What Do You Crave?

I want to talk about one aspect of that this morning. If you'll turn with me over to Matthew 5. I'm going to talk about one of the Beatitudes here. A few weeks ago, we talked about, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Today, let's look at verse 6 here in Matthew 5. It says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. I know we've all hungered and thirsted at times in our lives.

Probably not the way almost every generation that has ever lived has hungered and thirsted in their times. We fast sometimes for one, two, or three days. We think we're really, really, really hungry, but we always know there's a meal on the other side of it. Most of humanity has had to endure times where they didn't know where their next meal was coming from, or they had to work very hard for it, and they didn't know how long their fast would be. You would read through the Bible, and you see people who went for weeks, you know, David's army, who would go for days without eating.

I try to imagine what it would be like to not have eaten for seven days and then be expected to be marching and everything, but people back then knew what hunger was. We know what hunger is, a sensation of it. But God uses that physical sensation to draw this beatitude.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. So I want to look at that verse and do it a little bit, maybe, differently than we normally do today. You know, one of the ways that we can look at the Bible and understand the Bible is let the Bible interpret itself. So I want to look at the words, the key words here in verse 6, and go through some of those things this morning.

And maybe this verse, maybe this verse will come to life a little bit more and help us to understand what God is looking for us to do. And he says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Let's look first at this word, righteousness.

I think all of us would be able to answer the question, what is righteousness? And we would probably all be right. But let's look at what the Gospels say. Because this word that's translated, righteousness, it comes from Strongs, number 1393. I'm not even going to try to pronounce the word. It's one of those that has a lot of consonants and a lot of vowels in it.

And I just couldn't memorize it. But anyway, it's 1393. It's used 92 times in the Bible, but only seven times. It's only seven times in Matthew and only ten times in the Gospels. So Jesus Christ uses it several times here in Matthew, the seven times that are here. Let's go back and look at those and get a picture of what he was talking about when he said, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Let's turn back to Matthew 3.

And we'll see the first time that this Strongs, number 1393 in the Greek is used in the New Testament. Let's pick it up in verse 11. This is where Jesus Christ is coming and he is going to be baptized. The only man who lived who didn't need to be baptized, but he set us an example that baptism is something that we need to do in order to be in his kingdom. Let's pick it up in verse 11.

Matthew 3.11. I indeed baptize you with water. This is John speaking, or they're quoting John the Baptist. I indeed baptize you with water under repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand and he will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor and gather his weight into the barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. John reckoned with who he was and John tried to prevent him, saying, I need to be baptized by you and you're coming to me? We would have the same reaction, wouldn't we? I'm going to do that to you, Jesus Christ. I need to be baptized by you instead of you coming to me. But Jesus answered and said to him, Permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.

Then he allowed him. So Christ said, John, we need to do this. Part of righteousness is being baptized. Part of righteousness is doing the right thing the way that God pronounced it to be. And when John heard that, he allowed Christ to do it. And we learned something about John when we read that.

When he understood that that was part of the plan, that was part of what needed to happen, he was willing to do it. His initial reaction was, not me. I'm not worthy to do that. You should be baptizing me, Christ. But when Christ said righteousness in the Greek word, he understood that's what God's will is. And so Jesus Christ knew that was God's will too, and he needed to be baptized as an example to us. Part of righteousness is doing and yielding to what God wants us to do, even though it may be the thing that just seems different to us. But when it's in the Bible, when God shows that it's righteousness, we just do it.

We yield to him. We let him dictate what it is, and we don't let our own preferences get in the way, just as John didn't allow his natural reaction to get in the way there either. It was just doing what God wanted to do, or what God wanted him to do. Let's go back to the seventh time that righteousness is mentioned in Matthew, and that's back in Matthew 21. And John the Baptist is involved in this context as well. This is later on after John is in prison, and he's beheaded.

And Christ shows the example of him and paints him as a great prophet. This isn't the quote where he says that, John, there's no greater prophet born of women than men. That's back in Matthew 11. But in Matthew 21, he says this in verse 32, John came to you in the way of righteousness. He came to you in the way of righteousness, and you didn't believe him. The tax collectors and harlots believed him. And when you saw it, you didn't afterward relent and believe him. He came to you in the way of righteousness.

He was telling you he was preaching what God had asked him to repent or commanded him to preach, not repent. It was the gospel of repentance and preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God. He came in that way, and the religious elite of that day, they didn't want to hear it. It was different than what they wanted to believe. But the tax collectors and the harlots and those who were humble, who were listening, they came and they listened to it, and they recognized it as the Word of God, and they were willing to follow. But even the Pharisees, later when they saw him and maybe even recognized him as a great prophet, they didn't come to obey what God said.

