Heavenly Appetite

Would you please stand in honor of God's Word as we read it together this morning. This morning we continue our journey through the Beatitudes which are found in Christ's Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5.

We've already looked at the first three of these Beatitudes so we come this morning to the fourth Beatitude in verse 6. We're going to begin by reading the first six verses of Matthew 5. Matthew 5 verses 1 through 6. Hear now the Word of the Lord.

Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them saying, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Pray. Father, our text this morning is much harder to obey than it is to understand because our taste for sin is so highly cultivated and oftentimes our appetite for righteousness is too small and anemic. So this morning we offer our passions and desires and our motivations to you and ask that you would reshape them according to the righteous standard of your most perfect and holy word. We ask you to fill us up with that which alone can truly satisfy and we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

You may be seated. Have you ever acquired a taste for something that you previously just really didn't care for? Maybe it was some vegetable your mother used to make you eat and you hated it, but now it's one of your favorite vegetables and you can't imagine not liking it. Maybe it was a hobby or a pastime that at some point you thought, how could anyone enjoy doing that?

And now you're right there with the best of them having a great time. For me it was coffee. I used to think that coffee tasted awful and now hardly a morning goes by that I don't have a cup of it, at least a cup of it. I acquired a taste for something that I previously disliked. You know, it's funny how we all have different tastes, unique tastes. Some of us like dark chocolate. Some of us prefer milk chocolate. Some don't like chocolate at all somehow when it comes to music. Some people like classical music. Others like the blues.

Some people prefer southern gospel. In fact, I suppose there's not a single life arena in which our desires don't play a major part. We are creatures of desire. We're driven by our tastes and appetites. Whether it's food or friends or career or religion, we're driven by desire.

Now we may call it different things. We may call it passion or preference. We may refer to it as longing or desire, but whatever we call it, the reality is we make choices and establish priorities and determine values on the basis of this inner appetite for certain things. Our hunger drives our lives.

Now this is not a bad thing unless we have an appetite for things that will hurt us. It's a good thing if we're driven by our hunger for good things, if the things we are hungry for are to our advantage and blessing. But this universal principle that we are creatures driven by appetite was Christ's particular concern when he spoke the fourth beatitude. He knows that we're driven by desires and he wants to make sure that we acquire a taste for that which will benefit us. He wants his disciples to be hungry for the only thing that will fill us up and for the only thing that will lead to blessing and true happiness. He wants us to develop a heavenly appetite. And so he says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Of all the desires and passions in my life, there is one that is far more important, far more consequential than all the rest, and that is my desire to be righteous. This fourth beatitude then is all about acquiring a heavenly appetite, an appetite for things that are godly and right and just and good.

Now as we consider this verse today, I want you to notice four aspects of the beatitude. We could say four components to a heavenly appetite. Let's consider first the object of a heavenly appetite. The object of a heavenly appetite.

The object of Cookie Monster's appetite is cookies. The object of the Blessed Man's appetite is righteousness. That's what he's driven by. That's what he's hungry for.

That's what he desires. So what is meant by righteousness in this verse? You know, we live in a culture that tends to think of righteousness, I think, primarily in terms of morality or respectability. Someone who is righteous would be someone who is morally upright, a good person, a respectable person, the kind of person you'd like to see run for political office or the kind of person an employer would want to hire. The Pharisees possessed this kind of righteousness.

They were externally moral. They put on good behavior, and yet they were far from hungering and thirsting after what Jesus is talking about here. What Jesus refers to here is the sort of righteousness that is given to a sinner by grace. He's talking about the righteousness that comes when we are justified by faith in Christ. Don't think for a moment that this beatitude is encouraging us to go out and earn the status of righteousness.

The very first beatitude that we looked at several weeks ago shows us that we can't. We're poor in spirit. We're spiritually bankrupt. We have no righteousness on our own. And so when Christ starts talking about righteousness here, he's emphasizing the most fundamental doctrine of the gospel. He's talking about the righteousness that is granted to a sinner by grace and by grace alone. But we need to understand that this righteousness that comes by grace alone includes two necessary ingredients. It includes both justification and sanctification.

Now let me just take a moment and make sure we understand these two terms. Justification refers to our being declared righteous by God apart from anything we've ever done. It's a judicial term that pronounces our innocence on the basis of Christ's merit. It has to do with being made right with God through the death of Christ on the cross.

