SPEAKER_00: Matthew five, verse six: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
SPEAKER_00: There are very few things in life that motivate us like food.
SPEAKER_00: We often build our days around food.
SPEAKER_00: We build our vacations around food.
SPEAKER_00: We build so much of our life around food.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, even just anything unusual.
SPEAKER_00: A friend says, hey, let's go out after church.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, where are we going to eat?
SPEAKER_00: A friend invites you to go on vacation with them.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, let's go over in a lake house for a week.
SPEAKER_00: And your response might be, great.
SPEAKER_00: Who's going to do the cooking?
SPEAKER_00: Where are we going to eat?
SPEAKER_00: And you plan out, even in the weeks leading up to the vacation, you might plan out who has which meals and all that.
SPEAKER_00: You're structuring your whole relational time and vacation around who's going to cook and when they're going to cook and what are they going to make and who's going to shop for the food.
SPEAKER_00: It's just we're geared to think and live that way.
SPEAKER_00: We plan it, we talk about it.
SPEAKER_00: You're on your way out the door to work in the morning and you already have in your mind what you're doing for lunch.
SPEAKER_00: Your wife might even ask you, hey, what do you have lunch plans today?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, I have a meeting with this person and we'll do it at lunch.
SPEAKER_00: Or actually, no, I don't have lunch plans.
SPEAKER_00: And you grab food to take, you're planning ahead.
SPEAKER_00: In four hours, I'm going to need to eat, so I'm going to grab my lunch now and take it with me to work.
SPEAKER_00: And if you forget to do that, you stop what you're doing in the middle of the day, and you, if you work at Emmanuel Bible Church, you walk across the street to one of the 20 restaurants right across the street.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you stop whatever you're doing.
SPEAKER_00: And if you don't stop what you're doing to go eat when it is lunchtime, you are not productive.
SPEAKER_00: You get angry at your coworkers.
SPEAKER_00: You grumble, you complain, you lose energy, you lose focus, you can't even work.
SPEAKER_00: And so so much of our life is built around food.
SPEAKER_00: We even talk about what we're going to eat at the next meal at the current meal.
SPEAKER_00: We made a rule in our family once that uh that I think needs to be brought back out sometimes, but like, no talking about the next meal at this meal, okay?
SPEAKER_00: One meal is sufficient for conversation.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you post pictures of your food on social media, some of you, which immediately gets you unfollowed by me.
SPEAKER_00: Everything we do, it seems, is about food.
SPEAKER_00: We understand at a family level.
SPEAKER_00: You want a healthy family?
SPEAKER_00: A great way to have a felt healthy family is to have meals together.
SPEAKER_00: Have meals together.
SPEAKER_00: It builds conversation.
SPEAKER_00: It's just just a it's indicative of a family that's that's functioning.
SPEAKER_00: You guys you meet together, you know, at dinner.
SPEAKER_00: It's rude if the husband's not coming home from work or doesn't communicate to his wife that he's gonna be late because maybe there is food ready, and maybe the kids are around the table and you're not there, and it's weird, and they don't know if they're supposed to eat, and they get angry at each other because they're hungry and you're doing your own thing.
SPEAKER_00: And food just is injected into all of our social relationships in that way.
SPEAKER_00: You want to hang out with somebody, you go eat with them.
SPEAKER_00: You go eat with them.
SPEAKER_00: Our life is just structured around what we need to eat next, when we're gonna eat, how it's planned for, you get angry if it doesn't happen.
SPEAKER_00: You go to Chewy's and she says 15 minutes, and at 17 minutes, you're like, you said 15 minutes.
SPEAKER_00: You're not even making eye contact with me.
SPEAKER_00: What if, what if instead of structuring your day and your thinking around what you're going to eat, what if you brought that same approach to how you're going to serve the Lord?
SPEAKER_00: What if instead of the first question being, what are we going to eat?
SPEAKER_00: The first question in your mind at least being, how can we serve the Lord there?
SPEAKER_00: A friend invites you to go out, how can we serve the Lord?
SPEAKER_00: A family invites you to go on vacation, how can we serve the Lord?
SPEAKER_00: You think through the day and you think, what am I gonna do for lunch today?
SPEAKER_00: Rather, you think through the day and you think, how can I serve the Lord with this activity today?
SPEAKER_00: You come home from work, not just to eat, but you come home from work to be with your family so that you can serve the Lord together.
SPEAKER_00: What if that was the driving thing in our thinking?
SPEAKER_00: We understand that you know babies cry because they need food.
SPEAKER_00: We understand with teenagers, you know, they're in the room.
SPEAKER_00: Don't worry, they'll come out eventually, they'll get hungry eventually.
SPEAKER_00: You'll see them again.
SPEAKER_00: What if our thinking was geared around growing out of the desire for food and into the desire for righteousness?
SPEAKER_00: And I I grant it's a false dichotomy.
SPEAKER_00: It's a both ands, not an either-or.
SPEAKER_00: You need to think about what you're gonna eat, or you want to have the strength to serve the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: I get that.
SPEAKER_00: But just work with the illustration Jesus is using here.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, not period, but blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who have a zeal for life, who take their hunger, which is an inner desire, their thirst, which is an inner need, who channel that inner desire and that inner need towards something that is not just feeding their face, but towards something that is feeding their faith, that is getting them in the world and actively serving the Lord Jesus, who have a desire to pursue righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: That will lead to happiness, Jesus says.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed or happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: It's a very clear call to take your desires and orient them around something other than yourself, to orient them around the Lord and his righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna kind of build our outline around the concept of righteousness this morning.
SPEAKER_00: To begin with, you need to understand what righteousness is.
SPEAKER_00: I think the best way to define righteousness is that it's the moral quality of God, it's God's ethical dimension.