Not just a matter of keeping the commandments, that's one thing certainly that's implied in it, but recognizing the way of righteousness and what is being said to you, because John came in that way. He wasn't just about preaching, but he was about his whole lifestyle, what he did and how he sacrificed himself for what God wanted him to do.

So righteousness. Righteousness is something we yield to, even when it's something that we may initially think, no. And it's a whole lifestyle that John came to them in. For us, it's a lifestyle as well. And then Christ talks about it more here in the Sermon on the Mount. The rest of the times that he uses the term righteousness is in this first message that we have recorded that he gave to the people in that day. We read Matthew 5-6, where he says, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. But down in Matthew 5-10, he brings it up again.

He says, Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. So on one hand he's saying, blessed are you, blessed are you, happy are you, fulfilled are you, when you hunger and thirst for righteousness. But what you're hungering and thirsting for is going to bring persecution on you.

Blessed are you, or blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It isn't that a paradox. John was beheaded for righteousness' sake. Jesus Christ suffered. He lost his life for righteousness' sake. And he says to us, who would pursue righteousness, who would hunger and thirst for righteousness, it's going to be a way of persecution.

If they hated me, he says, they're going to hate you. The world is the antithesis of what they want. They don't want to hear what God has to say. They don't want the way of light. They want the way of darkness. And so he says, blessed are you if you hunger and thirst for this. But realize that what you're asking for, what you're hungering and thirsting for, is going to bring some trying times into your life.

And as we look at the world around us, and none of us, I don't believe any of us, have really suffered persecution the way that, in any way, in any real way, that we could talk about, that yet lies ahead of us. When we look at a world around us, and one of the things that they talk about all the time is tolerance, right? We should be tolerant of this. We should accept this lifestyle. We should accept that. I think what we'll learn is, years ago I gave a sermon on tolerance, and the only thing that tolerant don't tolerate is God's way. The only thing they don't tolerate are people who abide by the laws of God. And as we look at the world around us, you can kind of see the writing on the wall, that people who abide by God's laws and follow His principles and let those dictate what their preferences are, what they do with their life, they are going to be the people who are called enemies.

People who hate, people who do all these things. So, you know, we can see that time in the writing on the wall when what Christ said here, blessed are those who pursue righteousness, will be persecuted for that. Just as He was, just as John was, just as many of the prophets in the Old Testament were persecuted for that.

But in spite of that, He says hunger and thirst, hunger and thirst for that, because this, theirs, is the kingdom of heaven. Here in the same chapter down another few verses in Matthew 5, He uses the word righteousness twice, 13, 9, and it's strong, 13, 93. Matthew 5, verse 20. He said, I say to you that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.

And He gives us a little bit more insight into what righteousness is. What He is looking for us to do is more, is different than what the Pharisees, the religious elite of that day, were doing. Just like today, He's looking to us, not to be just like the world around us, but to leave some of those principles behind. Now, the world around us, they would feel good about themselves if they're following God, and they just spend an hour or two on their Sabbath day, or on their worship day, just going to church and then going doing whatever they want.

But that's not what God says about us. He says you keep the whole Sabbath day, the whole 24-hour period holy. You follow Him on that day. Christ expanded on the Ten Commandments. It's not just enough to keep Him physically, but there's also the mental part, the spiritual part of it. It's not enough just to not kill your neighbor. You don't even hate your neighbor. You love each other. You pay attention to each other.

So, He says your righteousness has to be more than the Pharisees. They were running around saying, oh, we're keeping the law of God. We keep the Sabbath day. We keep the holy days. We keep all these commandments. Of course, they had all these other little burdens that they paid more attention to for them to find what keeping the commandments were.

But He said, you can't be like that. You're not that way. Your righteousness needs to exceed that. It needs to become who you are to keep those commandments. It needs to be something you just don't look at a wall and say, I can only walk XX feet on the Sabbath day. And as long as I've walked a foot under that, I've kept it holy. No, no, no, no, no. It's more of an attitude of what you do. It's not a matter of just not killing someone. It's not just a matter of not committing the physical act of adultery.

It's what you do and what's in your mind. It has to become you. It has to define you. When God calls you and you pursue righteousness, it becomes who you are. And you operate and you make decisions. And your behavior is dictated by that. And more and more closely to the Bible, more and more closely to Jesus Christ as he was as the years go by and as were led by him.

