Senior Pastor Damein Schitter continues our series on the Beatitudes, preaching about the importance of hunger and thirst after righteousness, or right-making ache in our three word summary.
All right, good morning. My name is Damien, I'm the senior pastor and I'm grateful to get to preach this morning. We are in a sermon series right now on the Beatitudes, and today we've come to the Beatitude where Jesus says blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Now, these Beatitudes, if you've been with us, we've said our characteristics of the flourishing life. These are Jesus's teachings If you want to live a life of flourishing. This is what it looks like.
Speaker 1:I do want to notice that today we've been weaving in this theme of hunger and thirst and satisfaction all throughout the liturgy, and it did dawn on me that, in a culture of plenty and cupboards of all of ours that are probably filled with food and if you're like me, you sometimes can open the refrigerator, look in the pantry and say we have nothing to eat and then not go shopping for a week and you're just fine. You know what this is like, this fullness of resources, now, that's not always been true. In fact, it hasn't been true most of human history and it's not true in most of the world, even today. And the reason that I bring this up is because this metaphor of hunger and thirst is meant to capture us. It's meant to grab on to something visceral, and for many of us, we've lost the experience of what it really is to truly hunger and truly thirst, to be desperate, to think that I might die if I don't have something to drink. Well, this would have been much closer to the experience of the original hears, of this beatitude and, of course, all throughout the scriptures when the metaphor of hunger and thirst is used. Think about a journey throughout the desert when you only have so much water. And for us, we think well, there's always a gas station. When I was growing up, we'd go on a trip and my parents would say at the end if we forgot something, there's always a Walmart there. Well, that's not true here. Hunger and thirst is serious business, and to try to grab our attention of a visceral reality, of what it might be like to hunger and thirst to the point where you might die, I want to tell a story that many of you will know once I get into it, about a man in 2003, april 26th to be exact made a solo descent of Blue John Canyon in southeastern Utah.
Speaker 1:His name is Aaron Ralston. He's a mountaineer and a mechanical engineer, so that is to say he didn't do this for a living. This was a hobby for him. While he was descending on his own, he dislodged a boulder and it pinned his right wrist to the side of the canyon wall and at first he thought he could move. But then he realized I cannot move my hand. And that may not seem like that big of a deal, except when you can't move your hand, it means you can't keep walking, which means he's trapped. After five days he had to break his forearm and amputate it with a dull pocket knife to break free. But that's not it. After that he had to make his way through the rest of the canyon, part of which required him to repel down a 65 foot drop and hike seven miles to safety.
Speaker 1:When reflecting on this in an interview years later, in part of the interview he says quote I think that the darkest point of the entrapment came after I had eliminated all my options of escape and was really left with the idea that I had to amputate my arm. It's just that I wasn't desperate enough yet. And then, as I became more desperate on the third day, I tried it and it didn't work at first. He goes on to say you see all options had been exhausted. No one was coming for me, no one knows where I am. I cannot move this rock, and if you read the rest of the interview or other interviews, you'll learn that during the days I'm sorry, yeah, the days of this desperation, rostin endured extreme conditions. One of the worst for him was extreme dehydration. In his recounting of the experience, he described the overwhelming thirst and the mental and physical toll that that took on him. The lack of water became a central and agonizing part of his survival story. Think about that. I knew what I had to do, I just wasn't desperate enough yet.
Speaker 1:Now, while hopefully we will never experience this type of harrowing reality, we all must come to grips with the reality that we have a hunger and thirst. We just haven't become desperate enough yet. It's there, but in a culture of seeming plenty, we cover it up. We don't experience it, but it is there. This isn't just new for us. From Plato to Aristotle, from Aristotle sorry, from Plato and Aristotle to Seneca and even Oprah, the reality of something like this hunger of heart, this longing to be filled, is not only taught but sought. Yet oftentimes we don't truly get in touch with it until we admit, as Aaron Rawston did, that all of our options have been exhausted or, in Jesus's words, that we are poor in spirit. You see, we all have a deep hunger and a thirst in our heart, but we often try to fill the void with things that will never satisfy. And until our metaphorical arm is stuck between a rock and the canyon wall where we can't move, we'll continue to seek fulfillment that does not actually fulfill.
