Matt. 5:6; Luke 10; 25-37-Hungry Enough? Thirsty Enough?-2/8/15
We look here as we are peering into our Lord’s greatest sermon: The Sermon on the Mount.
He is giving us as His disciples today a set of new commands to live by. We are now hungering and thirsting for righteousness, and looking at the story many of us know: the Good Samaritan. Now, why do we hunger?
Because our flesh needs nourishment. Why do we thirst? Because our bodies need water…To have a healthy appetite is seen as a good thing.
On the other hand, if your body is hungry but it knows it’s not getting anything to eat, it shuts off your appetite. It is the same thing for our spiritual lives as Christians.
If we seek to do God’s will, if we hunger and thirst to be more like Jesus in every way, if we would desire that which God desires, then not only will we grown and mature, but we will also find ourselves with increased appetites, wanting more and more to be shaped and molded and sculpted by God into what we were meant to be.
Sometimes we starve our spirits by not taking time to feed on God’s Word, sometimes our souls become parched because we do not drink in the gift of prayer and communion with God…and sometimes we begin to suffocate because we don’t breathe in the joy of community and fellowship with other believers.
And so our spiritual lives begin to deteriorate and die rather than grown and thrive.
Just like our bodies need to hunger and be fed and then grown so they can hunger again, likewise our souls need to hunger and be fed and mature Likewise we ourselves cannot fill ourselves up spiritually.
We must turn to God for that. Our souls hunger, desiring to be fed by God. How can we have this increasing hunger? The Good Samaritan has the key to the answer.
I heard one commentator put it in this way, “The priest looked at the wounded man as a problem to avoid. The Levite as an object of curiosity. It is only the Samaritan who treated him as a person to be loved, as a human being to be cared for, as a fellow man to be looked after.”
The robbers beat him up, the priest and Levite passed him up, but it was the Samaritan who picked him up. The thief said, “what’s yours is mine, I’ll take it.” The priest and Levite said, “What’s mine is mine, I’ll keep it”. But the Samaritan said, “What’s mine is yours, we’ll share it”
The Samaritan hungers and thirsts, for right-living before God, and justice for his neighbor.
We find ourselves at the crossroads, asking that same question, “Who is my neighbor?” Friends, remember who you are in Jesus, remember your new lives in Him, remember that we are to see our enemies not as needing to be destroyed, but rather needing to be redeemed.
See when Jesus says “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”, that word “righteousness” could also be translated justice.
Righteousness means personal holiness to God. Justice means love toward neighbor.
Caring for neighbor goes hand in hand with loving God. We don’t have to choose between feeding on Scripture and feeding the hungry, between reaching out to God and reaching out to those in need. Who is our neighbor?
Our neighbor is anyone who needs our help, not just those already part of our group, our church, or local community, but everyone who needs it, the hungry, the injured, the hurting.
How can we do this though? How can we love all men as our neighbors? friends be encouraged. When the Lord saved you, the Holy Spirit came within you as part of the package deal.
When we as believers let Him take full command, God’s Holy Spirit fills us with dynamic power, power to love our neighbors all over. That is what God wants from us, to be filled with power to do the godly thing in this world.
Where brokenness is found in the world, the church mends, where hunger, it heals, where suffering, it assuages. Even when the problem seems bigger than just one Christian or one church, and it requires official persons and large governments, it is still up to the church to call forth justice and righteousness from those groups so that they will act justly and love mercy.
We the people of God are called to do whatever is at hand to do, act with all our might to hear our neighbor’s cry and answer it lovingly. A Spirit-filled, Spirit-led believer in a spirit-filled, spirit-led church will constantly hunger and thirst for more of God’s righteousness and justice.
Friends, when we have that hunger, God satisfies. AMEN