The Pursuit of Happiness (Part 2) Matthew 5:6-8

Sermon

Key Passage

Matthew 5:1–8 NIV

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. He said: “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. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Introduction

Happy Mother’s Day!

We don’t have a Mother’s Day sermon. Sorry.

We have begun a journey through a passage of Scripture called the Sermon on the Mount.

This was a three chapter segment preached by Jesus, very early in His ministry

The author, Matthew, presented Jesus as a king, savior, messiah, and the Son of God

Jesus began preaching a message about the Kingdom of Heaven.

Matthew 4:17 NIV

From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

After preaching this message about the Kingdom, Jesus immediately calls his disciples to follow Him

Matthew 4:18–20 NIV

As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” At once they left their nets and followed him.

What we have concluded is that there is one gateway into the Kingdom of Heaven. That gate is not a physical gate that we must open.

The gate is a person, Jesus Christ

He invites us to follow Him as His disciples

If we surrender to the King, Jesus and follow Him, we find ourselves in the Kingdom of Heaven.

If we reject Jesus and choose to follow our own path, then we are outside of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Jesus then goes into a description of what life in the Kingdom and life dependent on the King looks like.

Matthew 5:1–5 NIV

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. He said: “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.

Jesus introduced the Kingdom of God by defining how we pursue happiness.

The word “Blessed” in the original Greek language means “Happy”

You can interpret each of these statements by saying, “In the Kingdom, you will find happiness by...”

Happiness and joy in the Kingdom of God is often counter-intuitive to our thinking in the world today.

Last week, we looked at the first three statements

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

The kingdom of heaven is not for those that can bring a bunch of skills and ability to the table. It is for those who recognize their poverty and the reality that they have nothing to bring to the table.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

As we discussed this, it is the humbled heart that recognizes the consequence of sin as a separating agent from the God who loves us.

The early church recognized their sin and they were “Pierced to the heart”

As a result their comfort was to repent and be baptized.

Comfort is not feeling better about where you are

Comfort is finding redemption in Jesus from who you were.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth

We must embrace contentment in this world and allow for God to provide what we need.

Lives of ambition and personal gain mean that we depend on ourselves for our path and what is provided.

We must learn to depend on the King of the Kingdom for our path and what we are provided.

Today, we are discussing the next three statements in this part of the Sermon on the Mount

I have to confess that I laid out my calendar wrong.

I scheduled Christian to preach next week and asked him to preach about being salt and light.

It will be out of order. But, we need to learn to be adaptable. Especially right now!

Sermon

With that, we will get into today’s three verses.

Hunger and thirst for righteousness

Matthew 5:6 NIV

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

This is a very simple concept and we will talk about its simplicity.

However, this one is possibly one of the most difficult applications in all of the beatitudes.

Start with the pursuit of happiness

The person who can get to this place will find happiness in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Happy is the person who hunger and thirsts for righteousness

I did a word study on this and the word hunger means to be hungry or starve for something

Thirsty means to be parched or thirsty

And righteousness means right-standing before God.

If a person were to be hungry and thirsty for righteousness, what will happen?

They will be filled!

Pretty simple right?

In life, I understand what it means to be hungry. You don’t get my size without dealing with some pretty sizeable amounts of food as a teenager.

Jesus uses our physical hunger and thirst as the metaphor for something much deeper within us.

We know what our hunger feels like. It becomes the center of our attention and our mind reorients away from our tasks and onto the question, “Where am I going to find some food (or water)”?

Jesus is saying this reorienting of our mind and focus ought to be directed toward righteousness.

When we crave righteousness, then we will be filled (or satisfied)

With what? Righteousness.

So, I want to break down a couple of further discussions:

What is righteousness?

How do we hunger and thirst for it?

Righteousness

We might see this as the righteousness that comes from salvation.

There is some truth to this, but once we begin to follow Jesus, are we to stop hungering and thirsting for righteousness? Absolutely not!

Righteousness in the Kingdom of Heaven is what we spoke about a few weeks ago when we talked about the big word, “sanctification”.

We are saved by grace through faith. We are spiritually empty apart from Jesus.

We must recognize our sin and our need for a savior.

The cross that Jesus died upon and the blood he shed was the payment for our sin.

