Desperate for Righteousness

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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me now to the Gospel of Matthew and welcome you back to our study as we have been going through the last few weeks the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, also known as the Beatitudes.
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And the goal of this series is actually to go through the entire Sermon on the Mount, which will take us from Matthew 5 all the way through Matthew 7.
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So we're going to be here for a little while, which is not anything new for our church and our style of learning.
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We go verse by verse, and I think this is our fourth week and we are on the fourth Beatitude here, so we're doing pretty good.
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We're sticking right to the appropriate schedule.
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So, that being said, we are going to read this morning Matthew 5 and verse 6.
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So if you would stand, we will stand together.
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Matthew 5 and verse 6 says this.
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It says, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
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Our Father and our God, we thank You for Your Word.
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I thank You that You have given Your Word with such clarity and I pray that this morning that You would first and foremost keep me from error as I seek to bring instruction.
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And ultimately, Lord, that Your Holy Spirit would be the Teacher and that He would instruct the hearts of the people and that You would open up their hearts to the truth.
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And Lord God, again, just as I have said, keep me from error as I preach.
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I pray, God, for the congregation.
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I pray for this time of study that You would be glorified and that Your people would be edified.
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In Jesus' name and for His sake, Amen.
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Last week, we began our message by discussing the importance and the value of context.
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Do you remember I said there are three rules to interpreting the Bible? Context, context, and context.
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Because context is everything.
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And with the Beatitudes, there is a context which needs to be understood and it is simply this.
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People look at the Beatitudes as stand-alone statements.
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In fact, many people view them that way.
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They quote the Beatitudes individually to suit a particular occurrence.
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But the reality is that they are not intended to stand alone.
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Each one of the Beatitudes builds on the one before it in an attempt to create a picture for us, a picture of what we might call the blessed man.
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Who is the blessed man? Who is the blessed person? Well, that's what the Beatitudes are trying to tell us.
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It's not telling us about an individual who mourns, an individual who on this side, this person mourns.
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On this side, the person is poor in spirit.
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And over there, there's a guy who is meek.
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No, this is one individual.
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This is telling us about this one blessed man.
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A few years ago, Dr.
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James White, one of my favorite men to listen to and to learn from, had a debate with a Roman Catholic on the subject of salvation.
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During that debate, Dr.
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White quoted Romans 4 and verse 8, which we read this morning in our calls to worship.
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Romans 4-8 says, Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.
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And a discussion ensued between Dr.
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White and the Roman Catholic on this question, who is the blessed man? The text says, Blessed is the man against whom God will not count his sin.
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So they had this sort of this argument.
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Well, who is the blessed man? Well, Paul tells us who the blessed man is.
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The blessed man is the man against whom God will not count his sin.
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That's who the blessed man is.
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But I want you to consider something.
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When we ask the question, who is the blessed man? We can also turn to the Beatitudes.
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Again, the Beatitudes is not talking about different types of people, not some who are poor in spirit, not some who mourn, not some who are meek.
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But the Beatitudes has a blessed man in view who encompasses in all of these attributes.
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And I want you to consider the progression.
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The poor in spirit.
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This is the person who has recognized his spiritual destitution before God.
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He recognizes his own spiritual poverty.
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He believes the word when the word tells him that his righteousness is as filthy rags.
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He realizes that he has nothing to bring to God.
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He has no goodness to present to God to say, God, I am worthy of your grace.
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I am worthy of your mercy.
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He has nothing.
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He understands his spiritual poverty.
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That in turn leads to mourning.
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Because he then is broken over his sin.
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He's broken over the fact that he has realized his spiritual desperation and his plight before God.
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And he cries out in desperation.
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He mourns over his sin.
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So he's poor in spirit.
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As a result, he mourns over his sin.
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And that desperation, that mourning leads to meekness.
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And what we talked about last week, what is meekness? It's humility before God.
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It's an understanding of our place before God.
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Well, we've understood we're spiritually poor.
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No, we're spiritually broke.
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We mourn over our brokenness.
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And what do we do? Do we stand before God prideful or humble? Well, we have to be humble.
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Thus, it says, blessed are the meek.
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Makes sense? Absolutely.
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We realize that salvation is 100% God and nothing of us.
