Blessed Are They That Hunger And Thirst After Righteousness

Matthew 5:6

Today’s message is going to be a blend of this past weeks messages and study. Tuesday night’s revival message and Wed. night’s study.The idea Tuesday night was how to keep the flame burning in our hearts. That we let those flames die down because of circumstances and situations in our lives. Everything is vieing for our attention and our flesh is willing to go along with those temptations. But there is one thing that c is not dictated by circumstances and never changes and that is Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

We read from the Beatitudes Tuesday night, verse 3 in which Jesus states that those are poor in spirit is blessed and will inherit the Kingdom of God. In other words, blessed are the ones that are the opposite of self-sufficient! Ones that are conscious of their lostness and their hopelessness.

Today, we move down to verse 6 and we read of what the recognition of our inability to be sufficient on our own, causes! A hunger and a thirst for that righteousness!

Hunger and Thirst have basically the same meaning: “To desire strongly”

In other words, we do not have the things that provide life. We recognize that and we seek after that desperately, understanding that this filling will not come from ourselves!

Righteousness means: justice or what is right. This is not right according to man, it is God’s right.

This strong desire to be filled is not by our righteousness, what Jesus is speaking of is seeking after God righteousness; being right with God!

Blessed are those who seek to be right with God, they will be filled!

These are people who have denied themselves and recognized their inability to obtain a rightness with God. They sought it out and found a Savior!

Jesus tells the woman at the well: “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”

John 6:48-51 “48 I am that bread of life. 49 Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. 50 This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. 51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

I love it when Jesus tells them that their fathers ate of the manna that came down from and they died!

We cannot count on this world for nothing, but we can count on Jesus and what He has done!!

Basically, today the Lord is calling us away from our strong desires for the hoping for something to happen, to hanging our desires on what already has happened!

We so look for other things, but I believe it is time for us to come up out of the world and look to Jesus Christ and Him crucified!

John 2:23-25, has a brief mention if this and how Jesus responded to it.

This is a hard passage. The people that saw His miracles, had an appetite for the spectacular and according to John, Jesus did not commit Himself to these folks. He didn’t trust them with the Gospel message.

He knew the hearts of men and He knew if it was genuine or not.

Verse 23 subtly reveals the true nature of belief from a Biblical standpoint. Because of what they knew of Jesus from His miraculous signs, many came to believe in Him. However, Jesus made it His habit not to wholeheartedly entrust or commit Himself to them because He knew their hearts. Verse 24 indicates that Jesus looked for genuine conversion rather than enthusiasm for the spectacular. Jesus had no faith in their faith!

Belief in His Name involves much more than the spectacular, it calls for a wholehearted commitment of one’s life to Jesus!

Personally, the most spectacular miracle or healing that I have ever witnessed is when my sinful flesh was washed clean by the Blood of Jesus Christ! Then his resurrection from the grave to die no more and that is a promise for all those that “believe in His Name!”

We hear and say things like “heaven is going to open up and pour out His spirit”, I will dare challenge that and say that Heaven has already opened up and poured out His Spirit among men. It is when Jesus Christ emptied Himself to be the perfect life and perfect sacrifice for mankind!

Some of the things that controls us, is dictated by how things turn out! Why don’t we stop being dictated by the result of human life and be dictated by the Son of God, Who came to be the Son of Man, coming not to be ministered to, but to minister to us by giving His life as a ransom for many!

2 Corinthians 5:11-21.....It is the Love of Christ that compels/controls us!

Nothing else can be said to this. I am compelled or controlled by the love of Christ. What does that mean?

1 John 4:19 “We love him, because he first loved us.”

Romans 5:8 “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

This is what compels us, not the enthusiasm for the spectacular, but the love that was poured out on Calvary!

I am not dictated by whether COVID goes away or not, but I am dictated by the love of Jesus Christ, Who died for all!

I am dictated by Him Who died and rose again, we do not trust ourselves or man anymore, because we have been made new by the precious blood of Jesus Christ!

We have been filled, reconciled to God! Nobody speaks of it that way anymore. They speak as if God owes us something that we deserve the goodness of God!

We get the goodness of God, by His merit not ours and before that can even happen we have to be reconciled to God!

If we truly knew that and held to that every moment of our lives we would be in a better state, we will be filled! In our world which is seeking after any and everything to fill that longing in their hearts, they are blinded that Jesus has already done that, we must believe rightly in His Name!

When that happens then because of the compelling love of Christ in our lives, we are ambassadors for Christ! Declaring be reconciled with God!

An ambassador because of the person and complete work of Jesus Christ!

I can declare that to the world and it is not something that we are waiting to happen, it has already happened.

The 2nd coming of Christ is an event to come, not hoped for or wished for, it is set, it is going to happen, and because of Jesus Christ and Him crucified I can be excited about His coming again to receive unto Himself, to be where He is!

Verse 21 is what Jesus is speaking of in Matt. 5:6.........This where our strong desire should be aimed,

For God the Father has made Jesus Christ to be sin for us, Jesus, Who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ!

If we had some wort of gateway just to witness people as they leave this world and stand before God, if we could and at the moment we witnessed the first one approach God, this verse would become so passionate to us and would be our anthem. We would then begin to hunger and thirst after being right with God and for others being right with God! Jesus Christ would truly become the head cornerstone in our minds and hearts and we would be compelled or controlled by the love of Jesus Christ!

Our whole lives would change! Yes, we would still have to deal with stuff on this earth, but the magnitude of the temporary would hold not weight up against living for the eternal!