Those Who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness Part 2

Welcome to this edition of Back to Basics with Pastor Brian Broterson.

If you're going to make any progress, if you're going to advance, if you're going to change

anything, you're going to do it through the exercise of power.

That was the Roman mentality.

But guess what?

Many of the Jews adopted the Roman mentality.

They thought the exact same way.

And that's one of the main reasons why they rejected Jesus because Jesus didn't come

with a power plan.

It came with a different plan.

Today, on Back to Basics, Pastor Brian continues his study in the Sermon on the Mount.

Join us as Pastor Brian resumes his teaching on Matthew chapter 5, verse 6, in a message

titled, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Now is Pastor Brian.

Within us, there is this constant longing.

It's kind of a paradox because on one level, we are completely content and secure in the

fact that we are saved.

But then on another level, we are discontent because we want to go further.

We want to be more like Jesus.

And I think every serious Christian knows this dilemma.

On the one hand, yes, I know that I'm saved and I'm safe and secure in Christ and I'm

not having to work my way into God's favor.

But I look at my life and I think, you know, there's so many areas where I'm still needing

to be like Jesus.

So I'm longing for that.

That's what Jesus is talking about, hungry and thirsting for righteousness as a child

of God.

So that's the moral righteousness.

But then there is also social righteousness.

And this is the place that I think many, many evangelicals, Bible, believing Christians

over the past, say, maybe 100 years have kind of missed this critical component.

Again, listen to John Stott.

And for those of you that don't know, you know, sometimes we throw these names up here,

these quotes and you're like, OK, who the heck is that?

John Stott was a great, one of the great evangelical leaders in Britain throughout much of the

20th century.

He was a contemporary of Billy Graham.

So a great evangelical leader, a scholar, a Bible teacher, a pastor, an evangelist, he

was all of those things.

But in his commentary on the sermon on the mountain, he said this, it would be a mistake

to suppose, however, that the biblical word righteousness means only a right relationship

with God on the one hand and a moral righteousness of character and conduct on the other.

For biblical righteousness is more than a private personal affair.

It includes social righteousness as well.

And social righteousness as we learn from the law and the prophets is concerned with seeking

man's liberation from oppression, together with the promotion of civil rights, justice

in the law courts, integrity in business dealings and honor in home and family affairs.

Thus Christians are going to be committed to hunger and thirst for righteousness in

the whole human community as something pleasing to a righteous God.

So this is a dimension, as I said, that has been oftentimes sort of neglected, overlooked,

ignored by the Bible believing Christians.

They haven't always, and I'm speaking of more recent times, like I said, but they've

so focused on the personal aspect of righteousness, which of course is there, and it's the foundation

for everything else.

But they've neglected to see, quite often, that it goes beyond that, that as we look

around at an unrighteous world, as we look around at the injustices and things, we're

not to simply say, oh, that's too bad or that's unfortunate or even worse, just ignore

it because it doesn't relate to me, there should be in us a longing to see that change.

We have seen that as the followers of Jesus, or what John Stott is talking about here,

we have seen that historically, as the followers of Jesus have led the way in so many of these

things throughout most of history.

Like I said, it's been a period of time, and I think in some ways it's even been more

a specific, I wouldn't even say Western problem, more specific American problem than any

other place where we've had this failure sometimes to see that there is a social component.

And one of the reasons for that is because early on in the 20th century, there were people

that you would call liberal in that they did not take the Bible at its word, they did

not believe in the supernatural, they did not necessarily believe that the Bible really

was the actual word of God, and they would deny certain things about the person of Christ,

they would question like his virgin birth, for example, they would question whether there

was literally a bodily resurrection and so forth.

These became known as the liberal Christians and denominations and leaders, and they adopted

because they thought that the mistake of many Christians was to focus on the supernatural

to the neglect of what was going on around them, so they took the focus off the supernatural

and even denied the supernatural aspect of the Christian story in many ways, they thought

that was a stumbling block, oh people are never going to believe that, we've just got

to show them good works.

And so what developed became known as the social gospel, which was concerned primarily with

loving your neighbor and taking care of the major social issues.

And so it was more than likely in a reaction to that that the pendulum for true believers

swung in the other direction, we don't want to have any association with this idea that

denies the essence of the Christian message concerning the person of Jesus.

We don't want to have any association with that, so there was a pulling away from addressing

the social issues and just more of an internal focus on the spiritual life.