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I've heard some pastors say, God does 99%, but you've got to do that 1%.
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You've got to step forward, brother.
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You've got to make the step.
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You've got to pray the prayer.
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You've got to raise the hand.
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You've got to come and get wet.
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You've got to do all these things.
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Beloved God does 100%.
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The only thing that we do is respond.
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And the only reason why we respond is because He opens our heart to do so.
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Thus, the response is even His grace.
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It's all Him.
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And it takes a real meekness, a real humility to recognize that.
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So again, the blessed man recognizes his spiritual poverty.
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He mourns over that poverty.
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And as a result, he is humbled before God.
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That's the progression.
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It's not three different people.
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It's one man.
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So that being said, what's the outgrowth of spiritual humility? What's next for this man who was poor in spirit, mourned over sin and is humbled before God? What's next? The answer? Spiritual hunger.
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Spiritual thirst.
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That's where the fourth beatitude comes in.
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A person has recognized their poverty.
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They mourned over their sin.
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They're laid bare before God.
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And now they're hungry.
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Now they're thirsty for something which formerly they were absolutely devoid of.
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They didn't have it before.
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They didn't even have a desire for it before.
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But now they want it.
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Now there is hunger and thirst for that which didn't even cross their mind before.
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So again, there's a progression here.
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And what I want to show you this morning is three things.
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I want to show you, one, the significance of hunger and thirst and those statements.
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I want to show you the significance of hunger and thirst.
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I want to show you the type of righteousness which is in view.
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And then I want to show you the meaning of the word satisfied.
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So that's the threefold outline for today.
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I wasn't real creative.
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I just stuck with the text.
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The text created the outline as it should.
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Biblical preaching, the significance of hunger and thirst, the type of righteousness in view and the meaning of the word satisfied.
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So let's look at first the significance of hunger and thirst.
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Well, this is the first time in the beatitudes.
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It's interesting enough, it's the first time in the beatitudes where there are two phrases that describe the character of the blessed man.
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So far, we've seen that he is poor in spirit.
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We have seen that he is mourning and we have seen that he's meek.
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But all these are individual words or individual phrases.
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Now it's saying two things.
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It's saying that he hungers and thirsts.
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So what's significant about the fact that why did he have to add the second? Why not just hunger for righteousness? Why not just thirst for righteousness? Why both? Well, I believe the reason for this is that Jesus is painting a picture for his audience that they will understand because hunger and thirst are similar, but they are certainly different.
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Wouldn't we all agree that hunger and thirst, though similar, are different? You can live many days without food.
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Would you agree? Maybe a few more days than others.
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I might.
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Well, you live many days without food.
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You can be hungry.
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You can be famished, but you can live a long time before you succumb to starvation.
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But hydration is different.
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Hydration is absolutely necessary and dehydration can take place almost immediately.
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If a person goes without water for a long enough time and the conditions are right and the heat is right and their body is profusely releasing the fluid that's within them, dehydration can set in before we know it.
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Within hours, in the right conditions, a person can succumb to dehydration and a person will not survive but a few days if he is left without any water to hydrate.
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So Jesus is using these realities of hunger and thirst.
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He's actually using the realities.
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If you dig deep into what he's saying, he's using the realities of starvation and dehydration, real severe hunger, real severe thirst.
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And most of us in America today have trouble relating to this because we have not experienced, for the most part, genuine hunger and real thirst in our nation.
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And I read this past week, we all know the government was shut down for a little while.
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Well, during the government shutdown, there were some 800,000 workers who went a few weeks without a paycheck.
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And because of that, they had to tighten up their spending a little bit.
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And there was a lot of stories in the news about people who were having to tighten up their spending.
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And one of the stories that I read was about a woman who was interviewed and she said that she had to decrease her spending so much that she was having to rely on McDonald's 99 cent cheeseburger to keep her going.
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And I feel for her plight.
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I mean, anyone who's going through an economic distress, I feel for that.
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And for all the workers who went through that shutdown, I feel for them.
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But I got to thinking, we live in a land wherein food is so plentiful that we sell hamburgers for less than a dollar.
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And there are so many of them, we never seem to run out.
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We have food all around us.
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It seems like we just we throw away bags full of food without a second thought.
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Go into any buffet, go to your Golden Corral or any of those other places and you see people leaving heaping piles of food on a plate.
