatitudes, these eight statements, that begin with the words “blessed are”. The word ‘blessed’, the Greek word ‘markariŏs’, literally means to be happy. And I am speaking of these as the ingredients of true happiness – not in the superficial sense of circumstances being nice and comfortable, but markariŏs style is that deep inner sense of well being that is there irrespective of what our circumstances might be. And these eight beatitudes are not speaking of eight different kinds of people, but eight qualities that will be true in each one person, beginning with the first, building on into the second, the third, the fourth.
And we looked at the first three. The first step to real happiness is facing our poverty of spirit, that I myself, by myself, am inadequate. I cannot be the person I was supposed to be.
And when we face our poverty we are to secondly, mourn that poverty, which is to live in that spirit of repentance. And those who mourn their poverty will be comforted by the Comforter who replaces our poverty with the riches of Jesus Christ.
And those who face their poverty and mourn it then become meek, which is to be humble and to be submissive and as we walk humbly in submission to God, they will inherit the earth - life on earth makes sense and has purpose.
But the question I wanted to asked this morning and then answer over these next three weeks, is: What are the evidences that these first three are true in our lives? How do we know when we have faced our poverty and we’re living in that spirit of mourning and we’re submitted to Christ?
Here’s the first evidence in Verse 6, because Jesus then says,
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.”
He talks about hungering and thirsting after righteousness. One of the main evidences of life and of health is, of course, appetite. If you, one morning, don’t eat your breakfast and a member of your family says, “Are you not eating breakfast?” and you say, “No, I’m not hungry this morning”, they might pass that off. But if you don’t eat lunch and then you don’t eat dinner, they’ll say, “What is wrong with you?” because lack of appetite is a symptom of ill health, as appetite is a symptom of health.
Now Jesus says that those people who face their poverty, mourn their poverty, submit to Christ, you’ll know who they are because they have an appetite for righteousness.
I don’t know if you have ever witnessed the birth of a child. It’s been my privilege to witness the birth of our three children. And the first instinct of a newborn baby is for its mother’s milk. You don’t have to give it a lesson, you don’t have to get its mouth and say, you know, “Start to do a bit of sucking”. It knows exactly what to do; it’s his primal instinct.
When I was involved in farming, I have seen many animals born – calves and lambs and you know, piglets – a pig will give birth to 12 to 15 piglets in one go. And you’ll see that the first thing those newborn animals will do is go looking for the milk bar. They know exactly what they want and what they need, because hunger and thirst is the fundamental instinct of life. And Jesus speaks of this in terms of righteousness – a hunger and a thirst for righteousness.
Now let me just take a moment to define our term here. The word righteous probably sounds a little stuffy and pretentious. It’s not a word we use every day and if it is used, it is often used negatively - “Man, he thinks he’s so righteous”, kind of usage. And so the word has a sort of stuffy connotation probably to us.
But righteousness in Scripture is primarily the moral character of God. It is God who is righteous and when He created human beings in His image, as Scripture declares that He did, the image is not a physical one for God is not a physical being; the image is a moral one. That is: God created human beings in order that in the way they live and the way they act and the way they react, they might portray the character of God. Then looking at a man or woman, you see what God is like; that’s what the word image means. If you look at an image, it tells you what the real thing is like.
And we were designed to be a display of the moral character of God and when God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, if you and I were a fly on the wall and we observed the way they behaved, we would see in them what God was like. The way Adam treated Eve would have been kind because God is kind, it would have been loving because God is loving. The way Eve treated Adam would have been generous because God is generous, it would have been patient because God is patient. The way they handled the animals in the garden, the way they patted the dog and stroked the cat and fed the chickens and cleaned out the guinea pig – whatever else they might have done – you would have seen in the way they acted, an expression of the character of God. That’s what image means. You look at a human being; you see what God is like.
Well, you know the story how that everything in the Garden was lovely until the fall took place. And when the fall took place in the land, which, said Paul in Ephesians 4, humanity became separated from the life of God. And once we had become separated from the life of God, we were no longer equipped to display the character of God, because the character of God in humanity derives from the presence of God Himself within human experience. And so, as Paul states in Romans 3 and Verse 10, as he surveys the needs of the human race, he says,
“There is no one righteous, not even one.”
This is the state of fallen humanity. And any attempt to rectify this by ourselves is doomed to failure because as Isaiah 64 says, “All our righteous acts” – that is that which originates in ourselves –
“All our righteous acts are like filthy rags”.
Now this is the human dilemma. And the gospel of Jesus Christ is designed to address this primary need in human experience – the fact that we no longer portray the righteousness of God. That’s what went wrong in the Garden of Eden. And the Gospel is designed to remedy that. Let me read you what Paul wrote in Romans 1:16 and 17. He wrote there:
“I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes, first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel”…
If I were to say, “dot, dot, dot, dot; fill in the blank, how would you complete that verse? For in the gospel, what? Well let me read to you what he says,
“For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last.”
He says, for in the gospel, the very thing that we had become separated from, (there is none righteous, no not one), is being restored on the basis of our faith in God. And it is vitally important we understand this. You see there are many secondary issues and secondary consequences of the Gospel that we are in danger of elevating to the primary issue. Sometimes we talk as though forgiveness of sin was the primary issue – no, that is necessary, that is wonderful, but forgiving our sin is simply clearing away the junk that now the Spirit of God might restore to us the righteousness of God. Getting rid of sin is a means to an end.
Sometimes we talk as though going to heaven was the essential content of the Gospel. That is a wonderful consequence but that’s only a result of our being reconciled to God, and His righteousness being restored into our lives. But these secondary issues, these – if you like – consequential issues are not the primary function of the Gospel – that is, to restore us to that relationship that was lost in the Garden of Eden where once again the moral character of God becomes displayed in human life. In other words, by the way we behave gives evidence of the authenticity of our Christian lives.
The mark of authenticity in your Christian life is not that your doctrinal “i’s” are dotted and your doctrinal “t’s” are crossed – that’s important – but it’s that something of the character of God is being restored and evidenced and seen. That’s why Jesus said, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you what?” That you know your Bible; that you go to church? These are all good things. “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.” Why? Because God is love and the primary evidence that you are a genuine disciple, said Jesus, is when they look at you, they see the behaviour of God. You love one another, that His character, His image is being restored into your life.