SPEAKER_00: It's how God functions morally.
SPEAKER_00: It's the attribute of God that is his goodness.
SPEAKER_00: It's morally speaking how you describe God.
SPEAKER_00: He is righteous.
SPEAKER_00: He's holy.
SPEAKER_00: Righteous is a synonym for holy, I guess.
SPEAKER_00: Righteousness is that attribute of God on display.
SPEAKER_00: God is righteous, and so his deeds display righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Just like at a human level, if somebody is good, their actions display their goodness.
SPEAKER_00: If somebody is evil, their actions display their wickedness.
SPEAKER_00: If God is righteous, his actions display his righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: It's the quality that fills God's acts.
SPEAKER_00: You look at how a righteous person acts, and his acts could be described as righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: That's what the word is.
SPEAKER_00: It's the moral dilemma or the moral dimension of God, a moral description of God is righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: The very first use of the word righteousness in the Bible is arguably its most important or its most significant.
SPEAKER_00: The word righteousness enters the pages of scripture in the book of Genesis with Abram.
SPEAKER_00: Abram heard the command of God to go and leave his family, to take his wife, and then he would have a son and a promise, and the promise would come to the world through the son.
SPEAKER_00: And the scripture says Abram believed God, and that was credited to him as righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: He put his faith in God's promise.
SPEAKER_00: That is righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Abram believed that God is righteous, and so the promise displayed his righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Abram, by connecting himself to that promise of God, received the righteousness of God.
SPEAKER_00: Now, as the Torah goes on, the word righteousness reappears.
SPEAKER_00: It becomes a theme in the book of Deuteronomy.
SPEAKER_00: In the book of Deuteronomy, God tells the Israelites, because I am righteous, your deeds should display righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, if Yahweh is your God, you should live like He describes.
SPEAKER_00: You should put yourself under the authority of His Word and live it out.
SPEAKER_00: You're displaying to the world your connection to God by your connection to his righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Because of Yahweh's righteousness, you are supposed to live righteously.
SPEAKER_00: That's a recurring theme in Deuteronomy.
SPEAKER_00: But it is all over the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 119 is a very clear example of this.
SPEAKER_00: The word righteousness is used repeatedly through there, but my favorite usage of it is in verse 138, where it says, You have appointed your testimonies in righteousness and in all your faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: Think about the chronology of that verse.
SPEAKER_00: You have appointed your testimonies in righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: God has appointed his testimonies.
SPEAKER_00: In Psalm 119, that's synonymous with his word, his law, his commandments, his statutes, his regulations, his directives.
SPEAKER_00: Basically, the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: God has appointed the scripture in righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: So the Meliu or the context of where God designed Scripture in His mind is in the context of righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: God doesn't do drafts of scripture.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible is instant in the mind of God.
SPEAKER_00: It's composed entirely in the very mind of God.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't go through revisions of it or anything.
SPEAKER_00: It's instantaneous in his mind.
SPEAKER_00: When he conceives it, it's there.
SPEAKER_00: But the context or the fabric of that is God's own righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: When God thinks of the Bible, the Bible is revealing who God is and God is righteous.
SPEAKER_00: So the scripture comes out of God's righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Psalm 119 means.
SPEAKER_00: When it says, you've appointed your testimonies or your statutes in righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: You understand that righteousness is a characteristic of God and that God is complete, God is unified, God's not made up of parts.
SPEAKER_00: You don't take different attributes and mix them together, and out comes God.
SPEAKER_00: God is those things all at once.
SPEAKER_00: God is righteousness and goodness and holiness instantly and simultaneously and for all eternity.
SPEAKER_00: That's important to understand when you think of righteousness in particularly, for this reason.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes when we think of righteousness, we're tempted to think that there is a moral code of conduct that is outside of God and that God is righteous because he does those things.
SPEAKER_00: Almost like if in the courtroom of heaven the Ten Commandments are on the wall, and God looks at the Ten Commandments and thinks about how he'll act based upon what they say, and then we would say God is righteous because he's keeping the law that's on the wall.
SPEAKER_00: That's not the way God's righteousness works.
SPEAKER_00: Because if it worked that way, it would imply that righteousness is something that exists outside of God, and God is righteous because he conforms himself to that standard.
SPEAKER_00: But the Bible says that the opposite way.
SPEAKER_00: All of God's word reveals God's flawless and perfect character.
SPEAKER_00: That is his righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: It reveals himself.
SPEAKER_00: This is why Isaiah 56, verse 1, says, Thus says Yahweh, keep justice and do righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: You think, how do you keep justice?
SPEAKER_00: How do you do righteousness?
SPEAKER_00: If you keep justice, where do you keep justice?
SPEAKER_00: Do you keep it in your sock drawer?
SPEAKER_00: Where do you keep justice?
SPEAKER_00: Do righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: What does that mean to do righteousness?
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's a way of saying that you, through faith, believe in God and you believe that God's word reveals God as He is, and so you are going to keep the standards of the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: You're going to keep God's commands.
SPEAKER_00: You're going to strive to live them out, to do them.
SPEAKER_00: And as you keep the word of God, you are keeping justice.
SPEAKER_00: And as you live out the word of God, you are living out righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: It's righteousness on display.
SPEAKER_00: You recognize that we live in a dark world.
SPEAKER_00: We're looking at God dimly through a dim glass.
SPEAKER_00: We don't see God face to face, so we try to do the best we can.
SPEAKER_00: We have his word, we receive his word by faith.
SPEAKER_00: We try to live out his word.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why Isaiah 56 goes on to say, keep justice, do righteousness, knowing that Yahweh will come and his deliverance will be revealed.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, we we keep justice while we're waiting for Yahweh.