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No thought to leave that food on the plate.
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It's been said that the average American dishwasher eats better every night than a large population of third world countries.
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That gets more nourishment passes through your dishwasher than passes through the stomach of some people in some countries.
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So we when we talk about hunger, it's hard for us to really picture real hunger.
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And the same can be said for thirst and water.
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We have so much fresh, clean water that we use it to keep our grass wet.
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You ever thought about that? We have so much clean water that we use it to wet our ground.
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Can you imagine being in one of these countries where there's no clean water to drink and seeing a person going out and spraying it on the ground? They would tackle him.
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It wouldn't allow such nonsense.
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But we have so much, we spray it on the ground.
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But again, this is because most of us have never lived in a condition where hunger and thirst are really an issue.
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Now, we've gone without.
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We've all gone without at some point.
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We've all had to roll pennies for gas.
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I'm sure we've all been broke.
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But the level of hunger and the level of thirst that Jesus is speaking of is speaking to people in a day and a time that really understood what hunger and thirst were.
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They weren't people who thought about hunger as that rumbling in our tummy between meals.
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They didn't think of thirst as that little bit of part sensation we get when we've been outside cutting the grass and we forgot to get a drink of water.
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No, these people understood real hunger and thirst.
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First century Jewish people who lived in Israel, they understood what hunger and thirst was.
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So when Jesus talks about hunger and thirsting, he's speaking to a people who knew what he meant.
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He's speaking to a people that didn't have McDonald's.
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They didn't have a convenience store.
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They didn't have Evian or Zephyr Hills.
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Food and water were always in demand and the fear of hunger and thirst were real realities.
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The fear of famine was a real reality for these people.
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Brian Swartley said this in his commentary, and I thought it was good.
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He said, speaking of hunger and thirst, he said, these are metaphors for a very strong desire, indeed, a desire so strong and dedicated, it is an obsession.
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We understand this point better when we consider these terms in the original cultural context.
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In the days of Jesus, poverty was common and the standard of living was quite low.
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A common laborer made very little money and would eat meat with a meal at best once a week.
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This situation describes times when crops were good.
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If the crops were poor or failed, people experienced real hunger, a hunger that we scarcely understand.
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In the Middle East, water is a scarce commodity.
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If a man was on a journey and ran out of water, he would have to tough it out and suffer an excruciating thirst until he reached the next oasis, town, well or stream.
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In the hot, dusty climate of Israel with the hot summer sun upon his head, such a man would be obsessed with water.
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In his mind at that point, everything would be relatively unimportant except water.
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Therefore, as we contemplate the hunger and thirst which Jesus is speaking of, let us not confuse our moderate hunger and our moderate thirst to the type of hunger and thirst with which he was speaking.
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We're discussing a hunger of a starving man and the thirst of a man who is in the desert without water.
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That is the hunger and thirst that Jesus is referring to here, a true hunger and a real thirst.
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He's using these as not synonyms for wants or synonyms for needs.
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It's synonyms for desperation.
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They are desperate for righteousness.
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The hunger and thirst here is real.
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Real hunger and real thirst, and that's what we get to now.
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Well, what are they hungry and thirsty for? Well, the text tells us they hunger and they thirst.
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They are desperate for something.
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What is it? It's righteousness.
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Well, what what does that mean? What does it mean to be hungry and thirsty for righteousness? And what is what is righteousness? Well, there's something we need to understand.
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The Bible actually talks about righteousness in different ways.
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And when we talk about righteousness before God, there are actually two types of righteousness that we need to consider.
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If you're taking notes or even if you're not, if you're putting them in your mind, there's two types of righteousness that the Bible talks about.
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One is imputed righteousness and the other is what we call implanted righteousness, imputed righteousness and implanted righteousness.
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And I need to describe these to you to impute something.
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And you've all heard me use this word before.
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Shouldn't be it shouldn't be that uncommon, but to impute something means to add it to your account.
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If I have one hundred dollars and Chris has nothing and I take my hundred dollars out of my account and give it into Chris's account, I have imputed that money to him.
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It is now yours and I my account is empty.
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I want to understand imputation to impute into something to take from one and give it to another.
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OK, well, that's the transaction that happened on the cross.
