TPW 77 What It Means to Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness

With applause and witness, this is Pastor Patrick Hines here at Bridwell Heights Presbyterian.

Church, and today I'd like to post this past Sunday morning's sermon that I preached on blessed hunger pains. And I think that this topic of the Beatitudes, of the way that God works in the hearts of His elect people when He draws them to Christ and creates those dispositions, creates that sense of spiritual poverty, that mourning over sin and hunger and thirst for righteousness, that couldn't be more relevant to the Gospel that we preach and to what it means to really believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and to know Him as your living Lord and Savior, and for Christ alone to be your all in all, as the one whose personal righteousness justifies you before God and whose personal righteousness and cross-work satisfaction of divine wrath is alone what saves us from the avenging wrath of God and gets us all the way past the final judgment into heaven.

Only God can create that hunger, and only God can satiate that hunger with the righteousness of Jesus Christ. So I hope that you'll find this to be edifying and encouraging, especially in light of the widespread indifference to error about the Gospel and the lack of Gospel preaching that goes on even in the church in our country today.

So I hope you find this to be edifying. Let's pray together for God's blessing on our time and His Word, please. Father in heaven, we thank you for the opportunity to open up the words of eternal life, and we pray that you would help us, Father, to understand what you have spoken clearly to us, your people.

May we receive their truth with faith and love, lay them up in our hearts, and practice them in our lives. We ask in Jesus' name, amen. Please take your Bibles and turn to Luke chapter 6, verse 21. Luke chapter 6, verse 21, Luke 6, verse 21, and our scripture reading this morning will be the first half of the verse, Luke 6, 21.

This is God's Word. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. May God bless the reading of His infallible Word. There are some experiences in life that really can't be fully understood until they happen.

Having children is certainly one of those. But I still remember when I had a child that was old enough to be eating regular human food that they really liked. And here I'm not talking about that cereal slop either.

I'm talking about things that they really like to eat and they start to ask for because they like them. If you have children, you'll also notice that their tastes are very different from one another. Some consistently ask for one thing and some another.

Some like salty stuff, others like sweet stuff. I remember sitting in our kitchen there in Ohio and watching my two eldest children eat their favorite foods until they were fully satisfied. And I remember I actually just stopped eating to watch them eat the food that they really liked that I had given them because they wanted it.

And it was a very strangely enjoyable experience. And I wondered if my parents ever stopped and watched me eat the food that I really liked and asked them for. What parent that loves their children doesn't enjoy seeing their children enjoy the food that they asked them for?

Our Lord uses the same sort of father-child love to describe God's willingness to give us the spiritual things that we hunger and long for. This is true especially because God alone creates spiritual hunger in his people.

God alone creates out of nothing the desire for righteousness, which only he can satisfy. Jesus taught in Matthew 7 later on in the Sermon on the Mount. Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, gives him a stone?

Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him?

Christian fathers are all sinful in themselves. They're evil in themselves. But if they, being evil, will give bread to a son who asks for bread instead of a stone, or a fish to a son that asks for a fish and not a serpent, how could we think of our heavenly father as being less than we are?

He who is righteous in and of himself, who has no evil in him at all. And it is for this reason that the first half of Luke 6 .21, Jesus pronounces blessing and happiness upon those who hunger now, for they shall be satisfied.

There's obviously much compacted into this short sentence. There is nothing stronger than desire in human beings. There is nothing stronger in you than desire, the things that you want. Our desires tell the world around us who we are.

Our desires tell the world around us what we live for. The things that we want and the deepest part of who we are tell the world who and what we serve and what we are living for. There is in the soul of every single person a hunger that rules them.

There is in every human being a hunger for one thing, not two, never two. That hunger drives everything else they do in life. When all is said and done at the end of the day, we will always choose to do that which we desire the most to do.

One of the great stumbling blocks that many people face in understanding God's sovereignty and salvation of sinners is that God is the one who chooses which of the sinners he's going to save, which ones of the helpless sons and daughters of Adam he's going to.

Save.

We often hear this objection. What about the people that really want to be saved? What about the people that want to be saved, who really want to serve Christ, but they just don't happen to be among the chosen?

And the answer to that is actually very simple. No such scenario has ever, can never, or will ever happen. It will never happen. You will never meet anyone who has a true desire for true holiness, for true righteousness that is not one of God's elect people.

