“Blessed are they
that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.”
~ Matthew 5:6
I have quite the sweet tooth.
My friends all got a kick out of it the day I posted a Facebook status that
said, “Help! I'm craving chocolate and have lost my M&Ms!” I scoured the
whole house up and down to find my giant bag of M&Ms that I keep hidden
from my children (I do share on occasion—really, I do).
I’m sure you’ll be relieved to
hear I found them and my craving was fulfilled, but what’s even better is the
way God has used that craving to draw me close to Him. It all started with a
question, “When was the last time I craved God enough to search Him out?”
We crave a lot of things:
chocolate, steak, a good book. But how often do we crave God or His Word?
That’s what the words Jesus spoke in Matthew 5:6 make me wonder. Do I really
hunger and thirst for righteousness? What would that even look (or feel) like?
And those questions led me to
the apostle Paul. I think Paul really understood this. He wrote to the
Philippians, “I long to know Christ and
the power which is in His resurrection, and to share in His sufferings and die
even as He died; in the hope that I may attain to the resurrection from among
the dead” (3:10-11 WNT).
Paul craved the righteousness
by hungering for more of Christ. Earlier in that paragraph he said he counted
everything else as a loss. He knew he didn’t have any righteousness of his own,
but only what he received by faith in Christ (vs. 7-9).
The knowledge of Christ is
there for the taking. His life, death, and resurrection are all recorded in the
Bible, all we have to do is open it with the intention of learning more about
Him. We can’t deepen our knowledge of Christ when we open God’s Word thinking
we already know everything it has to say. We have to be open for God to
communicate with us. We have to want to know Him more—to crave Him.
I loved the way one of the
women in my Bible study worded this. She said, “God is a gentleman. He waits for us to come to Him.” A.W. Tozer
said it this way, “God waits to be wanted.”
He doesn’t demand that we sit and eat. He doesn’t stand over us and tell us we
can’t start our day until we have spent at least half an hour reading His Word
and drinking in His Spirit. He waits patiently until we crave Him, and then He
fills us to the full.
When we draw close to God, He
fills us with peace, hope, love, joy, and so much more. Paul wrote in the book
of Romans that he wanted God to fill them with joy and peace so they could
overflow with hope (15:13). When we crave God, He does just that. He blesses us
with more of Him so we can live life to the fullest (John 10:10).
“It is written, ‘Man
shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth
of God.’”
~ Matthew 4:4 (WEB)
The above is an excerpt from my book, "Blessings from Above: A Deeper Look at the Beatitudes"