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Our account perfectly devoid of righteousness, we didn't have any.
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Some people think, well, we have a little bit of the Roman Catholics teach that we have some merit and what we what we lack, Jesus makes up for.
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That's wrong.
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That is heresy.
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It's not that Jesus makes up for our lack.
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We had nothing.
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Jesus gave it all.
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Every merit we have comes from Christ.
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Nothing we have comes from us.
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Jesus imputes that righteousness to us.
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Jesus's account was perfectly filled with righteousness.
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He lived the perfect law of God from the moment of birth to the moment that he died on the cross.
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Every second of his life was lived in perfect righteousness towards God.
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He not only did he never sin, he was perfectly righteous every second of every day of every moment of his life.
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That's on the cross.
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When Jesus died, his account, which was filled with righteousness, was imputed to your account.
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Amazing, right? Our account was empty of righteousness and now it's full.
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It's an amazing, it should cause us to stagger with that reality.
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For our sake, he made him who knew no sin to become sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
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I think I quoted it differently than the ESV, but that's sometimes you memorize a verse in a different translation.
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For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
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You see, the righteousness of God is given to us, it's imputed to our account, and that is the only righteousness which will stand before God on Judgment Day.
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It is the only righteousness which brings justification before God for justification is God's declaration of us as righteous.
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And the only way God can judge us as righteous is if we are actually declared righteous.
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How are we declared righteous? Because of the righteousness of Christ.
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So that's imputed righteousness, everyone understand it? Makes sense.
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Well, now let's talk about the implanted righteousness, because implanted righteousness, and I get that from that language from a Puritan commentator who wrote on this subject.
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I'm a little uncomfortable with the term implanted because I don't want there to be any confusion.
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So let me make sure I explain it right.
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Imputed righteousness is justification before God.
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Christ's righteousness is imputed to our account and we are made righteous before God because of the work of Christ.
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That's how we're saved.
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Implanted righteousness is what we call sanctification.
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It's the process by which we are daily conformed to the image of Christ.
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It's the desire to follow God's law.
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It's the desire to follow Christ's example.
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And it's the result of justification.
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We come to Christ poor in spirit, mourning over our sin, meek before God.
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As a result, he saves our souls, gives us the gift of imputed righteousness.
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He declares us righteous because of the work of God.
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But things don't stop there.
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From the moment of our conversion, a change occurs in our souls.
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We begin to desire his will.
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We begin to desire to follow his commands, our wants, our feelings, our desires, our needs, our longings change.
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We go from being children of wrath to children of God, as the Bible says in 2nd Corinthians 517.
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Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation.
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You've all heard that the old has passed away.
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Behold, the new has come.
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That's the picture of this conversion experience.
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We used to have this desire for the world, but now we're a new creation in Christ and now we desire him.
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And that's what we call the implanted righteousness, it's implanted desire to follow Christ, and it's a lifelong process and we call this process sanctification.
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We grow in our sanctification, we grow in that, we grow.
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As Christ followers, we start in the Bible, use that example as we start out, you know, eating baby food and we grow to the milk and the meat of the word, you know, we grow up in our faith.
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So the question becomes, well, we've got imputed righteousness and we've got implanted righteousness.
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Jesus said, Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness.
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Well, which one is he talking about? Is he talking about imputed righteousness or is he talking about implanted righteousness? And the answer is yes, because it seems obvious to me, at least, that both types of righteousness cannot be separated from one another.
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You cannot be justified without also beginning the process of sanctification.
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And likewise, you cannot be going through the process of sanctification unless you have also been justified.
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These two, they have to be understood distinctly, but they can never be separated.
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The person who says you can be justified but not be sanctified is a liar.
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Because the Bible knows not of such an idea.
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The pastor who teaches that you can be saved and live like the devil has never read the word of God with any type of clarity.
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Justification and sanctification are inextricably linked.
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So the one who is hungry and thirsting for righteousness, it would be wrong to say, well, it's just this one or just that one, because they both flow out of each other.
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Justification is the cause of sanctification.
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One is the cause of the other, and they work together in conforming us to that which we were we were called to, actually predestined to, according to Romans 8, to be conformed to the image of Christ.
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So that brings us to the last point.
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We've looked at what it means to hunger and thirst.