But sometimes when we are more taken up with the symptoms of the Christian life rather than the causes of the Christian life, or the causes being addressed, should I say. We deal with the symptoms; we find that there are thousands, if not millions of folks, across the world who make a profession of faith on the basis of the secondary issues, but are left with a Christian life that does not work because they have never understood the whole purpose is that God may in me restore His own character and image. And so, tragically, there are many professing Christians whose lives are little different to the folks who live on the same street who do not know Christ.
Statisticians tell us that the breakdown of marriage, for instance, among Christians is equal now to the world at large, which means we have nothing to say to the world about those things because we don’t know how to behave ourselves. Why? Because we have never understood the whole purpose is not to get ourselves out of hell and into heaven; it’s to get God out of heaven into us that living in us He might restore to us His own image and character and we begin to behave – not perfectly; we’ll never behave perfectly in this life, but we become the expression of His image and His character. And that’s why Jesus said, having finished these beatitudes in Matthew 5:13 He said,
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt has lost its saltiness … It is no longer good for anything, but to be thrown out and trampled by men.”
In other words He said, you are the salt of the earth but if you find that your experience of God leaves you unsalty - you’ve lost the distinction that makes you who you are supposed to be - do you know what will happen? The world will trample all over you, with no respect, little credibility. Because you see, the whole purpose of the Gospel is that once again in the way you and I behave, in the way I as a husband treat my wife, the way as parents we treat our kids and the way we talk to our neighbours, the way we spend our money, the way we drive the car down the road, we begin to display something of His character and His goodness. It’s called righteousness.
When Peter, in I Peter 2:24 wrote about Christ’s death on the cross, he said,
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (listen) “so that” (so that what?) “so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness.”
“This is the reason”, says Peter, “Christ bore our sins on the tree”. Not just to get us off the hook, not just to clean us up, not to get us washed up on the shores of heaven one day by the skin of our teeth. The reason He died is that you might die to sin and live for righteousness, because that is what the Gospel is designed to restore. For in the Gospel a righteousness has been restored, a righteousness that is by faith. And the evidence that a person is in genuine, living, healthy relationship with God is that there is appetite, hunger, thirst for righteousness.
Now let me talk about two ways in which this hunger and thirst for righteousness will be expressed. Firstly, it will be expressed in our communion with God. When I say communion with God, don’t confuse the use of the word communion with the Lord’s Supper where we take the bread and the wine and we call that communion. It is a connection with God of course. But what I mean by “in communion with God” is in personal intimacy with God, when we know God and we go on knowing Him better, we trust and go on trusting Him, we talk to Him, we listen to Him, we are living in communion with Him, because this is what drives the Christian life.
You see if you are a Christian this morning, your Christian life is driven either by appetites of your heart or it is driven by obligations that you feel are imposed on you. You are either here this morning because you want to know God better and you know that meeting together in a setting like this is a means of doing so, or you are here because it’s the right time on the calendar and you’re supposed to be. It’s either appetite driven or it’s obligation driven. By that I mean, it is either internally driven or it is externally imposed. To use the language of Scripture, it’s either life that comes from within, or it’s law, which imposes from without.
And the easiest thing in the world is to be driven by a sense of obligation in the absence of appetite, in the absence of a hunger and a thirst. And what that means in practice is: that in your Christian life you are either looking to God or you find yourself looking over your shoulder to see that you are satisfying the expectations of the other Christians round about you. Now that’s exactly what Jesus talks about in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, because the rest of the Sermon on the Mount contrasts true righteousness with what I’ll call pseudo-righteousness. Let me just give you a brief example. In Chapter 6 because it is always important to interpret Scripture in its context and, as I say, the rest of this Sermon on the Mount which occupies Matthew 5, 6 and 7 explains these issues that are presented in the beatitudes. But in Chapter 6:1 He says,
“Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.”
Now He talks about ‘acts of righteousness’, but instead of saying, “Do your acts of righteousness”, He says, “Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness”, which sounds interesting doesn’t it? Not to do them before men, to be seen by them. Because if we are living under a sense of obligation rather than living with an appetite for God, an appetite for righteousness, you’ll find yourself, what Jesus said here, doing, is looking over your shoulder and doing what you need to do in the hope that other people will be impressed by it. They normally are not, by the way, because they see right through it.
Jesus gave three examples in the following verses. He talked about those who give to be seen by men. He said they stand on the street corners and they get out their trumpets and when they see an opportunity to give something, maybe to somebody in need, they’ll blow their trumpet, everybody looks around…what is that noise over there and they pull out their money, wave it around and just drop it into the person in need….to be seen by men. And He says, “They have their reward in full.” What is their reward? They go home thinking, “Everybody thinks I’m generous”.
“But they have no reward from My Father in heaven”, said Jesus.
So what about those who pray? And He said what’s wrong with praying, what’s wrong with giving to those in need? It’s a good thing to do of course, but they are doing it not driven by an appetite for God, which includes loving people in need; they’re doing it to impress others.
He talked about those who pray. They stand on the street corners to pray, “to be seen by men”, said Jesus. So with a loud voice, when there’s people gathering around, they’ll pray, “Oh God, our gracious, loving, heavenly Father” (and they open their eye to peep) “Is anybody? ……..Oh they’ve all gone away, okay……..oh, here they come,…..we beseech Thee that………”
And He said “They receive their reward in full”.
What is their reward? They think, “Everybody thinks I’m such a spiritual man. That’s what I want them to think.” They probably don’t think that actually, but that’s what they think.
He talked about those who fast later. “And they disfigure their faces,” it says, “to show men they are fasting”. I mean they make themselves look gaunt and miserable and probably learn to mimic some stomach rumbles and people come by, “Are you alright? You look a bit weak and faint.”
“Yeah, I’m alright, I’m just fasting for the Lord.”
It’s not for the Lord at all. You know this is a subtle danger. When we are not appetite driven, we become obligation driven, so our audience changes from heaven to earth. We don’t do it before God; we do it before men, to be seen by them.
But when it is the life of God within us, we discover an appetite for God. And because it’s an appetite for righteousness that He talks about and righteousness - and righteousness is the character of God - it is an appetite for God Himself, because that is where our righteousness is found.
Now you don’t decide to have an appetite, you don’t look at the clock and say, “Oh, it’s one o’clock, I will be hungry now, because it’s lunch time.” Appetite is a consequence of other things that are going on in your life. It’s spontaneous. And I believe with all my heart that the mark of genuine conversion is appetite. When someone has really encountered God, follow-up is important, but if follow-up is simply a brainwashing approach to Christianize them, it’s not going to be effective. But when someone really encounters God, they have an appetite and they’ll follow it through if it’s real. They have an appetite.
