Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels
hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing
as water.… If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most
probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures
satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably, earthly pleasures were
never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. C. S. Lewis, Mere
Christianity

During several summers in the 1950s, Howard Mumma, a Methodist pastor, served as a guest
minister at the American Church in Paris. After Sunday service one day, he noticed a man in a
dark suit surrounded by admirers. Albert Camus [the author] had been coming to church, first
to hear Marcel Dupr, playing the organ, and later to hear Mumma’s sermons.

Mumma became friends with the existentialist Camus, who by then was famous for his novels
The Plague and The Stranger and for essays such as “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The two men met
to discuss questions of religious belief that Camus raised. Mumma, now 92, kept the
conversations confidential for over 40 years before deciding to share them. In one
conversation, Camus told Mumma:

The reason I have been coming to church is because I am seeking. I’m almost on a pilgrimage—
seeking something to fill the void that I am experiencing—and no one else knows. Certainly the
public and the readers of my novels, while they see that void, are not finding the answers in
what they are reading. But deep down you are right—I am searching for something that the
world is not giving me.…

In a sense we are all products of a mundane world, a world without spirit. The world in which
we live and the lives which we live are decidedly empty.… Since I have been coming to church, I
have been thinking a great deal about the idea of a transcendent, something that is other than
this world. It is something that you do not hear much about today, but I am finding it.

One of the basic teachings that I learned from Sartre is that man is alone. We are solitary
centers of the universe. Perhaps we ourselves are the only ones who have ever asked the great
questions of life. Perhaps, since Nazism, we are also the ones who have loved and lost and who
are, therefore, fearful of life. That is what led us to sense that there is a great idea or powerful
influence—but there is something that can bring meaning to my life. I certainly don’t have it,
but it is there. On Sunday mornings, I hear that the answer is God.

You have made it very clear to me, Howard, that we are not the only ones in this world. There
is something that is invisible. We may not hear the voice, but there is some way in which we
can become aware that we are not the only ones in the world and that there is help for all of us.

In one sense, of course, these chapters do not provide a full record of a sermon. They take about ten minutes to read; and it is unlikely that Jesus withdrew to the hills, attracted a crowd, and then spoke for only ten minutes! Some of His excursions turned into three-day conferences (see Matt. 15:32). These three chapters are condensed reports of long teaching sessions and are therefore necessarily selective and topical.

The reason these two points are important to a fair understanding of the Sermon on the Mount is this: these chapters include not only material suitable for those who really are Jesus’ disciples (“You are the salt of the earth,” 5:13; see also 5:14; 7:7–11) but also warnings aimed at those who think they are true disciples but aren’t (see 7:21–23).

Those who were not yet disciples in any sense, but who had rushed into the hills like gate-crashers and joined the “teach-in,” stood in no less need of such fundamental challenge. Thus the Sermon on the Mount, for all that it is a block of teaching, is not reserved, formal, or merely didactic. It is also a call to repentance, obedience, and faith.

The values set forth in the Beatitudes are fundamentally different from those of the central areas of modern life, education, technological development, or military might. The astonishing thing is that many people, because they are vaguely familiar with them, actually think they are more or less living them.

As we saw the first week of our study, the Sermon on the Mount begins with the demand for poverty of spirit. It begins by demanding that kingdom hopefuls acknowledge their spiritual bankruptcy, their need. Moreover, just as Paul is explaining some of the relationships between law and the gospel, so also is Jesus (cf. Matt. 5:17–20); but he does so in such a way as to underscore the demand for righteousness in the kingdom.

Jesus is preaching the law: he is preaching that toward which the law and the prophets pointed. proclaiming the norms and requirements of the kingdom, he is simultaneously providing genuine disciples with the kingdom’s perspectives, and making all others painfully aware of their insurmountable shortcomings.

The discipleship which Jesus requires is absolute, radical in the sense that it gets to the root of human conduct and to the root of relationships between God and men. A person either enters the kingdom or he does not. He walks the road that leads to life, or he walks the road that leads to destruction. There is no third alternative.