Those who are not part of God's elect will never desire to make a full break with their sin and come to Christ to be saved. There will never be the spiritual pain of hunger for righteousness in them. They may hunger for religious experiences.

They may hunger for community. They may hunger for a sense of transcendence. They may hunger for prosperity, for healing, for popularity and the like, but they will never, ever truly hunger for biblical righteousness that is according to the law of God.

You will have stony ground hearers from time to time that go in and out of the church, but none of them were ever truly saved to begin with. First John 2 19. They went out from us, but they were not of us.

For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us, but they went out that they might be made manifest that none of them were of us. This concept of heart desire of your heart's deepest affections.

That is the heart of the Beatitudes. That is the heart of what Jesus is talking about in the Beatitudes. Every one of them is an all ready present characteristic of the person who is truly blessed of God and is happy.

We must remember that all human beings in the world are either blessed or cursed. Those who already see in themselves a hunger and a thirst for righteousness, Jesus says they are blessed of God and they shall be filled in the divine act of justification and in the ongoing divine work of sanctification.

But only those who hunger, only those who really have that hunger, only those who thirst for righteousness. In other words, those who desire true righteousness in their heart of hearts. You see, many desire to be perceived by others as Christians.

Many desire to be seen and known outwardly as righteous by men. But it is the footprint of the supernatural work of God in the heart of a person that makes them desire righteousness in the deepest part of their heart.

Whether any other human beings ever see it, recognize it or not. Only God can make that happen. What marks true believers out from false professors of the faith is the desires that govern their hearts where no human eyes can see.

Yes, those desires, even in believers, will often be mixed with evil and wicked desires. But the true Christian loves holiness because it reflects the beauty of the God they adore. The true believer detests their sin, all of it, and wants to be rid of it because it's displeasing to their first love, namely the Lord Jesus.

The true believer and thus the truly blessed person knows exactly what Jesus means when he pronounces blessing upon the person who hungers and thirsts after righteousness. And that's a very important word.

Righteousness, that Greek term dikaiosune. What does righteousness mean? Well, it's got two senses here that are being communicated to us in this verse, in this half of a verse. The first, the first sense of righteousness is a state of being judicially righteous before the law of God.

The state of being judicially righteous before the law of God. That's in your outline there if you want to follow along that way. The forensic hunger and thirst for being justified before God. You see, every human being on earth knows, even the loudest and most obnoxious atheists in this country.

Richard Dawkins knows that he is going to appear before the judgment of God and he knows he's going to hell, according to Romans 1 .32.

Everybody does.

Everyone knows they're going there. Everyone knows they have a date with the judgment of God. But when God creates the hunger for righteousness, the person knows they need to seek that righteousness somewhere else because they don't have it in themselves.

That's why they hunger and thirst for it. The second sense of righteousness is a state of general, inherent moral uprightness before God in one's day-to-day conduct. We want to be righteous. We want to be better than we are in ourselves too.

The hunger and thirst to live one's life in outward conformity as much as possible to God's commandments, as a display of our love and our allegiance to him. Both of these senses are what the blessed person hungers for.

They hunger to be declared righteous and free from guilt before the judgment of God. And they also hunger to be righteous in themselves, in their affections and in their actions. So let's talk about each one of these separately.

I've divided the outline there into two major headings. The first one, hunger and thirst for imputed righteousness or legal righteousness. You see, when our children are hungry and they ask us for bread, we give them bread we've got it.

What's remarkable to consider here is the incredibly low cost that God has put on giving us righteousness. All we need to bring is a desire for it. All we need to have is a real hunger for it. Jesus says, if you have that hunger, blessed are they who hunger now for they shall be filled.

A true desire for justifying righteousness from God the Father, from a lowly, miserable repentant sinner will be met by God with the greatest gift imaginable. A whole life of perfection, of spotless, pristine, sinless holiness is legally credited to our ledger in God's accounting book.

Christ's perfect righteousness is given as a gratuitous and free gift to anyone who truly longs for it. Isaiah 55 verse 1, ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters and you who have no money, come buy and eat.

Yes, come buy wine and milk without money and without price. We try to bring our own trifles of righteousness, our own pathetic attempts at self-reform, then the gift of righteousness ceases to be a gift and becomes something that we're owed.