When we respond to that truth in faith, we are saved and we are righteous in the eyes of God.

We are not righteous based on our own merit

We are righteous based on Jesus’ merit

In this position of salvation, however, we still have a sinful nature

This sinful nature is still with us in our flesh.

This becomes our battle in this life

This battle is sanctification. We used the story of Lazarus as a metaphor for this process

Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.

Laz was alive! But he still had the stinking burial clothes of death wrapped around him.

We are raised and alive in Christ, but we still have the nature of sin stinking in our lives.

Our journey of discipleship involves us following Jesus and being changed by Jesus.

We are changed into righteous living!

This is sanctification

This is maturity

This is Kingdom living

This beatitude calls us to hunger and thirst for this

We ought to mourn our sin AND we ought to hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Growth, maturity and right living in this world.

We will talk about this next week when we look at being a light in a dark world.

The dark world will see our good deeds, righteous deeds, and glorify God.

There is no other place to find righteousness than the source of righteousness, Jesus Christ.

Discipleship leads to sanctification and righteousness.

Hunger and Thirst

Now, down to the nuts and bolts of this beatitude

We must hunger and thirst for righteousness.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t make myself hungry.

I think I used to be able to when I was in high school. I was always hungry.

The reality in this life is that we are always hungering and thirsting over something.

When we hunger and thirst over something in this world, is it any wonder why we have no appetite left for righteousness?

I think about when I was a kid. There was a gas station around 1/2 mile away from my house. This gas station had a bin of penny candy.

It was little Tootsie rolls, chocolate bars, suckers, and things like that.

My friend would come over and we would walk to the gas station and drop a $5 bill on the counter and make the poor cash register lady count out 500 pieces of candy.

We would go home and gorge ourselves on candy.

When dinner came around, guess how hungry we were. Not at all!

We had feasted on candy, and now we weren’t hungry for dinner.

This paints a picture for us of hungering and thirsting for righteousness.

All of us hunger and thirst, but what do we seek to satisfy our hunger and thirst?

This world has so much “candy” out there for us

This gets to a reality for me. There are times that I don’t feel like hungering or thirsting for righteousness.

I can’t just go make myself hungry for these things.

Just like I can’t make myself hungry for food. Either I am hungry or I am not. But that hunger is based on what I have put in my stomach beforehand.

So what are we filling our mind and our heart with?

Do I have hunger and thirst for righteousness?

When I lack hunger, its usually because I have put my hunger and thirst toward something other than righteousness

Some kind of “candy” the world would offer.

Hobbies

Fav sports teams

Experiences or feelings

Relationships

Social Media

Yourself and being the “best you”

Politics

Is it possible that you have consumed so much of these things that they have killed your appetite for righteousness?

I’m not saying these things are bad.

A piece of candy now and then isn’t a bad thing.

But we must arrange our lives to hunger and thirst for righteousness, then we will be filled.

Filled

I want to talk about this for a moment.

The word for “hunger” can literally be translated as “starved”

The word for filled can literally be translated into “fattened”

When we truly strive for righteousness, God’s righteousness will not come in small doses. It will be in abundance.

I believe being filled with righteousness comes in two ways.

First, obedience

God makes it clear what is righteousness and it is a matter of our will to conform parts of our life to His righteousness

Stop sinning

Start doing righteous things.

Obedience is active

Second, maturity

Maturity is passive

It is the righteousness that grows within us as we mature as disciples

If I yell at my kids to be more mature, it isn’t something they can do.

I need obedience from my kids.

Maturity will come with age and life. Maturity grows within them.

Merciful

Matthew 5:7 NIV

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Again, this is a very simple passage to understand.

The simple definition of mercy is not giving someone what they deserve.

Jesus told a story about mercy that we ought to understand:

This story can be found in Matthew 18.

Peter asks Jesus, “How many times do I need to forgive someone? Up to 7 times?”

I love this question from Peter because if he had forgiven someone for something 7 times, you’d think Jesus would say, “Well done good and faithful servant!”

But Jesus says, “You should have 10 times the forgiveness needed for the deficit. 70 times 7”

Then he tells the story of a man who owed a king 10,000 bags of gold

Just so you know, in our day, 10,000 bags of gold would be worth roughly $7 Billion dollars

Not million. Billion a 7 with 9 zeroes after it.