And we are to hunger and thirst after this righteousness. That's justification. But justification is never given by itself.

It is always accompanied by sanctification. That is, not only is our standing before God in view here, our behavior before God is also in view. We recognize that it is impossible for good works, good moral behavior to justify anyone, right? But in our zeal to defend this doctrine of justification by faith alone, we need to recognize that a person who has been genuinely justified by faith is so justified that that justification will start to show itself, evidence itself in good works. We are justified by faith, but that justification will lead to good works. It will lead to obedience, to holy living, to sanctification. So when Jesus tells us to hunger and thirst for righteousness, he's including both the desire to be right with God and the desire to live right before God. Now my experience has shown me that when preachers get up and start talking about holy living, people often react in one of two ways. They either run to the law and they start making all sorts of resolutions to try harder and do better and not sin anymore, or they run in the other direction to lawlessness and say, you know, Christianity is not about a bunch of rules. We're under grace.

So don't bog down. Grace will abound. I think the problem with both of these responses is that they divorce this call of Christ to a holy life from the first three, Beatitudes. We don't hunger for holiness because we think that somehow we have something to offer God. We are spiritual paupers, broken and incapable of fixing ourselves. On the other hand, the very reason that we know that we're spiritually broken, the very reason that we mourn over that spiritual poverty is because there is a standard of holiness that we've fallen short of. So we hunger for the righteousness that we lack. We don't want to be controlled by sin anymore.

We're sickened by the fact that not only do we behave unrighteously, we like to behave that way. We mourn over the fact that not only are we in bondage to sin, we enjoy our sin. So we hunger and we thirst for deliverance from this bondage to our desire for sin, not in order to climb some ladder to God, but because God has already accepted us and already given us a new nature, a new standing before him.

And we want desperately for our lives to match what he says is already true of us. So the object of a heavenly appetite is righteousness, a righteousness that includes both the right standing before God, that's justification, and right living before God, that's sanctification. Secondly, then let's consider the nature of a heavenly appetite.

What is the quality or characteristic of this hungering and thirsting for righteousness? We have different levels of appetite for different things. My desire for chocolate, for example, is different than my desire for water. I want chocolate solely for the pleasure that it gives me.

I want water because it keeps me alive. So we have certain desires, certain appetites that are maybe motivated by pleasure, other desires that are motivated by need, and certainly we have desires that kind of fall into both categories. But in our text, Jesus describes the heavenly appetite for righteousness primarily as a desire of necessity because he uses the terms hunger and thirst. And if you've ever been deprived of food or water, you understand the sense of urgency communicated by these words. This is not referring to the sort of hunger that you experience when maybe you've eaten an early breakfast and it's noon and you say, boy, I'm hungry. This word hunger typically describes an urgent, prolonged lack of food, genuine deprivation. It's used to describe David and his men when they went to the priest for some bread as they were fleeing for their lives from Saul after several days. They were hungry. It's used to describe how Jesus felt after spending 40 days fasting in the wilderness. So hunger and thirst in this sense are not passing sensations, passing feelings. They are by nature deep and profound.

They don't go away until they're satisfied. Now I have no doubt that we understand the concept here, but I would suppose that few of us, if ever, have ever truly experienced intense hunger and thirst. Let me highlight the intense nature of hunger and thirst by reading an illustration that James Boyce tells in one of his commentaries. This is an account of several British soldiers during World War I who were pursuing the retreating Turkish army across the Palestinian desert. And he tells the story like this. The attack outdistanced its water carrying camel train.

Water bottles were empty. The sun blazed pitilessly out of a sky where the vultures wheeled around. Their heads ached. Their eyes became bloodshot and dim in the blinding glare. Their tongues began to swell.

Their lips turned to purplish black and burst. Those who dropped out of the column were never seen again, but the desperate force battled on to Sharia. There were wells at Sharia, and had they been unable to take the place by nightfall, thousands were doomed to die of thirst. We fought that day, writes Gilbert, as men fight for their lives.

