Those Who Hunger and Thirst after Righteousness
1Seeing the multitudes, he went up onto the mountain. When he had sat down, his disciples came to him. 2He opened his mouth and taught them, saying, 3“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. 4Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 5Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. 6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. 7Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. 8Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. 9Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God. 10Blessed are those who have been persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. 11“Blessed are you when people reproach you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, for my sake. 12Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Wealth is something no one can do without. Because possessions have already become the measure of a person’s character and worth, people will use any means at all if only it brings in money. Now that human value and character have been replaced by the worldly wealth a person holds, things have gone so far that money itself is worshiped. Not everyone is like this, but the world has become a place where morals, conscience, and faith are readily abandoned in the face of money, and where people seize another’s property by force if only they can lay hands on it. As people’s thinking shifted in this way, a creed of cutting corners spread everywhere—whatever it takes, just make plenty of money—and people grew stingy about sharing with their neighbors. Once the thought takes hold that it is enough for me to have plenty, we become grudging about entering into our neighbors’ pain. Because of that, contempt for human life spreads, and robbery, fraud, and murder multiply.
Then what can turn the hearts of people who are running headlong toward evil, and who can bring light to this dark world? The churches, charged with exposing by the truth the sins of people sinking into materialism, are silent. Bound to the size of their buildings, the number of their members, and the degrees of their pastors, churches everywhere are dressing themselves up more lavishly than the world does. God told us to proclaim the truth, yet as if competing to boast of the biggest building, they build far larger and grander than anything the world puts up. In the sermons, truth, the glory of God, and the fullness of the Holy Spirit go in by the pinch, like seasoning, while worldly blessing has become the main ingredient. Jesus told us to be light and salt, yet few churches today are striving to shine as light. He told us to be the salt that keeps souls from decay, yet so many churches keep one eye on what people think that it has become hard to find one that preaches the truth. In Hosea 6:6 God says that he desires mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings. He does not mean that he wants no sacrifice; he means that we must not practice a faith of empty form.
1 Samuel 15:22
22Samuel said, “Has Yahweh as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying Yahweh’s voice? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.
God is not saying that he dislikes sacrifice itself. If we worshiped in truth and in the Spirit several times a day, he would be greatly pleased; what he does not want is worship and sacrifice that are not honest. When Amalek attacked Israel without restraint, God was furious and declared that he would blot out Amalek’s name so that it would not be remembered. He then commanded King Saul to strike Amalek and utterly destroy it, leaving nothing of all they had. Yet even though God had commanded that everything be destroyed, Saul thought it a waste to kill Amalek’s finest animals. So he put the worthless ones to death and drove all the best of them back to Israel. Then he made his excuse: he had spared the fine animals, he said, because he wanted to offer them to God as choice sacrifices.
But even when we offer what the world approves, chosen by human greed, God will not accept it. Saul, who had defied God’s will, could not discern what came first, and in the end he even set up a monument so that all the glory would go to himself. When God saw this, he drove him from the throne forever.
God wants us to know him even before we bring him worship or sacrifice, because only when we know him can we fully offer the sacrifice of obedience that he accepts. Without knowing his will, we may look as though we have faith, yet we end up practicing it however we please. To judge and decide matters of faith as we like reveals, in the end, that our own thoughts, righteousness, pride, and knowledge matter more to us than God does. We tend to weigh both our walk with God and the sermons we hear by our own measure, but we must wrestle with what kind of worship God wants and what kind of prayer he longs to hear. To live according to his will, we must first learn clearly, through Scripture, what he is saying. Once we know it clearly, we must then worship in truth and in the Spirit. What do you think? Is the church today offering worship he would accept? Had its members lived by the word of truth like the five virgins who kept watch, their faith would be shining out now, while the nation stands in such peril.