SPEAKER_00: We practice righteousness while we wait for the return of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: We put his word to work, because his word tethers his righteousness into this world.
SPEAKER_00: We practice it, we live it out, waiting for him to come personally where righteousness will be revealed face to face in the Lord Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: That's what it means to practice righteousness, to do righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: The New Testament picks up on this theme.
SPEAKER_00: You know, the very first use of the word righteousness in the New Testament is also insightful, just like the one from the Old Testament, Abram and credited him as righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: That sets the stage for the whole Old Testament, the promise of the Savior, and all that.
SPEAKER_00: The New Testament, the first use of the word righteousness in the New Testament, is similarly paradigmatic.
SPEAKER_00: It shows Jesus at the water of baptism, going to John.
SPEAKER_00: Baptism was for repentance from sins, remember.
SPEAKER_00: John was baptizing people as they repented from their sin.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus comes to the water for baptism.
SPEAKER_00: John recognizes Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
SPEAKER_00: And John says, I shouldn't be baptizing you, you should be baptizing me.
SPEAKER_00: That was John's objection.
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to baptize the Savior because that would imply he has sin and that would imply I'm above him.
SPEAKER_00: And John, if there's anything that's true about John the Baptist, it's that he's not above the Savior.
SPEAKER_00: He keeps saying, I'm going to grow less, I'm going to go under, I'm not worthy to tie his sandals.
SPEAKER_00: And so now the Savior shows up at the water and John says, I am not baptizing you.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says, No, you have to.
SPEAKER_00: This is necessary to fulfill all righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: That word fulfill, bring up from the inside.
SPEAKER_00: It's going to complete righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, Jesus is saying, I am under, Jesus is saying, Jesus as man is under the law of God.
SPEAKER_00: It's showing the meekness of Christ, that he's submitting to the law of God.
SPEAKER_00: It shows the meekness of Christ that he's putting himself as a servant even to John.
SPEAKER_00: John's pointing at Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is pointing at John, pointing to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It's all about Jesus submitting himself to the Word of God, even though he had no sin to repent of, Jesus never sinned.
SPEAKER_00: But he's going to fill up righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: God's law displays righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is submitting to God's law, keeping all of it.
SPEAKER_00: He's doing everything the Bible commands him to do perfectly without sin.
SPEAKER_00: And in this instance, he's getting baptized by John to demonstrate his authority and his submission to the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: That's righteousness on display.
SPEAKER_00: Righteousness paired with meekness right there, and submission.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus living in obedience to Torah.
SPEAKER_00: That is practical righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: So that's what righteousness is.
SPEAKER_00: In this beatitude, verse 5 here, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Couple observations about how this righteousness relates to us.
SPEAKER_00: First is righteousness and our desperation.
SPEAKER_00: Righteousness and our desperation.
SPEAKER_00: This beatitude hinges on the use of the word hunger or the pair here, hunger and thirst.
SPEAKER_00: Hunger and thirst are often used in the Old Testament to indicate a deep desire for something.
SPEAKER_00: You hunger and thirst for righteousness, you hunger and thirst for God's kingdom, you hunger and thirst for deliverance.
SPEAKER_00: We even use that kind of idiom today.
SPEAKER_00: A coach might tell a sports team, are you guys hungry for a win?
SPEAKER_00: Or you'll hear an athlete after a game say, Oh, I knew we were going to win because we were hungry for it.
SPEAKER_00: And what does that mean?
SPEAKER_00: It means inside of them there's this desperation, there's a desire, there's a seeking after something that motivates you from the inside.
SPEAKER_00: That's what hunger and thirst means.
SPEAKER_00: But also, it has to be pointed out, something that I think should be obvious to us.
SPEAKER_00: Hunger and thirst in the ancient Near East or in the Roman world or in an agrarian society or an arid society like Jerusalem is going to be very different than hunger and thirst in our American culture, right?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you get so hungry if church goes five minutes late.
SPEAKER_00: Hungry.
SPEAKER_00: If you forget lunch, like I said, you can go across the street to one of 20 restaurants.
SPEAKER_00: And if you forget your wallet, it doesn't matter, pay in your phone.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't have cash, pay in a credit card.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't have money to pay the credit card off, that's okay.
SPEAKER_00: Make the minimum payment next month, you know?
SPEAKER_00: We don't really have a grid for what hunger is in our society because there's so many different ways for you to get food now.
SPEAKER_00: You can get food by lunchtime right now.
SPEAKER_00: Bust out your phone, and a thousand restaurants will deliver to you in church, walk down the aisle and hand it to you.
SPEAKER_00: Don't try that, please, to make the point.
SPEAKER_00: All that to say we don't really have a grid for what hunger is.
SPEAKER_00: But in an agrarian society, look, if it doesn't rain enough, you're not gonna get enough food for winter.
SPEAKER_00: That's what hunger is.
SPEAKER_00: Like February is gonna come around and you don't have food.
SPEAKER_00: So what happens in that world?
SPEAKER_00: Well, you eat less.
SPEAKER_00: You pace yourself on your food.
SPEAKER_00: At harvest time, you know, portion it out and you eat less, which means you will be hungry for four or five months.
SPEAKER_00: Or you pack up and move.
SPEAKER_00: Like in Ruth chapter one, there was a famine in the land, and so they packed up and they moved to Moab.
SPEAKER_00: That's what you do.
SPEAKER_00: Or water.
SPEAKER_00: You know, we don't know what thirsty is here.
SPEAKER_00: You're so thirsty because you've got your water bottle in your car.
SPEAKER_00: There's drinking fountains in the hallway.
SPEAKER_00: In Israel, it's so hard to find water.
SPEAKER_00: It's so hard to find water.