And it wasn't the case for history prior to that, church history.

And like I said, it wasn't the case everywhere.

So the reality is that the followers of Jesus have led the way historically in care for

the poor and marginalized, in the fight against slavery and human trafficking, in the fight

for racial justice and equality, in the fight for the lives of the unborn and a myriad

of other social causes.

Historically Christians have always led the way in these things.

And even during this season where there's been a little more of an neglect of this, Christians

have still been probably the ones who have moved things forward in regard to so many

of these things.

So it's the longing, and this is where we go back to the hungry and the thirsty, it's

the longing to see things put right in the world that has led the followers of Jesus

into advocacy and activism around these issues from the beginning of church history right

up till today.

Christians have always led the way.

They've always led the way because as a Christian part of your very nature as a Christian

is to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to long to see things the way they ought to

be.

Now here's the promise.

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

They shall be filled.

And again, let's just walk right back through those, the legal, the moral, and the social.

So those who long for righteousness in the first sense are those who long for forgiveness

and to be right with God, and they are filled when they put their faith in Jesus Christ.

When a person comes to that place of looking at their own life and realizing, you know,

I am not righteous.

As a matter of fact, I am unrighteous and oh, I long to be right with God.

That is fulfilled as they receive Jesus.

So those who hunger and thirst for righteousness on that level, they shall be filled.

They shall be filled through their faith in Christ.

Those who long to be more holy and pleasing to God, to be more and more transformed into

his image, that is happening as well.

But that is a process.

It's a process that we're all in the midst of.

So I've heard it said, and you've probably heard it said to, I'm not what I will be,

but think God, I'm not what I used to be.

That's describing a process.

We're not perfect.

We're not sendless.

We still have those longing, so gosh, I just wish that that area of my life, I just want

to be freed from that.

I want to get rid of that.

I want to be beyond that.

And there is a day coming when that will be the case.

When full sanctification will have been accomplished.

We'll conformity into the image of Jesus.

But right now, we are in a process.

Listen to Paul's words to the Corinthians.

I love this passage.

He says, we all, with unveiled faces, are looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord

and being transformed into the same image from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord.

You see, this is what is happening to us.

We, as we are seeking Jesus, as we are giving ourselves over to the pursuit of personal

holiness, it is like we're beholding the face of the Lord in a mirror.

And slowly but surely, we are looking more and more like Him.

That's what Paul is describing there.

So keep seeking Jesus and know this, because remember, the promises that you shall be filled,

know this, that one day you will be totally like Him.

As we hunger and thirst to see the world put right, and don't we hunger and thirst for

that?

We look at the world we live in, and it is just an absolute mess, isn't it?

It's just a complete mess.

And we look at it and we think, oh, Lord, how long and when are these injustices

going to be dealt with?

When will this unrighteousness be taken away?

We know that that will not fully happen until Jesus returns.

So we know that.

Although the kingdom has already come, it's not here in its fullness and the church will

never bring it in in its fullness.

This alone will bring it in its fullness.

But the church and where the people of God are has the possibility of bringing glimpses

of the kingdom into the here and now, as we hunger and thirst for righteousness.

And as we do those things that would make for righteousness.

So it's only when Jesus returns that hunger and thirst will be fully satiated, but even

now since the kingdom has in some sense arrived with the coming of Jesus, we can have little

fillings here and there as we see injustice pushed back and righteousness prevail.

We can have little fillings here and there in this regard.

On the first level, we're totally filled through faith in Jesus.

That long and for righteousness has been completely filled through faith in Jesus.

Morally, we can sense that we are being filled because we're going from glory to glory

as we behold the face of the Lord.

We're growing in Him, we're becoming more like Him.

And in this area, we can have, like I'm saying, these sort of little fillings because we

see through that longing for righteousness on the part of God's people that change is

possible in society.

And so we can think back over the centuries of the many places where the people of God,

as of that hungry and thirsting for righteousness, as they've seen injustice, as they've seen

unrighteousness, as they've seen the plight of humans in sin, they have determined to do

something about it.

And so let's keep humbly pursuing righteousness.

And I say humbly because that's a key point in our pursuit of righteousness.

Remember what I said a moment ago that in Jesus' day, the broader culture of Rome despised

humility and did not think at all that that was any way to make progress, any way to advance.

