Living towards the day: ‘Hungering and thirsting for righteousness’ (Matthew 5:1-12)

Living towards the day: ‘Hungering and thirsting for righteousness’ (Matthew 5:1-12)

[00:00:00] We’re starting this new series. Yes. Uh, living toward the day. And, uh, looking at the Sermon on the Mount, which is kind of Jesus’ most famous teaching. Uh, and it’s three chapters long. Matthew five, six, and seven. Uh, it’s full of the most incredible things, isn’t it, that we need to know for our life. It’s all about how to live.

[00:00:20] And so we’re gonna jump into something big with this whole series. Uh, each week there’ll be blog posts, courtesy of Dan, and a summary of the talk. And questions to discuss. And that’ll be hopefully done by the Tuesday each week. Uh, and you can access that from the website or other means. And we’re starting with the Beatitudes, the Blesseds, as we just read.

[00:00:45] Uh, Matthew 5 1 2 12, which are the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount. Are you ready to go? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Cool. All right. Here we go. So this is the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. [00:01:00] Uh, Jesus has called his disciples and begun teaching and healing in Galilee. Then in chapter one, uh, five verse one, there’s a huge crowd that is following him.

[00:01:11] And when he saw the crowd, Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him and began to he began to teach them. This is where the sermon on the mount, uh, traditionally is. I think it’s probably right, uh, just by the Sea of Galilee near Capernaum. And Jesus says, verse three, blessed are the poor in spirit.

[00:01:35] Blessed are those who mourn and blessed are the weak. And today I want to begin with the fourth beatitude, which introduces us to the concept of righteousness. Matthew Chapter five, verse six. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are those who hunger and [00:02:00] thirst, who have an ache, who long, uh, who crave for righteousness, for they will be filled.

[00:02:09] They are the ones who will be satisfied. I’ve got three questions. First question, what does Jesus mean by righteousness? When Jesus uses the word righteousness, he’s talking about how we live. The apostle Paul might use the word slightly differently in, for example, the book of Romans, but Jesus, especially in Matthew, is describing a new way of living.

[00:02:33] It’s living toward the day. Later in chapter six, verse 33, Jesus says, seek first. The Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness. I want you to live differently. Even here in the Beatitudes, he’s talking about being merciful, being pure in heart, being peacemakers, and the whole sermon on the Mount chapters five, six, and seven of [00:03:00] Matthew.

[00:03:00] It’s all driven by, and you’ve heard it said, do not murder, but I say to you, have you been reconciled to your brother? And so on. In other words, I say to you, take the will of God to the max. Really go after doing what God wants you to do. This is righteousness. A heart that wants to obey God. This is a person who longs and craves and hungers for God’s will in their life, and for God’s will to be done in their life.

[00:03:35] Hungering and thirsting is such strong language, isn’t it? It’s from the heart. Lord, I want to do your will in my life. I want your kingdom and its righteousness to dominate everything that I’m doing in my life. And Jesus says, if that’s you, you’ll be satisfied. You’ll be filled. You’ll find what [00:04:00] you’re looking for.

[00:04:02] Second question, why would we hunger and thirst so desperately, so intensely? For righteousness, for the will of God in our lives. Why would that be our guiding star? Why would that be our passion, our fire? I wanna go on a, a fairly long tangent here, if that’s okay. Sorry. But hopefully it’s brilliant.

[00:04:23] I don’t know. But really illuminating. I, I suspect I wanna look at the will of God as a theme in the whole of the scriptures. The will of God, particularly for his people. How do we understand God’s will for our lives if that’s what we’re hungry and thirsty for? In Ephesians chapter one, there’s something fascinating and it happens twice, and this really opened the door for me for a whole new understanding of Christian faith, and I wanna show you because it has real implications for understanding what it means to hunger and thirst for [00:05:00] righteousness.

[00:05:00] So Ephesians one, verse five says, God predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure, and will God adopts us as his children through Jesus. And he does that in accordance with his pleasure and will. And then verse nine and oh, and I want you to just concentrate on those words, pleasure and will.

[00:05:29] And in verse nine, he made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ. So the things that God is doing through Jesus are according to his pleasure and will in both these verses. God’s will and God’s pleasure are connected. They’re used synonymously.

[00:05:53] And if we take that idea. And really pursue it and go galloping through the whole of the [00:06:00] scriptures. We’ll find it everywhere, and it’s absolutely everywhere. It’s staring us in the face. God’s will and God’s pleasure are related, and the writers don’t distinguish between those two things when they’re talking about God’s pleasure.

[00:06:16] They’re talking about God’s will. We immediately wanna separate them. Well, on the one hand, there’s God’s pleasure, God’s satisfaction, God’s delight, God’s joy. And then on the other hand, he has a will. But these writers say, no, no, no. They’re the same thing. They go together. You can’t separate God’s pleasure from God’s will.

