Desiring God
November 4, 2007 7:42 pm Matthew, Sermon-TextsAn exegetical treatment of Matthew 5:6 addressing the theme of Christian hedonism and spiritual discipline. This sermon was originally preached November 4th of 2007 at The Resolved Church in San Diego, CA.
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November 4th, 2007
Pastor Duane M. Smets
Sermon: “Desiring God”
Text: Matthew 5:6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
Introduction
Good morning. I am here and preaching which means my daughter has not been born yet. I’ve only slept about half the nights this week because every time Amy moves I wake up and think it’s time! J So if all the sudden you see me run out in the middle of my sermon, that’s what’s going on. I’m headed to the hospital.
Today the title of my sermon is “Desiring God.” I chose that word desire because I think it captures the thrust of what the verse we are going to be looking at today talks about. Desire is something we all know well. It is thoroughly mixed up in everything we are and do. Our culture knows it well.
Bob Dylan put out a great album called “desire” which I thoroughly enjoy. One of U2’s songs is called desire. Or if you like lame music like Yanni, he also has a song called desire. The popular TV show “Grey’s Anatomy” advertises itself as being one about desire. “Desire” is also the name of one of the main characters in a DC comic book series. And just last month, Judith Thurman, a New York Times best seller just came out with a book called “Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire” in where if you read it you will (quote) ” find explorations of voracity: hunger for sex, food, experience, and transcendence.” Desire.
Jonathan Edwards was aware that much of who we are and what we are driven by is wrapped up in, desire. In Religious Affections he writes, “Take away all love and hatred, all hope and fear, all anger, zeal, and affectionate desire, and the world would be in a great measure motionless and dead.” Desire. Let’s read our text and then pray.
Context/Cultural Background
Matthew 5:6 is the centerpiece of one of the greatest sermons that mankind has ever had the privilege of hearing. Besides the fact that it is the longest and most renown sermon of Jesus it is also a masterfully put together. I’ll show you why in a minute but first I want to try and help us get the situation in our heads of what was going on here. So first, back up and look at verse 4:23 through 5:1 because they go together. The Bible we have, the English Bible, is a translation from Greek in the New Testament and chapter and verse divisions are not in the original greek. They were not added until 1551 by a guy named Robert Stevens in his translation. So let’s read these two verses together.
Notice that there are multitudes or crowds. We have these multitudes gathering from Galilee, Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond Jordan. Those are the people who were there with Jesus up on the mountain. So we have multitudes. But why? Why were these multitudes following him? There are a couple of reasons, one is right here in the text. Look at 4:24, it says that “…fame, or news, had spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pain, those oppressed by demons, epileptics, and paralytics, and he healed them.” So the first reason why there is multitudees here is that Jesus was performing miracles and people wanted to see what was happening. They had heard about him and what was going on and they wanted to check it out, “I want to see one of these miracles. I want to see what is going on.” If you heard that Chris Angel was outside and walking around on water on mission bay on the other side of the freeway, I’m sure there would be many of us who would want to go check that out.
The second reason crowds were probably gathering comes from something we know about studying all the Bible and its history and culture about what the Jews people were expecting at the time. At this time in history, when Jesus preached this sermon, the Jews were under the Roman government. They were no longer the nation state Israel. They did not have their own rule and reign. They were underneath the rule of the roman government as their subjects. They had to pay taxes to Rome. And roman soliders and officials stood over them enforcing roman law on their jewish way of life. And something very dear to the Jewish people were prophecies about a messiah. A deliverer who would come and deliver them from oppression. This messiah was to be from the family line of David, the great Jewish king of their past. And this messiah would restore the kingdom of Israel to a place where it was strong and proud and prosperous like when David was king. When israel was one of the most powerful and richest kingdoms on the earth.
They longed for this. They wanted freedom from Rome. They expected this political, military, to come and bring this great kingdom. They expected a powerful man. The word they would of known in Hebrew for messiah is, Hama-Shiac. It kind onomonopoetic, it kind of sounds like it is. a powerful man, Hama-Shiac! A man that would come and bring this deliverance.
So here on this mountain you probably a lot of Jews…those who were wondering if this man might be the messiah that they were so longing for. Then you probably have a fair amount of Greeks that were there. The decapolis were ten cities, ten Greek cities. They might have known a little bit about the messianic prophecies because there had been other people, who had tried to start revolts, claiming to be the messiah. Which the Roman Government would crush right away. Rome would not stand for any oppossition. They wanted peace, the pax romana, the Roman peace. So there were Greeks, who were probably attracted most because of the miracles. They had heard stories about other greek gods doing miraculous things accomplishing great feats, like Zeus and Hercules and Apollonius.