We bring our sins, folks, nothing else to Christ. Paul spelled it out so beautifully in a verse of scripture that I hope echoes in your mind constantly. Romans 5, 17. For if by the one man's offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one Jesus Christ.

This gift of righteousness, which is the most precious gift God ever gives anyone, surpassing all of the wealth, power, prestige, and pleasure of the whole world together, is given freely to those who simply hunger.

Isn't that amazing?

Blessed are you who hunger.

Do you look at your life? You look at yourself?

You look at the desires of your heart? You look at your actions and think, I don't have this. I'm empty of it. God, I hunger for it. That's all he requires is a hunger. And then he gives it. Is that what you hunger for in life?

Do you hunger to have the righteousness which will guarantee your entrance into heavenly glory? Do you hunger for the perfection and righteousness of Christ to be legally transferred into your legal account before God?

Think of your favorite restaurant. Do you have a favorite restaurant, a favorite meal at a favorite restaurant? Think of getting geared up for that great meal you love to get there. In my own life, there are times that I'll fast for the whole day just so you can really dig in for that meal.

But you know it's going to set you back a pretty penny. The best and the most tasty food is always a little pricey. For the greatest satisfaction of the greatest desire imaginable, however, that desire to be forgiven of your sins, justified before God's judgment throne, and conformed more and more to the image of Christ to satisfy this greatest of hungers and this greatest of thirst, a hunger and a desire is the only price.

Those already full of their own righteousness, their own religiousness, their own process of transformation, maybe with a little help from Jesus, this gift is not for them, for they do not hunger for it.

Those relying, trusting at all upon themselves, their process, their fruits, how well they put sin to death, how well they pursued holiness, anything at all that they've done, they don't know what Jesus is talking about here when he says, blessed are you who hunger.

To hunger for righteousness means you realize you don't have any, and you never will have any to bring before God in this way. Why do we hunger and thirst for righteousness?

Why?

For the very same reason when ducklings hatch from their eggs, they immediately take those little web feet and they start paddling in the water. They have that instinct and that ability, they can't help themselves.

When God causes the dead sinner to be reborn, that now alive sinner will do that, which is consistent with his new nature. And hunger is pain.

It hurts, doesn't it?

To know we don't have what we desperately want. And because the eyes of that sinner are supernaturally opened by God, they will feel that pain from then on until they die. The hunger pains in the soul of God's children for true righteousness to be legally in their possession before God is one of the greatest things about us that makes us blessed.

That hunger pain is a good thing. It is a blessing from God. Remember what Calvin taught us? His fear was that Satan would so deceive me that he would remove from me my own sense of wretchedness. That hunger for righteousness is a glorious gift from God.

That sense of wretchedness. I am worthless before God. That is a gift from God that keeps us clinging to Jesus. Jesus attaches that beautiful promise to it. Blessed are you who hunger now for you shall be filled.

But what about those who know nothing of what Jesus spoke here? What about those who have not had a sleepless night considering the judgment of Almighty God and his judicial case against them and the sentence of eternal damnation that rests upon them presently at this very moment?

What about those who have never been concerned about that? What about those who have never laid awake at night thinking if God really is holy and he really knows me and he knows my thoughts and my heart, I am lost.

What about them? What do they desire? What do they serve? What do they hunger for in the depths of their hearts and their souls? The answer is so simple, sin. Prior to our new birth, what do we hunger and thirst for?

Our lusts, our sins. We were carried about by various lusts and we're by nature children of wrath walking according to the prince of the power of the air, the sons of disobedience. And the sad reality is before we're born again, before we're affectionately and powerfully called and made alive by God, we go astray from the moment we're conceived in the womb.

As soon as we're born. Psalm 58 .3, the wicked are estranged from the womb. From the womb, they go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies. I remember reading Augustine's confessions long ago and Augustine speaks about infant children.

Augustine did not have a concept of the age of accountability. He talked about infant children exacting their hatred and their revenge on their parents. When they scream and yell and flail about for not giving them what they want.

I remember reading Augustine and I had, well, I've pretty much always had an infant child at some point. And then thinking, you know what? If that child was 6 '4 and weighed 280, they'd probably kill me.