I was converted on a Saturday night. I was twelve years of age. I had gone to youth event in the city of Hereford in the west of England, where I grew up. It was organized by the local Youth For Christ committee. And they were showing a Billy Graham film called “Shadow of the Boomerang”. And I’m sure I’ve told you about my conversion before. At the end of that film I knew I was not a Christian. I knew God was distant from me but I wanted to become one. Somebody stood up at the front and invited people to come forward who wanted to give their lives to Christ. I didn’t go forward; I was too shy and embarrassed to do something like that. But I prayed and I don’t remember the words of course but the gist of it was, “Lord I’m not a Christian but I want to be one. Will you please make me one tonight?” I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t know if anything had happened. If somebody had said to me that night, “Did you become a Christian?” I wouldn’t know the answer. I didn’t know. I knew I wanted to be but I didn’t know if I had.
But the next day was a Sunday morning and I went to the church in the village that I lived in. And I had been to that church every Sunday for most of my life, and for the first time the service that morning was interesting. I went back on Sunday night and for one of the first times, the preacher made sense. And I thought to myself, “This is remarkable; these people have changed overnight. They used to be uninteresting; they used to be dull. Suddenly it’s interesting; suddenly it makes sense.”
And twenty-four hours after I became a Christian, I knew I was a Christian for the simple reason everything was making sense. I had an appetite I never had before. This book, which I had been told I should read, was the dullest book on the planet, but suddenly it was alive.
Now I know people come to Christ through different ways and everybody’s experience is different but I always look for an appetite as the evidence of genuine conversion, that here’s a person who’s beginning to hunger for God, hunger for truth.
I remember a guy coming to Christ. He was in his thirty’s. And a few days later I was going to speak at a university down in the south of England and I asked him if he would like to come with me. We would go down during the day, come back overnight basically – it was a few hundred miles away. He had come from an unchristian background altogether but he had come to Christ and as we talked he told me about things in his life that had been wrong and he needed to rectify, things in his business that he had done that were wrong that had cheated people; he needed to put them right and there was going to be some cost to it. And as we talked I began to marvel in my own mind. I thought this is amazing he is talking like this. So I said to him after a while, “Why do you suddenly think you need to put these things right?”
He said, “Because they were wrong.”
I said, “Well they were, but they were wrong last week and you didn’t think this last week did you?”
“No I didn’t.”
“Why are you thinking this, this week?”
He said, “I don’t know. It’s suddenly obvious. These were wrong and I’ve got to put them right.”
I said to him, “If I need any more evidence that you are born again of the Spirit in the last few days, it is this: that you have an appetite for what is right. You recognize what is right and what is wrong and you have an appetite for what is right. That is the mark of the Spirit of God in a person’s life.”
Let me point out an irony in this verse, if you will. It says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, they will be filled (says the New International Version). Other translations say, “They will be satisfied”. You know, most people are looking for satisfaction I guess. But Jesus does not talk about hungering and thirsting for satisfaction. He talks about hungering and thirsting for righteousness and the result of that is going to be: you’ll be satisfied. You go to bed at night and you’ll scratch your head and say, “Isn’t that amazing? I’m at peace, I’m content; I’m satisfied.”
You know, satisfaction doesn’t come by looking for satisfaction. According to this statement, satisfaction comes as you look for God and His righteousness. As Jesus said later in the same Sermon on the Mount, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and His righteousness and all these things – material things in the context, physical things, food, clothing, you read the context in Matthew 6:33 – these things (not because you are looking for them), will be added to you and you’ll be satisfied.”
You know satisfaction is one of these elusive things. If you are looking for it, you won’t find it; if you stop looking for it and you begin to look for God, you will actually find it. It’s like the galaxy Andromida in the night sky. You won’t see it around Toronto, there’s too much light pollution, but go to where it’s dark, if you know where to look. And I love to look at Andromida because it is the furthest distance you can see with the naked eye. It’s 2.2 million light years away; it’s a galaxy wide as the Milky Way, 100,000 light years across. And if you know where to locate it and you look straight at it, you can’t see it. But if you look a little bit to the side, in the corner of your eye, you will see the hazy shape – it’s a spiral shape. I have looked at it through a telescope where you can see the spiral shape much more clearly. Well if you have got an imagination, you can’t see that spiral but you can see the haze.
Last summer when my wife and I were on vacation, we were in an area where the sky was beautiful and it was dark and we, several evenings, just sat out under the sky looking at the sky, realizing how small we are and how big the universe is. And I kept saying to Hillary, “Have you found Andromida yet?” (Because I kept showing it to her every night). Just look slightly away from it.... “Oh I can see it now”…and you quickly look at it and “Oh, it’s gone.” Satisfaction is like that. It’s like getting hold of soap in the bath you know, you think you’ve got it and “boop” - it’s slidden away again. But when you forget about that, when your goal is not to find satisfaction, when the goal is not to find my own selfish needs being met - my goal is to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to know God, to know His character, to love Him, to trust Him, to experience Him - you’ll be satisfied. Because we were created with a homesickness for God that nothing else can or will ever satisfy. And you’ll say with David in Psalm 23,
“The Lord is my shepherd,”
What’s the result?
“I shall not want.”
As the Living Bible puts it:
The Lord is my Shepherd, I have everything that I need.”
And he talks in that Psalm about struggles and troubles in life.
“Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
The rod and staff of a shepherd was to direct and discipline the sheep. It’s His discipline, His direction that comforts me. He says,
“Though I pass through the valley of the shadow of death,”
That’s not a nice prospect; you’ll still go through that.
He talks about sitting down:
“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies…”
There’s still enemies, there’s still a battle in life, and there will be until the day we die, but he says, “I don’t need anything else.”
Satisfaction is not the absence of all the troubles in life; it’s the enjoyment of God in the midst of the troubles and the experience of His presence and His working.
But I said there were two aspects. The second one, very quickly: we find this righteousness, this appetite for righteousness in communion with God and secondly in community with His people. Now this may seem a very down to earth element, but it’s a very necessary element. You see righteousness has relational connotations, because if righteousness is the moral character of God, it can only be experienced in the context of relationships. You cannot be loving, detached from anyone to love, can you? You can’t lock yourself in a cupboard and be loving. If God’s moral character is that He is kind, you cannot be kind without recipients of your kindness. If God is merciful and His righteousness includes mercy and we’re to become merciful, you can’t be merciful without people in need who are the recipients of your mercy. God is just; you cannot exhibit justice outside of relationships. And God’s moral attributes are relational attributes and that’s why God created the world, that’s why God created humanity. It was a logical expression of His own character, because He is love and He is kind and He is gracious and He is merciful. It could only be expressed in relationship.