So we have Jews and Greeks here and Jesus takes these multitudes, probably thousands, and goes up on this mountain…probably so his voice would project (they didn’t have microphones in those days) so that all these people could hear him. And then he sits down, that’s kind of odd, he sits down and then begins to speak…beginning in verse 3, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (that’s odd)” for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. What? “Kingdom of heaven?” What! All the sudden everyone is listening. He’s talking about the kingdom. He’s talking about the kingdom. The Jews are wondering is this the messiah? Could it be him? The Greco-Romans might have been thinking they were about to have another fight on their hands. I’m sure at that point Jesus had to pause for a long time because there was probably a lot of commotion going on. Everyone was probably whispering and talking going on…”is this the messiah? He’s talking about the kingdom.”
So Jesus has their attention. But the things he begins to say and the way he is acting is not what they were expecting. He sits. That’s not what a powerful leader would do. Then he starts talking about being poor in spirit, mourning and comfort, and being meek. If he’s the messiah shouldn’t he be talking about revolt and taking up weapons, preparing for war to take back jerusalem and all of Israel? Isn’t that what he sould be talking about? Then we get to verse 6 and Jesus lets us know what the kingdom of God is really about.
Blessed
Okay, now that we got the picture of what’s going on lets get into the verse. (read 5:6) The first thing I want to talk about is this word “blessed.” From vs. 3-11 every single verse starts with the word “blessed.” Jesus keeps saying blessed, “blessed are the poor,” “blessed are those who mourn,” “blessed are the meek,” blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed…
Blessed is a weird word. I don’t thinking anyone has ever said to me in common english here in San Diego, “Duane, blessed are you if you…” If someone did I’d probably think they were one of those weird drama kids who are all into Shakespeare and stuff. J I’m not quite sure what a modern paralllel would be to the word blessed? Stoked? Stoked are you my friends if… or maybe it would be kind of like saying, “Dude, this is what it’s all about, listen…”
I think the question behind “blessed” is, how can life be good? What is life about? How can it be pleasing? How can a person be happy and find meaning and purpose and joy? How can we be happy? Jesus does not deny that life is about pleasure, I’m going to argue in a few minutes that life really is and ought to be about seeking out what pleases you and that Jesus here tells us what that is, that it is in himself. But first, look at what this word blessed does.
By beginning each of these statements within his sermon Jesus does two things. The first thing is he offers a positive proposition. That is, he offers an appealing picture. Who doesn’t want blessing? If someone came to you and said “hey you want to hear the secret of how to be happy in life?” Who would want to stop for a second just to see what they were going to say? Well, I suppose that depends on who the person is. If it was some whacko I’ve never met before who tells me he hears voices in his head called God and he knows the secret to everything, I’d probably tell him “good luck with that.” J But if it was someone I knew and respected, then it would be a different story, then I’d listen. So first, we have a positive propostion, how to be happy in life. It is an appeal to something we want or desire.
Second, an expectation is set forth within this word “blessed.” What Jesus is saying is that those who are God’s, this is what they will be like. Those who are going to be part of his kingdom will be this way, be this type of person. They will have this type of life and attitude. That’s why they sometimes each of these blessed statements are called the “beatitudes.” They are the blessed attitudes. So there are two things intended by “blessed”, we could say its about pleasure and its what God wants and expects of us.
Now, that’s what blessed is but there are couple things it is not I want to warn you about. There is a somewhat popular idea out there that claims to be Christian, you hear it a lot from those preachers that are on TV. And they say things like, “God wants to bless you, and that if you are really a christian then you should be walking in blessing. You should be healthy and rich. After all Christians are children of the king.” They say that you just need to claim authority over sickness in your body by faith and you need to claim money by faith and it will be yours. “You just need to think positively and work hard. And after all Jesus himself said you have not because you ask not.” And then they say that if you don’t have health or riches it is because there is sin in your life.
When I was a youth pastor I took my kids to this camp and the speaker there had been buying into some of this stuff and he said, “you know kids God wants you to have those new clothes and that new car and if you don’t have it, it is because you have sin in your life that you need to repent of.” I just wanted to go up and punch him.
When they, these heretics read Matthew 5:6 what they read is, “if you are righteous then you will get all this stuff and everything will go good for you if you do righteous things.” Now there are a ton of verses in the Bible that teach the exact opposite, I could spend a whole sermon on refuting this to show that it is not true and that it is in fact the exact opposite. But I think just one or two should be sufficient for us to dispose of this teaching. Most of you ought to know it just by common sense since our Lord Jesus himself was poor carpenter and suffered and died and since everyone gets sick and dies one day. But Scriptures speaks even more clearly.
Here is the verse I want to use. It is found in Job 1:21. The context there is that Job has lost everything. Fire has come and destroyed all his flocks, killed his kids and his servants. He was the richest man in the land and he loses everything, then he comes to verse 21 and in response to this, in response to losing all his riches and his family, he falls down in worship and says “the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the lord” …then after losing his house and his kids, he gets sick, he gets boils all over his body, starts to really suffer physically and then his wife comes to him and says, “you know Job, why don’t you just curse God and die?” Then Job responds to her and says “shall we accept good from God and not accept evil? Then the Bible says this, right after that, it says, “In all this (up to that point) Job did not sin with his lips.”
So get the story, Job has all kinds of riches, anything anyone could ever want, he is healthy and well, then he loses it all, falls down and worships and says, “the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”
So suffering, if you are a believer, it is a blessing. I fear this dumb heresy running around in circles of those who claim to be Christian, who claim to be a part of the church, has crept into our minds, creeps into my mind, because we have this great fear and want of nothing “bad” to happen to us. And we will do everything in our power to pursue safety and security in order to avoid any kind of suffering and we assume that if we do suffer in any way is not from God to teach us. But today I stand with the apostles who counted it a joy to suffer and who said everyone who wants to live a godly life will suffer (2 Tim 3:2) and say that there is no such thing as something “bad” for the Christian. I believe in the biblical and historical doctrine of the church which says God is sovereign and therefore nothing is out of God’s control.
So today, if you are suffering, know God is in control and he is a tower and a refuge for you to run into and that he holds you in the palm of his hand and he has granted unto you to receive of a blessing of His Spirit others are not in allowing you to share in the sufferings of Christ.
Lastly, about blessing is this money issue. If God has blessed you with finances it is for one purpose. Not so that you will be blessed in having them. Not so that you will be happy that you have money and able to buy things. But the purpose is that you might experience his blessing in provision for your needs and then being able to give money away. 2 corinthians 9:8 “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything and may provide in abundance for every good work.”
If you are new with us we are not after your money. But if you are part of this church you need to be regularly giving a portion of your income to Jesus’ church, it’s called “firsfruits.” That is the biblical expectation. Giving isn’t some expendible option for you if you are a Christian and you happen to have some extra money. No it crucial not only for the way Jesus designed his church but also to your heart. Not giving and trusting God with your money will keep your heart from truly loving him freely.
Okay, so a summary of blessing: “blessed” in the beatitudes is how to be happy in God and for God. Not one of the beatitudes say blessed are those who are healthy and strong or blessed are those have lots of money. No, blessing here is what brings us the most pleasure and is what God wants and expects of us.
Now the reason that I took so much time to talk about this one word “blessed” is because I think the people Jesus was speaking to in that time, had some misconceptions, like we sometimes do, about what blessing really is. What Jesus is teaching is that when we want blessing, when we pray for blessing, what jesus is teaching is that what we are really wanting or asking for are these things (to be poor in spirit, to mourn, for meekness and so on..). And this becomes crucial for understanding what it means to hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Righteousness
Let’s look at our verse again. (read 5:6) I said earlier it is the centerpiece verse of these beattitudes. Here is why, the structure of them…. It has to do with this word “righteousness.” There is an order in the beatitudes and it centers upon this word. Being poor in spirit, mourning, becoming meek and hungering and thirsting are preparations in order to receive righteousness. Then the rest of the beatitudes, being merciful, pure in heart, and being people of peace and persecution are the results of righteousness. So we have preparations for righteousness and results of righteousness. “Righteousness” is the pivot point of this sermon.
“Righteousness” is one the most important words in the Bible. I have said a number of times that “righteousness” = right standing. Whenever you see this word you can think of a ”right standing” before judge. It is a legal term. We are morally guilty, unrighteous, corrupt, wretched, wicked unrighteous people. And this unrighteousness extends to every faculty, in our minds, affections, and wills. We are completely and totally depraved. God demands righteousness and there is nothing we can do to ourselves to make us righteous.
There are some who attempt to say that this is not the way the term is being used here. They say that understanding righteousness here as right standing is just reading Paul (the author of Romans were studying) into Jesus words.
But let’s look a few verses later in verse 20 of of the same chapter in Matthew. It is the same sermon Jesus was preaching. (read 5:20) Now scribes and pharisees whole lives were devoted to fulfilling the law, doing good works, they were serious about it. They had it down to how many steps you could walk on a certain day…and Jesus says that all of their efforts still fell short of the righteousness that heaven requires. Jesus says unless you are perfect like God, which no one is, you are not entering. So it is clear that Jesus means the exact same as Paul in Romans 3 when Paul says, “there is no one righteous not one, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23).” Jesus and Paul were on the same page.
Furthermore, that Jesus here is teaching us that we ought to hunger and thirst means shows that we must recognize first that we don’t have righteousness but we must want it. If we are to hunger and thirst for righteousness we must not have it. The text assumes that we don’t have it. hungering and thirsting is to be an ongoing thing. These words hunger and thirst are present active participles in the Greek, which means that literally what this is saying is those who are hungering and those who are thirsting. It is to be an ongoing, present thing. I am hungering and am thirsting. The Christian life is to be a life of hungering and thirsting after God and the righteousness he provides for in Christ Jesus, his perfect life lived for us and his perfect death in our place for our sins.
Hunger and Thirst
Let’s talk about this hungering and thirsting. Hungering and thirsting are affections. They are things we feel, desire and are designed for. When I get hungry I feel hungry when I get thirsty I feel thirsty. Life is composed of feelings. We feel fear. We feel hope. We feel love. We feel hate. We feel desire. We feel joy. We feel sorrow. We feel gratitude. We feel compassion. We feel zeal. We feel pain. We feel hunger. And we feel thirst.
Life is composed of feelings and that which drives them. I am convinced along with Jonathan Edwards that if it were not for feelings we would not do anything at all. As I quoted earlier from his book, “Religious Affections,”
“Take away all love and hatred, all hope and fear, all anger, zeal, and affectionate desire, and the world would be in a great measure motionless and dead; there would be no such thing as activity amongst mankind, or any earnest pursuit whatsoever…The world continues, from age to age in a continual commotion and agitation, in a pursuit of these things; but take away all affection, and the spring of all this motion would be gone, and the motion itself would cease.”
You see, it is our affections that drive us. We would never eat if we never felt hungry. We would never drink if we were not thirsty. In life we are driven by feelings and what is behind them. They are our affections. Tim Keller calls it, our whole “motivational structure.”
Now lets think for a minute about Jesus’ audience again. We have those two groups: the Jews and Gentiles or the Greeks. For the jews religion was outward. An outward fulfilling of the Law. A meeting of requirements. Doing things by rote will-power. They would make sacrifices in order to be justified, to be right with God and make themselves feel better. Then we have the Greeks. One of the most prominent philosophies, things that greeks thought and believed is what is called, “stoicism.” it is where we get the word stoic. And it too sort of sounds like it is. Just sort of blank faced, like a statue. Stoic. Stoics believed the way to gain salvation was through being free from passion, being unmoved by joy or grief, totally indifferent to pleasure or pain…like a statue. That is how you gain salvation, by detaching yourself from your feelings and your emotions.
Now let’s think about what Jesus is saying here. He takes the heart of judaism, the Law, these outward requirements and he takes the most prominent Greek idea of the day and turns them on their head. Jesus puts affections at the center. He says it is not about what is going on out here but what is going on in here, in your heart. Think about this…he puts the affections, hungering and thirsting right at the heart of true religion. He takes hunger and thirst and says they have everything to do with righteousness.
And its not just here in this passage. It is all over the place. In Matthew 15:8 Jesus says “these people honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.” In the Bible the heart is your mind, your emotions, and your will or decisions making center. What Jesus words then mean is that it is possible to think some correct ideas about God but have no true heartfelt adoration of him and a sense of love and thanks and worship does not drive your decisions. You got to be scared of your heart. What you feel matters. If we sing songs and our minds are inactive of the words we are singing, and we feel dead and don’t care, our lips moving is still then pleasing to God. God is not after hearing you sound out certain syallabes. He is after your heart.
John Piper in his book “desiring God” says this,
“An act of worship is vain and futile when it does not come from the heart…It is more than an act of mere willpower. All the outward acts of worship are performed by acts of the will. But that does not make them authentic. The will can be present while the heart is not truly engaged. The engagement of the heart in worship is the coming alive of the feelings and emotions and affections of the heart. Where feelings for God are dead, worship is dead.”
Hear me today, our feelings matter to God. Your emotions are not just the caboose on the end of the train. They are not something bad you need to get rid of. Feelings matter to God they’re all over the Bible. Think of Paul’s words in Phil 4:4 “Rejoice in the Lord always. again I will say, Rejoice.” You can’t rejoice without feeling it! Think of David’s words in Ps.37:4 “Delight yourself in the Lord” You can’t delight if you don’t feel it!