Probably throw me through the window for not doing what they want. We go astray from the womb. We are utterly ruthless in our pursuit of sin. That's all we care about. Human beings, apart from the supernatural rebirth from God, are inherently evil, selfish, and idolatrous.

And unless they are taught supernaturally by God to hunger for what they don't have, desperately need, and could never earn, namely true righteousness, they will not hunger for it as Jesus speaks here.

When God sovereignly and powerfully makes the sinner alive in Christ and he opens their eyes, not just to their present sins and their sinfulness, but to their past sins as well, that person will be blessed in all the ways that Jesus proclaims in the Sermon on the Mount.

Then they will actually learn what it means to be poor in spirit.

Blessed are the poor.

We looked at that last week in Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are those who mourn. Why is he saying that? Happy are those who mourn. It almost sounds like a contradiction. Happy are those who are sad.

Well, why are you sad?

Because you see your failure. You see your sin. You see that you're not what the God that you adore wants you to be. And you mourn for it. You hunger for what you know you don't have. We learn to be poor in spirit,.

Mourn, meek,.

And here have a real and present hunger and thirst for righteousness. And folks, when that happens, gone for the rest of eternity will be a superficial desire for outward righteousness to be seen by men.

That disappears when a person's born again. God for the rest of eternity will be their God. Gone for the rest of eternity and that person will be idolatry for self, sin, pleasure, fame, popularity, wickedness.

That hunger for sin will be shattered by God's almighty sovereign power. A hunger for righteousness will take its place and folks, in case you're feeling soft, like a soft conscience right now, well, that's not really yet true of me.

That's part of the proof that you're one of God's own.

You're still mourning for it, aren't you?

I am.

My heart is so divided at times. When this happens, we will repudiate our own supposed righteousness with horror and scorn and we'll cry out and confess with the biblical writers, Isaiah 64, 6, but we are all like an unclean thing and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags.

We all fade as a leaf and our iniquities like the wind have taken us away. Psalm 130, verse three, if you, oh Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? Psalm 38, three and four, there is no soundness in my flesh because of your anger nor any health in my bones because of my sin.

For my iniquities have gone over my head like a heavy burden. They are too heavy for me. Do you pray that prayer this week? You feel that in your soul? These are not simply the musings of Psalm writers.

Feeling wistful.

These are windows into the souls of all the truly redeemed, all that know this blessedness and this happiness from God. And just precisely because we know what these inspired words are talking about in our own experience that we ourselves hunger and thirst for righteousness.

We hunger and thirst for it because like the empty stomach of the little boy who asked his father for the food he enjoys most to satiate that hunger, nothing other than what Christ has achieved can satisfy that gnawing hunger.

The heart of the redeemed sinner knows that there is no peace between them and God apart from the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. That's no mere quibble. That's not a reformed distinctive. That's not a Presbyterian idea.

That's the heart and soul of New Testament proclamation. Abraham believed in Yahweh and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Theologian James White has written what I think is one of the finest books on the topic of justification written in the last hundred years called The God Who Justifies.

In chapter seven of that great book is called Imputation, The Only Hope of the Sinful Soul. And he wrote this quote on page 116 quote, why is imputation? Why is the legal transfer of someone else's obedience to the law transferred legally into my account before God?

Why is that my only hope before God? Because it is the one who knows the stain of his sin who knows that he must have a righteousness that is not his own. Paul knew this personally for he expressed his desire that he might be found in Christ not having my own righteousness derived from the law but that which is through faith in Christ the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, end quote.

Paul used the Jewish people as a great example of people who did not understand this foundational truth. People who did not know what it meant to really hunger and thirst for righteousness. And he said in Romans 10 one talking about his Jewish brethren the people that he had such a burden for for them to come to Christ.

He said, brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness they have a great zeal for God but not according to knowledge for they being ignorant of God's righteousness and seeking to establish their own righteousness have not submitted to the righteousness of God.

They don't know what it is.

To hunger and thirst for righteousness. They don't understand that and because of that they're ignorant of God's righteousness. Yes, they have a great zeal for God. Yes, they're very devout in all their observances and their feasts and their dietary laws and everything else.

But the most important thing they don't know and that is that your righteousness cannot stand before God. That's the whole reason Jesus came to achieve that righteousness by which alone we enter into heaven when we die.

That is the heart of the Christian gospel. That is the heart of what it means.