SPEAKER_00: It's a tourist thing to go through Hezekiah's tunnel.
SPEAKER_00: Look, they found a spring and they diverted.
SPEAKER_00: And you get you get there and you're like, it's so small.
SPEAKER_00: It's like this little creek, this little tiny stream is watering the whole city.
SPEAKER_00: You go out along the Dead Sea, it's so hard to find water out there.
SPEAKER_00: It's you know, it's easy to find Ingeti now because there's a big sign that says in Getty right here.
SPEAKER_00: Parking here for Ngeti, tour guides.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, here's the springs that David was at.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't have all that, it's very hard to find.
SPEAKER_00: That's this world.
SPEAKER_00: So there's this desperation that's associated with hunger and thirst.
SPEAKER_00: You should think of Psalm 42, which Pastor Steve read for a scripture reading.
SPEAKER_00: As the deer pants for the water, so my soul longs after God.
SPEAKER_00: As the deer pants for water, that's not, you know, Hallmark cards have ruined that Bible verse, by the way.
SPEAKER_00: You go to the bookstore and there's the picture of like the rainforest and the happy-looking deer next to a flowing brook with you know water splashing in the air and the deer smiling and having a drink.
SPEAKER_00: That is not what a deer panting for water looks like.
SPEAKER_00: That's a a deer panting for water is an image of a wounded animal, an animal that is on the brink of death.
SPEAKER_00: You know, if you see a deer panting, like call Fairfax County.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that thing's sick.
SPEAKER_00: That thing's going down.
SPEAKER_00: You don't want to eat a deer that was panting before you shot it.
SPEAKER_00: It's a sign of desperation.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what's happening here.
SPEAKER_00: Are you hungering and thirsting for righteousness?
SPEAKER_00: Are you desperate for righteousness?
SPEAKER_00: Do you have the approach that the deer does?
SPEAKER_00: If I don't find the water, I will die.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what happens when if you do go bow hunting and you shoot a deer with the bow, the first thing it's gonna do is try to get away from you.
SPEAKER_00: But the second thing it's gonna try to do is get to water.
SPEAKER_00: It has this instinctive drive to it, that the water will help it.
SPEAKER_00: Its greatest need is its own life at that point, and getting to the creek will save it.
SPEAKER_00: Is that your attitude towards righteousness?
SPEAKER_00: Do you recognize that you are wounded by sin, that the arrow of sin has pierced you and you are bleeding out, and the only hope for you is to make it to God's righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: That's what it means to hunger and thirst for righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: There's images of famine all over the Old Testament, and none of them are good, of course.
SPEAKER_00: Think of Jeremiah, where the donkeys won't even give birth because of the drought and the famine.
SPEAKER_00: They'd rather die than give birth.
SPEAKER_00: Or in 1 Kings 17, the Israelites are in a famine, and ravens are bringing Elijah food, and everybody else is dying.
SPEAKER_00: Or in 2 Kings 6, with Elisha, there's a famine in Samaria, Israel's capital, and they're resorting to cannibalism.
SPEAKER_00: They're eating each other.
SPEAKER_00: That's hunger.
SPEAKER_00: That's thirst.
SPEAKER_00: And there's an irony to those Old Testament examples of hunger and thirst.
SPEAKER_00: In all of the ones I just told you, it's because the Israelites were worshiping the rain God that God was withholding rain.
SPEAKER_00: They're gonna worship the rain god, God withholds the rain, God withholds the rain, they go into famine, they need rain to grow food, and so they start worshiping the rain God more.
SPEAKER_00: That's the cycle.
SPEAKER_00: The 2 Kings 6 one is so obvious.
SPEAKER_00: There's a famine in Samaria, they're dying because they're worshiping the rain god, and so the king of Samaria walks along the wall and says, If Elisha's head Is not served me on a platter today.
SPEAKER_00: He makes a vow that he's gonna do whatever it takes to kill Elisha rather than repent and trust God.
SPEAKER_00: People hunger and thirst for all sorts of things.
SPEAKER_00: You know, our country isn't in a national covenant with God.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you can't say, uh, because of our own country's lack of righteousness, God withholds the rain from us.
SPEAKER_00: That was a covenant with Israel, not with America.
SPEAKER_00: But I will tell you the way it does parallel.
SPEAKER_00: You see people today that don't worship the rain God, but worship themselves, their own self-fulfillment.
SPEAKER_00: They think that they can pursue the God of money and be satisfied, the God of self-pleasure and be satisfied.
SPEAKER_00: And the more they pursue those things, God may even let them get those things, but they won't be satisfied.
SPEAKER_00: The person who lives for money may even accumulate money for himself, but is the money gonna satisfy him?
SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
SPEAKER_00: The person who lives for self-fulfillment and personal success, God may grant that person self-fulfillment and personal success, but it won't satisfy him.
SPEAKER_00: And so the more he's searching for satisfaction in those arenas, the more he's going to be disappointed, the more he doubles down and keeps going.
SPEAKER_00: Just like worshiping the rain god.
SPEAKER_00: You see this with some people with sexual immorality.
SPEAKER_00: That's the language of Romans 1.
SPEAKER_00: The people think, oh, if only I could sin in this way, then I would be satisfied.
SPEAKER_00: And so they go after that sin, they do that sin, and does it satisfy?
SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
SPEAKER_00: Do they learn the lesson?
SPEAKER_00: Also, of course not.
SPEAKER_00: They keep going back to it.
SPEAKER_00: And it never satisfies.
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, one of two things will happen.
SPEAKER_00: God will give that kind of person over to their desires.
SPEAKER_00: God will just say, you can spend the rest of your life serving your own sin.
SPEAKER_00: Serve money, serve pleasure, serve sexual morality, serve your own personal success, go for it.