[00:06:39] Now, how many of us sometimes think of God as some kind of cranky grandpa? I can be a cranky grandpa sometimes. And we think of God that way, and, and we don’t really know what mood he’s going to be in. Uh, and so God’s will for us can be a source of [00:07:00] terror because if we don’t obey, oh, we’re gonna be in trouble.

[00:07:04] It’s gonna be ugly. And I think all of us have that attitude to some extent, but God’s will isn’t like that. God’s will is his pleasure. Now stay with me please. Uh, this is exciting. The reason these writers in the New Testament are doing this and putting God’s pleasure and will together is that they’re translating a Hebrew concept from the Old Testament scriptures and these two words, pleasure and will, are trying to convey one Hebrew word.

[00:07:41] The New Testament’s written in Greek, and they didn’t have a single word for this concept, so they had to use two words to convey the meaning of it. But there’s one word in Hebrew and it’s called God’s ratzon, it’s [00:08:00] a fun word. I guess the opposite would be rats off. ratzon rats off. I can’t get that outta my head.

[00:08:08] ratzon, rats off. Here’s a, an album cover uh, ratzon Hashem. That is the ratzon of the name the name of God, the ratzon of God. This whole album devoted to this it’s so, the Old Testament uses this word ratzon because they understood that God’s will and God’s pleasure are the same thing.

[00:08:33] And it was called God’s ratzon, and it’s everywhere. So the New Testament is merely taking this concept from the Old Testament and using other words to try and convey what this thing God’s ratzon is all about. God’s will is his pleasure, and when God’s people do what God wants, it brings God pleasure.

[00:08:55] Or you could say it the other way. God’s pleasure and God’s favour. [00:09:00] Is resting on the people of God as they do His will and as we do, God’s will for us, as His people we’re entering, entering into his pleasure, his delight, his joy, and that favour, that delight, that joy of God, that peace is resting on us as we obey him.

[00:09:26] And this is the concept. Also in the Old Testament scriptures, ratzon, was the idea that God wanted his pleasure and favour and delight and will to invade the earth. God’s intent was to bring his ratzon to earth. So Psalm 5, 1 12 says, surely Lord, you bless the righteous. You surround them with your ratzon as a shield.

[00:09:53] Yes. When we as God’s people live as God intended us to live, as we obey, as we do what God tells us to [00:10:00] do, we live in the way God’s inten intense for us, and he longs for us to live. Then God’s ratzon his pleasure, his joy, his delight is a shield around us. I’m protected by it, and it’s on me. It’s surrounding me.

[00:10:17] It’s above me. It’s within me. God’s delight, his joy, his favour surrounds me. What a, what a cool concept. Also, Proverbs 11 verse one, the Lord abhors dishonest scales, but accurate weights are his ratzon. So God says, I hate it when you cheat, but when my people are honest with each other and forthright and vulnerable, and say things the way they really are, that’s my delight.

[00:10:48] So this is saying that when I’m telling the truth, God’s pleasure is resting, his delight, his joy is resting on me and Isaiah 61. This is [00:11:00] really getting to the heart of things. This passage is really behind what Jesus says in the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 It’s hundreds of years before Jesus, and it says, when the Messiah comes, he’ll say, the spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me.

[00:11:17] Because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, he has sent me to bind up the broken hearted to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners to proclaim the year of the Lord’s ratzon. How cool is that? The year of the Lord’s favour is how we translate it, but it’s the word ratzon So God says, a time is coming when my ratzon is going to invade the earth in some new way. My pleasure, my delight, my joy, my favour, my goodwill, however you wanna say it. When the Messiah comes, my ratzon is going to be [00:12:00] present in some unique, powerful, and ultimate way. And so they understood that God’s intent for his people was that his peace, his joy, his salvation.

[00:12:10] Uh, this is what he wanted to give to his people in some ultimate way in the future, when the Messiah came on the day that was coming. And then for that to spread throughout the whole world. And what happens when we view God as a cranky old man is we can lose this sense that God’s goal for humanity and for us, his people in particular, his desire, his delight.

[00:12:37] Is that his ratzon would explode in, in, into the whole world, and that people would experience his joy, his delight, his pleasure. And we can talk about God’s wrath. We can talk about God’s judgment. There’s plenty of scriptures on that, but his ratzon is the idea that God wants to invade the earth which means invade your life and my [00:13:00] life with his good pleasing and joyous will.

[00:13:04] It’s like this incredible act of grace, salvation, and blessing that we get to keep his will, that we get to be part of his will, the way he wants us to live and the way he wants the world to be. It’s going to actually explode on this earth. So in Matthew five, six, Jesus is saying, that day is here. Blessed are you.