There is no field—politics, the economy, education, or any other—without Christians in it. Yet though they have been placed in every corner, they give no light, and the world grows steadily darker for it. The saints have not lived as saints, and that failure is what keeps them from shining boldly into the darkness. The church has no strength because we have failed to be salt—salt that, as God commanded, dissolves itself and is spent so that the world does not rot. Then to whom have all our countless services been offered, and what have all our unceasing prayers been for? Had the church taught truth and the Holy Spirit rather than material blessing, its people would have become lamps full of the Spirit, lighting up the darkness wherever they stand. Had the church refused to compromise from the start and taught the word rightly, no one would need to urge them out into the world to govern well or to rescue the economy; they would already have borne the responsibility given to them as the saints. Of course, we cannot change a world racing toward judgment. But the church has stood in this land for a hundred years. Had the churches preached the gospel alone, steadily, for all those hundred years, by now people transformed by the word would probably be fighting sin in every place. The church must not press its people only toward the outward forms of worship and prayer; it must teach the living word of life and lead them to worship in truth and in the Spirit. After only a few years in church, anyone knows that Naaman, the Aramean commander, was healed of leprosy, and that Elijah prayed and brought rain after three years and six months without it. We have heard countless times how Joseph, sold as a slave by his brothers, became prime minister of Egypt and kept his own people alive; but because we heard it only as a Bible story, we cannot apply it to our lives. Daniel and Nehemiah were carried off as captives, yet they became prime ministers in that land, brought their people home, and built the temple. These things truly happened, and what brought them about was their reliance on God.
Presidents, officials, ministers, and church members who serve God must stop blaming others and first repent, so that their own faith may be set right. When a Christian goes into politics and turns out no different from anyone else in the world, it is because the church and its ministers have failed to teach the gospel properly, and they must answer for it. And when people, at the first touch of hardship, harm their own lives or the lives of others, lose heart, and cannot rise again, it is because no one has rightly taught them who the Lord of life is. Our life does not belong to us. God gave it, and God will take it back; so we must never take it upon ourselves to decide whether a life goes on or ends. Taking another person’s life is murder, and harming oneself is a sin as well; neither may be done. To those who have lost heart and all hope in this way, we must bring the news that God himself came to this earth for them and died in their place. When churches too many to count, pastors who must preach the truth, and saints who must live by it take up their responsibility and boldly proclaim the gospel, the Holy Spirit will surely be at work.
There was a time when I prayed for people according to my own judgment of them. For one who truly loved God, I prayed for blessing; for another who was worldly, I prayed that they would repent. But I came to see that God, quite unlike me, loves every person without condition. He said to me, “I show no partiality. If I had saved people by sorting the good from the wicked as you judge them, not one soul in this world would be saved.” He went on, “I saved even the thief on the right on nothing more than his confession of faith, and I forgave the disciples who left me. Remember this: salvation is not your work but mine. Your part is only to pray for the souls I have entrusted to you and to tell them the truth—no more and no less.” He also said, “Even someone who looks wicked to you needs to be saved. As I have forgiven you, you too must forgive those souls and pray for them.” And he added, “If a soul does not return though you tell them and pray for them, I will not hold you responsible. But if you do not tell the truth to the souls I have entrusted to you, and do not pray for them, I will surely call you to account.”
There is a reason God has brought you to hear the word of truth. It is so that you will carry that truth to the souls he has entrusted to you. Until now the church and its people have not done this as they should. The world mocks the church and all who belong to it, for we have swelled our heads with knowledge and filled our hearts with the world’s rubbish. If the church has gone the wrong way until now, it is time to turn back. Before people become slaves of Satan, we must plead earnestly for grace.
Matthew 5:6
6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.
Jesus commands us to live as those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. To hunger and thirst after righteousness is to know the desperation of someone stranded in a desert without a drop of water, searching for it simply to stay alive. Perhaps this does not feel real to you, since you have never known the hunger of the pregnant woman driven to steal, or a thirst so fierce that you could no longer think straight. People who risk their lives to flee North Korea for the South, we are told, cross the river ready to die, so great is their hunger and their longing for freedom. How could we ever truly understand what they feel? Hunger and thirst that we have only heard about cannot be known without living through them. In 2 Kings 6 the suffering and anguish of Israel are recorded in detail, and through that account I want us to sense how deep a spiritual hunger and thirst after righteousness really is.
Ben Hadad, king of Aram, led a great army and laid siege to Samaria. Surrounded and cut off from food, the people of Samaria could not endure their hunger and committed the evil of eating their own children. One day a woman cried out to the king of Israel for help. The king answered that he had no strength left to help her and asked what was wrong. She told him that the other woman had proposed that they eat her son today and the other’s son tomorrow. She had already eaten her own son, she said, but now the other woman had hidden hers and would not give him up, and she begged the king to help her get that son to eat. Hearing this, the king tore his clothes and groaned. I cannot say how hungry a person must be to eat their own child, but when Jesus says we must hunger for righteousness and thirst for the word, he is speaking of a spiritual famine as desperate as what these women endured.
