Blessed ar e The Dissatisfied

From Rich Carroll:

Jack Miller's devotional from the June 3rd entry of a collection called Saving Grace was helpful to me.  Here it is:

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” (Matthew 5:6)

Jesus didn’t say, “Blessed are those who are righteous, for they shall be satisfied.”  His whole Sermon on the Mount is about how obedience to the law is not only about behavior, but also about heart orientation.  What God calls us to is not a pharisaic self-righteousness.  The Pharisees were nice, decent people, but they missed the inward and upward and outward relationship of Jesus’s teaching.

If you are a true believer, your response to Jesus’s words should be “Help!”  Those who know their inability to be righteous, and ask for help, will be blessed.  The very idea of eating and drinking is that what you need comes from outside yourself.  You don’t have the righteousness God requires, and, therefore, this is what you long for.  Jesus wants us to have an appetite for, to long for, what we do not have – the righteousness that comes from him.  It is blessed to long for what Jesus wants to give you.  It is blessed to be dissatisfied.  It is blessed to aim for perfection.  You are not going to be perfect in this life, but you aim for it because that’s what Jesus commands.  You work for it, you long for it, and you put off your sins.  That’s what it means to have an appetite for God.





​