To be a child of God.

Is to know and understand that truth. Do you hunger for it? Do you see your need for his righteousness? To be a Christian is to stop seeking to establish your own righteousness. It is to surrender that futile and foolish fight and comes to grips with your absolute spiritual bankruptcy, poverty and death.

It is to mourn at your own lost condition and then to cry out to the only source from whence true help can come, Jesus. His blessed and terrible cross and his glorious and perfect righteousness imputed to you as the alone basis of your justification before God and your entrance into heaven.

It is to hunger for Jesus to the point of death. It is to be as the deer that pants for the water brooks. So pants my soul for you, oh God. We confess with the saints of old, my soul thirsts for you, my flesh longs for you in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water.

So I have looked for you in the sanctuary to see your power and your glory because your loving kindness is better than life. My lips shall praise you. My soul shall be satisfied as of marrow and fatness and my mouth shall praise you with joyful lips.

What is this dry and weary land where there is no water? That is our storehouse of righteousness.

There's nothing in it. It is dry and weary.

It's a place where there's no water. There's nothing there. It's empty.

It's dry and weary.

It is devoid of the one thing that God has supernaturally implanted, a hunger in us for righteousness. You know, one of God's glorious names by which he reveals himself to sinners. Jeremiah 23, five. Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord.

I will raise to David a branch of righteousness. A king shall reign and prosper and execute judgment and righteousness in the earth. In his days, Judah shall be saved and Israel will dwell in safety. Now, this is the name by which he will be called the Lord, our righteousness.

Not the Lord who makes me righteous. Not the Lord who helps me become righteous. Not anything other than the Lord who is our righteousness.

That's Jesus Christ.

He is that branch of righteousness. What is his name? The Lord, our righteousness. The Lord who is himself the satisfaction of the soul-stirring hunger pains that torment us every moment we live before we finally cross over into eternity.

You'll still be hungering and thirsting for that righteousness when you're dying. You'll still be longing for it. It's Christ alone whose personal righteousness satisfies that soul-longing pain, that soul-longing hunger.

This is the hunger that God alone implants and God alone fills in his son, Jesus Christ. The idea of a self-salvation or a partial self-salvation at the final judgment by something in addition to Jesus or something alongside of Jesus or something other than Jesus is absolutely foreign to biblical Christianity and it is foreign to the experience of spiritual hunger.

For this reason, much of the New Testament, much of the Bible is devoted to the direct refutation of everything contrary to a fully gracious salvation on the basis of Christ's righteousness alone. Paul even said, when those Judaizing teachers in Galatia had added one tiny little thing to the gospel, one tiny little thing to faith as the means of justification, he says in Galatians 2 .19, for I through the law died to the law that I might live to God.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me and the life which I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself in behalf of me.

And then he says, I do not nullify the grace of God. For if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain. If the decisive factor that's gonna get you into heaven is the fruits of your faith, Christ died for nothing.

It is Christ alone that gets you into heaven or he's not in the equation at all.

It's one or the other.

One or the other. Those two roads, works and faith are facing opposite directions and they walk for eternity in both directions. They can't intersect anywhere. If justification comes to the law, Christ died in vain for nothing.

Later in Galatians 4, Paul uses another striking illustration, which if our Arminian friends thought carefully about it, I think it would do away with their theology too. Galatians 4 .21, tell me you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law?

For it is written that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bond woman, the other by a free woman. But he who was of the bond woman was born according to the flesh and he of the free woman through promise, which things are symbolic.

For these are the two covenants, the one from Mount Sinai, which gives birth to bondage, which is Hagar. For this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to Jerusalem, which now is and is in bondage with their children.

But the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all. For it is written, rejoice, O barren, you who do not bear, break forth and shout, you who are not in labor, for the desolate has many more children than she who has a husband.

Now we brethren, as Isaac was, our children of promise, but as he who was born according to the flesh, then persecuted him who was born according to the spirit, even so it is now. Nevertheless, what does the scripture say?

Cast out the bond woman and her son for the son of the bond woman shall not be heir with the son of the free woman. So then brethren, we are not children of the bond woman,.

But of the free.

What's amazing about that passage is that ethnic Jews who sought to be justified or saved by obeying God's law are actually the spiritual descendants of Ishmael, not Isaac. And Gentile nobodies, like probably most of us here, Gentile dogs who believe in Jesus and trust in his death and hunger for his righteousness and trust only in his righteousness for our justification.

