Hungering & Thirsting

SERMON: 2006-11-18--sm0606--hungering-thirsting SOURCE DURATION: 00:32:45.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The sermon begins with segment [0] and continues through the final scripture reading in segment [482]. Segment [483] marks the clear transition to sustained acoustic music, indicating the end of the main spoken sermon content. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:29:36.340-00:32:44.380 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Let me begin this morning by talking a little bit about the physiology of hunger and thirst. Neither is, of course, a particularly pleasant experience, and yet they are both very important for our well-being because they are the body's way of saying we are in need of the food and drink necessary to sustain life. As such, then, hunger and thirst are not only an indication that we are alive and functioning, they are also a God-given means to drive us into action. And Jesus says, even as in the physical world, hunger and thirst are a means to do that. The same thing is also true in the kingdom of God. "Blessed are those," He says in Beatitude number four, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." And as we look at this Beatitude this morning, I want to make three general observations. The first is that spiritual hunger and thirst are a good thing, and they are a good thing for two reasons. First of all, they tell us that we are alive spiritually. Think this through with me physically. What's one of the first things that happen when you don't feel well? Well, you lose your appetite. Food tastes like cardboard. The smell of food makes you gag, and things that otherwise would stir up your appetite and would create hunger in you leave you absolutely cold. And the same thing is true, too, in a situation of extreme starvation. What happens when a person does without food for a long, long time? Well, interestingly enough, they lose their hunger. They lose their thirst. Whenever you see pictures of these emaciated children out of Africa withered away, then you know that they lack the ability even to have hunger and thirst. They are at the end of their lives, so to speak, and if they're to be fed, they are to be fed with an eyedropper because they don't even have the energy to take that in. Well, Jesus says the same kind of thing is true, spiritually speaking. How do you know when you are sick spiritually? Well, you lose your hunger and thirst for the things of God. Prayer becomes a chore. Bible reading, if done at all, becomes perfunctory, maybe done out of duty more than out of passion. Going to church, well, you know, it loses its interest, and even as God and the things of God lose their interest, the things of the world become increasingly powerful, and we start looking elsewhere to satisfy the hunger of our souls. And so hungering and thirsting for God and for the things of God is a very good thing. We sometimes think it's not a good thing, but it is because it means you are healthy. And this morning, if you're joined to Christ and your life in Christ is healthy, then there ought to be seasons in your life where you are hungry, when you are thirsty. Not all the time, because sometimes you're satisfied, but if you're away from church for a while, if you're away from God's people for a while, if you are out of touch with God, if you haven't prayed, if you haven't read Scripture, one of the ways in which you can tell that you are in a spiritually healthy state is that there is a hunger that arises in you, a desire to head back to God, a desire to find him again in prayer, a desire to read Scripture, a desire to reconnect with God's people. Where that is missing, and where that is missing over the long term, we are in a spiritual state of decline because that hunger, even as physical hunger, drives us to find food, so spiritual hunger drives us into action, and that is the second reason hunger and thirst are a good thing. Because, again, think this through with me. What happens when physically you're hungry or thirsty? What happens when you come home from work and you're hungry? One of the first things you do is you go to the fridge and you scrounge around, "Is there something to drink? Is there maybe something to eat, a snack?" If it's close to meal time and you have the energy to put a meal together, then you put a meal on the table. Food and drink only appeals to you when you're hungry and when you're thirsty, and the greater the need, the greater the passion with which we pursue satisfying that need, and that is particularly true when it comes to hunger and thirst. I was struck just recently in the October issue of Reader's Digest, reading the condensed book version of the book "Miracle in the Andes." It is the story of Nando Parado and his Uruguay rugby team when they crashed high in the Andes Mountains on the border of Argentina and Uruguay on October 13, 1972. Some of you here will be old enough to remember that story. It was in news headlines all around the world. 