And these are direct commands of the Bible and we should take them just as seriously as the command not murder. You are commanded to feel God. And I believe as I said earlier that all people, all of us, are contaminated, corrupt, and wicked deep down. There are only two types of people. There are wicked people and wicked people who are being saved.
We’re a church that highly values the Bible and good theology. But there is a danger there. A danger in thinking that we got it all right! And because we think the right things we are okay. No, we have a heart problem.
God demands righteousness and we don’t have it. Hungering and thirsting are feelings, so they are not something we can do to get righteousness. We are in a predicament. I can’t make myself feel anything. God’s not my slave, he is the only one who can make me feel something for him. But he is not my servant and I am not his master. I can’t say, “God make me feel something” and he must respond. He doesn’t have to obey me. And I can’t do it myself. I can’t say, “self, feel sad.” “self, feel happy.” I can’t make myself feel anything.
So what do we do? My feelings matter to God and He commands me to have them but i can’t make myself have them? So what do we do? Well, God is a unique and infinitely glorious being because He can do things that no one else is able to do. And that is that he can work in people’s hearts. I can’t do anything to make any of you feel anything, but God can. He has the unique ability to work in our hearts and give us affections and emotions. It is one of the greatest things about God. That he has access to the most intimate part of who you are.
But that’s not quite where I want to end this morning. Some other time we will talk more about the satisfaction that comes through the righteousness in Christ. I’ll just say this. I think satisfaction expresses itself in different ways at different times. Sometimes it expresses itself in those moments when we feel sorry about who we are and the things we have done, but we feel the love of God so profoundly when you consider, Christ died, for me. Sometimes it expresses itself when we are just so happy and everything seems right and we give God credit and thanks for it, because we know that it couldn’t be that way if it were not for him. Sometimes I think it expresses itself as a deep assurance that God is in control and everything will be okay, even though everything in your life feels and looks like a mess. And sometimes I think it expresses itself when you know that you are walking in the right way and you are being who God designed you to be.
Conclusion
Here is how I want to conlcude. I can’t make myself feel something. And I can’t make God work in my heart. I want blessing. I want to hunger and thirst. I want the righteousness of Christ. Is there anything that can help? I think there are a lot of things. I like to think of them as pieces of wood that you would throw in a campfire. I can’t make the word burn and God is not required to light it. But I can put the logs in there and pray and ask and in that desire may be born. I’ll just give you a few.
1. Confess your lack of emotion as sin. Acknowledge that your heart is hard and wicked and ask God to change your heart. Receive the righteousness of Jesus Christ. That is what Jesus was getting at. Hunger and thirst for me and my righteousness for when you have that you will be satisfied.
1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Confess some sin to the Lord today when you go before the table.
2. Pray and ask God to give you right affections.
Psalm 63:1 david says “O God, thou are my God, I seek thee, my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”
3. Feed on the word
Jesus says in Matthew 4:4 “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” and Ps.119:103 says “how sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” You want God, to feel him, to know his satisifaction in your life, then feed on his word. eat a lot of it.
4. Get into Jesus’ Church
Hebrews 10:25 says “Let us not forsake the assembling of ourselves together as some are in the habit of doing.” There is much spiritual benefit for our lives by spending time together just hanging out, by singing unto God, by sitting under the teaching of is word, by partaking of his elements. Don’t forsake the benefit of being part of the body. One of the things we don’t want to happen is for you just to become attendies here at The Resolved Church, you are the church.
5. Don’t eat
I believe the very reason God created human beings with the need to eat is so that they would learn the spiritual truth of needing to feed on him. Not eating sometimes is what the Bible calls fasting and should be a part of every Christian’s normal regular life. In Matthew 6:16-18 Jesus gives instructions to the disciples about fasting beginning with “when you fast…” So Jesus expects His followers to fast. And fasting is great because when you don’t eat your stomach hurts, it hurts it makes noise…and you can respond automatically with God I need you, I hunger for you. I want and need you more than food. By not eating food you can petition God to give you a hunger for Him.
That’s just a few things which will help. The great burden of this sermon today is my plea to try and awake a hunger for God in you, so that we would begin to build a gospel city in the city of San Diego as a people who truly desire God and love and cherish his glory as our chief pleasure.
I’ll end with one last quote from John Piper,
“If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great. God did not create you for this. There is an appetite for God. And it can be awakened.”
Let’s pray.