We entered Sharia Station on the heels of the retreating Turks. The first objects which met our view were the great stone cisterns full of cold, clear drinking water. In the still night air, the sound of water running into the tanks could be distinctly heard, maddening in its nearness. Yet not a man murmured when orders were given for the battalions to fall in too deep facing the cisterns.

He describes the stern priorities. The wounded, those on guard duty, being company by company. It took four hours before the last man had his drink of water, and in all that time they had been standing 20 feet from the low stone wall, on the other side of which were thousands of gallons of water. I believe Major Gilbert concludes that we all learned our first real Bible lesson on that march from Beersheba to the Sharia wells. If such were our thirst for God, for righteousness, for his will in our life, a consuming, all-embracing, preoccupying desire, how rich in the fruits of the spirit would we be? Folks, the nature of a heavenly appetite is such that it is the most intense impassioned pursuit of your existence.

As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for you, oh God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. My mom used to tell me not to pick at my food at the table but to eat it. This usually meant I didn't really care for what I had been served. But church, a casual disinterested appetite for righteousness will never do.

We don't pick at it. We are to hunger and thirst for it as if our very souls depended on it. You remember the story of the prodigal son, how he wasted his inheritance on frivolous living when he had nothing left. A famine came to the land and he was forced to go work as a laborer feeding pigs. And for a time all he had to eat was whatever the pigs were eating. But he eventually came to his senses and returned home hoping that his father would take him back as a slave. We all know the ending of the story how his father indeed received him back as a son and in fact killed the fattened calf and honored his son in every possible way. I think this story illustrates for us what ought to be characteristic of our appetite for righteousness.

Someone once said of this story of the prodigal son, when the prodigal was hungry he went to feed upon husks but when he was starving he returned to his father. Are you starving for a righteousness that only God can give? Are you dying of a thirst that can only be quenched by Christ? This is the nature of a heavenly appetite.

It's focused, it's undistracted, it's severe. Well there's another component to this heavenly appetite. We've looked at its object which is righteousness. It's what it desires.

We've looked at its nature or characteristic. It's to be an intense, all consuming hunger and thirst. Next let's think about the result of a heavenly appetite. The result of a heavenly appetite. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be filled. They shall be satisfied. The result of a heavenly appetite is satisfaction.

Now let me begin by pointing out the obvious. The only thing that will satisfy an appetite for something is the attaining of that object, right? In other words, if I'm hungry for friendship, only friendship will truly satisfy that hunger.

If I'm hungry for solitude, only solitude will satisfy that hunger. So to say that the person hungering for righteousness will be satisfied is to say that that person attains righteousness or becomes righteous. It's interesting that this beatitude promises that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed, which is another word for happy, but happiness, although it's a wonderful side benefit, is not the primary focus or result. These blessed disciples are hungry above all for righteousness. They're thirsty for righteousness and so God fills them with the very thing they desire.

He gives them righteousness. Now this filling which God gives us has a dual nature. In one sense, it happens immediately when we're justified by faith in Christ. This filling happens once and for all, never to be repeated, never to be undone. But there's another aspect to this filling. There's a sense in which this filling with righteousness is an ongoing progression. It's a process. This process occurs as God's Spirit gradually conforms us more and more to the image of Jesus Christ. We call it sanctification. So Christians are at the same time hungering and thirsting and yet filled. The more they're filled, the more they hunger and thirst. It's as if we reach a certain stage of sanctification and it deepens our hunger for more righteousness and more holiness and so the process continues. Paul describes it as a process of being transformed from one degree of glory to another until one day the Christian finds himself face to face with Christ in heaven, perfectly righteous, perfectly satisfied. This is the result.

This is the outcome. This is the consequence of a heavenly appetite. You know, Jesus frequently alluded to this perfect satisfaction of our appetite and he pointed to himself as the source of that satisfaction. In John 4, for example, he said, whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

In John 6, he said, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. The end result of this heavenly appetite is that one is filled with the righteousness of Christ, satisfied with him, happy because they have the very mark of his holy character on their life. The last component that we will consider has to do with the pursuit of a heavenly appetite.

The pursuit of a heavenly appetite. The question that we need to ask ourselves is this, are we filled? Because you see, if we're not enjoying the blessing that's promised when we hunger for righteousness, the only explanation is that we're not truly hungering for righteousness.