SPEAKER_00: You'll never be happy, and I'm giving you over to it.
SPEAKER_00: That's the language of Romans 1.
SPEAKER_00: They're giving over to their desires.
SPEAKER_00: Or the person will have an epiphany.
SPEAKER_00: The person will come to the realization that serving themselves does not produce satisfaction, but only separation from God.
SPEAKER_00: When that happens, that's the hungering and thirsting for righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: When that happens, you realize I'm desperate on my own.
SPEAKER_00: I need God's righteousness in order for me to live.
SPEAKER_00: I need God's righteousness for me to be satisfied in this life, and I can't obtain it.
SPEAKER_00: That's hungering and thirsting for righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, this is an ongoing hungering and thirsting.
SPEAKER_00: This isn't the moment of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: This is an ongoing hungering and thirsting for righteousness your whole life.
SPEAKER_00: Just like it is with food.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you said, Oh, I'm hungry for lunch, I wouldn't say it, but you ate lunch yesterday.
SPEAKER_00: You hunger and thirst for righteousness throughout your Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: That's the desperation.
SPEAKER_00: You're desperate for God's righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Second, revelation about righteousness from this passage is righteousness in our motivation.
SPEAKER_00: We saw righteousness in our desperation.
SPEAKER_00: Here's righteousness in our motivation.
SPEAKER_00: This beatitude here is a, I would refer to it as the bridge beatitude.
SPEAKER_00: It's connecting the ones that went before with the ones that come after, and I guess every beatitude does that, but this does it in a unique way.
SPEAKER_00: The first three beatitudes are about the person going low and about the person being empty.
SPEAKER_00: And the next beatitudes after this are about positive action, living in the world.
SPEAKER_00: This is the beatitude that connects those two camps.
SPEAKER_00: So the first beatitude remember is blessed are the poor in spirit.
SPEAKER_00: That's the person who says, I am not righteous on my own.
SPEAKER_00: They go looking for their wallet for godliness and they don't have it.
SPEAKER_00: They have no currency before God on their own.
SPEAKER_00: They're spiritually poor, they're poor in spirit, they're spiritually bankrupt.
SPEAKER_00: They don't have any capital to stand before God.
SPEAKER_00: If they were to stand before God and God were to say, Why should I let you into heaven?
SPEAKER_00: this person realizes they have no answer for that.
SPEAKER_00: There is no reason God should have favor on them.
SPEAKER_00: There's no reason God should love them.
SPEAKER_00: That's spiritual poverty.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody asked me after I preached a sermon a few weeks ago, if spiritual poverty is true, why would God love us?
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, that is the right question.
SPEAKER_00: That's the question for somebody who's listening closely.
SPEAKER_00: If spiritual poverty is true, why would God love you?
SPEAKER_00: That is the hugest question.
SPEAKER_00: That question is what makes that beatitude so important.
SPEAKER_00: For you to realize there's no good answer to that question.
SPEAKER_00: He certainly doesn't love me because of anything in me.
SPEAKER_00: I'm broken and I'm poor.
SPEAKER_00: That's spiritual bankruptcy.
SPEAKER_00: The second beatitude is mourning, do you remember?
SPEAKER_00: Mourning over your bankruptcy.
SPEAKER_00: So the per lots of people are aware of their spiritual bankruptcy, but that doesn't produce salvation.
SPEAKER_00: They're aware they don't have any spiritual capital, but they make excuses, or they say it's somebody else's fault, or they say everybody's in the same boat, or I can just be a good person, or whatever.
SPEAKER_00: Lots of people realize their spiritual bankruptcy, but it does not lead them to salvation.
SPEAKER_00: Some people realize their spiritual bankruptcy and it leads them to mourning.
SPEAKER_00: And they weep over their sin and they weep over their spiritual malfunction and they weep over their lack of righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: But again, not everybody who weeps over their sin is saved either.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible is filled with stories, lots of stories of people who weep over their sin that didn't find salvation, including Esau, who, though he sought repentance with tears, it was withheld from him.
SPEAKER_00: Or Judas, who hung himself in his grief.
SPEAKER_00: Or the whole nation of Israel in Judges chapter 2.
SPEAKER_00: There's so many examples of people that weep over their sin that aren't saved.
SPEAKER_00: But there's no examples of people who are saved that got there without being broken spiritually and mourning over their sin.
SPEAKER_00: It's possible to weep over your sin and not be a Christian.
SPEAKER_00: It's not possible to be a Christian and not have been broken over your sin.
SPEAKER_00: So that leads to the third beatitude, meekness.
SPEAKER_00: And that's the surrender one.
SPEAKER_00: We looked at that last week.
SPEAKER_00: That I would say is the conversion one.
SPEAKER_00: That's the person who gets to the point to their brokenness and their mourning, that they finally give up and they surrender at the feet of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: They give up, they lay down at the Lord's feet.
SPEAKER_00: I talked last week about how the idiom that's often used for meekness there is familiar with the hand, and this is outside the Bible in the Greco-Roman world.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody's been beaten into submission, that's that attitude.
SPEAKER_00: That you've been crushed by your own sin.
SPEAKER_00: You're now, the word we use in English for like horses or animals is you're now broken.
SPEAKER_00: That animal has their spirit is broken and they're now submissive.
SPEAKER_00: When that happens to you, that's conversion.
SPEAKER_00: You give up fighting, you give up working for your own righteousness, you lay down at the feet of the Lord, you surrender to him, that's conversion.
SPEAKER_00: That's still loneless, though.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this fourth beatitude, that's you looking at something outside of yourself.
SPEAKER_00: If you're looking for righteousness inside of yourself, you need to go back to the first beatitude.