45 people were in that plane, and when the plane crashed in the mountains, 32 survived the crash initially, and then many of the injured died, and it took 72 days for them to be rescued. And even then, they were only rescued because Parado and one of his friends trekked across the mountains for 10 days to get help. And so when help came out of the 45 young men and family members on that airplane, there were only 16 survivors. Now, I said a moment ago the story made headlines all around the world, not only because the rescue was spectacular and unusual, but if you'll remember the story, very shortly after their rescue, stories began to circulate of cannibalism, and Parado, in his book, "Miracle in the Andes," confirms that story, how the survivors were at the point of starvation, debated for a long, long time whether or not to consume the flesh of their fallen teammates. You can imagine the incredible dilemma that placed them in, and it was either that or die. And so they stepped into it, difficult as it was to overcome that taboo. The hungrier you are and the thirstier you are, the more ambitiously you're going to strive to fill the needs of your body. And the Bible talks about that, too. Deuteronomy 28, 53, God pronouncing the curse in Israel says, "Because of the suffering that your enemy will inflict upon you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and the daughters the Lord God has given you." Now, the same thing is true spiritually. The hungrier we are for God and the thirstier we are for God's intervention in our lives, the more desperate we become in searching for His answer and for His solution. So hunger and thirst, spiritually speaking, are a good thing. Second thing I want us to notice, then, is that the focal point of this beatitude is a hungering and thirsting after righteousness. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be failed." There are, of course, many kinds of hunger and thirst in your life and in my life. We hunger and thirst for physical food and physical drink, not only, but we hunger and thirst for things like comfort. We hunger and thirst for fame, for recognition, for happiness and joy. All of these are deep cravings of our soul, and they're not necessarily all bad, except that where they come out of a fallen human nature, where we try to satisfy them outside of and apart from God, they will always leave us hungering and thirsting for more. If I'm greedy, the more I get, the more I want. If I lack comfort, the more comfort I receive, the more comfort that I want. Life in those places can be a bottomless pit. That's not the hungering and thirsting Jesus is talking about here. He's talking about hungering and thirsting after righteousness. And righteousness in the Bible is a right relationship with God. It is living in a way that has His approval and His blessing. The whole teaching of Scripture is if we will first see God and His kingdom and His righteousness, then everything else we need, God is going to add to us, because if we're in right relationship with God, and He loves us, and He has overflowing bounty to provide for each one of His children, then that's all that matters. Because if we have Him, and if we pursue His righteousness, then He'll see to it that every other need of your life and my life ultimately and fundamentally will be satisfied. Now, when it comes to righteousness, and when it comes to seeking for righteousness, the Bible makes it very clear there are at least two levels of righteousness that we need to think about. The first is what we would call a personal righteousness. That is to say, a personal relationship with the Lord and a personal living before His face in a way that honors Him and that does His will. You know, as well as I do, that before we come to Christ, righteousness is not what we pursue. Before we come to Christ, we pursue our own happiness, we pursue our own well-being, we pursue all our own goals. When the Lord opens our eyes to the foolishness of that, and we surrender ourselves to the Lord Jesus, when we are born again, there is a fundamental transition that takes place in your heart and in my heart. If we're joined to Christ, then we have died to sin, we have died to the world, and we have come alive to God and to His righteousness. It doesn't mean that we will never fall into sin. It doesn't mean that we're going to do everything right. But please bear with me when I say what it does mean is that fundamentally, we've made a decision to leave behind us the world and the ways of the world, and we want to seek God and honor Him. And so we learn to put to death the old, we learn to put on the new, and the more we do that, the more our personal righteousness becomes a reality before the face of God. Our lives ought to be changing because we now hunger. We hunger for the righteousness of God. We begin to love the things we used to hate. We learn to hate the things that once we loved. And even though we will fall short many, many times over, there is something inside us that says, "I don't want to live the old way anymore. "I understand that for all of its attractiveness "and for all of its temptation, "it fundamentally leads to death. "I want to love God, not because I have to, "not because I'm afraid of going to hell if I don't, "but because I have learned, often the hard way, "there is no better way to live "than to live in a right relationship with God." You can look at your own life this morning, and I'm willing to bet that some of the happiest, most content moments of your life have been those times when you have felt closest to God and were most conformed to His will. I know that's true in my life. And I wonder sometimes, why is it so hard to hold on to that when it is so obviously the better way? So there is a personal righteousness, but there is also a