Category: 2018 – Beatitudes

Quenching Your Real Hunger & Thirst

Today, in parts of Africa, India, and Latin America, thousands die of malnutrition and its accompanying diseases.  Hunger is like war and pestilence.  It kills.  It consumes.

I’ve never really known hunger like that.  I’m “starving” if it’s 2:00, and I haven’t eaten lunch yet…but I recognize that’s not really “starving.”  I’ve also been very thirsty on a summer day with 3-digit temperatures.  I’ve been “parched”, hiking in the Grand Canyon and other hot places…but that’s not really “thirsty”, either.

When Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled,” he used a Hebrew word meaning an “acute lack of food.”   According to Eerdmans Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, this word was used for the exhaustion caused by a military campaign or a desert journey.

We must recognize that all the hunger horrors imaginable grow pale when compared to the horror of unfulfilled spiritual hunger and unquenched spiritual thirst.  Unsaved people thirst for happiness and hunger for fulfillment, but they seek it in the wrong places.  Spiritual hunger is the characteristic of all God’s people.  Our supreme ambition is not material but spiritual.  The fourth beatitude deals with our appetite for the things of God.

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Happy are the Meek

In The Beatitudes: The Only Way to Happiness, John MacArthur points out that when Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” it was a shocking statement to his audience.  As generally used, it smacks of victimhood and weakness, but this is clearly not the implication Jesus intends here.

Jesus called for a broken spirit, a mourning heart, and now meekness.  No self-righteousness, no spiritual pride—and they didn’t understand his revolutionary approach.

Would today’s audience be any different?  In a world of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and others, we look for who has the most friends, who is most liked, and popularity reigns.  If Jesus walked the earth today, would he have been a social media user?  If so, how would his “meekness” show up?

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