They called him Lord. They seemed to have the charismatic gift of prophesy. They were engaged in exorcisms of demons and miracles in Jesus’ name. And he turned them away at the last day saying he never knew them, because they were doers of evil and not righteousness.

They thought they knew him. They thought he knew them. But they were strangers: “I never knew you.” Why? Because they had not hungered and thirsted for his righteousness. They had been religious! They had gone to church. They had gotten involved in many religious activities.

But the passion, the hunger, the thirst of their lives was not righteousness. And therefore they will not be satisfied, neither in this age nor in the age to come. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (5:6)

People in the biblical times knew a lot more about hunger and thirst than we do. It’s rare for us ever to be hungry or thirsty. We have ready access to instant food and drink at any time. But people in the ancient world didn’t have that wonderful advantage and famine was very common.

The pursuit of righteousness is not popular even among professing Christians. Many today are prepared to seek other things: spiritual maturity, real happiness, the Spirit’s power, effective witnessing skills. Other people chase from conference to conference seeking some vague “blessing” from on high, a spiritual experience, for the conscience of God.

This is not uncommon to mankind to be intense, to be passionate, to be pursuing. In fact, most people spend their lives pursuing the wrong thing. Many people, of course, have perverted ambitions, but even those who have ambitions for what on a human level might be noble find themselves at the end of their life either having never attained what they pursued or having attained it found that it wasn’t all that it was supposed to be. It’s easy to spend your life looking for the wrong thing.

There are many illustrations in the Bible of those who pursued the wrong thing. Lucifer, who was already God’s most glorious creation, who was already the supreme angels among the angels, and yet he was driven with a passionate ambition, a strong desire, a consuming pursuit. He had a resolute devotion to being like God, according to Isaiah 14:13 and 14. He said, “I will be like God.”

He was hungry for power. He was hungry for greater glory. And God reacted, you remember, by throwing him out of heaven. In fact it says in Isaiah 14:15, God says, “You shall be brought down.”

Adam and Eve followed and did the very same thing Lucifer did.

First John 2:15–17, reminds us that appetites can never be satisfied by this world’s fare. “Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the boastful pride of life is not from the Father

You desire not only the righteousness that comes in salvation by the act of God declaring you righteous and imputing Christ’s very righteousness to you, but you desire the righteousness that comes in sanctification, that is the continual conforming to Christ.

But how many hunger and thirst for righteousness?

What is this righteousness which we must thus pursue?

Isaiah 55:2–3: Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor
for that which does not satisfy? Hearken diligently to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in abundance. Incline your ear, and come to me;
hear that your soul may live.

Jeremiah 2:12–13: My people have committed two evils:They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.

Many people, some in here today, are like this. Your soul is hungry and your heart is thirsty. You feel an insatiable longing for something. You are restless. Almost everywhere you turn, the grass is greener than where you stand. And the great tragedy for some of you is that even though this is the Spirit of God beckoning you to himself, you turn away again and again.

The drugs, alcohol so called fun, can’t keep you from waking up in the real world again and again with your messed-up life.

We drink at broken cisterns. And we eat bread which does not satisfy.

5:20 Jesus says, “I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Then what follows in the rest of chapter 5 are six illustrations of how our righteousness

As you grow as a Christian you will have a greater hunger for righteousness because the more mature you become as a believer, the greater your sin will appear to you and the more dissatisfied you’ll become. It’s really a strange thing to live. The longer you’re a Christian, the longer you’re walking faithfully with the Lord, the more sin decreases. But even though there may be less frequent sin, it is more heinous to you because you have cultivated such lofty longings.

What Jesus meant back in 5:20 when he said that our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees. It has to do with showing mercy, and being radically pure in your heart, and making peace instead of retaliating. So our understanding of righteousness from the structure of the beatitudes is indeed confirmed. Righteousness is showing mercy to other people; and righteousness is being pure in heart before God who alone can see the heart; and righteousness is the effort to make peace.