Therefore the Christian life is nurtured and expressed in community with others. That’s why we have a church, that’s why the Christian Gospel is not about saving one over here and one over there and one back there and one up there, and as individuals we relate to God and simply because we’re all Christians, let’s get together once in a while. No. The Biblical doctrine of the church is intrinsic to being a Christian. It is a non-negotiable part of being a Christian. Because in being brought into relationship with God, we’re brought into relationship with each other. And the righteousness of God - the moral character of God - is going to be worked out in relationship with each other.
Now in our western culture, we have prized individualism and this militates against Christian living. We prize independence, we prize being our own man, being self-sufficient, fulfilling your personal dream, all these kind of these that we are bombarded with. We value individual accomplishments above communal. That’s why we celebrate personalities more than we do the communal benefit and growth.
But the New Testament tells us that we are to grow together. Paul, describing the church in I Corinthians 12 describes it as being like a body, or it is the body of Christ. He says, “Christ is the head, His Spirit is the life, we are members of that body.” And then he says this: “the hand cannot say to the foot, ‘I don’t need you’. The hand cannot act in independence or isolation from the foot. The ear cannot say to the eye, ‘I don’t need you’. They cannot operate and function independently of one another. Every part of the body needs every other part. The foot, the hand, the eye, the ear are interdependent.” And when Paul speaks about that, he’s speaking about the church and he’s saying if you are a Christian you’d better be sure you’re part of a community of believers where your gifts are developed and exercised and where your needs are met through your fellow believers, and you are ministering to the needs of others together. That’s why in Hebrews 10:25 the writer there says,
“Let us not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another - and all the more as you see the day approaching.”
Giving up meeting together is not a 21st Century phenomena where people don’t go to church as much anymore. It was a problem that the 1st Century Christian church was facing too, because people misunderstanding - “I can be a Christian, me in my small corner and you in yours”- and you can’t. And that’s why we believe one of the great needs of this church, of our community together, is building the sense of community, where as Galatians 6 says, “where you carry each others’ burdens and in this way you fulfill the law of Christ.” This way you satisfy God’s agenda for you.
James describes what he calls the “royal law”. He says this is a royal law: love your neighbor as yourself. That is: get involved in connection and interdependence with others. That’s why we’ve been stressing the living room today, because we’re talking about righteousness and serious about righteousness is not about you going home and having a better quiet time (I hope that might be something that may happen for some of us) but that you equally learn to connect, because this is how we’re designed to grow and this is how we are designed to stimulate one another.
C.H. Spurgeon, who was a very wise and very powerful preacher in the 19th Century, apparently had a young man come to visit him one day and said, “I can be a Christian without the church; I don’t need others.” And they were sitting apparently in Spurgeon’s lounge; there was a open fire there and at one point Spurgeon took a pair of tongs and took a coal from the blazing fire and put it on the hearth at the side, went on talking and after awhile he said to the young man, “Look down at the hearth. What happened to the coal that I took out of the fire?”
He said, “Well it’s become black; it’s lost its heat and its flame.”
And Spurgeon said, “Young man, that’s why you need to be part of the church, because it’s only as together you are stimulated together that you grow. But like this coal taken out of the fire, on its own it dies out. But in the heat of the fire all the other coals are stimulating it to go on glowing and giving off the heat.”
And it may be that some of us feel a little stunted in our Christian lives and it’s not because your relationship with God is not in order; it’s because you have not developed and involved yourself in relationships with others in the way that we are designed to by God. You are being built together to be a dwelling place in which God lives by His Spirit, Paul says in Ephesians 2.
And so the hunger and thirst for righteousness, which is the moral character of God, is also a hunger and thirst for relational attributes: love, justice, mercy, gentleness, kindness.
And I want to encourage you this morning because I don’t want to put our heads in the clouds - I want to put our feet on the ground – that the great goal of the Christian life is that we know God and be found in Him having a righteousness that is not our own. But that as He works in us and through us, He displays His character and as we are built together in harmony and unity and community with one another, we are a dwelling place where God more fully is able to exhibit Himself and accomplish His purposes.
And so the hunger and thirst after righteousness will involve a hunger for communion with God and a hunger for community with His people. And God will build into you and into me His character as a process that will not be completed in this life, but there will be a process of growth and one degree of glory to another, as Paul describes it, into His image, when we find ourselves ministering to one another in that community that brings us together so that we bear one another’s burdens and others bear our burdens. And together corporately we grow in God and people see His presence, His working, His enabling.
Are you interested in that? And by the way, if you say, “Well I don’t have any appetite”, I’ll tell you why. Go back to the beatitudes. You are not meek – that’s the one that comes before. You are not submitted to Christ as your Lord.
If you are not meek, I’ll tell you why: you are not mourning your condition, you’re not living in that spirit of turning from what you are to what He is.
If you are not mourning your condition I’ll tell you why: you are not aware of your poverty of spirit, you still think you’ve got what it takes.
If you are not aware of your poverty of spirit, you’re not happy because these are the ingredients of happiness, according to Jesus.
If you want to know how that righteousness works out, well come back next week too because the next one says,
“Blessed are those who are merciful, for they will receive mercy.”
Now we get down to the nitty gritty of relational life. Oh boy, this is where it’s tough. It’s fine myself and God; it’s a problem myself and these awkward people around me. Well, we’ve got to learn to be merciful. We’ll talk about that next week. And when you are, you receive mercy. I am tempted to say more than I should; I’m stopping right now, but we’ll pick that up next week.
Let’s pray together. Father, we thank You for the comprehensive portrait of the Christian life in these few verses spoken so long ago by the Lord Jesus Christ, and yet so powerfully relevant in our own lives today. Lord, we don’t want to go home from here resolved to have an appetite because we can’t create it that way. We want to go home, men and women resolved to walk humbly with God in dependency upon the indwelling Holy Spirit and to discover we have an appetite we never had before. And as we feed that appetite we deepen that appetite, that we’ll be people who long to know You better and who long to serve one another better. Mark our lives with those characteristics we pray. For we ask it in Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Part 4: Matt 5:6 ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled’.
Pastor Charles Price
Let me read to you Matthew Chapter 5, the first 6 verses.
“Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them saying:
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled’”
If you have been here in recent weeks, you will know that we have begun to look at these eight beatitudes, these eight statements, that begin with the words “blessed are”. The word ‘blessed’, the Greek word ‘markariŏs’, literally means to be happy. And I am speaking of these as the ingredients of true happiness – not in the superficial sense of circumstances being nice and comfortable, but markariŏs style is that deep inner sense of well being that is there irrespective of what our circumstances might be. And these eight beatitudes are not speaking of eight different kinds of people, but eight qualities that will be true in each one person, beginning with the first, building on into the second, the third, the fourth.
And we looked at the first three. The first step to real happiness is facing our poverty of spirit, that I myself, by myself, am inadequate. I cannot be the person I was supposed to be.
And when we face our poverty we are to secondly, mourn that poverty, which is to live in that spirit of repentance. And those who mourn their poverty will be comforted by the Comforter who replaces our poverty with the riches of Jesus Christ.
And those who face their poverty and mourn it then become meek, which is to be humble and to be submissive and as we walk humbly in submission to God, they will inherit the earth - life on earth makes sense and has purpose.
But the question I wanted to asked this morning and then answer over these next three weeks, is: What are the evidences that these first three are true in our lives? How do we know when we have faced our poverty and we’re living in that spirit of mourning and we’re submitted to Christ?
Here’s the first evidence in Verse 6, because Jesus then says,
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.”
He talks about hungering and thirsting after righteousness. One of the main evidences of life and of health is, of course, appetite. If you, one morning, don’t eat your breakfast and a member of your family says, “Are you not eating breakfast?” and you say, “No, I’m not hungry this morning”, they might pass that off. But if you don’t eat lunch and then you don’t eat dinner, they’ll say, “What is wrong with you?” because lack of appetite is a symptom of ill health, as appetite is a symptom of health.
Now Jesus says that those people who face their poverty, mourn their poverty, submit to Christ, you’ll know who they are because they have an appetite for righteousness.
I don’t know if you have ever witnessed the birth of a child. It’s been my privilege to witness the birth of our three children. And the first instinct of a newborn baby is for its mother’s milk. You don’t have to give it a lesson, you don’t have to get its mouth and say, you know, “Start to do a bit of sucking”. It knows exactly what to do; it’s his primal instinct.
When I was involved in farming, I have seen many animals born – calves and lambs and you know, piglets – a pig will give birth to 12 to 15 piglets in one go. And you’ll see that the first thing those newborn animals will do is go looking for the milk bar. They know exactly what they want and what they need, because hunger and thirst is the fundamental instinct of life. And Jesus speaks of this in terms of righteousness – a hunger and a thirst for righteousness.
Now let me just take a moment to define our term here. The word righteous probably sounds a little stuffy and pretentious. It’s not a word we use every day and if it is used, it is often used negatively - “Man, he thinks he’s so righteous”, kind of usage. And so the word has a sort of stuffy connotation probably to us.
But righteousness in Scripture is primarily the moral character of God. It is God who is righteous and when He created human beings in His image, as Scripture declares that He did, the image is not a physical one for God is not a physical being; the image is a moral one. That is: God created human beings in order that in the way they live and the way they act and the way they react, they might portray the character of God. Then looking at a man or woman, you see what God is like; that’s what the word image means. If you look at an image, it tells you what the real thing is like.
And we were designed to be a display of the moral character of God and when God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, if you and I were a fly on the wall and we observed the way they behaved, we would see in them what God was like. The way Adam treated Eve would have been kind because God is kind, it would have been loving because God is loving. The way Eve treated Adam would have been generous because God is generous, it would have been patient because God is patient. The way they handled the animals in the garden, the way they patted the dog and stroked the cat and fed the chickens and cleaned out the guinea pig – whatever else they might have done – you would have seen in the way they acted, an expression of the character of God. That’s what image means. You look at a human being; you see what God is like.
Well, you know the story how that everything in the Garden was lovely until the fall took place. And when the fall took place in the land, which, said Paul in Ephesians 4, humanity became separated from the life of God. And once we had become separated from the life of God, we were no longer equipped to display the character of God, because the character of God in humanity derives from the presence of God Himself within human experience. And so, as Paul states in Romans 3 and Verse 10, as he surveys the needs of the human race, he says,
“There is no one righteous, not even one.”
This is the state of fallen humanity. And any attempt to rectify this by ourselves is doomed to failure because as Isaiah 64 says, “All our righteous acts” – that is that which originates in ourselves –
“All our righteous acts are like filthy rags”.
Now this is the human dilemma. And the gospel of Jesus Christ is designed to address this primary need in human experience – the fact that we no longer portray the righteousness of God. That’s what went wrong in the Garden of Eden. And the Gospel is designed to remedy that. Let me read you what Paul wrote in Romans 1:16 and 17. He wrote there:
“I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes, first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel”…
If I were to say, “dot, dot, dot, dot; fill in the blank, how would you complete that verse? For in the gospel, what? Well let me read to you what he says,
“For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last.”
He says, for in the gospel, the very thing that we had become separated from, (there is none righteous, no not one), is being restored on the basis of our faith in God. And it is vitally important we understand this. You see there are many secondary issues and secondary consequences of the Gospel that we are in danger of elevating to the primary issue. Sometimes we talk as though forgiveness of sin was the primary issue – no, that is necessary, that is wonderful, but forgiving our sin is simply clearing away the junk that now the Spirit of God might restore to us the righteousness of God. Getting rid of sin is a means to an end.
Sometimes we talk as though going to heaven was the essential content of the Gospel. That is a wonderful consequence but that’s only a result of our being reconciled to God, and His righteousness being restored into our lives. But these secondary issues, these – if you like – consequential issues are not the primary function of the Gospel – that is, to restore us to that relationship that was lost in the Garden of Eden where once again the moral character of God becomes displayed in human life. In other words, by the way we behave gives evidence of the authenticity of our Christian lives.
The mark of authenticity in your Christian life is not that your doctrinal “i’s” are dotted and your doctrinal “t’s” are crossed – that’s important – but it’s that something of the character of God is being restored and evidenced and seen. That’s why Jesus said, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you what?” That you know your Bible; that you go to church? These are all good things. “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.” Why? Because God is love and the primary evidence that you are a genuine disciple, said Jesus, is when they look at you, they see the behaviour of God. You love one another, that His character, His image is being restored into your life.