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And it's real desperation.
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We've looked at what the righteousness is in view.
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It's imputed and implanted righteousness.
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We hunger for that.
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And finally, well, what does it mean when it says we're filled or satisfied? Some of your translations say filled.
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Well, just like righteousness has a double reality of the one time declaration of justification, the continuous reality of sanctification, so, too, does the promise of the satisfaction or the filling.
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Upon understanding our spiritual poverty, our mournful heart falls meekly before God and realizes our utter desperation and our situation before God.
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And in that moment, God demonstrates his love to us by filling our empty account with the righteousness of Christ.
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We who are utterly destitute have now become the richest of all, having had our accounts full to the brim with the righteousness of Christ.
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In a sense, all of the righteousness we will ever need before God has already been filled.
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So when Jesus said, blessed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for you shall be filled.
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Well, there it is.
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There is that filling.
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Christ is our righteousness.
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It's filled to the top.
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Yet this does not mean that we are to live as we lived before.
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Paul contemplates this question in Romans chapter six and verse one, he asks the question very plainly, he says, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may abound? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may abound? Why would he even think to ask such an inane question? Because that's the question that people were asking.
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You're telling me that Christ justified me, that his righteousness is all the righteousness I ever need.
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Well, why even try? Why? I don't have to do anything.
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Jesus has done it all.
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I don't have any responsibilities in this whatsoever.
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I can continue to sin because God's grace is greater than my sin.
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And Paul says, what shall we say? Should we continue to sin so that grace can abound? Meganoita, by no means may it never be.
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God forbid.
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However, your translation says that it's no.
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The answer is no.
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For how can we who died to sin still live in it? It's a simple question, but it's profound.
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We who have come to Christ have died to sin, and now we live as ones who yearn for righteousness.
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We live as ones who yearn for that which we were predestined to, the image of Christ conforming to that image.
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That's why we experience the reality of the righteousness which we have been given.
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And we also experience the reality of our lives becoming more and more conformed to the righteousness of the one who saved us.
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We hunger and thirst for the actual righteousness that Christ has already given us.
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But we also hunger and thirst for the practical righteousness of daily living.
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We have an actual righteousness that's been given to us by Christ.
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It was a gift.
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We can't earn it.
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We can't do anything to pay for it.
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That's ours.
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It's already been given.
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But we still live this life with a desire for righteousness, a hunger and a thirst for real living out of the commands of God, the practical righteousness.
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Beloved, it is such a real, it should be such a real desire in our heart, this living out of righteousness.
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It should be something that we long for.
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And we miss it.
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Oh, how we miss it.
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But when we miss it, it should disturb the soul.
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When we miss it, it should register in our consciousness that we have missed it and it should inflame the hunger and the thirst even more.
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I one of the most interesting things and John MacArthur talked about this a few years ago, I remember hearing him talk about this.
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Well, he said he said the most interesting thing is, is that when a believer comes to Christ, he becomes more and more conformed to Christ.
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But the more and more he gets conformed to Christ, the less and less good he feels about it, because he realizes just how far off the mark he is.
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The more and more he gets close to Christ, the more he realizes how far he really is away because he becomes this strong understanding that that sometimes bothers people.
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Sometimes they say, well, pastor, I know all the good I'm supposed to do, and I also know how much of it I don't do.
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And I said, get in line, brother, because we are all there.
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But that doesn't mean we shouldn't desire it.
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I mean, just cursed be the man who tells the people of God that they shouldn't hunger and thirst for righteousness in this life because we should.
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We should have a desire, a hunger and a thirst for what is right, so much so that we hunger and thirst for righteousness in others.
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I think about that.
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I was reading Spurgeon on this on this verse and Spurgeon said, and I'm paraphrasing, of course, but he talked about how how when he looked at the politics of his land and that sort of caught my ear because, you know, all the politics and things that are going on.
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And he talked about how, you know, there comes a point in our in our faith where we start looking at these these people who are who are out in there and they're in these positions.
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And it's just we want righteousness for them.
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You know, and we and we and we we're we're we're unsatisfied with our leaders because they are so unrighteous and we so hunger and thirst for righteousness that we want it in our land.
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We want justice and righteousness and rightness of behavior.