Have you ever longed for God’s grace so intensely—hungering for his righteousness and thirsting for his word—that you were nearly beside yourself? People sometimes lay down their lives for justice, and some fight to their dying breath to defend their own righteousness. I wonder whether those who battle so boldly for the world’s justice make the same effort to be filled with the righteousness of God. The more we give up human righteousness, the more God’s righteousness fills us; that is why Paul trained himself to lay down his own righteousness, as one who died daily. When you have failed to worship with your whole heart, does it hurt as if your heart were torn, leaving you so sorry before God that the whole day is agony? If you go a day without talking with God in prayer, do you lose all desire to eat or to laugh, does life itself seem empty, so that you can hardly bear to go without prayer? As saints, we must hold the conviction that nothing good the world offers is greater than the joy of understanding the word, and that for the church and the saving of souls we can sacrifice ourselves. Sadly, saints today lack even this basic faith. We must throw away the absurd notion that reading the Bible and setting aside time to pray, in order to understand the word, is something only pastors need. Salvation is not something a pastor hands you; you receive it directly from God through your own faith. And heaven is not entered by a whole church together, but by each person.
Jesus said, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Only with an earnest faith that hungers after righteousness will we be filled—with eternal life, with the grace of God, and with the inheritance of heaven. Only when we are spiritually full can we look to those around us, make sacrifices, share what we have, and pour out love. A hardened heart can never do good. It is mature Christians like these who can take part in God’s work. Those who have become poor in spirit, who mourn for the saving of souls and are comforted by God—these are the holy ones who hunger and thirst after righteousness.
Matthew 6:33
33But seek first God’s Kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well.
Because the people of the world do not know that God has richly provided all things for them to enjoy, they live anxious about what they will eat, what they will drink, and what they will wear. To those who squander their years securing food, clothing, and shelter, Jesus said that this world is only a place where we spend a brief season as strangers passing through, and that we must seek first his Kingdom and his righteousness. He meant that if they believed his word that God’s Kingdom comes first and lived by it, what they needed would be supplied as a matter of course. Faith is a spiritual battle over whether we believe the words of Jesus or do not. To believe what the Lord Jesus Christ, who is himself God’s righteousness, has said is faith; to live by his words is wisdom. We can say this because Jesus, the only Son, took on a human body, came to this earth, and promised that he is the bread of life, that whoever comes to him will never hunger, and whoever believes in him will never thirst. We who once lived with Satan as our father and our husband have become holy, serving God as our Father and Christ as our husband. Those who have been loved so deeply have been blessed to lay down every heavy burden and enter into rest.
John 4:14
14but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst again; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”
From now on you must consider what water you will drink. Will you drink, for the sake of the flesh, the water that floods the world, or the water of life that Jesus gives? You must make that decision clearly. The water the world offers quenches thirst only if you draw it and drink it yourself. So people, afraid of thirsting again, cannot leave the world, and in the end they choose eternal death to guard water that will dry up. The water Jesus gives cannot be seen, but it is a well of water springing up to eternal life within everyone who simply believes. There is no need, then, to fight anyone for it, and no need ever to thirst again. People accept only what they see with their own eyes, which is why they place no value on the water of life; but you who hope for the eternal Kingdom must keep the water of eternal life in a clean heart.
When a Samaritan woman from the town of Sychar came to draw water, Jesus asked her for a drink. Since Jews and Samaritans had no dealings with one another, the woman was astonished and asked how he could ask her for water. Jesus replied that if she had known the gift of God and who he was, she would have asked him instead, and he would have given her living water. As she saw it, she had a well to drink from whenever she was thirsty and lacked nothing; at first she could make no sense of a man who had nothing at all offering water that would end thirst for good. But once she understood that the well Jacob gave could quench only the body’s thirst and could never satisfy the soul’s longing, and that the water Jesus gives is the never-failing word of life, she left behind the water jar she needed to live and ran off to tell others the good news.
The words of Jesus are a spring that never runs dry. This word of life now dwells in your heart. If you are parched and longing now, I hope you will drink the living water that wells up without ceasing through the truth, because it is a never-failing spring that flows all the way to the throne of God. He has told us that the world’s water must always be paid for, but that we may come and drink the water of life freely, to our heart’s content. If you lead thirsting souls to Christ and share the water of life with them, God will give you the inheritance of the land as your blessing. May you never be swayed by the temptations of the world, but stand before the Lord always as one who hungers and thirsts after righteousness. If you share so that other souls may drink their fill of living water, God will satisfy your own longing with the power and grace of heaven. Let us be holy people who, like those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, stay always close beside God, receive blessing upon overflowing blessing, and bring life to souls that are headed for death.