collective righteousness. That is to say, the Lord is not only interested in individuals like you and me being in right relationship with Him, hating sin, and loving righteousness. God's scope's a lot bigger than that. God is looking for the whole world to be restored in relationship to Him. "For the earth will be filled with the knowledge "of the glory of the Lord," says the book of Habakkuk. "Even as waters cover the sea." And the book of Psalms tells us the nations will fear the name of the Lord. "All the kings of the earth will revere your glory." Now again, before we're united with Christ, we have a fundamental love for the world as it is in rebellion over against God. Doesn't mean that we like everything that we see. We grieve over earthquakes, we're sad about wars, and all of that sort of stuff. But until Christ lives in us, we fundamentally resonate with the values of the world which John says in 1 John chapter two are essentially the pride of life, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes. And we're quite content to live in a world that is in rebellion over against God. And we probably look askance at those who, to our mind, look to be too radical in their devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ. But then when Jesus comes into our hearts and we're joined to him, then we're not only crucified to our sin, but we're also crucified to the world. And the spirit of Jesus that always gravitates towards God, that always wants to honor him, that always wants to serve him, living in your heart and in my heart, opens our eyes to the brokenness of the world, opens our eyes to the selfishness, the pleasure-seeking, the grief that we experience in the world. And you begin to hunger and you begin to cry out, and you say, "Oh God, let your kingdom come." Let the nations bend their knee before God, and you become exercised. You become exercised about the sin and the brokenness that you see in the world, and you become exercised deep in your soul. You begin to cry out, "Oh God, let your kingdom come." I mean, hasn't that been your experience? As you live in Jesus and you see little children starving because of the selfishness and the brutality of humankind. When you see churches split or families fall apart, or nations go to war against each other, aren't there those times in your heart where you cry out and you say, "God, let your kingdom come"? That's hungering and thirsting for righteousness. And again, one of the ways in which you and I can tell that we are in a healthy relationship with the Lord Jesus is that every so often, I'm not saying it's gonna be there all the time, because you're not hungry all the time, you're not thirsty all the time, but every so often when meal time rolls around, spiritually speaking, there is a hunger in your soul that cries out and that says, "Oh God, I wanna be more like Jesus. "I wish that my family were all together, "that my children would serve you. "I want for the Church of Christ to stand up "and to let its light shine "in a world that is filled with scandal. "I wanna see the nations beat their swords into plowshares "and their spears into pruning locks." And you know that you're resonating with the heart of Jesus. You're resonating with God's desire to see the kingdom come. And intense as that passion may be, painful as sometimes that hunger will be, because you share in the groaning of all creation, God says in scripture that you are blessed because it is an indication of God's activity in your life. Because you see not only are hunger and thirst a good thing, not only is the focal point of that hunger and thirst righteousness, the promise of scripture is that God promises to fill us. Because notice again how Jesus puts it, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. I like old translations in that regard better. They shall be filled. Don't hear a lot of shells anymore. But it seems to me there's a power to shell. They shall. When you're hungry, you shall be filled. One of the very first things I learned in the Christian life, and it came from a man by the name of Bob Mumford, is that God is not a tease. See, a tease is somebody who stirs up your appetite and your passion, but then who doesn't feel it. It is like tantalize. The word tantalize, by the way, comes from Greek mythology. A guy by the name of Tantalus had fallen out of favor with the gods and they put him on the river bottom. And then they let the river rise right to his mouth. And then every time he tried to drink the water, the river water would drop. And the poor guy died of thirst because he could never quench the thirst of his body. God is not a tease. He doesn't stir up hunger and thirst for righteousness in your life or in my life, just to hang us out to dry. No, his intention is to satisfy our deepest thirst and our deepest hunger. Jesus, in conversation with the woman at the well, puts it this way, "Everyone who drinks this water," that is the water of this world, "will be thirsty again. But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water, welling up to eternal life." And this satisfying, this infilling that God promises to you and to me, just very quickly as we wind up this morning, takes place, I think, on three levels, positionally in Christ. The Bible says we are saved by grace through faith. And I've often said we're never more righteous than when we confess our sins and receive the righteousness of Jesus. And