Crave

Hunger and Thirst

Have you ever really experienced hunger or thirst? Like really, deep down, stomach rumbling hunger? Or the type of thirst where your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth? It’s in these times that you realize how desperate of a human you really are. You are willing to do anything to get something to eat or something to drink. Now, whether we have felt his on an extreme level, or just discomfort, all of us understand what it’s like to hunger and thirst for something. Maybe it’s a craving for cake, a desire for coffee. Maybe it goes deeper. Maybe you want 10,000 followers, a new car, or just for your dad to tell you he’s proud of you. We all understand hunger and we all understand thirst.

Jesus loves to use things we are familiar with to show us the character of God. Throughout His teaching He always tied things back to some common part of the human condition. Poverty, weakness, hunger, and thirst. The Bible says in Romans 1:18-20 that creation reveals the nature and attributes of God. So, what is Jesus trying to tell us about God. Or, more specifically, our relationship with Him?

6 God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice,

for they will be satisfied. [1]-Matthew 5:6

What is righteousness?

Righteousness- the quality of being morally right or justifiable.

When you hunger or thirst for something, you do whatever you have to to get that thing. And God placed that drive in you! But so often, we satisfy that hunger and thirst, that craving, with something else. So poor imitation of what God really has for us. We fill it with food, social media, relationships, church, work, school, sex, porn, drugs, alcohol. Some of the things we use are good things. But when a good thing becomes the ultimate thing it’s a useless thing. Church is good. But if you use serving at church as a replacement for what you are really craving, it becomes a false god in your life.

So the question remains, what are we all craving? This says righteousness, but we don’t see righteousness in the world though we hunger and thirst for it. When we think of righteousness we often think of social justice. That’s not what Jesus is speaking of here. Righteousness is something that none of us can attain on our own. It’s something beyond our understanding. The righteousness Jesus is talking about is right standing before God. And as sinners, we are completely unable to achieve that. At least, on our own.

So far everything Jesus has spoken of in this sermon points back to our own awareness of the situation. We had to know we were poor in spirit and mourning our sin and be humble. We all crave righteousness. We crave a real relationship, personal relationship, with our Creator. But not all of us can pinpoint it. Once we can realize we crave a relationship with God, we go after it with everything we have. This is a promise from Jesus that is so simple, yet it can change your entire life.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for a relationship with God, for they will have it”

What you must decide is this, are you willing to give up the false gods you’ve used to satisfy that craving? Are you ready to walk away from the life you have built apart from God? Because if you truly hunger and thirst for a relationship with your creator, you will reject anything that stands in your way. If you just want and Sunday and Wednesday god, you can have that, but you’ll never be satisfied. If you want meaning, purpose, fulfillment, joy, peace, kindness, patience. If you want hope, you can have it.

[1]Tyndale House Publishers. (2015). Holy Bible: New Living Translation (Mt 5:6). Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers.