Transcript

Shelby Abbott [00:00:00]: Welcome to The Connecting Podcast with Paul Tripp. My name is Shelby Abbott and this podcast exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life, right here, right now; and we're working our way through The Beatitudes.

Paul Tripp [00:00:15]: Yes, and the reason we're doing that is we are focusing these twenty-minute episodes this year on how to live a vibrant, joyful, hopeful, courageous Christian life in a world that's clearly gone insane, in a world where nowhere will your faith be reinforced — in fact, it will be rejected and mocked — where unexpected things are going to happen to you that are hard to deal with. How do I live with peace and joy and courage and an ever-strengthening faith in this fallen world? And The Sermon on the Mount is just form-fit for giving us a map and guardrails.

[00:01:09]: Well, we're in episode 6 and I've titled this "It's Important to Be Hungry". ^6aBlessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. I just want to make this observation that human beings are always motivated by some kind of hunger.

Shelby [00:01:31]: Okay, what do you mean by that?

Paul [00:01:33]: Hunger to be fit, hunger to be successful, hunger for money, hunger to be loved and appreciated, hunger for a cool car, a great man cave.

Shelby [00:01:49]: To make an impact.

Paul [00:01:51]: Yes, the best lawn on the block. Yes, so where God has hardwired us to be hungry, that's His plan and that hunger in our hearts is meant to drive us to Him. That's the divine plan. That's why the provision of manna and Jesus as the bread of life is such a significant theme in scripture because Jesus is saying you're going to be hungry, but there's only one thing that's going to satisfy you.

[00:02:34]: So it's recognizing that hunger in a human being is a divine creation. It's not evil to be hungry. It's human to be hungry. The question is what will you feed that hunger with and that's what this is about because you're always going to feed your hunger with something.

[00:03:03]: There's a second theme in scripture that's very clear is that created things weren't designed to satisfy that hunger. Whatever the buzz of all those things we seek, we wake up the morning hungry again. That's why you look at a billionaire and you think, "Why is he still working?"

Shelby [00:03:29]: Yes, "Don't you have enough?"

Paul [00:03:30]: "Don't you have enough?" Or an athlete that's beyond his prime or an 80-year-old musician producing a new album. Well, there it is. All the success just don't do for us what we want them to do.

Shelby [00:03:52]: Yes, the itch always comes back. Even though it gets scratched in a number of different ways, it always comes back.

[00:04:23]: Treasure is something that's valuable to us and, we're always hungry for some kind of treasure. So what does it mean to hunger and thirst after righteousness? I think this is one of these places where people read the Bible and aren't really clear what it means.

[00:05:03]: It's like, "Okay, what does it mean to seek God's kingdom? What actually does that mean where rubber meets the road?" Well, I want to give you a definition and then, we can talk about it. A hunger and thirst for righteousness is a passionate desire for God's will to be done in you and around you.

[00:05:31]: God is the ultimate source of righteousness. He Himself is holy all of the time and in every way. A hunger for righteousness is a hunger that this holy God who is perfect in all His desires and actions toward me, that His will would reign in me, that I would actually want what He wants for me. That's hunger for righteousness. I want what God would say is best. I want that for me. I don't always.

Shelby [00:06:16]: Yes, I was going to say how does that actually happen?

Paul [00:06:18]: And then around me, we're going to get here, too, because that's the Lord's Prayer. "Your will be done on earth." Let's take this even further. You could argue that there in scripture are clearly defined two kinds of righteousness: imputed and active.

Shelby [00:06:51]: Okay, define imputed.

Paul [00:06:52]: We don't use that word "imputed" anymore, but this is the righteousness of Jesus. Jesus lived a perfectly righteous life, now given over to my account so that I can stand before God as righteous even though I'm not actually.

[00:07:13]: So you can't skip from the birth to the death of Jesus because His righteousness accomplished on earth is very important to His redemptive plan. Jesus lived in all the harsh realities of the fallen world. He lived under God's commands and He was perfectly righteous on our behalf.

[00:07:37]: So when I hunger for righteousness, that's what I hunger for. I hunger for the righteousness of Jesus. That's a prayer for salvation. It's beautiful that I know who I am. I know the mess I am, but I can stand before God unafraid.

[00:08:00]: There's a whole hymn that says, "I need no other argument. I need no other plea. It is enough that Jesus died and that He died for me." It's beautiful. I don't need to bring anything else. I come with the righteousness of Jesus, but there's a second thing. It's that that same grace empowers me to live righteously. That's the act of righteousness.

Shelby [00:08:26]: The hunger for it and to live that way. Not only living that way, but wanting to live that way.

Paul [00:08:33]: Yes, it's the desire, first, because the members of your body only go where your heart goes. So without the desire, you will never live righteously. It's first that there would be a transformation in my heart so that actually live, I actually desire to live righteously; rather than, as we talked about last episode, desiring to have my own way.

Shelby [00:08:59]: Yes, because that's probably where most people are like, "I don't want to live righteously. If I'm honest and I examine myself, I don't want to. I don't hunger and thirst for righteousness. I don't hunger and thirst for God the way that I want to. What do I do?" There's a gap there. What do I do? And I think that's always maybe... sometimes the wrong question. It's like, what do I do? It can be a tricky...

Paul [00:09:28]: Yes, yes, and maybe a more penetrating question is do you love God's commands? Do you really? Do you find you read God's commands, you find joy in God's commands to really long to have the fruit of the Spirit be the dominant character of your marriage?

[00:09:59]: Love, joy, peace? You know the list. Do I want to be faithful? Do I want to be kind? Do I want to be self-controlled? Do I really hunger that every aspect of what God names as righteous is my desire and my way of living?

Shelby [00:10:24]: Yes, and if the answer is no, I think don't beat yourself up about that, but I heard an author one time say maybe you don't want to hunger and thirst after righteousness, but don't you want to want to hunger and thirst after righteousness, and finding that kind of base level, wherever that want to want to want is and then, build from there and have God's grace meet you there in that moment, so that you can grow and say, "You know, I don't want righteousness. I don't hunger after it, but I want to want to hunger after it." That's a good prayer to pray. It's a good request to bring before God.

Paul [00:11:01]: Absolutely, and wallowing in guilt when you've been offered inexhaustible forgiveness is not a good choice. So your prayer begins with confession. "I don't desire. Please, please help me to desire these things, so I then will have the motivation to go out and do them." What a beautiful hunger to have.

[00:11:42]: You want to be the best mom or dad? Hunger and thirst after righteousness. You want to be the best partner in a marriage? Hunger and thirst after righteousness. You want to be the best friend? Hunger and thirst after righteousness. You want to handle your money well? Hunger and thirst after righteousness. You want to be sexually pure? Hunger and thirst after righteousness.

[00:12:10]: You want to be a good neighbor? Hunger and thirst after righteousness. You want to work well in your job with joy? Hunger and thirst after righteousness. You want to live at peace? Hunger and thirst after righteousness. I mean, it is the ticket and our lives are only troubled when we don't. It's such a beautiful blessing to be there. Well, talk to me about Proverbs 27:7. You wanted this to be part of our conversation.

Shelby [00:12:52]: Yes, I ran across this one time in my devotional reading. Proverbs 27:7 says, "One who is full loathes honey, but to one who is hungry everything bitter is sweet," and so, in my Bible, I kind of wrote in the margins, "Stay hungry."

[00:13:13]: I think when we are content with the lesser things of this world, all of a sudden, we're filling that hunger in our lives with kind of the junk food of whatever this world has to offer and most of the time, that kind of just satiates us enough to get to the next thing, but it doesn't actually satisfy us at the core level.

[00:13:45]: We need real nutrition. We need real connection and staying hungry for the right thing is what God calls us to do; and when you're full of all this other stuff, maybe you might want to call it "convenience store snacking", that ends up being something that substitutes in our hunger for the actual real thing that's going to genuinely satisfy us.

Paul [00:14:14]: There's something else that is so helpful in this passage. "Everything bitter is sweet." The bitterness of God's commands become sweet to me.

Shelby [00:14:26]: Yes, that's good.

Paul [00:14:29]: Those things that look so hard and going to create such sacrifice and feel like I'm losing actually become sweet to me and I'm thankful for them. As I was thinking about this and the importance of being hungry, I was thinking that it's easy to get into a habit where you have one Godward moment in the beginning of the day. That's your personal devotions or quiet time, whatever you call it. And then, within fifteen, twenty minutes, you become a God-amnesiac. You live a God-forgetful day, but that is not a vacuum.

[00:15:31]: That bag is filled real quickly with self and one of my prayers for me is that I don't do that, that morning time of my Lord would set the direction for my entire day so I'm still thinking of him, I'm still hungering after Him, I'm still feeding on Him throughout the entire day. So that would shape the way I respond to my children, the way I respond to my wife, the way I respond to friends, the way I respond to the difficulties of life.

Shelby [00:16:07]: Yes, because it could be easy to do it and then, check the box and say I'm done with that for the day, but instead viewing it as like this is what becomes is going to launch me out into my day, launch me out into the remainder of my time, so that when I get in the car and drive to work and the traffic that's there, it doesn't set me off completely.

[00:16:28]: I'm actually on a course that's in line with what God wants me to do and how He wants me to live, how He wants my heart to be. It's not just, "Oh, yes, I had my quiet time for the day and so, I'm done."

Paul [00:16:40]: Absolutely, and that, again, is only possible by God's rescuing grace; but cry out for it, pray for it. I have one other observation. What we're talking about is love. What love controls your heart? Love of what, and, therefore, shapes your choices, your decisions, your actions, your words. Well, having thought about that, I immediately thought of 1 John 2. This is verses 15-17.

[00:17:19]: ¹⁵Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. ¹⁶For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. ¹⁷And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Shelby [00:17:44]: So beautiful.

Paul [00:17:45]: What a great summary passage for what we've been talking about and you know, one of the things he includes in love of the world is the pride of life. That's the opposite of meekness. When you hear love of the world, you think of stuff out there I love.

[00:18:07]: That includes love of me because right there is the pride of life, so what do we want to say about hunger and thirst after righteousness? God wants to own your love and the most wonderful life is found when God is the center of your love, when He's the object of the deepest, fullest, most motivating loves of your heart.

Shelby [00:18:46]: And other things are not kicking Him off His rightful place.

Paul [00:18:51]: That's right and that's a war, and we have a warrior Spirit living within us to convict us and to empower us; and so, there's hope. You should not be defeated by these conversations that we're having. You should be motivated.

[00:19:14]: Start with confessing your lack of desire and God will meet you. It's so important to stay hungry for His righteousness because He's always right. His way is always the best. There's no alternative and there's no happy road in the middle. I'm either loving the world and that's what's motivating me, or I'm loving the Father and that's what's motivating me. I want to hunger and thirst after righteousness.

Shelby [00:19:56]: That's great.