SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/28/2020
10:04 AM
My Worship Time Focus: “The Object
of Spiritual Hunger”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 5:6
Message of the
verse: ““Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (ESV).
As we begin this SD I
want to again quote a small paragraph from John MacArthur and then we will move
onto looking at “The Object of Spiritual Hunger for Salvation, and then for
Sanctification.”
“As with the other
beatitudes, the goal of hungering and thirsting for righteousness is
twofold. For the unbeliever the goal is
salvation; for the believer it is sanctification.”
For Salvation
As I look back at the
road that I traveled to get to the point where the Lord saved me I can think of
a number of things that God was doing in my heart from the time that I was a
young boy to the time when I finally received Christ as my Savior. I think that as I look back at those times
that I had a hunger and thirst for righteousness, and what I was seeking was
actually salvation, which is the righteousness that comes when I would turn
from sin and submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ, which actually came after
I was saved. Speaking of the lordship of
Jesus Christ, I do believe that every person who is a true believer will end up
submitting to His lordship, and in my case I first of all accepted Jesus Christ
as my Savior and then later on in my walk with the Lord I knew that He was my
Lord, the One who I would follow.
It was in poverty of
spirit that I saw my sin, and the sin that God used to get my attention was swearing,
something that I knew was sinful and that offended the Lord. One can probably follow the route of the
beatitudes to see coming to the Lord Jesus Christ as becoming one’s Savior as
one must be poor in spirit to see their sin, and then in mourning one will
lament over that sin and turn from it, and then in meekness one submits their
own sinful way and power to God, and now in hunger and thirst one seeks God’s
righteousness in Christ to replace their sin.
We will look at some OT
passages where righteousness is used as a synonym for salvation. Isaiah 51:5 “"My righteousness is near, My salvation has gone
forth, And My arms will judge the peoples; The coastlands will wait for Me, And
for My arm they will wait expectantly.”
Note: When one looks at the book
of Isaiah one must remember that the first 39 chapters are like the OT, and
then the last 27 chapters are more like what is going on in the NT as Isaiah
talks a lot about the Messiah. It has
been said that Isaiah is a miniature Bible. Daniel wrote of the time when “"Those who
have insight will shine brightly like the brightness of the expanse of heaven,
and those who lead the
many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever” (Dan.
12:3).
There must come a time when a person
abandons all hope of saving themselves, abandon all hope in self-righteousness,
and then he begins to hunger for the salvation that brings God’s righteousness
and also the obedience that God requires, then he will be “blessed,” to be made
divinely happy.
As one looks at the people of Israel
back when Christ was on the earth, and continue to look at them from that point
to today the biggest obstacle to receiving the gospel was their
self-righteousness, their confidence in their own purity and holiness, which
they imagined was created by good works.
I have to say that this is the problem with many people and the
religions that they follow today. MacArthur
writes “Because they (the Jews) were God’s chosen race, and as keepers of the
law—or, more often, keepers of men’s interpretations of the law—the felt heaven
was assured.”
Jesus, their Messiah told them,
however that the only way to salvation was by having a hunger and a thirst for
God’s righteousness to replace their own self-righteousness, which in fact was
really unrighteousness.
For Sanctification
Now we move onto looking at the
object of spiritual hunger for believers and this is a part of the
sanctification process of all believers, for the object of hungering and
thirsting is to grow in the righteousness that believers received when they
trusted Christ.
We have written about sanctification
in earlier SD’s and stated that once we become a believer that we are
sanctified, and while on earth growing more like Christ we are being sanctified,
and then once we get to heaven we will be totally sanctified. We are not perfect while on earth but we are
perfect in God’s eyes because of the fact that we are “in Christ,” and God sees
the righteousness of Jesus Christ when He looks at believers here on
earth. MacArthur writes “Children of the
kingdom never stop needing or hungering for more of God’s righteousness and
holiness to be manifest in them through their obedience. Paul prayed for believers in Philippi that
their love might ‘abound still more and more in real knowledge and all
discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to
be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ’ (Phil. 1:9-10).
This may seem strange to some who
read this but I have said that I listen to the sermons that John MacArthur
preaches and on this particular sermon I remember hearing about different verbs
in the Greek language, and the strange thing is that I had a vivid dream about
these verbs. I think that this is
important enough that I want to quote four paragraphs here from John MacArthur’s
commentary that talk about Greek verbs.
I hope that not many of you will dream about this, but if you do that’s ok
too.
“In the Greek language, verbs such
as hunger and thirst normally have objects that are in the partitive genitive,
a case that indicates incompleteness, or partialness. A literal English rendering would be: ‘I hunger for of food’ or ‘I thirst for of
water.’ The idea is that a person only
hungers for some food and some water, not far all the food and
water in the world.
“But Jesus does not here use the
partitive genitive but the accusative, and ‘righteousness’ is therefore the
unqualified and unlimited object of ‘hunger and thirst.’ The Lord identifies those who desire all the
righteousness there is (cf. Matt. 5:48; 1 Peter 1:15-16).
“Jesus also uses the definite
article 9ten), indicating that He is not speaking of just any righteousness,
but the righteousness, the only true
righteousness—that which comes from God and, in fact, is God’s very own
righteousness which He has in Himself.
“It becomes obvious, then, that we
cannot possibly have our longing for godliness satisfied in this life, so we
are left to continually hunger and thirst until the day we are clothed entirely
in Christ’s righteousness.”
Spiritual
meaning for my life today: I have known for a very long
time that I am clothed in the righteousness of my Lord, and yet today as I
looked at this truth again it had new meaning for me to think that the
righteousness that I posses is just like God’s righteousness.
My Steps of Faith for Today:
Continue to realize that I am poor in
spirit and therefore I desire the Lord to teach me contentment, humility, and
also to continue to give me joy as I study His wonderful Word each day.
4/28/2020 11:04 AM
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