Matthew 5:6
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
It should not require us to proclaim to people who love the
Lord that Jesus tells the truth, but I have discovered in my own life the
deceiver is one smooth talker, and often I have been tricked by his
tactics. Now if you were the enemy of
God, and God had designed you before you rebelled with an I.Q. of shall we say
1000, then you and I will not match-up so well in a debate with the dude, and
that is what he is counting on. Scripture
is very clear, he has picked a fight with God, and his desire is to kill,
steal, and destroy the thing God loves, and that is you. For many years I was an easy target of the
enemy of my soul, because of my fear and insecurity which made me talk often
when I should have been listening, teach when I needed a teacher, and the Lord
began to show me I was full of pride which leads to arrogance. Though I believed in my head Jesus tells the truth,
often my life did not model this belief, and the thief Jesus refers to in John
10:10 was stealing from me the ability to live in abundance.
With that said, what are some reasons we do not hunger and
thirst for righteousness? If you are
living in the culture of instance gratification, then hungering and thirsting
for anything does not come across as a goal we are going to set. Jesus is aware of the culture, and maybe you
and I were in his mind when He told the story of the “Lost coin” for in that story
we find what is needed to hunger and thirst for righteousness. The story is found in Luke 15:8-9, “Or what woman,
having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep
the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she has found it,
she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I
have found the coin that I had lost.” For
a person to walk in righteousness it will not happen without seeking diligently
in both prayer and submission to the authority of Scripture, and asking the
Holy Spirit to guide you into truth.
Jan and I had the great honor of sitting at the feet of
Howard Hendricks at the Billy Graham center called the Cove, on three occasions. To his friends, he was Howie, or Prof, and
he is now experiencing the presence of our Lord, because he left the dying and
went to the living. His son told the
story of asking his dad how he sat through sermons that were so poorly prepared,
and his dad shared that he had never sat through a uninspiring message for once
the Scripture had been given he would begin to search for understanding and
before the sermon was finished he had been refreshed. Howard Hendricks was hungry for the truth, he
was a man of the book, and because he thirsted for what was there it not only
changed his life but the life of one like me.
In my “HCSB” Study Bible, it states on page1618 the
following: “Hunger
and thirst are metaphors for a disciple’s fervent desire for righteousness. The words they will be filled are in the
passive voice, indicating righteousness is not something that disciples can
achieve by their own efforts.” The
author of the Study Bible goes on in the footnotes to state this: “it is a “divine
passive” that describes an act of God.
He alone imparts the righteousness for which disciples hunger and
thirst.” “The righteousness that Jesus
demands of us is actually a divine gift given to his followers.”
From the Back Porch,
Bob Rice
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