"...thirst for Righteousness..."" [4]- Neil Ryan

Date: September 10, 2006
Passage: Matthew 5:1-12
Message: Blessed are the Hungry
Series: The Be-Attitudes [4]

There is a little ritual that is played out in our family whenever we all go out to dinner.
I have theory when it comes to ordering your meal.

You know what its like.
Everybody scours the menu looking for that meal that leaps out at you – eat me!!
Most times you have to go through the menu two or three times.
Then you change your mind two or three times.
Then you ask around the table what everybody else is having and that throws you into doubt about what you were going to have.
Then you get really serious, you call the waiter over to explain a particular meal.
By this time the waitress has come 2 or 3 times and asks if you’re ready to order.

That’s when I generally make my insightful statement to my family!!

“Just remember, it doesn’t matter what you order because as soon as you see what someone else has got, you are going to wish you’d got that!”

We have this insatiable appetite for the right thing to eat; we just don’t know what it is!
It’s true of life.
We have an insatiable appetite for something; we just don’t know what IT is!

Every generation expresses it in song.
My parents listened to Peggy Lee - “Is that all there is?”
We listened to Rolling Stones - “I can’t get no satisfaction”
Or Bruce Springsteen – Everybody’s got a hungry heart”
These days it’s Stacie Orrico – “More to life”

I've got it all, but I feel so deprived
I go up, I come down and I'm emptier inside
Tell me what is this thing that I feel like I'm missing
And why can't I let it go

I've got the time and I'm wasting it slowly
Here in this moment I'm half-way out the door
Onto the next thing, I'm searching for something that's missing

I'm wanting more

I'm always waiting on something other than this
Why am I feelin' like there's something I missed....
Always... Always...

More to life
There's gotta be more to life

We want IT, but we don’t know what IT is!
We spend our lives trying to quench our thirst and satisfy our hunger.
We often have a ‘junk food’ mentality to life.
We consume what looks good, tastes good and we can get it now!

One of the most successful companies in the fast food industry is Domino's Pizza. It is no surprise that the founder of the company had a clearly defined statement of mission: "Domino's has a single goal. Its mission: to deliver a high-quality pizza, hot, within 30 minutes at a fair price."

Oxymoron in that statement: ‘high-quality pizza!’
But they have tapped into one of our great weaknesses.
Something looks good, smells good, tastes good, doesn’t cost much and we get it in 30 minutes!
Always going succeed!

This looking for the illusive IT causes someone to walk out on their family, restless in their job, uncommitted in their relationships, unreliable in their commitments.

It causes us to seek retail therapy, to max out on credit card, to buy things you can’t afford, to create a lifestyle that looks like you have IT.

This deep seated hunger and thirst craves any solution that looks like it might satisfy the great cry of the human heart
…..there’s got to be more than this

That’s why this statement of Jesus goes right to the core of our lives. Matthew 5:6
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled [satisfied]
Jesus declares that the great mission of life is not the pursuit of happiness; it is the pursuit of righteousness!
The reason we come up empty is that we pursue the wrong thing.

To put happiness before righteousness will leave you feeling the same as you do after eating a pizza.
You wish you’d eaten something else!

What is this that Jesus talks about?
Is he saying that the ultimate in life is to retreat to a monastery in the back side of the desert and shut ourselves away from the world while we seek to live righteous and holy lives?

No – that doesn’t work.
You can take the heart away from the world but you can’t take the world out of the heart!

That’s why retreating to Church once a week doesn’t make us any more holy because even though we look a holy bunch this morning – our sinful hearts are just as sinful in here on a Sunday as they are out there on a Monday!

Jesus is saying
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst to be right with God
Take away all the God-jokes, the Hollywood myths and legends about God, the vague perceptions about God that we have picked up along the way from somewhere –

Reality is – things are not right between us and God.

Bible tells us that SIN disbars us from a relationship with God.
Because of that we are all out of kilter.
We now look for ‘rightness’ in all the wrong places.