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I mean, look at how our leaders look at how the ungodly glorify the ungodly, the unleader does something which is ungodly and the ungodly masses lap it up like dogs.
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But our hearts break over that ungodliness.
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Our hearts break over that unrighteousness because there is such a hunger and a thirst for that which is right.
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I thought that just was so insightful from Spurgeon some, you know, so many years ago, yet at the same time dealing with the same type of unrighteousness and leadership that we still deal with today.
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And we so long for it in ourselves, we long for it in our leaders, we long for it in our brothers and sisters in Christ, we long for righteousness, we look forward to the day where this sin soaked body will be stripped away.
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We will be given that glorified body and have that opportunity.
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Jennifer and I were actually laying in bed last night and we said, what's it going to be like to live without sin? What's it going to be like? We don't know, but man, we're looking forward to it.
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And that's the hunger and the thirst for righteousness to be right.
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We are right before God because of the work of Christ, but we also seek that practical daily righteousness.
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And we hunger for that, and when we miss it, we yearn for it and we mourn over having missed it.
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There is an important reality, which I think we all need to consider from this beatitude.
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And this is where I'm going to end as I've been studying these attitudes and I've been examining them and looking at them in contrast with one another and how they complement one another.
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I've already noted that it's not individual people, but it's a blessed man.
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And this is sort of his this is sort of the outline of who he is.
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And I want you to think about this is a picture of conversion.
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This man has understood his spiritual poverty.
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He has mourned over his sin.
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He has been humbled before God and he has been born again.
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He said, wait a minute, Pastor, this passage doesn't say he was born again.
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Oh, contrary, it absolutely does, because dead men do not hunger and dead men do not thirst.
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But it says, blessed is the one who hungers and thirsts for righteousness.
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The spiritually dead do not hunger for righteousness.
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The spiritually dead do not thirst for righteousness.
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It is the one who has been made alive in Christ.
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It is the one who has been born again.
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And I want you to think about this.
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Dead men crave nothing, but men who are spiritually alive crave the righteousness which God provides.
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I thought about this week as I was writing this sermon.
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I thought about when hope was born.
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Jennifer made me go to a breastfeeding class, a little awkward, but I went and in the class, the lady told me, she said, when the baby's born, they put the baby on the mom's chest and stomach area and the baby will actually reach out for the mother's breast.
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That it's instinctual.
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That the baby, not even realizing it, will just start, will reach out and latch, given the opportunity.
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And I didn't think it was true.
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I mean, I mean, you know, they talked about it.
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But when when Hope was born, they put her up on Jennifer's chest.
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And lo and behold, she began to make the nursing pucker with her mouth and was looking for something because she knew what she needed.
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And she was hungering for it.
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Beloved, I think that's a picture of what salvation looks like.
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Because prior to being born again, we are dead in our sins.
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But yet when we are born again, we reach out for that which previously we didn't even know we needed.
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And it's a natural inclination of the heart to reach out for this, for this sustenance that we need, this this righteousness, which only God can provide.
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It's a natural thing for the new believer to reach.
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And that's why these people say, well, you can get saved and not desire righteousness.
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No, if that's you have not been saved.
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If your life is not hungering and thirsting for righteousness, you have not been born again.
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You are still dead in your sins because the natural inclination of the of the saved heart.
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Is to hunger and thirst after that which only God can provide true.
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And living righteousness.
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And if that describes you, I pray for your commitment, I pray for your confirmation to Christ.
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But if that doesn't describe you, then I pray God would show you your need for him.
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I pray that he would show you your poverty of spirit, that he would cause you to mourn over your sin, to humble yourself before him so that you would crave the everlasting nourishment that only he can provide.
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Our Father and our God, we thank you for this opportunity that we've had to investigate your word and to study it together.
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And to learn from it and to be moved by it.
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I pray, Lord, for our congregation.
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I pray for those who are who are believers, Lord, that you would just continually conform them to the image of your son and remind them of the responsibility that we have to follow after his commands.
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And Lord God, if there are those here who have no desire for righteousness, they have no desire for confirmation to the image of Christ.
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I pray that you would break their spirit.
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Over the anvil of their sin and show them their need to come to you.
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In Jesus name, we pray.
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Amen.
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Beloved, please stand with us as we sing.
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And if you have a need for prayer, please come.