But sometimes when we are more taken up with the symptoms of the Christian life rather than the causes of the Christian life, or the causes being addressed, should I say. We deal with the symptoms; we find that there are thousands, if not millions of folks, across the world who make a profession of faith on the basis of the secondary issues, but are left with a Christian life that does not work because they have never understood the whole purpose is that God may in me restore His own character and image. And so, tragically, there are many professing Christians whose lives are little different to the folks who live on the same street who do not know Christ.
Statisticians tell us that the breakdown of marriage, for instance, among Christians is equal now to the world at large, which means we have nothing to say to the world about those things because we don’t know how to behave ourselves. Why? Because we have never understood the whole purpose is not to get ourselves out of hell and into heaven; it’s to get God out of heaven into us that living in us He might restore to us His own image and character and we begin to behave – not perfectly; we’ll never behave perfectly in this life, but we become the expression of His image and His character. And that’s why Jesus said, having finished these beatitudes in Matthew 5:13 He said,
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt has lost its saltiness … It is no longer good for anything, but to be thrown out and trampled by men.”
In other words He said, you are the salt of the earth but if you find that your experience of God leaves you unsalty - you’ve lost the distinction that makes you who you are supposed to be - do you know what will happen? The world will trample all over you, with no respect, little credibility. Because you see, the whole purpose of the Gospel is that once again in the way you and I behave, in the way I as a husband treat my wife, the way as parents we treat our kids and the way we talk to our neighbours, the way we spend our money, the way we drive the car down the road, we begin to display something of His character and His goodness. It’s called righteousness.
When Peter, in I Peter 2:24 wrote about Christ’s death on the cross, he said,
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (listen) “so that” (so that what?) “so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness.”
“This is the reason”, says Peter, “Christ bore our sins on the tree”. Not just to get us off the hook, not just to clean us up, not to get us washed up on the shores of heaven one day by the skin of our teeth. The reason He died is that you might die to sin and live for righteousness, because that is what the Gospel is designed to restore. For in the Gospel a righteousness has been restored, a righteousness that is by faith. And the evidence that a person is in genuine, living, healthy relationship with God is that there is appetite, hunger, thirst for righteousness.
Now let me talk about two ways in which this hunger and thirst for righteousness will be expressed. Firstly, it will be expressed in our communion with God. When I say communion with God, don’t confuse the use of the word communion with the Lord’s Supper where we take the bread and the wine and we call that communion. It is a connection with God of course. But what I mean by “in communion with God” is in personal intimacy with God, when we know God and we go on knowing Him better, we trust and go on trusting Him, we talk to Him, we listen to Him, we are living in communion with Him, because this is what drives the Christian life.
You see if you are a Christian this morning, your Christian life is driven either by appetites of your heart or it is driven by obligations that you feel are imposed on you. You are either here this morning because you want to know God better and you know that meeting together in a setting like this is a means of doing so, or you are here because it’s the right time on the calendar and you’re supposed to be. It’s either appetite driven or it’s obligation driven. By that I mean, it is either internally driven or it is externally imposed. To use the language of Scripture, it’s either life that comes from within, or it’s law, which imposes from without.
And the easiest thing in the world is to be driven by a sense of obligation in the absence of appetite, in the absence of a hunger and a thirst. And what that means in practice is: that in your Christian life you are either looking to God or you find yourself looking over your shoulder to see that you are satisfying the expectations of the other Christians round about you. Now that’s exactly what Jesus talks about in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, because the rest of the Sermon on the Mount contrasts true righteousness with what I’ll call pseudo-righteousness. Let me just give you a brief example. In Chapter 6 because it is always important to interpret Scripture in its context and, as I say, the rest of this Sermon on the Mount which occupies Matthew 5, 6 and 7 explains these issues that are presented in the beatitudes. But in Chapter 6:1 He says,
“Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.”
Now He talks about ‘acts of righteousness’, but instead of saying, “Do your acts of righteousness”, He says, “Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness”, which sounds interesting doesn’t it? Not to do them before men, to be seen by them. Because if we are living under a sense of obligation rather than living with an appetite for God, an appetite for righteousness, you’ll find yourself, what Jesus said here, doing, is looking over your shoulder and doing what you need to do in the hope that other people will be impressed by it. They normally are not, by the way, because they see right through it.
Jesus gave three examples in the following verses. He talked about those who give to be seen by men. He said they stand on the street corners and they get out their trumpets and when they see an opportunity to give something, maybe to somebody in need, they’ll blow their trumpet, everybody looks around…what is that noise over there and they pull out their money, wave it around and just drop it into the person in need….to be seen by men. And He says, “They have their reward in full.” What is their reward? They go home thinking, “Everybody thinks I’m generous”.
“But they have no reward from My Father in heaven”, said Jesus.
So what about those who pray? And He said what’s wrong with praying, what’s wrong with giving to those in need? It’s a good thing to do of course, but they are doing it not driven by an appetite for God, which includes loving people in need; they’re doing it to impress others.
He talked about those who pray. They stand on the street corners to pray, “to be seen by men”, said Jesus. So with a loud voice, when there’s people gathering around, they’ll pray, “Oh God, our gracious, loving, heavenly Father” (and they open their eye to peep) “Is anybody? ……..Oh they’ve all gone away, okay……..oh, here they come,…..we beseech Thee that………”
And He said “They receive their reward in full”.
What is their reward? They think, “Everybody thinks I’m such a spiritual man. That’s what I want them to think.” They probably don’t think that actually, but that’s what they think.
He talked about those who fast later. “And they disfigure their faces,” it says, “to show men they are fasting”. I mean they make themselves look gaunt and miserable and probably learn to mimic some stomach rumbles and people come by, “Are you alright? You look a bit weak and faint.”
“Yeah, I’m alright, I’m just fasting for the Lord.”
It’s not for the Lord at all. You know this is a subtle danger. When we are not appetite driven, we become obligation driven, so our audience changes from heaven to earth. We don’t do it before God; we do it before men, to be seen by them.
But when it is the life of God within us, we discover an appetite for God. And because it’s an appetite for righteousness that He talks about and righteousness - and righteousness is the character of God - it is an appetite for God Himself, because that is where our righteousness is found.
Now you don’t decide to have an appetite, you don’t look at the clock and say, “Oh, it’s one o’clock, I will be hungry now, because it’s lunch time.” Appetite is a consequence of other things that are going on in your life. It’s spontaneous. And I believe with all my heart that the mark of genuine conversion is appetite. When someone has really encountered God, follow-up is important, but if follow-up is simply a brainwashing approach to Christianize them, it’s not going to be effective. But when someone really encounters God, they have an appetite and they’ll follow it through if it’s real. They have an appetite.