The king ordered this man and his family to be thrown into prison because he couldn’t repay the debt.

The man fell on his knees before the king and asked for patience.

How much patience would be needed for this guy to get $7 Billion?

Instead of patience, the king took pity on him and canceled the debt.

You no longer owe $7 Billion. You are free from your debt.

Can you imagine the joy?

As he is walking away, he comes across a man who owed him a few hundred silver coins.

In our day, this is still a significant amount of money, but nowhere near what he owed the king.

A few hundred silver coins would equate to around $100,000.

He approached this man and started choking him out!

The man fell to his knees and begged for the man to be patient with him.

But the man refused and had him thrown into prison until he could pay off the debt.

The king heard about this and was outraged.

He called the man in and un-canceled his debt

Matthew 18:33 NIV

Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’

What do we learn from this story?

Mercy is never easy.

$7 Billion dollars isn’t easy

$100,000 isn’t easy.

It doesn’t matter the issue, showing mercy to another person who is indebted to you is going to be hard.

Jesus is saying, “in the kingdom, you need to understand the amount of your sin that has been forgiven”

In doing this, we realize that the sin committed that impacts us is very small in comparison.

It is still massive and difficult to navigate, but all the more it is necessary to do this.

Happiness in the Kingdom comes when we can forgive and show mercy.

Pure in Heart

Matthew 5:8 NIV

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

I want to begin our discussion of this statement with the conclusion, “For they will see God.”

To the Jewish audience that was there, this would be a massive, even scandalous statement to make.

Now I want you to hear what Jesus is saying here, so there is no misunderstanding.

The word “see” literally means to be in the presence and see with your own eyes.

This isn’t some misunderstood phrase or, “seeing” as in understanding.

It is seeing as in being in the presence of someone and seeing them with your own eyes.

The Jewish people’s understanding of God was so high that they believed that to lay your eyes on God would result in your death.

God’s holiness and presence is far too powerful for a sinful person to be in his presence.

The only person who could be in the presence of God was the high priest and that was only allowed on the day of atonement, once each year

Before the day of atonement, that priest would go through a whole purification process to ensure he was as holy as humanly possible to bring the sins of the nation before God.

they would still tie a rope around his leg, because if he had any unholiness within him, he would surely die and if he died, they needed a way to pull him out of the presence of God without killing another unholy person trying to get him out.

When Jesus said, “In the Kingdom of God, the pure will see God” was a shocking statement.

They knew that they were sinful people and there would be no access to God because of their sin.

But Jesus

Hebrews 4:14–16 NIV

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Jesus is our high priest. He has taken our sin and through Him we are forgiven.

Through Jesus we are pure in heart

Jesus is not a priest that had to purify Himself. He is pure and sinless.

Because we know Jesus, because we follow Jesus, because we have the righteousness of Jesus, our hearts are pure before God.

We can approach the throne of God with GREAT CONFIDENCE.

We can be in the presence of God today.

We will be in the presence of God for eternity.

We may receive mercy

We just discussed this

Not getting what we deserve

And grace

Getting what we don’t deserve

Mercy- Not getting what we deserve

Grace- Getting what we don’t deserve

We are pure in heart because we follow the King and the Priest, Jesus Christ

We can approach the throne of the almighty God with confidence.

Conclusion

I want to talk about this for a moment

I believe that many of us pursue lots of things that surround the throne of God.

We do Bible study programs

We do devotionals

We listen to sermons and podcasts

We draw near, but often stop short of the presence of God

This is the almighty God who wants us to know Him. To be with Him. To speak to Him. To open our hearts to Him.

We listen to sermons or do the routine and how often do we fail to approach the throne of God?

I liken it to a vacation

You get on the airplane and arrive at a tropical paradise, but never leave the airport.

You don’t go to the beach.

You don’t eat the amazing food.

You don’t experience the culture.

You just sit at the airport.

God’s like, “I’ve given you my word. I’ve given you my Spirit. Now slow down and listen to me. Be with me. Draw near to me, so I can draw near to you.”

This connects us to the first point. Hunger and thirst for Him. He will fill you.

Real Life in Action

Head- What have I been hungering after?

Heart- How do I push this aside so I can hunger after God?

Hands- Repent from the things that spoil our appetite for Him.