Now 'righteousness' has come to be a kind of theological term which
people use without attaching any very distinct meaning to it. And it
would be little improvement to substitute for 'righteousness' the
abstraction of moral conformity to the will of God. Suppose we try to
turn the words of my text into modern English, and instead of saying,
'Blessed are those that hunger and thirst after righteousness,' say,
Blessed are the men and women that long more than for anything else to
be good. Does not that sound a little more near our daily lives than the
well-worn and threadbare word of my text? Righteousness is neither more
nor less than in spirit a will submitted to God, and in conduct the
practice of whatsoever things are noble and lovely and of good report.
The production of such a character, the aiming after the perfection of
spirit and of conduct, is the highest aim that a man can set before him.
There are plenty of other hungers of the soul that are legitimate. There
are many of them that are bracing and ennobling and elevating. It is
impossible not to hunger for the supply of physical necessities. It is
good to long for love, for wisdom. It is better to long most to be good
men and women. For what are we here for? To enjoy? To work? To know?
Yes! But it is not conduct, and it is still less thought, and it is
least of all enjoyment, in any of its forms, which is the purpose of
life, and ought to be our aim here upon earth. We are here to learn to
_be_; and the cultivation and production of characters that lie parallel
with the will of God is the Omega of all our life in the flesh. All
these other things, even the highest of them, the yearning desire
'To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the furthest bounds of human thought,'
ought to be subordinate to this further purpose of being good men and
women. All these are scaffolding; the building is a character conformed
to God's will and assimilated to Christ's likeness.
That commends itself as a statement of man's chief end to all reasonable
and thoughtful men in their deepest and truest moments. And so, whilst
we must let our desires go out on the lower levels, and seek to draw to
ourselves the various gifts that are necessary for the various phases
and sides of our being, here is one that a man's own conscience tells
him should stand clearly supreme and dominant--the hunger and thirst
after righteousness.
Still further, notice how this desire, on which our Lord pronounces His
benediction, comes in a series. I know that all men have latent, and
sometimes partially and fragmentarily operative in their lives and
manifest on the surface, sporadic desires after goodness. The existence
of these draws the line between man and devil. And there is no soul on
earth which has not sometimes felt the longing to be better than it is,
to its own consciousness, to-day. But the yearning which our Lord
blesses comes after, and is the result of, the previous characteristics
which He has described. There must be the poverty of spirit which
recognises our own insufficiency and unworthiness; or, to put it into
simpler words, we must know ourselves to be sinners. There must be the
mourning which follows upon that revelation of ourselves; the penitence
which does not wash away sin, but which makes us capable of receiving
forgiveness. There must be the comfort which comes from pardon received;
and there must be the yielding of ourselves to the Supreme Will, which
is the true root of all meekness, in the face of antagonism from
creatures and of opposition from circumstances. When thus a man's
self-conceit is beaten out of him, and he knows how far he is from the
possession of any real, deep righteousness of his own; and when,
further, his heart has glowed with the consciousness of forgiveness; and
when, further, his will has bowed itself before the Father in heaven,
then there will spring in his heart a hungering and thirsting, deeper
far and far more certain of fruition, than ever can be realised in
another heart, a stranger to such experiences. Brethren, if we are ever
to possess the righteousness which is itself blessed, it must be because
we have the hunger and the thirst which are sharpened and accentuated by
profound discovery of our own evil, lowly penitence before God, and glad
assurance of free and full forgiveness.
Then note, still further, how that which is pronounced blessed is not
the realisation of a desire, but the desire itself. And that is so, not
only because, as I said, all noble aspiration is good, fulfilled or
unfulfilled, and aim is of more importance than achievement, and what a
man strongly wishes is often the revelation of his deepest self, and the
prophecy of what he will be; but Christ puts the _desire_ for a certain
quality here as in line with the _possession_ of a number of other
qualities attained, because He would hint to us that such a
righteousness as shall satisfy the immortal hunger and thirst of our
souls is one to be received in answer to longing, and not to be
manufactured by our own efforts.
It is a gift; and the condition of receiving the gift is to wish it
honestly, earnestly, deeply, continually. The Psalmist had a glimpse of
the same truth when he crowned his description of the man who was fit to
ascend the hill of the Lord, and to stand in His holy place, with, 'he
shall _receive_ the blessing from the Lord, and _righteousness_ from the
God of his salvation.'
Of course, in saying that the first step towards the possession of this
divinely bestowed and divinely blessed righteousness is not effort but
longing, I do not forget that the retention of it, and the working of it
into our characters, and out in our conduct, must be the result of our
own continual diligence. But it is effort based on faith; and it is
mainly, as I believe, the effort to keep open the line of communication
between us and God, the great Giver, which ensures our possession of
this gift of God. Dear friends, the righteousness that avails for us is
not of our making, but of God's giving, through Jesus Christ.
So, before I pass to the other thoughts of my text, may I pause here for
a moment? 'Blessed are they that hunger and thirst'--think of the
picture that that suggests--the ravenous desire of a starving man, the
almost fierce longing of a parched throat. Is that a picture of the
intensity, of the depth, of our desires to be good? Do we professing
Christian men and women long to be delivered from our evils and to be
clothed in righteousness, with an honesty and an earnestness and a
continuity of longing which would make such words as these of my text
anything else, if applied to us, than the bitterest irony? Oh, one looks
out over the Christian Church, and one looks--which is more to the
purpose--into one's own heart, and contrasts the tepid, the lazy, the
occasional, and, I am afraid, the only half-sincere wishes to be better,
with the unmistakable earnestness and reality of our longings to be
rich, or wise, or prosperous, or famous, or happy in our domestic
relationships, and the like. Alas! alas! that the whole current of the
great river of so many professing Christians' desires runs towards earth
and creatures, and the tiniest little trickle is taken off, like a lade
for a mill, from the great stream, and directed towards higher things.
It is hunger and thirst after righteousness that is blessed. You and I
can tell whether our desires deserve such a name as that.