So he says, you know, there's a part of righteousness that the Pharisees said, but that's not who you, his people, need to be. We need to be much more than that. And then in Matthew 6, Matthew 6 and verse 33, the seventh time here that is mentioned in this Gospel. And as Matthew wrote, he knew exactly what he was writing. He knew exactly the words he was using here as God inspired him to do that.

Matthew 6, 33, of course, Matthew, the verses preceding that God is talking about, you know, don't put our priorities and our number one attention on what we're going to wear, what we're going to eat, you know, those type things. God is more than capable of providing what we need, and he knows what we need, he says, even before we ask for it.

But in Matthew 6, 33, he concludes the section and says, well, it's verse 32. After all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. He knows that we need clothes. He knows that we need food. He knows that we need the physical things of life.

He created us in that way. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Hi, you're going to need shelter. Everyone needs that. Now we work for shelter, but it shouldn't be the absolute number one priority in our life. If there's a choice between righteousness and shelter, and a good example of that would be working, violating the Sabbath, because we say, we've got to have shelter, we've got to have this, or we've got to have food, or we've got to have clothing.

God would say, follow him first. Seek first his kingdom and righteousness, and he'll add all these things to you.

And that takes some faith, doesn't it? It takes some faith sometimes to do that. To put God first and say, you know what? I've got this tremendous need, and it can be filled, and I can use my ideas. And maybe God will understand this one time that I do that. He says, no.

Yes, it's a priority in our lives. Yes, we work. Yes, we make sure that we have the things our families need and we need, but not at the expense of putting it below seeking God and his righteousness.

And yielding to him first, and doing what he would say first. And that requires a large amount of faith.

So all those things are part of righteousness, and faith is part of righteousness as well. Let's go back and just look at a couple of things in the Old Testament, where righteousness is mentioned. The companion Hebrew word to Strongs 1393. And it has to do with Abraham.

Abraham, even in Galatians, is pointed as the father of faith and his righteousness. Let's look back to Genesis 15.

Genesis 15, verse 6.

So often, we may think of the Old Testament as just being physical adherence to the commandments. And that's all that righteousness is.

But Abraham was much more than that. Abraham obeyed God's commandments. But Abraham, for him, it was his life. And God called him righteous. Genesis 15, verse 6. As God is giving him the promises that he's going to have a son, that his descendants would be as many as the stars of heaven and the sands of the sea. And Abraham still didn't have a son at the time here in chapter 15, verse 6. So he believed God. It says, He believed in the eternal, and God accounted it to him for righteousness. He believed God. When God said, you will have a son, Abraham, what I'm telling you, even though your wife's body is past the time that she would naturally bear children, you will have a son.

And you remember Abraham did the thing, the physical thing, and thought, oh, maybe this is what God means. I'll take Hagar as my concubine here, if that's the appropriate word, and have a son by her. Maybe that's what God means. He learned that isn't what God means. God meant you have faith in me. I said it will happen. I will make sure it is provided. And Abraham had that faith. He believed God that it would happen. He made a mistake along the way, but he believed.

Christ said in Matthew 6.33, seek first the kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. Abraham believed, and it was counted to him for righteousness. A few chapters over in chapter 18. God is again saying that Abraham is going to become a great nation here, and he decides he's going to let Abraham know what's going to go on with Sodom and Gomorrah before he destroys it. In verse 19, he says this, God is saying, I'm going to give him what I told him I'd give him. Abraham believed, and part of that belief, as we often talk about, included doing the things that God wanted him to do. Living the life that God wanted him to live. Not picking and choosing what he wanted to do. Not going through the Scriptures of what God told him to say, okay, I'll do that, but not this. God's okay if I keep all this one, but maybe not this other one. Abraham did it all, and Abraham believed God. And in his day and age, he was willing to leave family behind. He was willing to move wherever God asked him to do. He was the only one on the face of the earth.

He didn't even have the blessing that you and I have of seeing each other each Saturday. It was him and God. And he did that in spite of all the world around him and probably his family even saying, what are you doing, Abraham?

But he did it. And he was living, I mean, this cabin is beautiful and rustic, what Abraham lived in just tense. All his life. All his life.

So maybe we have a little bit of picture of righteousness, when Jesus Christ says hunger and thirst after righteousness. It's our whole life. It needs to define righteousness.

It's how we become. It's the choices that we make. It's the way we think. It's the way we train our minds to think. As we come out of darkness and into light. As we come out of the way we used to do things in our own mindsets.

And we see how Jesus Christ was as we look at his example. As we see the words in the Bible and we catch ourselves and think, no, that's not at all what God would have me to do. That's not at all how he would have me to react.