one of the things hungering and thirsting after righteousness does for you and me is it makes us aware of our sin, it drives us to our knees, and it makes us keep short account with God about our sin. And whenever we confess our sin, God's promises not only to wash it away, but to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. See, that's what enables us to keep on going. There isn't a one of us here who doesn't fall short of the glory of God every day, every week, perhaps almost every moment. What gives us the courage, the boldness to draw near to God and to say, you're my father, I wanna love you and I wanna serve you? Well, it's the righteousness of Jesus. On Christ, the solid rock, I stand. All other ground is sinking sand. We're never more righteous than when we come to God by faith and repentance in Jesus. And then in actual experience, if positionally in Christ, we are made right with God, which is known theologically as justification, actual experience is the biblical doctrine of sanctification. As God works in our hearts by His Spirit, as He creates in our lives a hunger to be more like Jesus, His Holy Spirit begins to show us our sin. And as He shows us our sin, He gives us a willingness to forsake it, to abandon it, to put it off. And as He shows us what the righteousness of God is that God is looking for in your life and in my life, He changes us on the inside so that we want to love God, we want to love our neighbor, we want to be different. And even though the struggle sometimes may be long, intense and deep, we know that no good thing will the Lord withhold from those who are in Christ Jesus. Everything that we need for life and godliness, God has given us in Jesus Christ. And so as time goes on and we hunger, we discover God breaks through. There are those times when our sins fall away. There are those times when we have great moments of victory. And here's the interesting thing. It is an ongoing cycle. There is a hungering and a thirsting in a given area of your life and my life. We seek God and we seek His righteousness. In due time, God meets us and He satisfies us in that place. And the more satisfied we become in tasting the goodness of God, the deeper becomes the hunger to be more like Jesus in other areas of our lives. Do you understand what I'm saying? We hunger and we thirst. We get filled up and it increases our appetite because we more and more want to be like Jesus. And it's all He's doing. All we have to do is abide in Him and He'll make us bear fruit. And that of course sets the stage for the fullest of all in fillings which happens in the age to come. And keeping with His promise as Peter, we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness. No matter how righteous we are positionally in Christ, no matter how far God has moved us along in this age in the process of sanctification in this life, we will never be completely perfect. We will never be completely whole. There will still be scars on our souls. There will still be places where the ravages of sin have left their mark. But all that does is it increases for us the hunger for that day when everything will be made new. I said last week, heaven is the kind of place that everybody wants to go to. Nobody's in a hurry to get there. You know how God increases our appetite for the age that is to come? He shows us the hungering of our souls. He lets us face the brokenness of the world and He creates in us by His Holy Spirit a glad anticipation for the day when all things are made near. I don't know how you react to funerals. I don't know how you handle the terrible sense of loss and grief that overtakes us when somebody that we love and love dearly passes away. You know, I've known Florence and Frank for almost 30 years now. When we first got to Nova Scotia back in 1979, Florence was the first person to come forward in her Bible study to ask for prayer. And she's often referred to that moment as being the definitive moment that changed her life forever. How do you handle the loss, especially a sudden loss of somebody that you care for a lot? Well, you know what it does? It makes you hunger and it makes you thirst for the day when death will be thrown in the lake of fire and when all sin will have been conquered and when the kingdom of God comes in glory and majesty and power and nobody will be hungry or thirsty or broken or crying or mourning anymore. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they will be filled. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:29:36.340; remove through 00:32:45.000] (gentle piano music) ♪ Spirit of God ♪ ♪ Well, thou within my heart ♪ ♪ Read it from earth ♪ ♪ Through all its process through ♪ ♪ Stood to my weakness ♪ ♪ Mighty as thou art ♪ ♪ And made me love thee as I art to love ♪ ♪ 'Tis thou not made us ♪ ♪ Love thee God and King ♪ ♪ All I know so hard and strength and mind ♪ ♪ I see the cross there ♪ ♪ Teach my heart to think ♪ ♪ Oh, let me seek thee and oh, let me find ♪ ♪ Teach me to feel that thou art always nigh ♪ ♪ Teach me the struggles of the soul ♪ ♪ To bear to check the rising of the rebel sky ♪ ♪ Teach me the patience of unanswered prayer ♪ ♪ Teach me to love thee as I angel's love ♪ ♪ One holy passion filling all my frame ♪ ♪ The fact is of the heav'n descend and die ♪ ♪ I art an altar and I love the flame ♪ [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:32:45.000; resume after this marked segment]