I’m #Blessed When I Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness

I don’t like being hungry. My American diet and fast-food culture has programmed me for convenience and trained me to expect instant results for whatever I’m craving. I remember, years ago, when I worked at a coffee shop, customers grew restless if it took more than two minutes, 120 literal seconds, from the time they ordered until their coffee was handed to them. 

I marveled at their restlessness, their inability to thirst for a latte and immediate desire that it be quenched. 

In my eyes, working as fast as I could to steam milk and pull perfect shots of espresso, they were foolishly over dramatic. And they were. But I need to count myself among them. 

Because I don’t embrace hunger. I don’t embrace thirst. My physical body aches and grows weary when I’m, not even denied, just made to wait for what I crave. My soul? It is even worse. I want instant, quick, and pre-made spirituality. 

And when I don’t get instant holiness? I want to scrap the whole dish and pretend that what I have is fine. 

But Jesus said that when we experience hunger and thirst for righteousness, we are blessed.

We are blessed because we will be satisfied with the righteousness we are longing for. 

But I try to bury down my need and ignore it. What’s worse is that, after suppressing a need for so long, I start to believe I don’t need it. I press down my true desires, for the righteousness that only comes from God, and try to satiate myself with the enticements of sin. 

Like Eve in the Garden of Eden, I question God’s goodness and go after what the enemy says will satisfy me. 

But it eats away deep inside me and leaves me wondering. 

God knew that, in the Garden, when Eve and Adam bit into the fruit that led to the breakdown of the entirety of Creation, that they would always hunger. Never again would they feel the fullness that comes from the presence of God. 

So He came, He blessed us not only by dignifying humanity with the incarnation, but through the finally filling our hunger.  

“So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” – John 6:53-58, ESV

He gave us His very being, His Body and Blood on the cross to satiate our hunger and to make us righteous. 

He said that we would be filled when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, and He himself fills us.

I need to embrace the hunger, the God-given hunger, and allow myself to long for righteousness.

So let us abandon ourselves to hunger for righteousness. 

Let us give in and feel the pangs flood our stomach every time we see the sinful nature in ourselves and the brokenness of the world. Let us hunger, truly hunger, for the righteousness of God that can satisfy our hearts. 

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” – 1 Corinthians 5:21, ESV

He is remaking us into the image of His Son, of His righteousness. Instead of our hungry hearts, He is giving us full, satisfied bodies that are filled with His righteousness. 

Because our God is the God who fills the hearts of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. So may we be a people who hunger and thirst. 

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