Matthew 5:6 - This is the way to be satisfied.

I’m not allowed to be cliche because my wife is allergic to cliches.

You want to know who is really good at cliches? Christians.

“Thoughts and prayers”

The fish symbol on the back of your car—Even though you just cut off five people in traffic.

“How are you?” “Too blessed to be stressed.”

What does it mean to be “blessed?”

We hear this word used a lot in a lot of different contexts.

Some people end a conversation with “God bless”

Politicians end their political speeches: “God bless you, God bless the USA”

People will even invoke a blessing on you if you sneeze.

Does it mean that I’ll be blessed with good health?

I hope this sneeze, by God’s grace, doesn’t become something worse?

Does it mean I’ll be blessed financially?

God is going to give me security and comfort?

When we think of someone that’s blessed, we think of financial stability and “the good life.”

Someone who’s got cash in the bank and seem to alway be in a great mood.

Big Idea: This is the Way…To Satisfaction.

Context

The beatitudes are the biography of a Christian.

What we need to understand about the beatitudes is that:

The blessed life does not come from right action

The blessed life comes from right identity.

Jesus is telling them that in order to be my disciple, that is what you will become.

You can’t just pick a beatitude and say, “I’m going to be poorer in Spirit!”

We have take a wholistic look of the beatitudes.

If you want to live the blessed life, this is the way.

Stand to read

Matthew 5:6 ESV

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Leader: This is God’s Word.

Everyone: Thanks be to God.

The first three beatitude communicate need.

Poor in spirit, mourning, meek.

These communicate a desperate need for a Savior because there’s nothing righteous in us.

We tend to pacify our spiritual neediness with things that don’t point us to God.

We look for short-term, temporary satisfaction that doesn’t leave us feeling full/complete, rather empty and alone.

We turn away from the abundant life to live for the pleasures of the world.

Gospel presentation

We are desperate for righteousness because we don’t have any of our own.

Because of our sin, we are unrighteous.

When Jesus died on the cross, His blood covered all of our unrighteousness.

When you trust that somehow, when Jesus died on the cross, it counted for you, you are saved!

This is the intense grace of God by giving us Jesus’s righteousness.

Jesus took our unrighteousness and gave us His righteousness.

Jesus took the punishment for your sin so that you can have His blessedness.

People who follow Jesus “Hunger and thirst for righteousness”

This is a hard metaphor for us to grasp because of where we live.

We have food and water readily available to us.

Jesus is referring to a helpless desperation.

I hate snow. I’m pretty open about it.

It’s pretty for the first five minutes, but then I’m over it.

It’s cold, wet, and I can’t go anywhere.

I took the kids over to my parent’s house this week and I was going to go to jiu jitsu.

Dad had warned me about their driveway and the snow

I’m his son, so I said, “Rah, rah, I got it.”

I started to head out of the driveway and got stuck because my dad van wasn’t an all wheel drive.

I thought, “I’ve got this.”

I could go back ward, not forward.

Then the frantic panic set in.

There was nothing I could do to get this car out.

But I was going to try absolutely everything.

I was even going to try to put a shirt under the tire—Because they’ll do it.

I felt totally helpless and desperate to get the van out.

Jesus is talking about this relentless pursuit

“I NEED IT. I HAVE TO HAVE IT.”

This is an unquenchable, intense appetite.

These people are obsessed with being more like Jesus.

A Christian want to live a godly life as much as a starving man wants his next bite.

Church, Jesus says we are blessed when…

We are desperate of righteousness

We find this desperation in the guys of the Bible.

Psalm 27:4 ESV

4 One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.

All that David wants is God’s presence.

Take the rest of the world, and give me You!

Psalm 42:1–2 ESV

1 As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?

David prays with a desperate pursuit and desire for the presence of God.

Can you hear his agony and angst?

This isn’t a happy-go-lucky verse.

He’s not there, but he wants to be!

I don’t hear people pray this way anymore.

I know a lot of people that know a lot of Bible verses that don’t desire the presence of the Lord like this.

