DM 620428

In the book of Matthew, Jesus is preaching a sermon in Matthew 5, if you want to turn there. If you're the kind of person who... Yeah, sorry, you may be seated. If you're the kind of person that likes to memorize Scripture, Matthew 5, 6, and 7 is a wonderful group of passages to memorize it would be a very, very large long-term undertaking for you to memorize the entire book of Matthew and so if you're anything like me and you memorize chunks you don't memorize part of a book, you memorize whole books that's how I memorize a lot of scripture but when it comes to a book like Matthew with 28 chapters an all or nothing approach really won't help you whatsoever.

And so memorizing Matthew 5 through 7 would be a blessing to your soul. It would certainly help you kids in some Bible trivia game one day. I'm certain of that. And I find it to be a passage that reminds me of our Lord standing and speaking to people and the things he told them. but in Matthew 5 6 I just want to look at one verse before we take communion Jesus says blessed are those a little water Jesus says blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied I think in the King James or maybe Elijah has the new King James.

I think it says they shall be filled. So if you're a Texas Receptus Onlyist or whatever, you know, you can say filled. But I want you to try to understand just briefly before we come and actually eat bread and drink wine, I want you to try to get an idea of what Jesus Christ would have been trying to tell us when he says, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

So why do you eat and drink? Most of the time, I mean, I just had a sip of water to wet my mouth. But most of the time, you eat or you drink because you're hungry or you're thirsty. God has actually instilled in us this natural tendency when we are alive to want to hunger and thirst So what the first thing your baby does when they come out and they clean them up What the first thing a mommy does with a baby Anybody it fine Yeah, the first thing you do is you feed the baby.

And do you have to usually tell the baby, it's time to eat? No, they naturally are hungry. There's something built into us that when we need nourishment, we crave, we crave. We either hunger or thirst. Now we can kind of mess that up physically, we'll say, by bringing in malnourishment. You can eat junk food and it won't satisfy your hunger.

It might for a moment make you think you're doing the right thing. But your body is craving nutrition. Your body is craving something it's lacking. And so your body sends a signal that you're hungry or you're thirsty. and then you take action just instinctively. Nobody has to tell you to eat. Well, there may be an exception here, but most of us, if we don't eat for a long enough period of time, you'll find us in the kitchen making something ourselves, even if we're the guy that somebody else makes it usually.

If you don't drink for a long time, nobody has to tell you, hey, make sure you drink something. Usually you will crave a drink so bad you will take it yourself. and usually under normal circumstances we'll crave things that are pretty good for us eventually. Nobody lives on junk food forever. Well, in the same way that you, when you are a living, breathing human being who is, we'll say, healthy, you will have hunger and thirst come naturally.

Jesus is telling people, if you are one of my sheep, if you are a believer, if you've been made alive, transferred from the domain of darkness into my kingdom, if you've been quickened by the Holy Spirit and you're no longer dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, you should hunger and thirst for righteousness. And so I could yell at you and tell you you should hunger and thirst for righteousness, and that's easy to do. And I'll yell more later about other stuff.

But this is more of Jesus saying, look, the same natural way that you just naturally desire to eat and to drink is how the child of God should feel toward righteousness. It should almost be a natural inclination of yours. You know how we say don follow your heart because the heart deceitful and wicked and no one knows it We say that from Jeremiah well once God changed your heart one of the hopes we have is that your heart will actually even though it a little bit corrupted by the flesh still, your heart will actually start to desire the right things.

And you will hunger and thirst for righteousness. And Jesus's promise, he says, if anyone's thirsty, Isaiah says this, and then Jesus quotes him later. He says, if anybody's thirsty, come and drink, right? That's what he says. It's come to the water. He's not talking about real water now.

He's talking about spiritual water. He's talking about himself as the living water. And so if you hunger and thirst for righteousness, the promise is that you'll be satisfied. Because God can actually satisfy that desire. Your desire for sin, your desire for corruption, your desire for all the things that this world has to offer will never satisfy you.

We all have a little bit of that left, a remnant of it, and some of us have more than others, and some of you aren't regenerate, and you've got a lot more than we want to talk about. But those desires will never be satisfied. You will continuously, like eating junk food, you will continuously sin and never find satisfaction in it. It will always leave you wanting.

But if you hunger and thirst for righteousness, meaning you actually desire the Lord Jesus Christ himself, who is righteousness incarnate, you will be satisfied. And you will be satisfied in him and him alone. And so our hope here is that when you come to church and you participate in the worship, that you are hungering for Jesus Christ. And that through the ministry of the sacrament of communion, or the ordinance, if you will, through the ministry of the word being read to you, the word being preached to you, men offering up prayers to God on your behalf, and through the corporate singing that you actually are being fed in a sense, Jesus Christ.

We are showing you Jesus over and over in many different ways so that those of you who are really hungering and thirsting for righteousness will be satisfied. So when people, you know, you read it online, when people leave churches, it's always like, well, I just didn't feel like I was getting fed there. Like, well, I think in some cases, maybe churches aren't feeding people well.

But I think in some cases, people aren't really hungry for what's being fed to them. And so we're going to give you Jesus Christ. And we're going to give you Jesus Christ from His Word. And if that's what you hunger and thirst for, it will satisfy you. And so as you come to communion tonight what I want you to consider is is Jesus Christ being offered to you through the bread and through the cup not not literally but symbolically but in a real true sense he is here present with us as we celebrate his his death and his resurrection and he desires that his people in it to use a food work he desires that we in in a sense, digest Him, that we take Him in.

And as you chew on the bread that you're chewing on, you're meditating on, right? We say, go chew on it when we want someone to think about something, right? When you're chewing on the bread, rather than just thinking about how good the bread tastes, which, thank you to my dear wife, it's wonderful bread. But rather than think about how long it's taken you to chew it, you know, chew on Jesus Christ.

Chew on the fact that you had to receive Christ in order to be forgiven of your sins. And as you drink the cup, and we use, tonight at least, we have a bit of a bitter wine, which I prefer anyway, but think about the bitter death that he tasted on your behalf. The bitter cup he drank so that you don't have to drink the cup of God's wrath. And so that's the meditation I want you to have.

If you want to put this into maybe even a little bit more, I don't know the right word, a more robust practice what I would say is next week commit to fasting on Sunday until you get to communion. So wake up Sunday morning and don't eat anything. You can have your coffee and your water. You know I get a lot of us have to do those things. I'm one of them.

But then if you don't eat anything until what is almost 3.15 or so now, you'll be pretty hungry by now. And I want you to think if you do that the lesson that it would be is do I ever hunger and thirst that much for God? How long can you go without God, without reading His Word, without meditating upon Him, without praying? How long can you go before you're just driven crazy, you need it?

Well, we can't go very long without a piece of bread, and we need it. And we'll fight for it, and we'll quit something we're doing that's fun to go eat. But some of us can go an awfully long time without real meditation upon Christ and His Word. And so I don't mean that to indict you, but I want you to examine yourself a little bit as well. And to maybe commit yourself to your disciplines in the sense of making sure you're feasting upon Christ regularly.

Okay? So I'll come down and we'll finish this part and then we'll sing the song and we'll have communion.