There's no qualification to the promise of this beatitude. If we hunger, we will be filled. So if we're not being filled, it's evidence that we're not hungering and thirsting for righteousness. How then might we test our spiritual appetite? How can we know whether we're hungering and thirsting as we ought?

Well, it's really not that complicated. You see, we pursue what we hunger for. We go looking for that which we desire. If you're hungering and thirsting for righteousness, then there will be indications in your life that you are actually seeking righteousness.

You're in pursuit of holiness. This past week, I had the unfortunate mishap of running out of coffee beans. Now, that's a rare occurrence in my life, and when it happens, it's very tragic. There's hardly anything worse than waking up in the morning to not a cup of coffee.

It simply won't do. When I realized I was out of coffee beans, I began instantly thinking about how and when I might find time in my busy day to go pick some up at the store. No one had to remind me. No one had to motivate me. I didn't need an accountability group to spur me on to go find coffee. I just made the time and took the effort to go get what I was hungering for.

Driven by my appetite for a good cup of coffee, I pursued coffee beans. It works the same way when it comes to righteousness. If we hunger for a life that is holy before the Lord, if we thirst for an obedience that is pleasing to a God who has saved us and forgiven us and adopted us, then we will be actively engaged in pursuing that holiness, in pursuing obedience. I think the real crux of the issue for most of us is probably the fact that our desire, our appetite for righteousness is so puny or so inconsistent or so distracted that our first step is going to involve increasing our hunger, acquiring a taste for it.

So if we aren't pursuing righteousness because we don't desire it, how do we go about increasing our desire for it? Well, I think our spiritual appetites function a lot like our physical appetites. When I have fallen into a bad pattern of eating poorly, I have to make myself abstain from what I really want. Maybe I have allowed myself to get into the habit of eating too much junk food or I have gotten addicted to sugar.

Maybe I am drinking too much carbonated beverage and not enough water. When I realize the dietary mess that I have made of my life because I start feeling yucky or I start having adverse health issues, I have to force myself against my will, against my desires to change my behavior. I know the right thing to do and so I begin to do it even before I have a strong desire to do it. That's a very excruciatingly difficult thing to do, isn't it? Scripture describes it as a mortification of the flesh, putting to death our flesh.

We don't like it. But what typically happens is that after just a few days of this miserable self-denial and discipline, my body starts to change. I begin to lose a taste for the bad stuff. My taste for the good stuff increases. I begin to have a lower tolerance for the bad stuff and begin to feel the benefits of the good stuff. What starts as perhaps sheer behavior control gradually begins to affect and change my appetites, my desires, my will, my affections.

The taste for good things is often acquired as we pursue the good things. This principle holds true with regard to our spiritual appetite as well. Maybe I find within myself a weak desire for the things of the Lord. I don't have any real interest in expending the necessary effort to read and meditate on God's Word. I don't have any stamina or zeal in prayer. I'd maybe rather avail myself of mindless time in front of a screen than of meaningful time interacting with God's people. In other words, my hungering and thirsting for righteousness is lacking, and so I've fallen into a slump of not pursuing those things that are for my spiritual good.

So what do I do? Well, again, it might sound simplistic, but here it is. I stop feeding my flesh, and I start feeding my spirit. I mortify the deeds of the flesh. I vivify, I give life to the deeds of the spirit. I put down the candy bar of spiritual slothfulness and start eating the leafy green vegetables of God's means of grace. As my soul begins to be weaned of its attachments to distracting and useless and damaging habits and begins to experience the nourishment that comes from feeding on spiritually satisfying meat, I begin to find that my desire for that spiritually satisfying meat actually increases. I want to draw our attention this morning as we close to three passages of scripture that describe this process of acquiring a taste for righteousness by simply pursuing it. First passage is Psalm 37 4. Psalm 37 4 says, Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Notice in that verse that delighting is a command. It isn't something we passively wait for.

It's something we actively pursue. I'm afraid that sometimes we have a romantic notion that for a desire to be genuine, it has to be spontaneous or uncultivated, but that's simply not true. Sinners aren't born loving the right things. You see, duty often precedes delight, which means we need to train ourselves to delight in what we ought to be delighting in.

And there's nothing insincere about that. Learn to love what is lovely by pursuing what is lovely. Acquire a taste for the things of the Lord by making your delight in him.

