There is a strange little treasure in this verse.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
Matthew 5:6 ESV
You will find as you continue maturing that things you enjoy satisfy up to a point. That is good. They are gifts from God to you personally. Yet there’s this threshold beyond which they just don’t fill you.
Everything good comes from God to point us back to him.
You see it in the culture and hear it in music – people searching and trying everything to fill them up. People look in love, money, fame, but they can tell something’s still missing. Maybe the most classic line is “I can’t get no satisfaction. I try and I try and I try and I try, but I can’t get no satisfaction.”
If you want your heart and soul and mind to be filled to the top, hunger and search for righteousness. People who do that will be satisfied.
The reason they – and only they – will indeed be satiated is because fullness of joy is found only in God himself.
“You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
Psalm 16:11 ESV
If you hunger for righteousness and holiness, you are hungry for God.
Food and romance, influential power and wealth don’t quench our desires all the way down for a reason. They were only ever meant to point away from themselves to God. That’s why he invented them.
“What do you have that you did not receive?” 1 Corinthians 4:7a. The implication is that truly everything we have is a gift. Even the things we got through our own hard work, we still received because the ability to work hard is a gift from God.
“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights,” James 1:17a. That is, everything good that we have is a gift specifically from none less than our Creator.
Fame, romance, money and relationships are not evil. God will give them to his people in inconceivable abundance in the next life, and in smallish ways in this one. Both here and in Heaven, they are gifts from God to draw our attention to the Giver.
Everything good comes from God to point us back to him.
“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”
Romans 11:36 ESV
We must let all the Good Yet Not Totally Satisfying things of earth draw our attention upward into hunger for God. Then our appetites will be fully satisfied.
Free Spirit Seed Company 