Christ’s Call to Counter-Cultural Living (5)

Scripture Reading: Matthew 5:1-6

Key Verse: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled (Matthew 5:6).

Meditation: The first four beatitudes were spoken to people who were *too weak to respond to the demands of Jesus. They themselves were in great distress for they lacked joy, happiness, power and righteousness. So Jesus affirmed the fact that often God meets the needs of people before the people themselves have met all His conditions because they desperately need help, the working of grace rather than law. Since Jesus pronounced these four different groups as blessed, we, too, must be careful not to put on them conditions, lest we lose the message of grace to those whom Jesus himself did not turn away.
 
The fourth group is the people who are deeply aware that a right relationship with God and man is painfully absent in their lives. People who feel spiritually empty and starved lack completely those virtues that might approve them before God and man. Yet because of their very honesty and transparency, Jesus calls them blessed, assuring that they will “be filled.”

The Bible speaks of several difference kinds of ”righteousness” One is Pharisaic, an external conformity to rules, but Christian righteousness is an inner rightness of heart, mind, and motive, for which Jesus exhorts us to hunger and thirst. Moral righteousness is that quality of character and conduct that pleases God. Paul also speaks of imputed righteousness that profound revelation that Christ Jesus is made us righteousness. It is that distinct impartation of the very life Jesus gives to us so that God sees only the perfection of His Son in us.
 
Thought for the Day: All our human acts of righteousness are as filthy rags unless they spring out of our relationship, with Jesus “who was made sin for us in order that we might become the righteousness of God through Him” (II Corinthians 5:21).

Isaiah 55:1

We all need to be in a place of thirst and hunger for righteousness.  
Then we are prepared to receive that which is from  an all loving and all powerful God.

* We are all too weak in our own power.