SPEAKER_00: But if you finally get to the point where you're saying, I still need righteousness, and it's not in me, that's hungering and thirsting for righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: You're looking, you're down low, broken, you're mourning, you surrendered, but now your eyes are brought up towards a righteousness that's outside of you, and you see it.
SPEAKER_00: It's God's righteousness, you lock eyes with it, and now you want that.
SPEAKER_00: That's hungering and thirsting for righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: That's the motivation.
SPEAKER_00: Now the beatitudes after this will be about holy living, purity, peacemakers, receiving persecution.
SPEAKER_00: They're all how you relate to the world in light of this one: pursuing righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: So you're broken.
SPEAKER_00: This is in the sense, this is the first positive beatitude.
SPEAKER_00: You're broken down, but you look up, and there's something you need to live.
SPEAKER_00: God's righteousness, it's not in you, it's outside of you, and you're hungry for it.
SPEAKER_00: You're hungry for it.
SPEAKER_00: And so you want to pursue it.
SPEAKER_00: This is so you have to go to God's word for righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: You're not going to find the righteousness of God in the world.
SPEAKER_00: You can't find it in entertainment.
SPEAKER_00: You can't find it in culture and society.
SPEAKER_00: It can only be found in God's Word.
SPEAKER_00: There's no award, motion picture award, you know, movie of the year, actor of the year.
SPEAKER_00: There's no award for most righteous movie of the year.
SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna find it in the world.
SPEAKER_00: It's not celebrated in the world.
SPEAKER_00: It's only found through the scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: But you can train your appetite for it.
SPEAKER_00: Just like you can with food.
SPEAKER_00: And here's where the food metaphor is very apt.
SPEAKER_00: People can train their appetites for things.
SPEAKER_00: They can train their appetites for things.
SPEAKER_00: Before I went to Australia a couple months ago, several of you told me, don't fall for Australians in Vegemite.
SPEAKER_00: It's something they eat, it's terrible.
SPEAKER_00: Don't fall for it.
SPEAKER_00: But that just, you know, motivates me all the more.
SPEAKER_00: And so the first time I tried Vegemite there, I thought, oh my goodness, how do people eat this?
SPEAKER_00: It's poison, it's rat poison.
SPEAKER_00: Rats poison in better and ah.
SPEAKER_00: But then I'm looking around and I see all these kids that are eating it on everything.
SPEAKER_00: Like, how did the kids learn to like that?
SPEAKER_00: And so you realize, oh, they just put a little bit on like a cracker, and they're like, oh, that tastes good, and then a little bit more, and they they you can build up to like making a vegemite sandwich, which people buy at like Starbucks.
SPEAKER_00: So you can get a vegemite sandwich, a bagel with vegemite at Starbucks.
SPEAKER_00: You can train your appetite to embrace those kind of things.
SPEAKER_00: You can also train your appetite on the negative side.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you can get your body addicted to refined sugar.
SPEAKER_00: You can eat stuff that is made out of refined sugar and it doesn't give you any energy, it just makes you hungrier, but your body gets trained to want that kind of thing, and so you keep eating it, even though it doesn't give you any actual energy, but you feel compelled to eat it and you get hungrier and hungrier if you don't have it, so you eat more of it, and it's a cycle, and you've trained your body to love and want things that won't actually help it.
SPEAKER_00: That's a fitting analogy for righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: You can train your body to want things that will build up, build you up in righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Or you can train your body on sugar.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you're not gonna find righteousness, as I said, watching silly videos online.
SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna find righteousness and watching TV and movies.
SPEAKER_00: It's not there.
SPEAKER_00: But you can train yourself to hunger for those things.
SPEAKER_00: You can train yourself to hunger for social media, even though social media is not gonna teach you about righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: To where your body feels deprived if you're not engaged in social media.
SPEAKER_00: Your body feels deprived if you're not watching the movies or the videos that you want to watch.
SPEAKER_00: You feel genuinely deprived from it.
SPEAKER_00: But those things, that's sugar.
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't help you.
SPEAKER_00: Hebrews uses that same analogy.
SPEAKER_00: You're addicted to milk and you need to grow up.
SPEAKER_00: Train your body is the language Paul uses.
SPEAKER_00: Train your body to eat meat.
SPEAKER_00: To eat meat.
SPEAKER_00: And the person who fills their mind with sugar, spiritually speaking, you know, they'll say, Oh, I only spend an hour a day on social media, and I only spend an hour a day watching TV, and I only spend an hour a day watching videos.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, that's three hours right there.
SPEAKER_00: And they say, but I don't know why I'm so spiritually famished.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know why I'm not growing in righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Well, what are you feeding your mind?
SPEAKER_00: It's not hard to figure out why.
SPEAKER_00: This beatitude is about those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: It's a motivation to press forward in righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Thirdly, righteousness and our satiation.
SPEAKER_00: We saw righteousness and desperation, righteousness and motivation.
SPEAKER_00: Thirdly, righteousness and our satiation.
SPEAKER_00: And that's how the beatitude ends here, for they shall be satisfied.
SPEAKER_00: They shall be satisfied.
SPEAKER_00: And satisfied's an okay word, but there is an English word that means what this Greek word means.
SPEAKER_00: It's satiated.
SPEAKER_00: It means like filled up to the point you can't really eat anymore.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure you know the difference, you know?
SPEAKER_00: You tell your kid to eat their green beans, and they're like, no, I'm full.
SPEAKER_00: What do you mean by full there?
SPEAKER_00: I've had enough to eat, thank you very much.
SPEAKER_00: That's a different category than like after Thanksgiving dinner and the third piece of pumpkin pie, and you're like, no, I can't eat another piece of food ever.
SPEAKER_00: That's this word here.
SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm actually full.