And then training ourselves over time and catching ourselves, no, I can't be that way anymore. If I'm going to seek righteousness, I have to deny self. I have to deny the things that I want.

I have to deny my natural reactions to things, my natural outbursts, if you will. Control this, control that. And pattern myself after Jesus Christ. Pattern myself after the apostles. Pattern myself after the words of the Bible.

And we can all do it. It just takes attention. It just takes being conscious of it. It just takes having our priorities in our minds all the time. Whether it work, whether it were play, whether it was with the neighbors, whether we're caught in traffic or wherever we are.

Always remembering that righteousness, hungering and thirsting after righteousness in his kingdom, is what God wants us to do.

So with that in mind on righteousness, that is the whole life that God is looking at. How we are all the time and as we grow into that over time. He says hunger and thirst. Hunger and thirst after that.

We talked about hunger, that we don't know much about hunger in the day and age we live by. The longest I've ever fasted is three days.

And I was more thirsty at the end of three days than I was hungry at the end of three days, surprisingly.

But I knew, but I also felt very weak and I knew I needed to eat something and get back to what I needed to do.

But I knew there was food there and I knew that I was doing it was voluntary and it wasn't something I was just thrown into because I lived in an area that had no resources at all.

Like so many, as I say, I think probably every generation of man, maybe until the time we're at, has known hunger sometime in their lives. Real hunger.

Unlike what we know. So when we hear of hunger, we think, oh, you know what? I haven't eaten anything since breakfast. I've got these, my stomach's growling, I'm a little hungry.

I think what God is talking about when you look at the Greek word, again, another one that I didn't write down, but it's Strongs 39, 83.

It's an intense hunger. It's an intense hunger. Not a starvation, because that's another word. Not a starvation hunger, as it mentions in Revelation 6 when so many will die from hunger and die from starvation.

But it's a real hunger, a real intense desire and an intense desire for food and intense experience in your life.

Well, if we look at the Bible for hunger and see what God may be talking about in that, as we look at hunger and thirsting after righteousness, let's look at a few examples again.

We're here in Genesis. Let's go forward just a few chapters.

And as I mentioned, that there are some examples of hunger and how people have reacted to their hunger. This is probably one that popped into your mind among another couple of them. You remember well the story of Esau and Jacob, right? And Esau was out hunting for a few days, and when he came back, what was he?

He was so hungry. He was so hungry. He could hardly contain the fact that he was so hungry.

So let's look at Genesis 25, verse 27.

A little background here, Esau and Jacob. The boys grew, it says.

Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, but Jacob was a mild man, dwelling in tents.

And Isaac loved Esau because he ate of his game, but Rebecca loved Jacob.

Now, verse 29, Jacob cooked a stew, and Esau came in the field, and he was weary.

He was even physically weak. He was hungry, and he was feeling weak because he hadn't had food in so long.

Now, maybe you can imagine that. If you've been out working all day long, and you come in, and you feel a little bit weary just because you haven't had anything for a while.

Well, this is more than just a day for him. So he sees Jacob. And while that stew smells really good, Esau said to Jacob, Feed me with that same red stew, for I am weary. And that's why his name was called Edom.

But Jacob always had something going on in the back of his mind. He saw an opportunity.

Here is Esau. They were twins, but Esau was born first, and Esau had something very valuable. He had the birthright.

And the birthright in those days entitled the firstborn to a lot. It was something valuable, something really valuable that you shouldn't ever take lightly.

Jacob wanted that. Jacob wished he had been the one who was born first, so he had that. And here he sees Esau in a vulnerable state.

I'm so hungry. I'm so tired. Just give me that stew. Jacob says, Tell you what, I'll give you a bowl of this stew for your birthright. Now Esau says he took it for granted. He didn't really consider that birthright so important. Here he was, a young guy. He probably thought, you know what, this is years off.

Isaac is healthy. I'm not going to have anything for a while. All I want is food. All I want is food. That's my number one priority.

And it trumps everything else in life. Right now, I will give anything away for that food. And he did. He gave away the most valuable thing in his life because he had this intense desire for food.

How intense was that hunger? And how intense might our hunger be? What would we give up the kingdom of God for? What would we give up righteousness for?

Is there something so intense in our life? So desire that we would give up the most important thing in our lives like Esau did. He gave it up for a bowl of stew. He counted it that unimportant to him.

Hunger can be an intense desire. No one will deny that. God created us with these things. Maybe it's not just hunger. Maybe it's other things that we intensely desire.

Intensely desire. And we're willing to give it up. Give up righteousness. Give up what God's calling is. Disappoint God's sin against him because we have that desire so strongly.