It is a sobering thought that we have no right to God!
Eg.
If you go into our web site
www.upbc.org.au
You can enjoy everything that is there.
You can have free access to everything on the site.
But you don’t have any rights to that site.

You can’t add to it, change it or be part of it.
In fact even when I log in and go to the browse section and hit on ‘create content’ you would think that the Senior Pastor would be able to create any content he liked on the UPBC webpage.

But when I hit the ‘Book Page’ entry, I get this terse little reminder
You are not authorised to access this page
There is someone more important than the pastor – he’s called the Network Manager
His name is Jason Hoet!

We don’t like being denied access to anything.
We don’t like thinking we are not the ultimate authority, especially when it comes to our lives, choices and our freedoms.

That’s why we have a very man-centred theology about God.
We think about God as though He is just there at our disposal.
We think He is rather pathetic, desperate kind of Deity that is grateful if we give him any kind of mute acknowledgement or endorsement.
We talk about God as though He has no options.

He thinks what we think!
He is bound by what we decide!
He is happy with what makes us happy!

Truth is God is God
Whether we make light of it or deny it the reality is we will never stand in the presence of God until we are set right with him.
Our sin cannot be overlooked by a Holy and just God!

Thankfully the message of the gospel is that God doesn’t require us to walk over hot coals, or trudge around with ash on our faces or deprive ourselves of anything enjoyable just to try and make ourselves worthy of forgiveness.

Gospel tells us that Jesus has set things right for us.
That’s what the Cross is all about.
Jesus did what we could never do.
He satisfied the righteous and just demands of God, so that now God could satisfy the hunger in our heart to be right with Him.

Only in Jesus do we find the way back to God and in doing so the way open for the whole of eternity!

Frederick Buechner wrote a book called “Longing For Home”
His major theme is that everyone of us is homesick.
That we grow up and have these longings to be back home.
That’s why we often feel a great sense of nostalgia when we go back to our childhood places.

We do get homesick.
Eg
When we shifted to Darwin in 1989 the kids were terribly homesick, I was homesick!
For the first few months we would often do something that may sound quite stupid to you as you listen to it.
We would get in the car and set off for home.

Stuart Highway runs out of Darwin and runs straight into King William Street in the centre of Adelaide! [3,000klms]
We would make out we were on our way to Adelaide.
Some days we would stop at Batchelor.
Other days we would go as far as Adelaide River.

But sooner or later reality struck that we had to turn around!
The drive back along that highway somehow seemed so much harder that the drive down.
At least on the way down, we were heading in the right direction!

I believe that as people who were made in the image of God that we are homesick.
Our cry that ……there must be something more
Is a cry for home!

This was gave rise to Augustine’s great statement
God, you have made our hearts restless until they rest in you.

Jesus said,
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.

The thing about being right with God is that we then have a hunger for what God wants.

Read Philippians 4:4-9

It means we now long to be what we really are in Christ.
It means we really long for the Church to be what it is as the body of Christ.
It means we really long for God’s life to overflow into the world in which we find ourselves.

Righteousness is not just for people in some sort of Holy Club called Church!
Righteousness is not just about retreating to our rituals and our religious formalities.

Micah 6:6-8:
6 With what shall I come before the LORD
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8 He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
God gives us a hunger to stand up for those who are suffering because of justice.
To speak for those who have no voice
To love those who are unlovable by anybody’s definition!

God gives us a thirst for integrity in business, family, Government, handling of global conflicts and racial tensions.

When we look at a world that is littered with –
• poverty, sickness and need,
• exploitation of people and resources,
• economic rationalism that is devoid of morality,
• with

God calls us -
To keep fighting for that which is right.
To adjust our lives and lifestyle’s to do what is right
To keep praying for that which is right
To speak out unashamedly about that which is right.

Perhaps the saddest image you can see on TV is that of starving child who has nothing in them to fight their condition anymore. They can’t even lift their hand to brush away a fly.

Here this –
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled

Those of us whom God has satisfied –Let us rise up with great heart …..to act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.