Speaker 1:Imagine this with me. Imagine that you have your favorite well and it's a reliable source of water for you, and it's always filled, and one day, though, to your dismay, you find that the well is dry. Panic sets in as you realize your dependence on the one source that you are used to is not there. And you see, the reality is that our lives are filled with wells that we depend on for fulfillment, welles that are cracked and one day will be empty. Welles like career success and relationships and personal achievements. But just like a real physical well with water, these sources run dry, leaving us feeling lost and eventually desperate.
Speaker 1:You see, because what we learn in this beatitude and many other places in the scriptures is that all wells of water to satiate our thirst that are not God himself are simply broken cisterns that hold no water. You see, it's not hunger and thirst that's your problem, it's the way you seek to satisfy it, that is, and this beatitude invites us to consider that at minimum, and so I want to consider it in three ways today. The first is what is the nature of this hunger and thirst that Jesus talks about? The second is the blessedness of this hunger and thirst, and then, finally, we'll end with the promise of being fulfilled, or satisfaction, as the ESV says. So first let's explore briefly the nature of this hunger and thirst.
Speaker 1:Jesus says it's a very particular hunger and thirst. It's a hunger and thirst for righteousness, and righteousness, in the Bible, has at least three aspects it has a legal aspect, it has a moral aspect and it has a social aspect, and you really can't, or nor should we try ultimately to pull them all apart. But legal righteousness, if we were to define it clearly, is a justification we learn in the scriptures. It is a right relationship with God for sinners. So if you are righteous because you have the righteousness of Jesus, it means that you have been made right with God. Okay, and oftentimes we only, or mainly, think about righteousness in that sense, and it has a real sense. But I want to explore the other two senses for a moment, and that is first the moral righteousness, the moral sense of righteousness, and this is a righteousness of character and conduct which pleases God Because it's in alignment with how God has made things to be.
Speaker 1:Later on, jesus goes on in the beatitude, after the beatitude, rather to contrast Christian righteousness with phareseical righteousness, and what this does is it gives us a clue that to hunger and thirst for righteousness, as Jesus is talking, is to hunger and thirst for not a type of conformity but rather a type of wholeness when, from the reality of being made right with God, we now are in a state of being right with God, being made right with God. We now begin to hunger increasingly to truly become righteous. We desire now experiencing righteousness as a gift, to become more and more right in our lives. We won't simply settle for external conformity to rules, but we actually begin to ache for an inner righteousness of heart and mind and motive. And throughout the weeks we've been giving you three word summaries of the beatitude, and now I'll give you the three word summary for this. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Speaker 1:A three word summary of this would be a right and aching for what is right, a right making ache, that is to say that what my desires and motives would be that they would be right, that I would ache that they would be as God designed them, but as we'll talk about in a moment not just for what's inside, but also for what is outside of us. You see, when we embody this, we want to want the right things, not just do the right things. We want to love the right things, we want to feel the right things, we want to think the right things. All of this comes from this ache to embody rightness, or righteousness and wholeness. So, while it's true, then, that there is a moral righteousness that springs from the legal righteousness that disciples of Jesus have, it's not only between us and God and then in our own hearts, but it's also to those around us, because righteousness is always relational in the Bible, it's always social and, as John Stott helpfully says, it would be a mistake to suppose that the biblical word righteousness means only a right relationship with God on the one hand, and a moral righteousness of character and conduct on the other. He says, for biblical righteousness is more than a private and personal affair. It includes social righteousness as well, and social righteousness, as we learn from the law and the prophets, is concerned with seeking man's liberation from oppression, together with the promotion of civil rights, justice in the law, courts, integrity and business dealings, and honor in home and family affairs. You see, it's in every sphere of life that this ache for rightness begins to move us into the world in a different way. He goes on to say that thus, christians are committed to hunger for righteousness in the whole human community as something pleasing to a righteous God. Righteousness is living in a way that is right according to God's standards, seeking His will in all aspects of life. So what is the nature of this righteousness? The nature of this righteousness is one for wholeness, both with God, with ourselves and with those around us. The nature of this hunger is not simply for personal holiness, but for the manifestation of God's justice and love in the world.