Well, that's not really keeping with Matthew 6.33, is it? Where Christ said, seek first the kingdom of God. Seek that first. These other things are important in life, but nothing is more important than his kingdom and righteousness.

Well, that intense desire can be there in hunger. And when it hits in our gut, it can be a driving force. God says, don't ever let it become the major force. Esau made a big mistake. Esau made a big mistake. He came to regret it later. Never repented of it later, but he did come to regret it later, we're told in Hebrews.

You probably also thought of Israel. Israel that came out of Egypt. Remember how God brought them out of Egypt through ten plagues? He brought them with his own might out of Egypt.

And they saw him, single-handedly, deliver them from a life of slavery. And they saw him open the Red Sea and deliver them from the Egyptian armies.

And then when they got across the Red Sea, they were a little thirsty. They were a little thirsty and they got a little hungry. And those physical sensations were there in their minds. And it's like they forgot everything else.

They started complaining. They started going against God. What did you bring us out of here for, Moses? Let us go back to Egypt. What did you bring us out of Egypt for? We'd rather be back there in slavery than we would be in this desert where there's nothing.

Nothing to eat, nothing to drink. They looked for miles in that desert. There's nothing. There's no arid land. There's plenty of arid land. There's no cultivatable land. There's no water. There's nothing in a million or two million people.

Sitting out there in the desert. And they're hungry. And they forgot. They forgot God's promises. Let's go back and look at Exodus 16.

That physical desire, that physical desire made them forget what God had done for them, made them forget what He could do. Certainly, if He could open the Red Sea, He could provide water and He could provide food, even though it looked like that was an impossibility in the land they were in.

Exodus 16, the chapter before, it talks about Him bringing forth water, God bringing forth water from Iraq. But here in Exodus 16, verse 1, it talks about the food. And we can see kind of there. And we can identify with this. If we were back in Israel at that time, we might have been part of the same group that was complaining and saying, give us something to eat, give us something to eat. Exodus 16, verse 1, they journeyed from Elam, and all the congregation of the children of Israel came to the wilderness of sin, which is between Elam and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month, after they departed from the land of Egypt. Then the whole congregation of the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. And the children of Israel said to them, Oh, that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and when we ate bread to the full. For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. You can just hear it. You may have heard some of that. Go for a long road trip and you have small kids in the car. They probably think they're dying if they have to go several hours without eating. And God said to Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you, and the people will go out and gather a certain quota every day that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not. God knew they were going to be hungry. He knew he was going to provide. And even though they had lost faith in him, and even though they complained and they weren't looking past their own hunger and their own physical desires, God was ready.

And he was going to test them, and perhaps even that hunger was a test, something that they should learn. Boy, God can provide what we need. When Jesus Christ said something they hadn't heard at that time, but when Jesus Christ said, Seek first the kingdom. Seek first God's righteousness. And he'll add all these things to you. Israel didn't pay attention to that. Israel just caved in to the physical desires.

They didn't think past it, and they didn't, of course, have God's Holy Spirit, but they just complained, and they turned against God.

Maybe their hunger and thirst should have been for God. Maybe that desire, that intense desire for physical things, should have been turned and trained into a loyalty to God.

Seeking first and hunger and thirsting after His righteousness, superior to any other physical desire that we might have.

There is an example of such a person in the Old Testament as well. Let's go back to 1 Kings.

Another well-known example where hunger, and this is hunger bordering on starvation, comes upon the nation at that time.

Elijah is the prophet at that time. In 1 Kings 17, God tells him, in the midst of a famine and a dearth of food in Israel, you go to this widow in Zarephath and dwell with her there. Let's pick it up in 1 Kings 17 and verse 10.

So Elijah arose and went to Zarephath, and when he came to the gate, indeed a widow was there gathering sticks, and he called to her and said, Please bring me a little water and a cup that I may drink. And if she was going to get it, he called her and said, Please, bring me a morsel of bread in your hand. And she said, As the eternal your God lives, I don't have bread. Only a handful of flour in a bin and a little oil in a jar. And say, I'm gathering a couple of sticks that I may go in, prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die. Who are you? She might have said in the modern vernacular, if she had an attitude. Who are you to ask? This is all we have left, and you're asking me to give it to you? Probably a lot of us would feel justified in saying, You know what? I've got to look after my son first.