Psalm 63:1 ESV

1 O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

David modeled a desperation for the Lord that he cried out for His presence.

David desired for God’s powerful presence in His life.

He was in agony over being with the Lord.

The way of a Jesus follower is that we are desperate for the righteousness of God in our lives.

It’s not our own self-righteousness we seek—Jesus purchased our righteousness on the cross.

Christians are people who hunger to be more like Jesus.

We are obsessed with being Jesus-y people.

We can’t do it perfectly until heaven, but through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can take steps toward Jesus.

How do we do it?

Prayer

We get to be with God.

Pray aligns our hearts and wills to God.

Bible

This is more than an emotional pursuit.

We need to know the character, nature, heart, power of God.

The more you know someone, the more you can love them.

The way you know you love your friends is because you know them.

Church

What we’re doing right now is very important.

We get to grow together as God’s people.

We are distinct from the world.

Sometimes I need reminded of God’s promises in my life and I need the church.

I need the people of God to spur me toward becoming more like Jesus!

Transition

This ferocious pursuit of righteousness comes with a major promise.

Matthew 5:6 ESV

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Jesus tells us that when we relentlessly pursue righteousness, we’ll be satisfied.

This hard for us in a day when we’re starving to be fulfilled.

We have so many things at our fingertips, that we find it impossible to be content but also we wont allow ourselves to be bored.

We’re always in the pursuit of happiness and satisfaction that companies who try to sell you things always give you the “satisfaction guarantee.”

This is always an empty promise.

I tend to get trapped in wanting trinkets and more things.

I get fixed on something I find tremendously interesting, and the part of my brain that’s the loudest says, “If I could just have that, I would be so happy.”

Then I get it, and it’s cool.

And then, I see something else that “If I could just have that, I would be so happy.”

Tony Valenti got me a watch when we launched the church.

It wasn’t a month later I was already searching for my next watch.

My wife had to remind me, “You just got that one from Tony…”

The constant pursuit of satisfaction is an exhausting endless cycle.

We attempt to find satisfaction in things that only God can fill.

We have a hole in the soul.

When we look for other forms of happiness, other Saviors, and anything but God to find our identity, we’ll never be satisfied.

Jesus says, the way to satisfaction…is through me.

Jesus is the fullness of God’s righteousness in a person.

If we are going to pursue righteousness and live a godly life, we have to find all our satisfaction in the good news of Jesus Christ.

An issue with church people is that they think the gospel is the beginning of their Christian life.

The gospel is the Christian life.

You don’t graduate from the gospel. I can’t get over the fact that God gave up His Son to die on the cross to forgive me of my sins and it pleased Him to saved me!

Now Jesus is looking at His disciples and saying “If you want to be satisfied…This is the way…I am the way.”

Church, we are blessed when…

We are satisfied by Jesus

There is always so much more of Jesus to be had.

We can be satisfied in Christ because there is always much more of Him than we have capacity for!

We will never be satisfied until we recognize that the Lord is the ultimate source of real righteous satisfaction.

We can’t settle for lesser loves that leave us empty and wanting more.

Only Jesus can fill the soul and give us complete satisfaction for this spiritual emptiness that we all feel!

If you’re not a Christian, you can trust in Jesus’s death on the cross to forgive you of your sins and give you a righteous identity before God.

Through faith in the blood of Jesus, you and I are declared righteous.

But this is only the beginning.

The Holy Spirit begins working through the gospel in our lives to make us more like Jesus day by day, giving us a hunger/thirst for righteousness.

It’s not instantaneous, but it’s progressive.

We do not become holy to be accepted by God.

We are made holy because we have been accepted by God.

The blessed life does not come from right action

The blessed life comes from right identity.

My identity is that I am a sinner who desperately needs the righteousness of Jesus to save me.

Now we start taking steps of obedience toward Jesus.

Take the Next Step

Trust in Jesus to be righteously satisfied.

Become a Christian.

Be baptized

Pursue righteousness

Prayer, Bible, Church.

Read Matthew 5:3-12 every day this week.

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