Speaker 1:I think about this when I think about this week. Think about the innocence of a child, someone who's old enough to understand a deeper sense of right and wrong, but hasn't lost the innocence or gained the cynicism of how the world so often works. And it's amazing how they will make a simple comment when they see something on television or on the news or on the playground and they'll say this, simply this that's not right, daddy, mommy, that's not right. And of course at least with my children I'm sure you've seen this they're not satisfied with simply naming that it's not right. They want it to be fixed, they want you to do something about it, they want you to move into the reality of what is not right and make it right.
Speaker 1:You see, in this simple faith, in this simple understanding, in this simple acknowledgement of the brokenness of the world, we are to become like children in that way to ache and to long for that which is not right, to made right both in us and around us. Quoting Pastor Ben, god made us right to make things right, and I'm going to say more about that in a minute. But think about the order God makes us right by faith, so that then we, in overflow, live to make things right. So the nature of this righteousness is just that Jesus' disciples are made right so that we are to move into the world to make things right, to ache for that which is right and good and righteous. So if this is the fuller nature of this righteousness that Jesus says the blessed hunger and thirst.
Speaker 1:For let's talk about that, the blessedness of this hunger and thirst. Now, like all of Jesus' beatitudes, this is actually counterintuitive, because to us we would say blessed are the full, blessed are the satisfied, not blessed are those who hunger and thirst. But yet there's always something upside down about the kingdom of God and here in the beatitudes, this one in particular, there is an upside down reality. It shocks our expectations. You see, the world views hunger as a lack, not a blessing.
Speaker 1:But in the kingdom of God, the Bible teaches us that hunger, this type of hunger, is actually blessed. In Luke, chapter one, we read he, that is God, has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he sends away empty. Now this is just one quote of many Psalms or passages we could go to where the upside down nature of the scriptures show forth, and that is that human beings experience blessedness when we experience our dependence. And we experience our dependence when we're desperate enough to recognize our poverty of spirit. And when we recognize our poverty and spirit, it moves us, among other things, to hunger and thirst for what is right and good. Why? Because God will fill it, god will satisfy. You see, the role of hunger and thirst in the Bible and its connection to spiritual growth or health is everywhere.
Speaker 1:In fact, there's perhaps no greater secret of progress in Christian living than a healthy, hearty spiritual appetite. My house has been filled with sick children. All five of my children have had crazy fevers this week 104, 103, we almost borderline taking the newborn to the hospital, never mind, I almost said something that I forgot it was Family Worship Sunday. So that's great self-control on display. My point is this what was my point actually? My point is that there is a reality when children or any of us are sick, and really sick, is that your appetite decreases, doesn't it? And we have to chase our kids around who are sick and say you need to drink this, you need to drink this or you'll become dehydrated. You see, a lack of an awareness of your hunger, or proper hunger, is not a sign of health, it's a sign of sickness. When you are not aware, and acutely aware, of your need for sustenance, you are not well, you are sick, and so it's the same. With spiritual maturity, do you have an appetite for God and his righteousness? Do you hunger? Do you have an ache inside of you, like those hunger pangs for things in you and around you to be right as God has defined them.
Speaker 1:Well, I actually think there's lots of things that actually prevent us from this experience, and I could talk about many things, but for the sake of time I'm just gonna choose one, and I can't even exhaust that one, and that is what I would just call soul hurry. One of the things that blows my kid's minds is that I'll come home at the end of the day for dinner and be so hungry, and they're confused why I'm so hungry already. And I will say I didn't eat lunch. And they're like how is that even possible? I was like well, I was busy, I was working. Well, weren't you hungry? And then, if I really think about it, I'm like I don't know. I don't know if I was hungry, I was busy, I don't know if I was hungry.
Speaker 1:I wasn't paying attention to that. What I was paying attention to was what was right in front of me. I was paying attention to the problems that needed to be solved. I wasn't paying attention to my heart. I wasn't paying attention to my body. I wasn't paying attention to what I needed. I was paying attention to the task in front of me, and if you've ever experienced that, what happens is you go home and experience that and what is the first thing you want to do? Because you walk in the house at least for me and all of your physical needs for hunger just descend on you, and when they do, you become the junk food monster. Anything chips, candy, anything that's fast, not carrots and apples those are there too, but I just eat anything else.