I've got to look after myself first. She could have said, No, no, this is intense. This is intense. I will look at myself first. Elijah replied to her and said, Don't fear, go into as you have said, but make me a small cake from it first and bring it to me. And afterward, make some for yourself and your son. You do this first. Put me first. And not yourself. Put me first. And then make yourself some for yourself and your son. For thus says the Lord God of Israel, The bin of flour shall not be used up, nor shall the jar of oil run dry, until today the Lord sends rain on the earth. And she did it. She went away and did according to the word of Elijah, and she and he and her household ate for many days.

She was living Matthew 6.33 before she ever read those words. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and you'll be filled. And she was filled. She was satisfied. She received all those things that they ate for many days.

She put God first. She put God first. And it was accounted to her for righteousness. Christ did the same thing. When He was on earth, I would be very surprised if any of us could say, We can imagine fasting for 40 days and 40 nights. But He fasted for 40 days and 40 nights.

You don't think He was hungry and weak after 40 days and 40 nights? You don't think everything in His body was saying, I just want bread. I just want anything. I just want something to eat. He was physical just like you and I were, in a lot better shape. But still after 40 days and 40 nights, what He was feeling had to be quite intense. And along comes Satan in the great temptation. And He says, you know what? You're the Son of God.

Turn those stones into bread and eat. You don't think that was a temptation? If you knew you could do that and you hadn't eaten for all that time and you had the power and knew that you could say to those stones, turn to bread. Oh, there'd be an intense desire to eat. But what did Christ do? Did He yield to that desire? No. He yields to the righteousness that God would have Him do. He put God first and said, no. It's by every word of the mouth of God that I live by, not just by bread alone. He lived Matthew 6.33 before He ever said those words. Seek first God, His kingdom, and the righteousness. And all those things will be added to you.

He said, Matthew 5, hunger and thirst. Hunger and thirst after righteousness. If we go back to John, John 6, God often used the physical sensations that we have, the physical and the life to teach us so much about the spiritual.

And He tried to do that here in John 6. He had spoken the night before to a group of people. They had listened to Him. And you remember that when He was done, the disciples wanted to send away the crowd because they were hungry. And Christ said, no, don't send them away. Let's just feed them. Let's just feed them here. Let's not make them go down and do that themselves. And of course, there was the five loaves and two fishes or vice versa, whatever it was.

And they fed all the people. And the people saw what Christ had done. He satisfied a physical need. And they knew what had happened there that night was a miracle. So they followed Him. They went home that night. Jesus Christ left. But the next day they wanted to find Him again. Certainly, if that happened, you know, if that happens, you would realize, this is a man.

This is a man I want to follow. This is the man who did something good by us. Let's pick it up in verse 11 here in John 6. Now, I just talked about that. That's where He's actually blessing the bread and they go out and feed the people. Let's drop down to verse 26. People have come back. They're looking for Jesus the next day. They're looking for Him. And in verse 25, they said, Rabbi, when did you come here? And Christ answered them in verse 26 and said, most assuredly, I say to you, you seek Me.

Not because you saw the signs, but because you ate to the loaves and were filled. I did something physical for you. You didn't see the signs. You're looking for something physical. You looked at that and that's what you came back and saw Me for. And He knew that. He knew what He was doing. He knew the lesson He was going to try to teach them. And He says, don't labor for the food which perishes before the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you because God the Father has set His seal on Him.

When you're looking for things, look for that. Yes, the physical is important. Yes, I provided that. But really, Christ said, what I'm here for is to give you the food that will last you for eternity. And they said to Him, well, what shall we do that we may work the works of God? And Christ answered and said, this is the work of God, that you believe in Him who He sent, that you believe in Him. And remember, when we believe and we believe deeply, it creates a change in the way we think, the way we act, the way we behave. Our whole pattern of life is affected when we truly believe something or where something affects us, as we discussed not too long ago.

Therefore, they said to Him, what sign will you perform, then, that we may see it and believe you? What work will you do? Our fathers ate the manna in the desert, as it's written. He gave them bread from heaven to eat. So what are you going to do? How are you going to feed us, the same way that God fed the Israelites? Jesus said to them, most assuredly I say to you, Moses didn't give you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.

For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Well, this is appealing. This is the bread. That sounds better than manna. That sounds like something we should be paying attention to. And they said to Him, Lord, give us this bread always. And Christ said to them, I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall never hunger, and he believes in me shall never thirst. Well, He went on and said some other things to them that they just didn't understand. Let's drop down to verse 48. He goes to us and He says, I am the bread of life.

Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they're dead. They ate the physical. The physical led to death. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. I'm the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever, and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.

This is the bread you should be seeking. Physically you need the bread, spiritually if you want eternal life. Spiritually if you want to have what God has promised, then eat this bread. Make it the bread you truly seek for above the other bread. God will add all that to you as well.