SPEAKER_00: I'm getting away from food, I'm removing myself outside of the house.
SPEAKER_00: That's this word.
SPEAKER_00: Satiated, filled up, completely fed.
SPEAKER_00: In the Roman world, it's a word for fattening an animal.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you when you're trying to fatten an animal to eat it, you're not giving it a little bit of food.
SPEAKER_00: You're you're fattening it up.
SPEAKER_00: It's used all over the New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: I wish you had more time to chase down some of these because they're really they're really fun.
SPEAKER_00: But I chose two that I think are particularly interesting.
SPEAKER_00: Revelation 19 is the Battle of Armageddon.
SPEAKER_00: And it says the valley is filled with the bodies of those that died in battle, so many they can't be counted.
SPEAKER_00: And then Revelation 19 says the birds of the world came to the valley to feast on the flesh.
SPEAKER_00: But the birds left many of the bodies there because the birds had been filled.
SPEAKER_00: That's this word.
SPEAKER_00: The birds filled themselves up so much they couldn't eat anymore, and they just left.
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever seen vultures leave food behind?
SPEAKER_00: But that's what happens when they're totally filled up.
SPEAKER_00: Another interesting use is John chapter 6, where the crowd is pursuing Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus had multiplied the fish and the loaves, and the crowd is pursuing him, and Jesus tells the crowd, You're after me, not because you saw my signs and believed my signs, you're after me because you gorged yourselves, and that's this word.
SPEAKER_00: You filled up on the bread.
SPEAKER_00: That's why you're following me.
SPEAKER_00: Here in Matthew 5, verse 6, it's got a positive use to it.
SPEAKER_00: If you hunger and thirst for righteousness, you will be satisfied.
SPEAKER_00: You will be satiated, you will be filled up.
SPEAKER_00: And that gets you to what seems like the contradiction in this verse.
SPEAKER_00: And this contradiction is in all the beatitudes, but some it's more obvious than the other.
SPEAKER_00: Others, it's very obvious in the first one, for example.
SPEAKER_00: Happy are the morning.
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's a contradiction.
SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't say happy are the morning, happy are the unhappy, but that's how it starts.
SPEAKER_00: Happier are the second beatitude, happier the morning.
SPEAKER_00: But it's here with this one as well.
SPEAKER_00: Happy are the hungry, for they will be satisfied.
SPEAKER_00: Well, that doesn't make any sense.
SPEAKER_00: Happy are the hungry because they're satisfied.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what hungry means.
SPEAKER_00: You would expect it to say, happy are those who have eaten.
SPEAKER_00: Happy are those with food, because they will be satisfied.
SPEAKER_00: Not happy are the hungry.
SPEAKER_00: But that's the point.
SPEAKER_00: It does not say, blessed are those who eat.
SPEAKER_00: It says, blessed are those who hunger for righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: And this gets you back to the way the word righteousness enters the Bible to begin with.
SPEAKER_00: Abraham was righteous before he had eaten, so to speak.
SPEAKER_00: He was righteous before he did anything good for God.
SPEAKER_00: Because it's something that happens to you.
SPEAKER_00: You're filled from the inside out by God.
SPEAKER_00: He fills you up.
SPEAKER_00: And then finally, righteousness in our imputation.
SPEAKER_00: Righteousness in our imputation.
SPEAKER_00: So God gives us this beatitude here to make you desperate, to reveal your desperation for righteousness, to motivate you to pursue righteousness, to promise to satiate or fill you up with righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: How does all of that happen?
SPEAKER_00: It happens through the biblical doctrine of imputation, where God, imputation is where God takes something that is not yours and declares it to be yours in a legal and a real way.
SPEAKER_00: That's imputation.
SPEAKER_00: God takes this and he makes it yours by declaring that it is now yours in a very legal and a very real way.
SPEAKER_00: Imputation.
SPEAKER_00: And this is where the word righteousness picks up in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: Romans 1, verse 17.
SPEAKER_00: There is a righteousness from God that is revealed through faith.
SPEAKER_00: So righteousness is an attribute of God, it's a quality of God, remember?
SPEAKER_00: And it is revealed to you not through works, but through faith.
SPEAKER_00: You can learn about God's righteousness by placing your faith in God.
SPEAKER_00: God's righteousness is on display in the world, Romans 1 says.
SPEAKER_00: But the world doesn't receive it.
SPEAKER_00: The world suppresses the righteousness of God with their own sin.
SPEAKER_00: But you, rather than suppressing the righteousness of God, can perceive it through faith in the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: That's Romans 1, verse 16.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel of Christ is the power of God unto salvation, and it reveals Romans 1.17, the righteousness of God through faith.
SPEAKER_00: So when you place your faith in Christ, you see the righteousness of God.
SPEAKER_00: It's a righteousness that is on display in the world.
SPEAKER_00: It's also on display through the law of God.
SPEAKER_00: We talked about that earlier.
SPEAKER_00: That's Psalm 119.
SPEAKER_00: That's also Romans 2.
SPEAKER_00: The righteousness of God is on display in the world through the law of God.
SPEAKER_00: You want to know what God's righteousness looks like?
SPEAKER_00: Look at the law, and that reveals it.
SPEAKER_00: But you will not become righteous by keeping the law.
SPEAKER_00: That's the conundrum you have.
SPEAKER_00: You see God's righteousness through the Word of God, but by keeping the Word, that does not make you righteous.
SPEAKER_00: You can't do it.
SPEAKER_00: So that leads to Romans 3, verse 22.
SPEAKER_00: That both Jew and Gentile can be made righteous through faith in Jesus Christ, who is our righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: That's Romans 3.22.
