Your Desire for Righteousness

Hunger after His Kingdom (3)

A note on the series Hunger after His Kingdom.

The present series Hunger after His Kingdom evolves from my sermon of the same title, which I delivered early this year. My objective is to make you hungry for more – more of His Kingdom. The reason is simple: all that you need and desire are found in His Kingdom.    

I am aware that many of us are not used to understanding the Kingdom of God this way. More likely than not we think of giving to and for His Kingdom instead of receiving from it. I am not trying to be different for the sake of being different. But the more I study on the subject of the Kingdom, particularly the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7), the more I find evidence for the fact that Jesus wants to give us the Kingdom for our sakes, rather than asking us to give of ourselves for the sake of the Kingdom.

To think of it, isn’t this most logical? How preposterous is it to think that we can do something to add to His Kingdom. Does God Almighty need anything from us to make Him complete? Simple questions like these put us in the right perspective about His Kingdom. It’s about your need, my friend, and not the need of the Kingdom.

Righteousness.

Righteousness is your foremost need and desire, whether you recognize it or not. Else Jesus would not spend so much time talking about it in His great Sermon. More than half of Matthew 5 talks about righteousness, and in Matthew 6:33 Jesus said to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Righteousness simply means the ability to stand before the throne of God without any sense of guilt or inferiority, (which Man used to be able to do before sin came into the world through Adam), knowing that you are accepted. Why is righteousness our foremost desire? Because Man is created to have fellowship with God and to enjoy Him forever. How can one stand before God and enjoy Him if he thinks that he is not accepted?

Jesus sure understands this. He said: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” (Matt 5:6, NKJV) He knows that we hunger and thirst for righteousness, He knows that we desire to be able to come before Him knowing that we are fully accepted. And He promises that our hunger and thirst shall be filled. 

After Adam’s fall, religion came into play. All religions have one goal ultimately: to find acceptance before God. They perform good deeds. They offer sacrifices. They do penance. They give money. They refrain from killing. They kill. They fast. They serve in church. They do social work. And the list goes on. All these they do hoping that they may find God’s acceptance. They hunger and they thirst for it and pursue it with great zeal and fervency. But no amount of their self-effort could make them succeed. The reason is simple. In the quest to become righteous through their own effort, they are saying that they can be like God – perfect, for this is the requirement set forth by Jesus if they want to attain righteousness by their own effort: be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect. (Matt 5:48, NKJV). Can anyone succeed? (See my earlier blog posts – The Three Kinds of Righteousness series March 2 to March 30 – for more discussion.)

How then are we to be righteous? We have already established that Jesus promises all our needs and desires are to find fulfillment in His Kingdom. There is no difference with regard to the desire for righteousness. So He said about this hunger and thirst: they shall be filled. They shall be filled when His Kingdom comes upon us, for it comes equipped with a Savior and His blood, powerful enough to reconcile us to God once and for all. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Cor 5:21, NKJV) This is His righteousness that He gives us. And it’s free.

Doubt not and fear not, in Christ you are righteous.