I was converted on a Saturday night. I was twelve years of age. I had gone to youth event in the city of Hereford in the west of England, where I grew up. It was organized by the local Youth For Christ committee. And they were showing a Billy Graham film called “Shadow of the Boomerang”. And I’m sure I’ve told you about my conversion before. At the end of that film I knew I was not a Christian. I knew God was distant from me but I wanted to become one. Somebody stood up at the front and invited people to come forward who wanted to give their lives to Christ. I didn’t go forward; I was too shy and embarrassed to do something like that. But I prayed and I don’t remember the words of course but the gist of it was, “Lord I’m not a Christian but I want to be one. Will you please make me one tonight?” I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t know if anything had happened. If somebody had said to me that night, “Did you become a Christian?” I wouldn’t know the answer. I didn’t know. I knew I wanted to be but I didn’t know if I had.
But the next day was a Sunday morning and I went to the church in the village that I lived in. And I had been to that church every Sunday for most of my life, and for the first time the service that morning was interesting. I went back on Sunday night and for one of the first times, the preacher made sense. And I thought to myself, “This is remarkable; these people have changed overnight. They used to be uninteresting; they used to be dull. Suddenly it’s interesting; suddenly it makes sense.”
And twenty-four hours after I became a Christian, I knew I was a Christian for the simple reason everything was making sense. I had an appetite I never had before. This book, which I had been told I should read, was the dullest book on the planet, but suddenly it was alive.
Now I know people come to Christ through different ways and everybody’s experience is different but I always look for an appetite as the evidence of genuine conversion, that here’s a person who’s beginning to hunger for God, hunger for truth.
I remember a guy coming to Christ. He was in his thirty’s. And a few days later I was going to speak at a university down in the south of England and I asked him if he would like to come with me. We would go down during the day, come back overnight basically – it was a few hundred miles away. He had come from an unchristian background altogether but he had come to Christ and as we talked he told me about things in his life that had been wrong and he needed to rectify, things in his business that he had done that were wrong that had cheated people; he needed to put them right and there was going to be some cost to it. And as we talked I began to marvel in my own mind. I thought this is amazing he is talking like this. So I said to him after a while, “Why do you suddenly think you need to put these things right?”
He said, “Because they were wrong.”
I said, “Well they were, but they were wrong last week and you didn’t think this last week did you?”
“No I didn’t.”
“Why are you thinking this, this week?”
He said, “I don’t know. It’s suddenly obvious. These were wrong and I’ve got to put them right.”
I said to him, “If I need any more evidence that you are born again of the Spirit in the last few days, it is this: that you have an appetite for what is right. You recognize what is right and what is wrong and you have an appetite for what is right. That is the mark of the Spirit of God in a person’s life.”
Let me point out an irony in this verse, if you will. It says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, they will be filled (says the New International Version). Other translations say, “They will be satisfied”. You know, most people are looking for satisfaction I guess. But Jesus does not talk about hungering and thirsting for satisfaction. He talks about hungering and thirsting for righteousness and the result of that is going to be: you’ll be satisfied. You go to bed at night and you’ll scratch your head and say, “Isn’t that amazing? I’m at peace, I’m content; I’m satisfied.”
You know, satisfaction doesn’t come by looking for satisfaction. According to this statement, satisfaction comes as you look for God and His righteousness. As Jesus said later in the same Sermon on the Mount, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and His righteousness and all these things – material things in the context, physical things, food, clothing, you read the context in Matthew 6:33 – these things (not because you are looking for them), will be added to you and you’ll be satisfied.”
You know satisfaction is one of these elusive things. If you are looking for it, you won’t find it; if you stop looking for it and you begin to look for God, you will actually find it. It’s like the galaxy Andromida in the night sky. You won’t see it around Toronto, there’s too much light pollution, but go to where it’s dark, if you know where to look. And I love to look at Andromida because it is the furthest distance you can see with the naked eye. It’s 2.2 million light years away; it’s a galaxy wide as the Milky Way, 100,000 light years across. And if you know where to locate it and you look straight at it, you can’t see it. But if you look a little bit to the side, in the corner of your eye, you will see the hazy shape – it’s a spiral shape. I have looked at it through a telescope where you can see the spiral shape much more clearly. Well if you have got an imagination, you can’t see that spiral but you can see the haze.
Last summer when my wife and I were on vacation, we were in an area where the sky was beautiful and it was dark and we, several evenings, just sat out under the sky looking at the sky, realizing how small we are and how big the universe is. And I kept saying to Hillary, “Have you found Andromida yet?” (Because I kept showing it to her every night). Just look slightly away from it.... “Oh I can see it now”…and you quickly look at it and “Oh, it’s gone.” Satisfaction is like that. It’s like getting hold of soap in the bath you know, you think you’ve got it and “boop” - it’s slidden away again. But when you forget about that, when your goal is not to find satisfaction, when the goal is not to find my own selfish needs being met - my goal is to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to know God, to know His character, to love Him, to trust Him, to experience Him - you’ll be satisfied. Because we were created with a homesickness for God that nothing else can or will ever satisfy. And you’ll say with David in Psalm 23,
“The Lord is my shepherd,”
What’s the result?
“I shall not want.”
As the Living Bible puts it:
The Lord is my Shepherd, I have everything that I need.”
And he talks in that Psalm about struggles and troubles in life.
“Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
The rod and staff of a shepherd was to direct and discipline the sheep. It’s His discipline, His direction that comforts me. He says,
“Though I pass through the valley of the shadow of death,”
That’s not a nice prospect; you’ll still go through that.
He talks about sitting down:
“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies…”
There’s still enemies, there’s still a battle in life, and there will be until the day we die, but he says, “I don’t need anything else.”
Satisfaction is not the absence of all the troubles in life; it’s the enjoyment of God in the midst of the troubles and the experience of His presence and His working.
But I said there were two aspects. The second one, very quickly: we find this righteousness, this appetite for righteousness in communion with God and secondly in community with His people. Now this may seem a very down to earth element, but it’s a very necessary element. You see righteousness has relational connotations, because if righteousness is the moral character of God, it can only be experienced in the context of relationships. You cannot be loving, detached from anyone to love, can you? You can’t lock yourself in a cupboard and be loving. If God’s moral character is that He is kind, you cannot be kind without recipients of your kindness. If God is merciful and His righteousness includes mercy and we’re to become merciful, you can’t be merciful without people in need who are the recipients of your mercy. God is just; you cannot exhibit justice outside of relationships. And God’s moral attributes are relational attributes and that’s why God created the world, that’s why God created humanity. It was a logical expression of His own character, because He is love and He is kind and He is gracious and He is merciful. It could only be expressed in relationship.