If you're going to make any progress, if you're going to advance, if you're going to change

anything, you're going to do it through the exercise of power.

That was the Roman mentality.

But guess what?

Many of the Jews adopted the Roman mentality.

They thought the exact same way.

And that's one of the main reasons why they rejected Jesus because Jesus didn't come

with a power plan.

He came with a different plan.

And so we today, as we see injustice and things like that, as we see unrighteousness around

us, we buy the grace of God and through the help of God and by the power of God that manifests

itself quite often in a different fashion than human power, we can also see the changes.

You think of the civil rights movement and the most well-known figure in the civil rights

movement, probably to this very day as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Who was a Christian pastor?

A lot of times people forget about that part of it.

That's who he was.

That's his whole message.

But what was his approach?

His approach was one of peaceful demonstration, humbly not trying to exert power.

Now there are other people in the African-American community at the time, other groups of people

who did not like his approach.

No, we need to raise our fist.

We need to exercise power against this.

I think in him, you see this, what we're talking about, humbly pursuing righteousness.

And of course, that did prevail.

I want to give you one other example of this.

William Wilberforce, some of us are familiar with that name.

William Wilberforce was a British parliamentarian.

He was first and foremost a Christian.

And William Wilberforce, more than any other name, was responsible for both the end of the

slave trade in 1807 and ultimately abolishing slavery in the British Empire in 1833.

But let me give you an example.

This is such a great example of what Jesus is talking about when he says, hungry and thirsting

for righteousness, listen to the words of Wilberforce.

So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the slave trade's wickedness appear that

my mind was completely made up for abolition.

But the consequences be what they would.

I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had affected its abolition.

Wow.

What does it mean to hunger and thirst for righteousness?

That pretty much describes it right there.

I will never rest.

And you know, he never rested for 40 plus years.

He fought in the houses of parliament and in 1833, one week after slavery was abolished

in the British Empire, primarily through his influence, he died and went to be with Jesus.

For 40 plus years, he fought for righteousness.

And this is what Christians do and this is what Christians have done.

And there's injustice and there's unrighteousness in our world today.

And thank God there are people who have that same passion and they're fighting for the

unborn.

They're fighting for those who are presently being trafficked and these kinds of real

things that are injustices in our culture.

Number four was empowered to do this because of his faith in Christ.

He was a believer in the Lord Jesus.

When I was in London a few, whatever it was, a month or so ago, I guess, we went to this

little church in the city of London where John Newton had become the leader of the church.

A small church of England church, John Newton, if you don't remember, he was a slave trader,

a ship captain who was converted and wrote the song Amazing Grace.

Wilberforce attended Newton's church and they would regularly gather and it's a very

small church.

This is a really interesting thing about it.

It's a very small church and it's the kind of place that you might walk by and just not

even give a thought as to what might be going on in that small little church.

But what was going on in that small little church was that the world was being changed.

As these men sought the Lord and sought his strength and power to bring about righteousness

in their day.

It was through the efforts of these people that millions of lives, of formerly enslaved

people, were delivered.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

It all starts at that first level of being right with God and I trust that that is the

case for us here today, most of us, that's why we're here because we've received that

fullness.

We've come to no Christ.

If it might happen that that hasn't yet taken place with you and you sense in you that

you don't have that quality of righteousness that you know God requires, he gives that

to you as a gift.

We'll continue tomorrow with more valuable insights from Pastor Brian as he continues

his series on the Sermon on the Mount.

Thank you for listening to Back to Basics with Pastor Brian Broderson.

These programs exist to help believers grow in God's Word and to point others to Jesus Christ.

Back to Basics is fully supported by listeners like you.

Your generosity allows us to share these Bible teachings daily on radio and podcast to

support the ministry or sign up for our newsletter.

Visit BacktoBasicsRadio.com and now here's Pastor Brian.

Just a real quick word once again on blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Remember that this is describing the person who because of the work of grace in their life

has a deep longing to live right.

This means living right but not only a deep longing to live right and please God ourselves

but we long to see that manifested in the society around us.

So we open ourselves up to the spirit to be led into that society to demonstrate God's

love and grace and kindness and mercy and compassion toward people.

So remember the attitudes are God's work in us leading us to manifest His kingdom in the world today.

Back to Basics is the listener supported preaching and teaching ministry of Pastor Brian Broderson.