SPEAKER_00: So you can place your faith in God who will declare you to be righteous by giving you Jesus Christ, who is your righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: So when you acquire Christ through faith, you acquire righteousness because Christ is your righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: That's imputation.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus led a sinless life and completely obeyed the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: He did everything the Word of God commanded him to do.
SPEAKER_00: So he was perfectly righteous.
SPEAKER_00: Through your faith in him, his righteousness is given to you.
SPEAKER_00: It's an external righteousness or an alien righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: It's outside of you.
SPEAKER_00: This is why this beatitude is not a contradiction with the first one, poor in spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Poor in spirit, that person has no righteousness of his own.
SPEAKER_00: Hunger and thirsting for righteousness, you're after a righteousness that's alien, that's external, outside of your borders.
SPEAKER_00: It's the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And he gives it to you through faith.
SPEAKER_00: This is the great exchange.
SPEAKER_00: His perfect life becomes yours, and your sin becomes his.
SPEAKER_00: That leads to Romans 4, verse 3.
SPEAKER_00: We can believe in Christ, and that belief, here it is again, is credited to us as righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: That's imputation.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you forget your lunch, so you go to Subway, use your credit card, you buy a sandwich.
SPEAKER_00: You didn't give the Subway people any money.
SPEAKER_00: Subway people take your credit card and contact your credit card company.
SPEAKER_00: And they contact you and say, hey, give us money, and you don't send your credit card money.
SPEAKER_00: You send them a check.
SPEAKER_00: And they get your check and they contact your bank, and your bank doesn't send them money.
SPEAKER_00: You know, Wells Fargo doesn't use the carriages, remember, anymore.
SPEAKER_00: They just do a little accounting thing, and the money goes from your bank account to your credit card's bank account, from your credit card to Subway's bank account.
SPEAKER_00: All that takes place with no gold taking place.
SPEAKER_00: But it's all legal, I assume.
SPEAKER_00: That's imputation.
SPEAKER_00: Something that is yours is given to somebody else.
SPEAKER_00: Something that is somebody else's is given to yours.
SPEAKER_00: All that language of imputation results in you getting your Subway sandwich.
SPEAKER_00: Biblically speaking, your sin is credited, given to Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And his perfect life and his righteousness, that is his by, in two ways.
SPEAKER_00: It's his by who he is.
SPEAKER_00: He's God, God is righteous, Jesus has the nature of God, Jesus is righteous.
SPEAKER_00: It's also his by his humanity, that he perfectly kept the law.
SPEAKER_00: So Jesus is doubly righteous, and he shares that double righteousness with you.
SPEAKER_00: He gives it to you in a very real way.
SPEAKER_00: And he gives it to you before you do anything good for him.
SPEAKER_00: Based solely on faith.
SPEAKER_00: With that understanding of imputation, you get that God can be both the just and the justifier.
SPEAKER_00: God can be holy and the one who declares other people to be holy, even though they're sinners, without violating his unholiness.
SPEAKER_00: Because he takes your sin and he punishes your sin in Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: His life fulfilled the requirements of the law, his death pays the atonement for your sin.
SPEAKER_00: And so at that exchange, you fulfill the requirements of the law, even though you never kept a single law.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus' death is God's punishment for your sin, even though he didn't actually do any of your sins.
SPEAKER_00: That's the exchange.
SPEAKER_00: Your sin became his and he died for it.
SPEAKER_00: Our hunger becomes his feast.
SPEAKER_00: His feast becomes ours.
SPEAKER_00: Our hunger is met by him.
SPEAKER_00: His holiness is saddled with our sin.
SPEAKER_00: Our sin becomes his, his holiness becomes our righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: The result, he bears the wrath of God so that we can be satisfied with righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: If you believe that, that should motivate holy living in your life.
SPEAKER_00: If you believe that, you shouldn't present the members of your body as instruments or as slaves to unrighteousness, but rather you should present the members of your body as slaves to righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Which is Romans 6, and that's also the rest of the Beatitudes, how you live coming out of being justified by God.
SPEAKER_00: God, we're thankful that you have called us to hunger and thirst for your righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: It's a righteousness that changes our lives, turns us upside down.
SPEAKER_00: Reorients the world around the cross rather than around ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we confess that we often hunger and thirst for sugar.
SPEAKER_00: We often pursue things that don't make us strong.
SPEAKER_00: We pursue things that delude us.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we pray that through the grace of Christ, we would be filled with your righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Not through our deeds, not through our own eating of it.
SPEAKER_00: But we would be filled with your righteousness through our faith.
SPEAKER_00: Our faith in the merit of Christ, our faith in the deeds of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It's his life that we want.
SPEAKER_00: It's his righteousness we need.
SPEAKER_00: Praise be to you, O God, that you share it with us.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, I pray for people here today who have never placed their faith in you.
SPEAKER_00: I pray that today they would stop looking to themselves and their own satisfaction as their gods or their idols.
SPEAKER_00: Today I pray that they would surrender that, they would fall at your feet, and they would hunger for your righteousness, not their own desires, Lord.
SPEAKER_00: I pray that today would be the day that they embrace your command to seek Christ while he can be found.
SPEAKER_00: I pray that today would be the day that they believe Paul tells the Corinthians that now is the day of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: Today is the appointed day.
SPEAKER_00: I pray that today they would go from living from themselves to surrendering that and living for you.
SPEAKER_00: And we know that for all who put their faith in you, you have borne their sin.
SPEAKER_00: You've forgiven them fully, completely, totally.
SPEAKER_00: And you've dressed them in the rags.
SPEAKER_00: You've taken off the rags of sin and you've dressed them in the robes of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Rich robes, righteous robes that they can become ours through faith.
SPEAKER_00: Pray that that would happen today in people's lives in the name of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_00: If you're in the Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: location, go to TMS.edu.
SPEAKER_00: I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.