We're the true Jews. We're the spiritual descendants of Isaac. We are the children of the promise. We are the children of Abraham. We are the seed of Abraham. And think folks, what was the real difference between the ways in which those two boys were conceived, Ishmael and Isaac?

Ishmael was conceived naturally via Abraham and a woman Hagar who is naturally capable of having children. It is Ishmael's conception that illustrates the futility of all of man's religions and all pseudo Christian counterfeits of the one true gospel.

What was Isaac's conception?

It's miraculous. It was miraculous.

It was bringing a child out of a dead womb, out of a barren woman. Folks, it's the same thing with our salvation. It's the same exact identical thing with our salvation. The spiritually impoverished, mourning and weeping over his wickedness, hungering sinner, longs to be forgiven and redeemed.

That hungering sinner recognizes that the righteousness that they need to be right with God will be a righteousness achieved and performed entirely outside of them, with no contribution from them, entirely performed by someone else and then legally transferred to them by God through the instrument of faith belief alone.

It will come to them only by a divine miracle to which we will contribute nothing. By divine action on God's part as the judge, it is God and God alone who justifies. It is God alone who creates the hunger pains for true righteousness in the soul of his elect people.

It is God alone who supplies the God righteousness, the righteousness of Christ, the holiness of Christ, the obedience to the law of Christ to satisfy that divinely implanted longing in the heart of the believing and repentant sinner.

It is only those who recognize their need for an alien righteousness, for someone else's righteousness, the righteousness of Christ, who can truly rejoice with all the saints of all the ages of time, who can truly find a lasting and unshakable peace in the face of the uncertainties of life, whose house will stand firm when the winds come, when the waters rise and the rains come and beat on that house.

We will still be saying with the Psalm writer who wrote this a thousand years before Jesus was born, Psalm 71, 14, but I will hope continually and will praise you yet more and more. My mouth shall tell of your righteousness and your salvation all the day for I do not know their limits.

I will go in the strength of the Lord God.

Listen closely.

I will make mention of your righteousness, of yours only. Christ alone, faith alone. It's right there in the Psalms. It's all the way through the whole Bible. It's in Genesis 15, six. It's all the way through.

How wonderful and beautiful is God for giving us the greatest of all riches, the complete forgiveness of all our sins, past, present and future, original and actual and the seamless and spotless, pristine, perfect white robe of Christ's righteousness to cover us as a garment.

And if that's not your hope, if that's not where your hope and expectation of heavenly glory rests, you're not a Christian. Isaiah 61, 10. I will greatly rejoice in the Lord. My soul shall be joyful in my God for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation.

He has covered me with a robe of righteousness external to us. The second major heading there in your outline, hunger and thirst for imparted righteousness. We will long and hunger also for righteousness to dwell in our innermost parts.

There will be a desire to study the Bible and to know its teachings and its doctrines and to walk in accordance with them. They will desire and value God above all else. Psalm 73, 25 says, whom have I in heaven but thee?

And there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee. My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. And the great Puritan writer, Thomas Watson, in his book on the Beatitudes gives five signs.

Listen to these.

Five signs that you truly hunger and thirst for righteousness as Jesus here speaks and are blessed and shall be filled. So if you have your outline there, I've given you all five of these in the outline.

First of all, it hurts.

Hunger hurts. Hunger is a form of pain. The spiritual hunger and thirst which Jesus speaks of here to the multitude in this beatitude is marked by real anguish of soul. You find yourself heartbroken at times just thinking about yourself, thinking about the struggles with sin, with doubt, with unbelief, with temper, with whatever the besetting sins are.

You see your failures with them and it hurts. It's painful. Our souls are faint with this hunger.

It hurts.

It burdens us just like an empty stomach. When we're blessed in the way Jesus speaks of here, we will lift up our spiritual cries to him exactly the same as the screams of the hungry newborn that absolutely will not stop until that hunger is assuaged by its mother's milk.

It's the same with us. We have the same kind of pain. Secondly, hunger is satisfied only by food. To the man dying of thirst and hunger, a beautiful song will not be welcome, nor will a bouquet of flowers, nor will a new car or a million dollars.