Speaker 1:I think that there's something to learn from this here. It's not that I wasn't hungry and thirsty, it's that I neglected it. I didn't cultivate it, I wasn't paying attention to it, and I think this is true for us in our hunger and thirst for righteousness, even for those of you who don't know Jesus yet, who are here, there is a hunger and thirst for what is right in you. It may get misdirected, but it's there. But all of us, many of us, are so busy so often that light coming home and just binging on junk rather than cultivating a healthy diet, what we end up doing is, in soul hurry, we end up neglecting and ignoring the true hunger for God and we feast on things that aren't Him. You know, in our culture we're taught that our hunger and thirst will be satisfied if we find ourselves rather than feast on God. It's when we recognize our hunger and thirst, that that is for God and His righteousness that we can actually begin to be satisfied. And the reality is we all have a deep hunger and thirst, but it's not until it's satisfied in God that we can actually live from a type of fullness. This is what I want to say here.
Speaker 1:What I want to say here is that everyone, I think, has a desire to experience wholeness in what the Bible calls righteousness Righteousness with God, righteousness in ourselves, where our insides and our outsides match, to see things right in the world around us, relationships and governments and businesses All those things we long for. But the problem is is that we really have no hope of in any meaningful way engaging in seeing other things become right until we experience the satisfaction of being made right with God. And that may be abstract, but just think about it with me just for a second. Until our hunger and thirst, our true hunger and thirst for righteousness, is satisfied, what we'll do is we'll manipulate others to try to get ourselves satisfied. We'll abuse others, neglect others, use others and things and substances and achievements and investments, all types of things. We'll use those things to get ourselves satisfied.
Speaker 1:And it isn't until we find our satisfaction, our fullness and what we were meant to experience, which is that in relationship with God, the right relationship with God, it's then that we can begin to truly love our neighbors, because love is one that gives, love is one that does not take. Love in the Bible is to disadvantage ourselves for the good of others, as is righteousness. And so until our hunger and thirst for righteousness is satisfied by Jesus, our hunger and thirst is not blessed to us or the world. In fact, then we can only turn outward and ache for things to be made right when first we have been satisfied. And so, if the nature of hunger and thirst is for a robust righteousness, and the blessedness of hunger and thirst is actually first to be satisfied in God so that we can seek righteousness for others, the last thing I want to reflect on today is the promise of being filled.
Speaker 1:This is the promise Jesus gives us is that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied, as the ESV says, or other translations simply say, filled. You remember that promise that Jesus makes that whoever drinks of the water he gives will never thirst, right? The woman of the well, john 4. And yet you and I know that it is not simply the drinking one time of this water, but it's the perpetual drinking of this water. See, that's something else that we have to recognize is that it's not a little need that we have, it's not a little bit of hunger and thirst. It's a big hunger and thirst. It's a hunger and thirst that will chase addictions and ruin relationships. It's a type of hunger and thirst that will hurt and use the people closest to you to protect your own reputation. You see, a person doesn't amputate their arm because they're kind of thirsty, it's because they're going to die.
Speaker 1:And so often I think about the ways in which I can cultivate hunger and thirst and just fail to do it. Yeah, it's like the common rhythm. It's a good start, but what's my percentage on that Every practice? I'm not sure it's better than it was, but the reality is is that, as we talked with someone one time a couple years, a few years ago, at New City, ben and I, that is. They said the reality what clicked for them was that when they begin to see things like the common rhythm not merely as discipline but rather as desperation. Their use of the common rhythm to cultivate their hunger and thirst and God and be satisfied in him went way up. And so my invitation to you is I know you want to be filled, I want to be filled, and so do we take Jesus at his word that he wants to fill us. Not only that he wants to, but that he can fill us. Now some of you, hopefully now or after this, will come to your senses and you'll recognize that, like many of us, you've been feasting on things that do not satisfy.
