Ok, Hold Out Your Bowl!

Let’s start with a question this morning: Who wants to be blessed? To be happy? Fortunate? We all do right?

That’s why I always bless people when they make a noise. Most people only bless after a sneeze, but not me…

We all have a desire in us to be blessed, to seek happiness. The important question is where do we turn for it. The Beatitudes is a great place to start since it’s literally a list of the kind of people who are blessed! But do we have faith that this is where we should look? Do we really believe that God’s Word is where we can gain the true source of blessedness? I hope you do, because here’s the good news today…

Mat 5:6

The person who truly desires godly righteousness will find themselves fat and happy with it!

PRAY

Being blessed is great! I’m sure we all want to be blessed! But we have to be careful. When we are just chasing that as a goal we usually find ourselves trying out a bunch of substitutes that don’t satisfy us. Like Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Make sure you are not hungering and thirsting after blessedness. Hunger and thirst after righteousness, long to be like Christ, and then you will have that and the blessedness. -Martyn Lloyd-Jones

TELL THEM YOU’RE GOING OUT OF ORDER!

Righteousness

We’re going to start with righteousness because I think it’s helpful to know what we’re hungering and thirsting for before talking about that.

Righteousness is right living according to God’s holy character.

It’s closely associated, this word, with justice, doing right by others.

He’s revealed his character to us through his Word… Righteousness is living according to that.

There was some YouTube thing I watched with my boys once, I think it was Dude Perfect, where they were having a competition and one of the things they had to do it the competition was go stand on a balance beam over a foam pit and then this thing came flying at them on a cable over their heads. It was a piece of drywall or something and it had a shape cut out of it, different shapes of people doing poses. So this thing is flying at them and they have to jump up at just the right time and hit that pose cut out of this mini-wall at just the right time and height…act it out a little And if they don’t get it right, they fail and they get knocked off the beam. They lose!

We can think of righteousness kind of like that! God has revealed the shape of his character to us, and we are called to match it. To live according to it. To be perfect as He is perfect!

God is in his character righteous, He is righteousness.

Psalm 119:137 ESV

Righteous are you, O Lord, and right are your rules.

Jesus was righteous in his character and in how he lived. He lived perfectly according to the holy, righteous character of God, his own character!

Hebrews 7:26 ESV

For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.

So we can see that in the Gospels. And we jump up and contort ourselves and get knocked off the balance beam.

We are not righteous. We are sinners by nature. In our own effort we can not be righteous.

Isaiah 64:6 ESV

We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

We must understand that and accept it. Confess that we fall short of God’s righteous standard by lightyears! But in acknowledging that, you hopefully also see that there is something that you need, and hopefully want!

Hunger and Thirst

We should earnestly desire to see, receive, and live by godly righteousness.

Jesus understood hunger and thirst! There is what I think one of the funniest verses in the Bible that tells us that, Matt 4:2… I think that 40 day and night kind of hunger is what Jesus is telling us here!

Usually I don’t let a whole lot of time go by without eating, and I really don’t like to be late for a meal. But occasionally I will get to doing something and I’ll get so focused on that, a couple weeks ago I built a storage bin rack for my garage. I started on it after I dropped Parker off at school and then all of a sudden it was like 2:00 and all of a sudden I realized I hadn’t eaten lunch and I was starving. In those moments I feel like I’m going to die if I don’t immediately eat! Kristen loves it when I get like that!

We ought to hunger and thirst for righteousness!

Psalm 42:1–3 ESV

As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”

We are to hunger and thirst for righteousness and The Lord is our righteousness: Jehova Tsidkenu. (Jer 23:6) Christ becomes righteousness for his people!

1 Corinthians 1:30 ESV

And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption,

So to hunger and thirst for righteousness is to hunger and thirst for Jesus! And we do this above all else!

Matthew 6:33 ESV

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

What do you do when you’re hungry and thirsty? Do you sit in your house and wait till food and water come to you? No! When I was in the garage and realized I hadn’t had lunch and I was starving, I didn’t sit down in the garage and wait for my family to get home to hopefully bring me something. I went inside and I started searching!

If you aren’t pursuing righteousness… then you’re not hungering and thirsting for it.

And this is a tricky hunger, it’s a specific hunger. Like when you have a craving for something specific and you’re not satisfied if you don’t get it. Whether we realize it or not, we need this righteousness. But sometimes we try to let other things satisfy us… It will never last!

Martyn Lloyd-Jones offers some tests to evaluate if your are indeed hungering and thirsting for righteousness:

Do you see through your own false righteousness?

Are you reminding yourself of and putting yourself in the way of righteousness?

Explain this

If you will hunger and thirst for righteousness… you will be satisfied!

Shall be Satisfied

All who place their faith and trust in Jesus will receive credit for his perfect righteousness through imputation.

I read this week that this verb is in what is called the divine passive…

Philippians 3:8–9 ESV

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—

We can go looking for it, but we can’t fill ourselves with it. It is the gift of God, we’ve established that we can’t do it ourselves, so we cannot boast! All glory to God!

It’s kind of like Space Jam! The old movie, the good one with Michael Jordan. Not the new one with LeBron. These little aliens become great basketball players. I brought a picture…

They had no skill of their own, they were filled with the skill of others. They didn’t work for it, they didn’t earn it. It wasn’t theirs but they were getting credit for it. That’s the righteousness we’ve received from Christ by faith!

Righteousness has always been given to us by God through faith.

Genesis 15:6 ESV

And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.

Those who have placed their faith in Jesus have been filled and are being filled with the righteousness of God, Lloyd-Jones says. And he got that from the Bible! Christian, you have been declared righteous before the Father on the basis of the life of Jesus. That is the doctrine of imputation. But you are also being made more and more righteous in your own life by the work of the Holy Spirit in your heart! That is the doctrine of sanctification! And God is doing it all!

This is an essential part of the Gospel!

2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

So Christian…

If you are not a Christian…