Today’s Inspiration – B is for Blessed
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Matthew 5:6
This beatitude (Beatitude meaning statements of blessing) speaks about a strong desire. It speaks about a driving passion, a consummate ambition…those who are hungering and thirsting for righteousness. Hungering and thirsting here communicate to us something of a deeply felt need. That’s exactly the point that our Lord is making. People who come into His kingdom and people who live in His kingdom are characterized by a certain kind of hunger and thirst. They have a strong desire. They are driven by a passionate ambition. They are on a very intense pursuit.
This is not uncommon to mankind to be intense, to be passionate, to be pursuing. In fact, most people spend their lives pursuing the wrong thing. Many people, of course, have perverted ambitions, but even those who have ambitions for what on a human level might be noble find themselves at the end of their life either having never attained what they pursued or having attained it found that it wasn’t all that it was supposed to be. It’s easy to spend your life looking for the wrong thing.
There are many illustrations in the Bible of those who pursued the wrong thing. I think, first of all, of Lucifer, for example, who was already God’s most glorious creation, who was already the supreme angels among the angels, and yet he was driven with a passionate ambition, a strong desire, a consuming pursuit. He had a resolute devotion to being like God, according to Isaiah 14:13 and 14. He said, “I will be like God.” He was hungry for power. He was hungry for greater glory. And God reacted, you remember, by throwing him out of heaven. In fact it says in Isaiah 14:15, God says, “You shall be brought down.”
But that’s how it is in the world. That’s how life in the world is. People in the world pursue fame and fortune and glory and possessions, achievements that will bring them a certain amount of power or a certain amount of praise, or a certain amount of comfort, a certain amount of ease and pleasure. And sometimes because of all these wrong ambitions, ambition itself is somehow put down. But ambition is a wonderful thing if ambition is directed in the right way. In fact, that’s precisely what this passage is talking about. The apostle Paul, remember, told the Corinthians that he had an ambition and his ambition was to be pleasing to God. Nothing wrong with being driven by a passion. Nothing wrong with pursuing a goal. And that’s the implication here in Matthew chapter 5 that people who come into the kingdom and people who live in the kingdom are passionate people. They are very much aware of what they don’t have and how desperately they want it. And that’s depicted in the language of hungering and thirsting.
People in the kingdom have a passion about something. They have a strong desire. They’re ambitiously pursuing it. It is not a material thing. It is not worldly glory or honor or possessions. It is righteousness. And righteousness is to the kingdom citizen what food and water is to the natural person. That’s why the parallel is so good. Food and water are necessities, not luxuries, and so is righteousness. People know, you know and I know, you can’t live without food and you can’t live without water. It’s impossible to live without it. And so it’s impossible to live in God’s kingdom without righteousness. our physical life depends on food and water, our spiritual water life depends on righteousness.
SOURCE: This article originally appeared here at Grace to You.
Copyright 2015, Grace to You. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
The inspiration for these alphabet verses came from Crossroad
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