Speaker 1:Henry Nowan, in one of his books, calls this living in the far country, and of course he's referring to this beautiful picture of repentance that we have in the Christian life, in Luke 15 with the prodigal son. That repentance in the Bible is primarily a coming home from a far country, that it's a returning to that which truly satisfies. And if you think about this story, if you remember with the prodigal son, he desires to find satisfaction in ways that he doesn't think his father can give him, and so he takes all the resources that his father gives him and he goes off into a far country, and what ends up happening is he invests in all of these wells, all of these realities that he thinks will satisfy, but in fact they all run dry all of his resources. And he's still not that desperate. He takes a job feeding pigs, and when he knows he's really desperate is when he looks at the food, the slop he's giving the pigs and he wants to eat it. And that's when he finally comes to his senses and he says being a servant of my father, if he would just have me as a servant, much less a child, it would be way better than this. And so he prepares a speech, as you remember, for his father. And he comes, and while he is still far off, yet far off, the scripture says his father sees him and runs to him and puts a jacket on, a coat on him and gives him his ring, prepares a feast for him.
Speaker 1:You see, this is what Jesus, maybe for you today, is calling you back to. He's calling you and me out of that far country, back to the father who wants to fill all of our longings, who isn't just willing but is eager. He will run toward you and grasp you. He will not only honor but stoke this ache inside of you for more, because he wants to fill it. He won't say okay, that's enough, you should be full. He'll say keep coming, I want to pour more, keep coming, I want to give more.
Speaker 1:This is what this beatitude is inviting us to. It's inviting us to an ache that includes not just us but the world. It's inviting us to see hunger and thirst as that which is blessed, because Jesus gives to those who are hungry and thirsty, not to those who say they are full. And it's to trust him that the father wants to give us good things, and he'll never say that's enough. He'll say keep coming, I have more for you. And you know the way in which this is possible is that because, on the cross, jesus became thirsty, that he could fill your thirst. On the cross, remember, jesus cried I thirst. And what he did was that he drank the cup of judgment so that you and I could drink the cup of salvation, so that we could really believe the father and the God. The cup of salvation, so that we could really believe the father, that he's eager to pour out and pour out and pour out for our goodness and satisfaction in him. We'll see in a moment that Jesus thirsted on the cross and he gave his broken body and poured out his blood as true food and drink, so that you and I could be satisfied.
Speaker 1:And I want to end here with this quote from a commentator. He says in the end, there are two thoughts here. The first insists on the disposition of the seeker. So I want you to reflect what is your disposition? Are you in touch with your hunger and thirst, or will you ignore it, like I often do?
Speaker 1:The good gift of God does not come indiscriminately to all he says, but only to those who seek it wholeheartedly. And when will you seek it wholeheartedly? When you've come to experience the desperation of your hunger and thirst, your dependence on Him? The second he says is that for all their intense longing, the seekers do not fill themselves with righteousness, but are filled because righteousness is a gift. So you see, to respond to this fullness is to receive it as a gift, not to earn it. And so in this longing, in this seeking, there's also a resting that is not possible in any other. Well, in any other thing that promises a satisfaction. So the invitation is to ache, the invitation is to thirst and hunger, and yet in this upside down kingdom, because righteousness is a gift, the call is also to rest.
Speaker 1:Let's pray, father. We're grateful for the truth that you have made us to hunger and thirst and you've made us for yourselves that you will fulfill the thing which you have created. Holy Spirit, I ask that you would stoke in us a realization of our hunger and thirst. Lord Jesus, would you teach us what it means to trust you when everything in the world tells us that fullness is blessedness? Will you help us trust you that hungering and thirsting for righteousness is blessedness, and it's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.
Speaker 1:Now this is the time when we respond to what we've heard, and today I want you to consider one of two things. Probably won't have time for both, but I'll leave that up to you. One thing you could consider is what far country are you in? And if you're in a far country, what is it going to mean or take for you to turn back to the Father, to return to Him in His house? So maybe you could ask yourself that what far country am I in? Am I in a far country? The second thing maybe you could reflect on is do you have a hesitation to believe the willingness of the Father to satisfy you, that he is enough, that he will pour Himself out to you and that you can actually not fully, but really begin to experience His presence as that which you truly hunger for. So let's reflect on those two things. What far country or how do you doubt the Father's eagerness to fulfill your longings? Take a few moments to pray.