Maybe this looks like something as simple as giving the best moments of your day. Those moments when you are most mentally alert, the most enthusiastic, the prayer and meaningful time in the word. Maybe training yourself to delight in the Lord means you arrange your weekly schedule around the Lord's day so that nothing interferes with the time and the energy you have on the Lord's day to worship with God's people. Taking practical intentional steps to train ourselves to delight in the Lord will lead to increased delight in the Lord. Tasting and seeing the goodness of the Lord will lead to an increased appetite for that goodness.

Delight yourself in the Lord. It's a command. It's an imperative. The next passage I want to draw our attention to is Isaiah 58. In Isaiah 58, God issues another command to his people, a command that has to do with our desires, our appetites. God is giving instruction concerning how we keep the Sabbath. And he says in Isaiah 58, 13 and 14, if you turn back your foot from the Sabbath from doing your pleasure on my holy day and call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable, if you honor it, not going your own ways or seeking your own pleasure or talking idly, then you shall take delight in the Lord.

And I will make you ride on the heights of the earth. I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. Once again, God commands us to dictate to our delights, to take pleasure in this and not that, which implies that we are not at the mercy of our pleasures. Rather our pleasures are at the mercy of us. And the promise that accompanies this command is that as we start training ourselves to delight in what is righteously delightful, God will increase our delight in those righteous pleasures.

It's acquiring a taste, a hunger for the right things. The last verse I want to draw our attention to is right here in the Sermon on the Mount. We're all familiar with Matthew 6.33. Matthew 6.33 says, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you. Once again, there's a command to actively do something that's related to our desires. Seek the kingdom of God ahead of everything else. Make God's kingdom, God's glory, God's purposes your chief delight and goal. And once again, we're forced to acknowledge that there's nothing insincere or disingenuous, inauthentic about making ourselves pursue what we ought to be pursuing. Maybe another way to put this is our knowledge of God's truth ought to be informing our desires and as God's truth begins to inform our desires, those desires begin to conform to God's truth. We learn what righteousness is and so we begin to pursue it and as we pursue it, we discover that our delight in it, our hunger for it actually increases.

Hunger begets more hunger and when we learn to hunger for righteousness, God promises to gratify that hunger by making us righteous and blessed and satisfied. You know, I wonder if there are some here this morning who have no idea what I'm talking about. You don't know what it's like to have your innate desires shaped by something that transcends your natural sinful impulses and you're thinking to yourself, that's pretty naive, Eugene.

There's no way that I can overcome this addiction, this habit, this temperament that I've been enslaved to my whole life. That's the stuff of fairy tales. That's just wishful thinking. A couple of weeks ago, I made the point that these Beatitudes in Matthew 5 are not for everybody. These promises are given to a very specific group of people.

They are for those who belong to Christ and if you don't belong to Christ, you won't get it because you can't get it. Your appetite is for sin and only sin and you'll never acquire a taste for righteousness without a fundamental change in the very center of your being. Scripture calls it a new heart. Scripture also tells someone in this condition where to find that new heart. Ezekiel 36, God says, I am the Lord.

I'm about to act. I will give you a new heart. I will put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

I will be your God and you shall be my people and I will deliver you from all your uncleanness. You cannot hunger and thirst for righteousness until you first recognize your absolute moral bankruptcy before a holy God. Until you admit that in you dwells no good thing and that unless God erases an insurmountable debt of sin from your life, you have no hope of ever hungering and thirsting for righteousness, much less of being righteous. The good news of the gospel is that if you admit your guilt and moral bankruptcy, God will forgive your sin and cleanse you from all unrighteous. That is the good news of the gospel. Not only that, but he will also credit you with the righteousness, the moral purity, the beauty of Jesus Christ. All you have to do is bring your sin to him and say, take this and give me Christ's righteousness.

So unbeliever or believer, whoever you are, wherever you're at in life, this is God's word to you today. Taste and see that the Lord is good. God in heaven, you know that our hearts are perpetually trying to create idols, substitutes that can never satisfy. But thank you that your power, your grace in us is so strong, so deliciously fulfilling that it can and will overcome every deviant appetite that we run after. Lord, would you fix our hearts on you that we might be filled with the sweet pleasures of righteousness. Through Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.