God’s Righteousness in View

Jesus surely means God’s righteousness—a righteousness like God’s, and a righteousness that God gives. Matthew 6:33 says, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” Surely that is basically the same as saying, “Hunger and thirst for righteousness.” When we hunger and thirst for righteousness, we don’t look to the broken cisterns of our own resources. We look to God. So it is not either-or: we hunger for righteousness in God.

Matthew’s use of the term means a pattern of life in conformity to God’s will. The person who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, hungers and thirsts for conformity to God’s will. He is not drifting aimlessly in a sea of empty religiosity; still less is he puttering about distracted by inconsequential trivia.

His delight is the Word of God, for where else is God’s will so clearly set forth? He wants to be righteous, not simply because he fears God, but because righteousness has become for him the most eminently desirable thing in the world.

This does not mean that the person is now so satisfied with the righteousness given him that his hunger and thirst for righteousness are forever vanquished.

Elsewhere, Jesus does in fact argue along such lines: “Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.… I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 4:14; 6:35). So there is a sense in which we are satisfied with Jesus and all he is and provides. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which we continue to be unsatisfied.

An example from Paul might help us understand this paradox.

Paul can testify, “I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day” (2 Tim. 1:12); but he can also say, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death …” (Phil. 3:10). Paul has come to know Christ, but knowing him, he wants to know him better.

In a similar way, the person who hungers and thirsts for righteousness is blessed by God, and filled; but the righteousness with which he is filled is so wonderful that he hungers and thirsts for more of it.

This built-in cycle of growth is easy to understand as soon as we remember that righteousness in this text refers not to obeying some rules, but to conformity to all of God’s will.

The more a person pursues conformity to God’s will, the more attractive the goal becomes, and the greater the advances made.

The Sermon on the Mount contains a great deal of ethical instruction, so much so that some people have concluded that it lays out a series of conditions which must be met if a person is to enter the kingdom of God. In this view, an individual enters the kingdom because his obedience merits entrance. Such a deduction is false; we saw in the last verses Jesus’ insistence on poverty of spirit (5:3), and mourning over our sin, shows we can not produce this ourselves. A superficial reading of the Sermon on the Mount might lead an inattentive reader to this false conclusion.

Paul’s teaching on salvation.

Paul insists that men are saved by God’s free grace, and by nothing else. Certainly they cannot be saved by their works, by the merits they accumulate. He takes the first two and one half chapters of Romans to prove that all men, without exception, stand guilty before God.

“Where, then, is boasting?” Paul asks; and he replies, “It is excluded.… For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law” (Rom. 3:27f.).

This salvation which comes by God’s grace, through faith, does not, according to Paul, condone irresponsibility. (Rom. 8:1ff.). Indeed, only those who possess this Spirit, and whose lives demonstrate it, have truly been pardoned; and all those who possess this Spirit, and whose lives demonstrate it, have truly been pardoned.

The salvation which God gives by grace is not static; it inevitably results in good works. Good works may not earn salvation, but they will certainly result from it. Ephesians 2:10 For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:8–10). According to this passage, good works can be construed as both the goal of salvation and the test of salvation.

Paul is referring primarily to the function of law within the history of the Jewish race. However, this account of things also holds up at the personal level. It is usually true that a man won’t cry to be found until he knows or suspects he’s lost.

The reason we are currently seeing such an embarrassingly high percentage of spurious conversions to Christ is precisely because we have not first taught people their need of Christ.

In much contemporary evangelism, there is little concern for whether or not God will accept us, and much concern for whether or not we will accept him. Little attention is paid to whether or not we please him, and much to whether or not he pleases us.

Many popular evangelistic methods are molded by these ideas. As a result, there is far too little stress on God’s character and the requirements of the kingdom, and far too much stress on our needs. Our needs are cast in preeminently psychological categories, not moral ones.

As a result, when a person comes to Christ, he comes stripped of all pretense of self-righteousness, all claims to personal moral merit. It is typical of Paul to stress, on the one hand, salvation by grace through faith; and, on the other, the unequivocal surrender by which men must approach God.