But seek this bread first. Make sure it's the number one overriding priority with all these other priorities in life that go around it. But this has to be the overwhelming or the overriding priority. Eat this bread, hunger and thirst after this bread. It's what leads to eternal life. All those other things that we need in this life, God will give. Maybe not always, immediately, when we would want it. But as we wait and as He provides, we learn patience, we learn faith, we learn to trust in Him. So He's saying, shouldn't that be what we hunger and thirst for?

Yes, we hunger and thirst physically for bread and water, but shouldn't we be really hungering and thirsting for the true bread, for the true water? Shouldn't that be the thing that we would never, or as we work toward it, never try to go against or never put the physical above what God is saying? So that intense desire that we all have, that we would all naturally do, we would choose the bread, I'm so hungry, I have to have that.

I need the water, I will give anything for it. We always have to remember we wouldn't sacrifice what God has given us for anything physical, but we would sacrifice the physical for the righteousness in His Kingdom. You know, as you look at Strong's 3983 or 3893, it talks about a hunger that is intense but not too starvation.

It says another way that this word is used, figuratively, is to crave. To crave. Now, craving is a word that you and I can all relate to, right? We all have cravings. There's commercials, right? I don't remember who it was, but there's some commercial that's out there that says, what you crave. And I look at that and I think, yeah, yeah, you can crave that. I imagine some people look at that commercial and they hop in the car and they go get some of whatever they're selling. But we all have cravings, right? There's things that we really want. Maybe we crave after potato chips. You've got to have something salty, you know, to kind of offset what we're doing. Maybe it's ice cream or something sweet that we crave, and we are sitting there and all of a sudden this craving comes on us. We just got to have these. We just got to have this, whatever it is. And, you know, maybe we hop in the car to go get it because there's nothing in the house.

But we all crave. No, Israel craves meat. Remember back in Numbers? It says that, I mean, here they had the man and whatever, but they were craving meat. Okay, we've got manna, we've got water, but man, we want some meat. It actually uses the word crave back there in Numbers 11, I think it is. They craved meat. They had to have it. So they complained. And you know what? They craved and God gave them so much meat, they got absolutely sick over it.

We all crave. We can understand that word. Maybe a question we can ask ourselves is, do we crave the kingdom of God and His righteousness? Is that what we crave? Is that what we, when we're sitting back and we maybe feel a little apart from God? We feel a little distant from Him. Maybe it's been a day or two since we've opened the Bible.

And we all of a sudden find ourselves craving. I crave God. I crave the relationship with Him. I crave reading the Bible. I crave kneeling down and praying to Him. I crave righteousness. As we look at our lives and know what God wants us to become, a whole life that's defined as righteousness. Not just physical adherence to commandments, but the whole nine yards that He calls us to. Do we crave that? When we read, David says, search me, O God, and know what's in my heart. You know, David was craving for that. David was craving, correct me, show me what weakness is in there. He was craving purity, something we should all be learning to crave. Craving that. Show me. That's what I want to know. That's what I want to become. That's what I need to see to get my life the way you want it to be. That I can yield my own desires and yield my own will and my own ideas to you. Do we crave that? I ask myself, do I crave that?

I know what I crave on a physical level. And I've learned over the last few months, you can train your cravings. What I crave today is different than what I would have craved four, five, six months ago.

And we can train our spiritual cravings as well.

If our cravings are for something that is apart from the Bible, we can train ourselves and catch ourselves and say, no, that's not me anymore. I can't have that unhealthy craving anymore. I need to do this and fill that craving with something other. And it may not be easy. Well, it's not easy. And it may not take the first time, but after a while, after a while, you can train your cravings spiritually and physically.

But you've got to do it. You've got to make a choice to do it.

You've got to make it happen. God will give you the strength. God will lead. And His Holy Spirit will be there to give us the power. But we've got to make the choices. And it means we have to arrest ourselves sometimes and say, nope, I can't let that feed my craving anymore.

And just like God can change our physical cravings, He certainly changes our physical cravings. That's what He's been called to, right? We leave behind the things of the world. We don't crave those anymore, more and more and more, as we are led by His Holy Spirit. We crave the things of God. We, as Christ would say, crave His Kingdom, crave His righteousness, crave His Kingdom, and crave His righteousness.

Physical cravings, we live in a world of food that's so different than all the generations or the six thousand years of man before us. We have all sorts of things that we can buy, and so many of them are just unhealthy if we look at them.

But we have such a choice that we can look at.