[00:13:31] Who are poor? Blessed of the meek. Blessed are you who mourn blessed if you are longing and thirsting for the ratzon of God, for the salvation of God. The delight, the pleasure, the joy of God, the good tidings of God, the good news of God to descend on the people of God for that day has come. So Jesus in the Beatitudes is announcing the ratzon of God.

[00:13:59] The [00:14:00] righteousness of God has now dawned. Blessed are you. Now, because it’s happening, Jesus is doing it. In fact, he even uses the word ratzon. Later in the Sermon on the Mount or the idea of ratzon Matthew six verse nine, this then is how we should pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, which means your rule and reign.

[00:14:24] Be more and more present in this world. Your ratzon be done. Your will be done. Excuse me. In other words, we are praying. We want to live as you created us to live. We want you to be pleased with us. We want your favour to rest on our shoulders and surround us like a shield. We want it to happen to the whole world.

[00:14:47] Now let’s tease this out. What a fascinating idea God’s will is his pleasure, and when I do his will, his pleasure and favour are resting on me. And many people [00:15:00] see God’s will as terrifying and this kind of heavy weight, uh, that they feel might come down on them. Uh, but these texts force us to see God’s will completely differently.

[00:15:14] What a privilege it is to do God’s will, to be part of God’s will. And it’s like God is smiling on us when we do His will. His favour, his peace is descending on us when we do his will, when we love his will, and we do it through the accomplishment of Jesus on the cross. By faith in him. We do it through his spirit that Jesus has poured out on us, uh, because of his achievement on the cross for us.

[00:15:44] In other words, it’s all coming out of the new covenant. The new covenant of the spirit and forgiveness that Jesus has brought us. Uh, the new relationship we now have with God through Christ means that we enter God’s will and can keep God’s [00:16:00] will and be involved in God’s will in some new way, in some incredible way.

[00:16:06] And when we think about obeying God, are we thinking at that moment about his joy? That his joy, as we obey, is descending on us because we are doing what he created us to do and what he so longs for us. Psalm 19 says, the decrees of the Lord are more precious than gold and sweeter than honey from the honeycomb.

[00:16:32] So here’s what the rabbis would do. They’d put honey on the fingers of a young boy who was about to learn the scriptures. Because honey, oh, it’s the best. It’s the ultimate delicacy. It’s a luxury. There is no, nothing more exquisite in the world than honey. So the rabbi would place honey from the honeycomb on the finger of the [00:17:00] student and say, remember the words of God and the life with God?

[00:17:04] There’s nothing better. The life with God, the life he gives us to live His good will is sweeter than the honeycomb. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, blessed are you. If you hunger and thirst for this life that God wants for you and for the world, because it’s like honey, you hunger for it. It’s that good.

[00:17:31] Where is fulfillment? Ultimately, it’s in the will of God. For me, God’s pleasure is upon me when I live according to how he’s wired me to live as a human being and how he intends me to live as his son and pursuing and obeying God can be difficult at times and gut wrenching. There can even be persecution as Jesus will go on to say in the last two beatitudes in verses 10 to 12.[00:18:00] 

[00:18:00] But we’ll have deep joy like honey from the honeycomb, even now, despite suffering as we wait for the ultimate day that is coming. It’s just an amazing way to think, to pursue his will, is to pursue his joy and also my own joy as he reigns that down on me. His ratzon then becomes my ratzon. So back to Matthew five, six.

[00:18:29] Jesus is saying, blessed are you. When God’s ratzon is your ratzon God’s will is your delight. You want what God wants. You love what God loves you. Hunger and thirst for what God hungers and thirsts for you crave. You passionately desire His kingdom and will because you see it as the ultimate source of satisfaction.

[00:18:54] You are hungry. For righteousness. Well, the last question [00:19:00] is, what if I don’t hunger and thirst for God’s will? Maybe I’m not excited about God’s will for my life and pursuing that to the max, which is what the Sermon on the Mount is all about, pursuing God’s will to the max now in Christ. Maybe I’m just not interested in the Sermon on the Mount and learning and and living that way.

[00:19:22] Maybe that’s not my guiding star. What do I do if I’m half-hearted, apathetic? There’s just nothing there. How does Jesus help us if we don’t have zeal for God’s righteousness? Well, notice what Jesus keeps doing. He keeps creating a thirst for God’s will in us just by the way he talks. I love this about Jesus and he does it all through the gospels.

[00:19:46] Like that lovely passage in Matthew 13, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure. He tells this story about it, the kingdom of heaven is like the finest pearl, and he tells this story about it and he’s arousing in us through these stories [00:20:00] of the kingdom and how precious the kingdom is. He’s arousing in us a thirst and a hunger for righteousness just by how he constantly talks.