Therefore the Christian life is nurtured and expressed in community with others. That’s why we have a church, that’s why the Christian Gospel is not about saving one over here and one over there and one back there and one up there, and as individuals we relate to God and simply because we’re all Christians, let’s get together once in a while. No. The Biblical doctrine of the church is intrinsic to being a Christian. It is a non-negotiable part of being a Christian. Because in being brought into relationship with God, we’re brought into relationship with each other. And the righteousness of God - the moral character of God - is going to be worked out in relationship with each other.
Now in our western culture, we have prized individualism and this militates against Christian living. We prize independence, we prize being our own man, being self-sufficient, fulfilling your personal dream, all these kind of these that we are bombarded with. We value individual accomplishments above communal. That’s why we celebrate personalities more than we do the communal benefit and growth.
But the New Testament tells us that we are to grow together. Paul, describing the church in I Corinthians 12 describes it as being like a body, or it is the body of Christ. He says, “Christ is the head, His Spirit is the life, we are members of that body.” And then he says this: “the hand cannot say to the foot, ‘I don’t need you’. The hand cannot act in independence or isolation from the foot. The ear cannot say to the eye, ‘I don’t need you’. They cannot operate and function independently of one another. Every part of the body needs every other part. The foot, the hand, the eye, the ear are interdependent.” And when Paul speaks about that, he’s speaking about the church and he’s saying if you are a Christian you’d better be sure you’re part of a community of believers where your gifts are developed and exercised and where your needs are met through your fellow believers, and you are ministering to the needs of others together. That’s why in Hebrews 10:25 the writer there says,
“Let us not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another - and all the more as you see the day approaching.”
Giving up meeting together is not a 21st Century phenomena where people don’t go to church as much anymore. It was a problem that the 1st Century Christian church was facing too, because people misunderstanding - “I can be a Christian, me in my small corner and you in yours”- and you can’t. And that’s why we believe one of the great needs of this church, of our community together, is building the sense of community, where as Galatians 6 says, “where you carry each others’ burdens and in this way you fulfill the law of Christ.” This way you satisfy God’s agenda for you.
James describes what he calls the “royal law”. He says this is a royal law: love your neighbor as yourself. That is: get involved in connection and interdependence with others. That’s why we’ve been stressing the living room today, because we’re talking about righteousness and serious about righteousness is not about you going home and having a better quiet time (I hope that might be something that may happen for some of us) but that you equally learn to connect, because this is how we’re designed to grow and this is how we are designed to stimulate one another.
C.H. Spurgeon, who was a very wise and very powerful preacher in the 19th Century, apparently had a young man come to visit him one day and said, “I can be a Christian without the church; I don’t need others.” And they were sitting apparently in Spurgeon’s lounge; there was a open fire there and at one point Spurgeon took a pair of tongs and took a coal from the blazing fire and put it on the hearth at the side, went on talking and after awhile he said to the young man, “Look down at the hearth. What happened to the coal that I took out of the fire?”
He said, “Well it’s become black; it’s lost its heat and its flame.”
And Spurgeon said, “Young man, that’s why you need to be part of the church, because it’s only as together you are stimulated together that you grow. But like this coal taken out of the fire, on its own it dies out. But in the heat of the fire all the other coals are stimulating it to go on glowing and giving off the heat.”
And it may be that some of us feel a little stunted in our Christian lives and it’s not because your relationship with God is not in order; it’s because you have not developed and involved yourself in relationships with others in the way that we are designed to by God. You are being built together to be a dwelling place in which God lives by His Spirit, Paul says in Ephesians 2.
And so the hunger and thirst for righteousness, which is the moral character of God, is also a hunger and thirst for relational attributes: love, justice, mercy, gentleness, kindness.
And I want to encourage you this morning because I don’t want to put our heads in the clouds - I want to put our feet on the ground – that the great goal of the Christian life is that we know God and be found in Him having a righteousness that is not our own. But that as He works in us and through us, He displays His character and as we are built together in harmony and unity and community with one another, we are a dwelling place where God more fully is able to exhibit Himself and accomplish His purposes.
And so the hunger and thirst after righteousness will involve a hunger for communion with God and a hunger for community with His people. And God will build into you and into me His character as a process that will not be completed in this life, but there will be a process of growth and one degree of glory to another, as Paul describes it, into His image, when we find ourselves ministering to one another in that community that brings us together so that we bear one another’s burdens and others bear our burdens. And together corporately we grow in God and people see His presence, His working, His enabling.
Are you interested in that? And by the way, if you say, “Well I don’t have any appetite”, I’ll tell you why. Go back to the beatitudes. You are not meek – that’s the one that comes before. You are not submitted to Christ as your Lord.
If you are not meek, I’ll tell you why: you are not mourning your condition, you’re not living in that spirit of turning from what you are to what He is.
If you are not mourning your condition I’ll tell you why: you are not aware of your poverty of spirit, you still think you’ve got what it takes.
If you are not aware of your poverty of spirit, you’re not happy because these are the ingredients of happiness, according to Jesus.
If you want to know how that righteousness works out, well come back next week too because the next one says,
“Blessed are those who are merciful, for they will receive mercy.”
Now we get down to the nitty gritty of relational life. Oh boy, this is where it’s tough. It’s fine myself and God; it’s a problem myself and these awkward people around me. Well, we’ve got to learn to be merciful. We’ll talk about that next week. And when you are, you receive mercy. I am tempted to say more than I should; I’m stopping right now, but we’ll pick that up next week.
Let’s pray together. Father, we thank You for the comprehensive portrait of the Christian life in these few verses spoken so long ago by the Lord Jesus Christ, and yet so powerfully relevant in our own lives today. Lord, we don’t want to go home from here resolved to have an appetite because we can’t create it that way. We want to go home, men and women resolved to walk humbly with God in dependency upon the indwelling Holy Spirit and to discover we have an appetite we never had before. And as we feed that appetite we deepen that appetite, that we’ll be people who long to know You better and who long to serve one another better. Mark our lives with those characteristics we pray. For we ask it in Jesus’ Name, Amen.