And sometimes when we eat those things, we think, oh, for a moment they satisfy the craving. Sometimes it takes a whole bag of potato chips to satisfy a craving. Sometimes it takes a whole pint of ice cream to satisfy that craving, but how deeply is that craving satisfied?

Not totally, because within an hour we're craving something else.

And sometimes those cravings that we have lead to other cravings. It leads us to just keep trying to fill more and more and more and more. And one of the things in society that we see is as people crave one thing, it creates other problems, and they just keep trying to fill that craving, and it creates physical problems.

Spiritually, if we try to fill our cravings without the things of God, we'll keep searching. We'll keep being uneasy. We'll keep feeling hungry. We'll keep feeling that little intense feeling, and we'll try to fill it up, because you know all of humanity has a hole in it. All of humanity is looking to fill up that hole in some way.

And it's not the cravings that come from the physical that fill that hole. It's not the cravings of the physical world that's going to fill that hole. For you and me, and for all the world that's able to come to understand, it's learning to crave the things of God. He's the one who fills.

He's the one who makes things happen. He's the one who satisfies.

So if we look at Matthew 5, 6 again, it says, Blessed are they who hunger and thirst we might say crave. Blessed are they who crave after righteousness. This whole life, this whole way that God has called us to. For they will be filled.

Now, if you look at the Hebrew, the Greek word for filled, can also be translated satisfied. For they will be satisfied.

Have you felt just satisfied after you have a meal? It doesn't mean you're so stuffed that you can't move. It doesn't mean anything like that. It's just satisfied. You just feel good when you're done. It's been a good meal. I've gotten everything I need out of it.

God says, when you hunger and thirst after righteousness, it will satisfy you.

You won't be in this constant searching mode trying to fill a hole with some of the things the world tries to fill it with. They might try to fill it with more things. They might try to fill it with more TV, more entertainment, more gambling, more drugs, more alcohol, more pornography, more of anything, to try to fill that craving, to try to find some meaning in life that they can't find. You shouldn't be that way for you and me. We have a purpose. We have a meaning. God will fill that hole. God will fill what we need. He will satisfy us if we hunger and thirst, if we learn to crave righteousness, if we learn to make that our priority, with all these other priorities that we work for and whatever as well. But the overriding priority is that we seek His kingdom, seek righteousness, and crave those things. Again, let's look at some verses back here in the Old Testament with the companion word for satisfied that's used there in Matthew 5. Let's go back to Psalm 103.

Psalm 103, verse 1. I know many of you have, at least the first part of this psalm, memorized. It lists all the benefits of God. Never bad to read the benefits of God. Psalm 103, verse 1. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits, who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from destruction, who crowns you with loving kindness and tender mercies, who satisfies your mouth with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagles. He provides the things that satisfy. He provides the things that can rejuvenate us, renew us, so that we're young like the eagles and we fly like the eagles again. It's not going to be our own personal cravings or the world that's going to create that desire in us and that youth again and that rejuvenation. It's going to be God who satisfies us and who provides what we need to get to that point. Back in a few chapters forward, Psalm 107. And as you think of David as he wrote these Psalms and the other ones, he came to understand that in his life. Because he changed his cravings from the man we see back at the time of Bathsheba and Uriah to the man he became when he started seeking after God and his righteousness. Psalm 107 and verse 9. He, for he, speaking of God, for God satisfies the longing soul and he fills the hungry soul with goodness. It's him. It's his things that satisfy. It's him that gives us the contentment that we need in life. It's him that gives us the ability to be settled in times that others would say are very unsettled, established when others would say, there is no stability around us. It's God who gives those things when we crave, when we crave his righteousness and his kingdom. Psalm 145. 145 verse 14. The eternal upholds all who fall and raises up all who are bowed down. The eyes of all look expectantly to you, David writes, looks to you, God, and you give them food and their food in due season. You open your hand and you satisfy the desire of every living thing. You do that. You satisfy their desires. People who learn to not look primarily for the physical things of life and put them above God, like the Gentiles do, but who learn to put the things of God above the physical, who learn to trust him and rely on him and then endeavor with his Holy Spirit to live the life that he called him to live. When we're satisfied, when we're satisfied, joy is there. Love is engendered. Peace is engendered. All those fruits of the Holy Spirit come to fore when we're satisfied and we're doing the things that God wants us to do. We'll see it in ourselves. We'll see it in each other. We'll see it in our families. We'll see it in our marriages. We'll see it in our churches and among the brethren. As we're all together and as we're all striving the same things, if we learn, as Jesus Christ said, crave, crave his kingdom and crave his righteousness and you will be satisfied.