The Hungry and the Thirsty
Matthew 5:6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Now, I know that you and I make mistakes in life – hopefully we’re growing and learning and improving – but we still make mistakes. It’s simply a fact of life. Sometimes you wake up in the morning, and as you think back to yesterday, you ask yourself, How could I possible have gotten that so wrong?! Yep. We all make stupid mistakes.
It gnaws away at you because deep down, we have a strong sense of right and wrong. We know when we’ve done wrong and let me tell you, when someone else does us wrong, that turns into a sense of justice and injustice – and what we want, is justice.
That’s the best way I can think of to unpack that word “righteousness” – that pops up so often in God’s Word. It’s that sense of the difference between right and wrong, between justice and injustice.
So, there are two times in life when we really want righteousness to be a happening thing. Firstly, when we’re sick of making the same mistake, the same error of judgement, over and over again. At that point we really want, is to start getting it right, so the pain will go away. And secondly, when we’re on the wrong end of an injustice, and what we yearn for is to have that injustice set right.
Those are the two times when we really, really, really want this righteousness thing, to be a happening thing. Jesus said:
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. (Matthew 5:6)
All too often we skate over our own mistakes and we live out the consequences. Sin inevitably has consequences. It’s the way it’s meant to be – we’re meant to learn from that.
For a long time, in my Christian walk, I made excuses for my sin. Well, you know that’s just how God made me. We each have our Achilles heal, this one is mine, and the rest of the world just has to learn to live with it!
But after you’ve bashed your head up against the same brick wall over and over again, when you finally come to the realisation that this one sin that keeps getting you, always has bad consequences, you eventually, because of the pain and the stupidity of it all, come to the point of longing for something to get better.
And that better life starts happening, when we live out this thing called righteousness; when we start living out and doing right instead of wrong, justice instead of injustice. In fact when the pain of the consequences of your sin gets so bad, you start yearning for that.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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