Matthew 5:6, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”  

Have you ever been dehydrated?  I had a doctor once tell me that the moment you get thirsty it’s a sign that your body feels dehydrated.  Thirst is your built in warning signal that your body needs water immediately. Jesus used thirst multiple times for us spiritually to describe our need for Him. Have you ever felt spiritually thirsty outside of when you realized your need for Him as your Savior?  

If you were to hunger and thirst for righteousness, what do you think that means, exactly?  I know that when my daughter, Danielle gets too hungry she gets what we call, “hangry”. It literally starts causing anger to well up inside her because her body wants food NOW!  If I get too thirsty, my vision starts to blur and it’s more difficult to think straight.  Those are the same types of symptoms we have when we are starving ourselves spiritually. Why do you think there’s so much anger in the world today?  We have managed to allow God to be taken out of everything and people are dying without ever having been fed the Word of God and one of the biggest problems is that Christians are famished too from a lack of time with God themselves.

Praise God that we are here and we can study His Word together, but I would encourage you to let this just be your appetizer. Ask Him to give you a hunger and thirst for Him and His Word. He would love to answer a prayer like that. We cannot give what we don’t have and unfortunately most Christians admit that they rarely ever open their Bibles to read them. I could use the same phrase parents have used with their children for years, “their are people starving in other countries!”  I just watched a video of a man talking about his visit to an underground church in China and he saw one woman hand the Bible they gave her to the woman next to her and when he talked to her about it he found out she had memorized the passages they were reading. He asked her how, when and where she was able to do that and she said she did it when she was in prison because of sharing with people God’s Word. Other Christians brought scripture in on slips of paper and she would memorize it as fast as she could before the guard would find it and take it.  That was convicting to me ~ we have taken our freedom for granted but worse than that, we have put God on the shelf too often because we have too much going on in our lives. I have been asked multiple times why we don’t have anything other than dvd’s to go with the two tvs we have and it’s because I don’t have the time or desire to watch anything on tv these days. I found it was much harder to get more time with God and it was also more difficult to have peace. I remember one day laughing several years ago because I was watching a “crime series” and I was so tense my shoulders were getting knots in them and I thought, “I have enough stress in my life, why on earth am I watching something as entertaining and fascinating as it was, that is adding more stress to my body and mind?”  Your body literally processes both stresses the same way, whether the situation is real or fabricated. There are just so many things we have allowed to take up our time that could go. I am not saying everyone needs to get rid of their tv, but we should limit how much time we spend on anything optional in our lives if we find we don’t seem to have time for God. 

I know this is maybe not a fun, heartwarming study this morning, but God just really impressed on me this morning that we need to get intentional about our time in His Word and in prayer.  Ignoring what is going on in the world won’t make it go away. I prayed that God would help me do more “teaching” not just writing and His Word is the crux of it all. I know we all need answers and comfort and encouragement and every bit of that, as we know, is found in His Word, so today we must start with the importance of making “Knowing Him” our first priority. We are so blessed that He has preserved all of this for us so we can know Him~ let’s make the best use of it that we can. It will not only change your life, it will change those around you!

Quote:  “Things that matter most must never be at the Mercy of things that matter least.”  ~ Goethe