[00:20:11] And in John four, Jesus sits down beside a well in Samaria, and a woman shows up and they begin talking. It’s the middle of the day. Many of you know this story very well. Uh, it’s the middle of the day when people don’t normally come to the well, and here is this woman. So we already know something’s going on.

[00:20:30] She’s coming to the well when no one else is there. So she doesn’t want to be seen. And Jesus says to her, you know this water, you’re coming to the well for. You have to keep coming for it, don’t you? And you just keep coming every day. You have to keep coming every day. But the water I that I have, when you take it, it’ll be coming you a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

[00:20:57] And the woman says to him, sir, give me this [00:21:00] water so I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming to this. Well, and Jesus shifts gear. Go call your husband, then come back. I have no husband. Jesus replies. You’re right when you say you have no husband, in fact you have five husbands, and the man you are now with is not your husband, sir, the woman says completely freaked out.

[00:21:23] I can see you’re a prophet. So this discussion that Jesus initiates is not really about water, is it? It was about something else. And Jesus never condemns her. He’s kind. He just says, you’ve had several men, haven’t you? And the man you are with isn’t your husband. And it’s like she’s searching for something.

[00:21:50] Man. Number one, didn’t do it, man. Number two, didn’t do it, man. Number three, wasn’t it? She’s searching for something. She’s looking, she’s [00:22:00] aching. She’s a lot like us. She’s searching for something that will satisfy, like philosopher Blaze. Pascal said, we have a God shaped hole. We have this ache within, and she’s searching.

[00:22:14] She’s searching, and it’s not working. It’s like Jesus sits down next to her and says, it’s not working for you, is it? Your life is not working for you. He doesn’t lead her away from her desires for meaning and love. Fulfillment and satisfaction. No. He takes it further into that desire. It’s not working for you, is it?

[00:22:41] Wouldn’t it be great if you could tap into something greater than just one man? Something that wouldn’t leave you craving for more. Something where you wouldn’t have to keep coming back and back and back. This is what Jesus does. He comes alongside of us. Whether we’re [00:23:00] Christians or not, and he points to the stuff that we are doing in our lives.

[00:23:06] He points to our habits, our sin, our habitual patterns, and he points to all the ways that we are searching to be fulfilled, but we are not being fulfilled. And he says it’s a God shaped hole. Or we could say it’s a rat’s on shaped hole. What you are hungry for is the kingdom of God and its righteousness.

[00:23:31] What you’re really thirsty for is God’s will to be done in your life. What you really need is obedience by the spirit, the power of God to enliven you so that you can obey your father in heaven from the heart. That’s what’s going to satisfy. We can’t detach God from his will for us. We can’t detach. The kingdom of God from his will, and Jesus doesn’t come pointing the finger.

[00:23:58] He comes [00:24:00] alongside and just shows us whatever we are doing, whatever we’re chasing after, whatever our idols are, what are we craving and hungry for? And it’s not gonna deliver. It’s not working for you, is it? And notice what she does in response to Jesus. Jesus starts to get personal. To get to her real stuff and she changes the subject.

[00:24:25] Sir, I can see you’re a prophet. Our fathers worship on this mountain, but you Jews claim that we should worship in Jerusalem. In other words, as soon as he starts to get into her real pain, what does she do? She starts talking about current events, about theological issues that were raging at the time because it’s easier to talk about surface things than to go deeper.

[00:24:49] And this is saying something to us. It’s like Jesus starts to get at our deepest desires to be loved, to be satisfied, to be [00:25:00] fulfilled. And as soon as he starts to get through to our real ache and our real longing, we changed the subject, we move on to the next thing. And Jesus is saying, we really need the ratzon of God.

[00:25:16] Anything, anything to avoid the fact that our life is not working for us is what we do, man. He starts to point out in the est and gentlest way because he’s God. He comes alongside us and the spirit gently says to us, Hey, it’s not working for you. But I have the way to ultimate satisfaction. Are you pursuing something?

[00:25:42] Are you searching? Are you trying to fill your life to get rid of that ache and it’s not working? And Jesus is essentially creating a thirst in us for what he’s talking about. Maybe this morning. That’s what’s happening to you right now. [00:26:00] Jesus is creating a thirst in you. That you know that you’ve been pursuing things which are not the will of God and you think that will satisfy, and Jesus says, no, it will not.

[00:26:13] I have the living water of the kingdom of God and its righteousness in the spirit given.

[00:26:22] Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. For they will be filled, they will be satisfied. Maybe it’s righteousness that you really seek. Why don’t we pray and just come before God. Now I’ll give you some time and then Glenda’s gonna come up I and lead us in prayer. But just a few moments of reflection come before God with whatever you need to come before him with.

[00:26:51] Is it just not working for you?