April 28, 2002

Service Theme – "Our God is Righteous"

Matthew 5:6

Man Does Not Live by Junk Food Alone…

1. Introduction

1. Illustration – From Homiletics Online: Mr. Lee was terribly overweight. So his doctor put him on a diet. "I want you to eat regularly for two days, then skip a day, and repeat this procedure for two weeks. The next time I see you, you'll have lost at least five pounds." When Mr. Lee returned, he shocked the doctor by having lost nearly 60 pounds. "Why, that's amazing!" the doctor said. "Did you follow my instructions?" Mr. Lee nodded. "I'll tell you though, I thought I was going to drop dead that third day." "From hunger, you mean?" "No, from skipping."
2. Illustration - Patrick M. Morley, in The Man in the Mirror (Brentwood, Calif.: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1989, 163), writes, Almost everyone has gone grocery shopping on an empty stomach and without a shopping list. Everything that tastes good looks especially attractive, and the shopping cart ends up filled with too many snack foods and not enough nutrition. When the cashier rings up the final total and announces the bill, you are in a state of shock at the cost of your unplanned shopping spree! The worst part may not be the cost, but explaining to your wife how you spent so much money and still didn't get what the family needed! The object of grocery shopping is to purchase a nutritionally balanced diet for the family. Shopping without a list risks spending your time and money on the wrong food. Life's many options compete for our priority just like the well-stocked shelves of a grocery store. To have any control over our lives whatsoever, we must decide in advance what we will give ourselves to. The object of setting priorities is to allocate limited amounts of time and money where God directs us. But too often we choose our priorities with the same foresight as our trip to the grocery store, and the things we give priority to are simply not what our family needs or God wants.
3. Context – Jesus outlined in Matthew 5:6 exactly what God wants from us regarding our appetites. He said:

1. Scripture Passage

1. Matthew 5:6 – Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

1. A Solid Diet

1. You know, so much of the time we let our minds take in whatever is convenient, whatever is amusing, whatever is relaxing, without evaluating what it’s doing to us. We do this with what we watch on TV and in the movies, by what we read, even by what we listen to. Our world convinces us that we’ve got to have an "open mind" so that we can be "balanced" in our approach to life. But author and theologian G. K. Chesterton said that the purpose of having an open mind is the same as having an open mouth -- so that we can close it on something nourishing. We’re supposed to nourish our hearts and our minds with the things of God. But how?
2. We’re not sure exactly how to nourish our hearts and minds with what God wants us to and still be able to relate to our world. You know what I mean? So we find ourselves thinking we’ve got to project a certain image to be acceptable to our world and a different one to be acceptable to our church, and we get caught in the middle. Mike Cope, in Righteousness Inside Out (Nashville, Tenn.: Christian Communications, 1988, 26), writes, My wife and I recently had a college student and the girl he was dating over to our house for lunch on a Sunday. As we started to relax, I said, "Why don't you take your coat off?" I'd already taken off my tie and coat. The young man kind of hem-hawed around, however, as if he didn't want to do it. Finally, he got me off in a corner and said, reminding me of an old trick I knew well when I was in college, "The only parts of my shirt I ironed were the cuffs and the collar." He had pressed just the parts that showed. The rest of the shirt looked as if he had ironed it with a weedeater! That was the way of the Pharisees: the part people could see looked great, but a weedeater appeared to have done the ironing on the inside. That’s what we find ourselves so easily slipping into. It drives me nuts when I catch myself doing it. So what do we do about it?
3. Jesus gave us the answer in the passage we read: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Okay, those are good words, and offer good advice, but what do they mean? I think all of us have times when we hunger and thirst in our souls for something so much more than we find in our world. Is that what Jesus is saying? And if it is, why doesn’t it seem like enough? A real key is found in the way this phrase is written. Maybe a better translation would be "Blessed through relationship with God are those who are continually hungering and continually thirsting for righteousness, for they will be filled." In other words, anyone who because of their relationship with God is continually seeking for His righteousness to fill their hearts and lives and transform them will be filled with His righteousness.
4. When we continuously long for God and His righteousness, His uprightness, His holiness, to fill our hearts and minds as much as we long for food and drink to fill our bodies, then and only then will we be filled. When we continuously long for God’s righteousness, we get filled with it. We become innocent in regards to sin because, not only does God no longer hold our sins against us, but we no longer have an appetite for doing things God hates. That is a powerful truth! The more we trade our appetite for sin for an appetite for God and His righteousness, the less we have an appetite for sin. There is a scientific principle that says that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. The same holds true in the spiritual realm. Good and evil cannot occupy the same space at the same time. God and sin cannot occupy the same space at the same time. So the more God we get into our hearts and minds, the less sin there is in there.
5. Think about it – all our hunger and thirst for anything other than God has gotten us is trouble. All hungering and thirsting for God and His righteousness brings us is eternal benefit. We can mortgage our eternal future to get to do everything we want here, no matter how much pain it brings us and even to other people. Or we can allow our hunger and thirst for God to enable us to overcome our lusts and gain eternal life and to bring life into the lives of those around us. That’s the choice. We will hunger and thirst spiritually – there is no question about that. The only question is whether we’ll attempt to fill that hunger and thirst by disobeying God, or truly satisfy that hunger and thirst with Him. The choice is ours.
6. So let’s say we begin making the choice to satisfy our spiritual hunger and thirst God’s way. What does that look like in daily life? It means we become more careful about what we watch and read and listen to. It means we pay attention and carefully evaluate what these things are teaching us. Are they teaching us how to better understand how to reach people for Jesus, or are they just dragging us away from Him? Or is it truly relatively neutral entertainment? Then comes the question of how much we are feeding our spiritual beings. Do we spend consistent daily time in prayer and Bible study? Do we faithfully spend time with other believers, sharing each other’s cares and encouraging each other? Do we obey when we sense God’s prompting to do something for Him? Lots of questions here, but the point is that which we feed will flourish and that which we don’t feed will starve. May all of us make the commitment to allow our hunger and thirst for righteousness to drive us to do anything that will bring us closer to God. And then may we all follow through on that commitment.
7. In her sermon "The Unfettered Word," Barbara Brown Taylor talks about the reaction someone had to one of her sermons: Who knows what it was about. All I remember is the man who came out afterwards -- a sensible, well-heeled fellow, looking slightly stunned -- who told me that God had spoken to him during the sermon that morning. He was going to quit his job on Monday. He was going to sell his car. He was going to change his life, he said, to which I said, 'Good grief! It was only a sermon! Sleep on it! Go get a cup of coffee! See how you feel in the morning!' Because We are old friends with the word by now, we have forgotten it's power. We read scripture out loud as though we are reading income tax instructions to each other .... There is nothing to get excited about. You can buy dish towels with the Beatitudes printed on them. You can give Bibles to your children without worrying what they read there will upset their lives. She concludes her sermon with this: The word that created heaven and earth, the word that became flesh and dwelt among us, the word that blew through an upper room and set believers' heads on fire -- that word is still loose in a world that cannot contain it, still seeking those who will hear it and speak it -- waking the sleepers, freeing the prisoners, raising the dead. 'Let it be ...,' God said, and it shall be so. Amen. That word has spoken to us this morning. Let’s let it change our hearts and transform our lives!

1. Conclusion

1. Please bow your heads and close your eyes. What’s God been whispering to your heart this morning? What do you sense Him saying to you about your spiritual appetites? If you feel like He’s been telling you that your appetites or how you feed them need to change, I’m inviting you to answer Him by committing your life to hungering and thirsting after Him and His righteousness. If you’d like to come forward and kneel at the altar to do that, please feel free. If you’d like to stay put, that’s fine. But spend some time in prayer asking Him to forgive you, committing yourself to hungering and thirsting after Him, and then telling Him what you’re going to do about it.
2. Let’s pray together.