Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2103
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, September 8, 1889
“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” Matthew 5:6.
BECAUSE man had perfect righteousness before the Fall, he enjoyed perfect blessedness. If you and I shall, by Divine Grace, attain to blessedness hereafter, it will be because God has restored us to righteousness. As it was in the first Paradise, so must it be in the second—righteousness is essential to the blessedness of man. We cannot be truly happy and live in sin. Holiness is the natural element of blessedness. And it can no more live out of that element than a fish could live in the fire.
The happiness of man must come through his righteousness—his being right with God, with man, with himself— indeed, his being right all round. Since, then, the first blessedness of our unfallen state is gone and the blessedness of perfection hereafter is not yet come, how can we be blessed in the interval which lies between? The answer is, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.” Though they have not yet attained the righteousness they desire, yet even the longingfor it makes them a blessed people.
The massive blessedness of the past, and the priceless blessedness of the eternal future, are joined together by a band of present blessedness. The band is not so massive as those two things which it unites. But it is of the same metal, has been fashioned by the same hand and is as indestructible as the treasures which it binds together.
Of this hunger and thirst I am going to speak this morning. I feel so unfit for the effort that I must correct myself and say that I hunger and thirst to preach to you but, that is all the power I have. Oh, that I, too, may be filled for your sakes! May the Spirit of the Lord fulfill my intense desire to minister to you from this beatitude of our Lord Jesus, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.”
First, then, in our text we have mention of singular appetites—“hunger and thirst”—not for bread and water but, “after righteousness.” Secondly, we have a remarkable declaration about these hungering people—Jesus says that they are “blessed,” or happy. And beyond a doubt His judgment is true. Thirdly, in our text is mentioned a special satisfaction meeting their necessity and in its foresight making them blessed—our Savior says, “they shall be filled.”
I. To begin, then, we shall speak of SINGULAR APPETITES. In this case, one insatiable desire takes different forms. They hunger and they thirst—the two most urgent needs of the body are used to set forth the cravings of the soul for righteousness. Hunger and thirst are different but they are both the language of keen desire. He that has ever felt either of these two knows how sharp are the pangs they bring. And if the two are combined in one craving, they make up a restless, terrible, unconquerable passion.
Who shall resist a man hungering and thirsting? His whole being fights to satisfy his awful needs. Blessed are they that have a longing for righteousness, which no one word can fully describe and no one craving can set forth. Hunger must be joined with thirst, to set forth the strength and eagerness of the desire after righteousness.
This desire is like hunger and thirst in constancy. Not that it is always equally raging, for the hungry man is not always equally in pain. But, still, he can never quite forget the gnawing within, the burning at the heart. Blessed is the man who is always desiring righteousness with an insatiable longing that nothing can turn aside. Hunger and thirst are irrepressible. Until you feed the man, his wants will continue to devour him. You may give a hungry man the best music that was ever drawn from strings, or breathed from pipes—but his cravings are not soothed—you do but mock him.
You may set before him the fairest prospect. But unless in that prospect there stands conspicuous a loaf of bread and a cup of water, he has no heart for flood or field, mountain or forest. They are blessed, says Christ, who, with regard to righteousness, are always seeking it and cannot be satisfied until they find it. The desire toward righteousness, which a
man must have in order to be blessed, is not a faint one, in which he feebly says, “I wish I could be righteous.” Neither is it a passing outburst of good desires. But it is a longing which, like hunger and thirst, abides with a man and masters him.
He carries it to his work, carries it to his house, carries it to his bed, carries it wherever he, himself, goes, for it rules him with its imperative demands. As the horse-leech cries, “Give, give,” so does the heart cry after purity, integrity and holiness when once it has learned to hunger and thirst after righteousness.