Have you ever felt that inner ache of loneliness? Have you felt an empty void in your life? In this study we will see how Jesus fulfills the innermost longings of the soul. Join as Pastor David continues in the series of messages from the sermon on the mount.

<p>Have you ever felt that inner ache of loneliness? Have you felt an empty void in your life? In this study we will see how Jesus fulfills the innermost longings of the soul. Join as Pastor David continues in the series of messages from the sermon on the mount.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Hillside O’Malley SDA Church

The Beatitudes

David Shin

Blessed are the Poor in Spirit

Blessed Are They that Mourn

Blessed are the Meek

Blessed are Those Who Hunger for Righteousness

Blessed Are the Merciful

Blessed are the Pure in Heart

Blessed are the Peacemakers

Blessed Are the Persecuted

If you have not already, I want to invite you to open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 5.

We're continuing in our series of messages from the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest sermon ever preached.

Jesus gathered together his disciples and was preaching to them, and he began with a series of blessings.

I'll be beginning in verse 3, blessed are the poor in spirit, for Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

And the focus of our message today is, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled." I had a description on the screen, but I don't know if we have it here yet.

But just imagine that on the screen you have a series of blessings.

You'll notice when you read the Beatitudes that the first blessed and the last blessed have the same connotation or the same aspect that ends the Beatitude.

Matthew chapter 5, verse 3, "'Blessed are the poor in spirit, "'for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'" And you read verse 10 the last beatitude blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake what does it say For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The first beatitude and the last beatitude have the same blessing, indicating that it doesn't matter if you're at the beginning of the Christian experience or at the end of the Christian experience, the promise is the same.

Scholars believe that the Beatitudes are a progression in the Christian experience.

You go from 1 level of grace to another level of grace.

You're saved all along the way, but the Holy Spirit begins to work in your life and brings you through the progression.

And I praise God that you are just as saved in the moment that you accept Jesus as if you have been a Christian for 20 or 30 years and later in the Christian experience.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are the persecuted, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven as well." There's another way of looking at these Beatitudes.

It can be also seen in 2 sets of 4 as well.

The first set of 4 ends with a blessing for those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

The second set of 4 is a blessing for those who are persecuted for righteousness as well.

So the first set of 4 goes from a state of emptiness to filling with righteousness.

The second set, God begins to give you aspects of his character and righteousness and you are overflowing with righteousness and you come to the place where you are persecuted for righteousness sake and I'm looking forward to actually discussing that 1 future in our series because I can't think of being persecuted as being a state of happiness, can you?

But for today's focus, we'll be looking at the blessing of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness' sake." Jesus, in this beatitude, is using a universal analogy that we can all relate to of physical hunger and thirst.

He's not talking about the physical aspect of our human nature, rather he's talking about a spiritual longing that is universal to all of us, It is universal to all human beings, and it's an inner longing, an inner ache of loneliness that we all experience.

I don't know if you noticed this past week, the iPhone 7 was announced.

I unfortunately watched a clip of the announcement and there's something about these promotionals because after I watched all the bells and whistles of the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7S, I went to use my phone afterwards and Suddenly the luster of my phone just immediately vanished.

It's just amazing the way capitalism works.

I mean, my phone, when it came out at the time, it's an iPhone 5, It's antiquated, about to break, but I'm so cheap, I don't want to get rid of it.

But when it came out, it was the latest and the greatest thing.

But suddenly, when Apple unveils the iPhone 7, which is waterproof, which doesn't have a headphone jack, all of these attributes just seem to elevate it to a certain state and I found myself craving a new phone.

It was fascinating because I read an article in the New York Times about happiness and desire and materialism.

And the heading was, do we really need it?

And the correlation with happiness, I also read an article in Psychology Today called the hedonic treadmill.

I want to quote to you a few excerpts from this article.

It says, even if we spent our whole lives pursuing something, once we've got it, we start adapting to it.

Once it's normal, it can start to get boring.

It doesn't matter that we've worked for it for decades to get there.

We've got it now, so it's not exciting anymore.

It's like we're just grown up children to a certain degree, except our toys are becoming more and more expensive, and we want this thing, and the thing that capitalism does is that it is actually selling an element of happiness.

You buy this phone and it will bring you joy.

You buy this product and there is a certain fulfillment that will come but it doesn't seem to last And this is what psychology today was saying, the shiny new toy loses its luster once we have it, We get used to it, that dream home.

We get used to the hot tub, the view, the skylights, the inner elation of happiness that it once brought wears away.

No matter what it makes, No matter what it is that makes you happy, you can get bored of it after a while.

That is because of a concept known as hedonic adaptations.

Simply put, There is no 1 thing that will make you happy forever.

Eventually, you get used to it and need something different.

We get something, whether it be a material belonging, a new house, a new car, it all wears away after a while.

The theologian John Piper put it this way, and everything turns to ashes in your hands.

The thrill of lust leaves the sediment of guilt and loneliness.

The drugs and alcohol can't keep you from waking up in the real world again and again with your messed up relationships.

The tan looks so artificial and fades so quickly and the new toy is so boring in just a few weeks.

All of us have experienced this inner existential ache of loneliness.

And it seems like the more we try to fill it, the emptier and the emptier we get.

And it seems as if the world is after this intangible fulfillment that we just can't get our fingers around.

Deion Sanders wrote in his autobiography about this very same experience.

For those of you that don't know who Dion Sanders is, he's a Hall of Fame football player.

Quite remarkable because he could play both offense and defense.

And he dabbled a little bit in Major League Baseball.

And I want you to notice the nature of the experience that Deion Sanders went through.

And I quote, I remember winning the Super Bowl that year and that night after the game, I was the first 1 out of the locker room, the first 1 to go to the press conference and the first 1 to go home.

That was the same week I bought myself a new $275, 000 Lamborghini.

And I haven't even driven it a mile before I realized, no, that's not it.

I tried everything, parties, women, buying Expensive jewelry and gadgets and nothing helped there was no peace.

I mean I was playing great I got all this media attention and everything the world has to offer but no peace no joy just emptiness inside I tried to buy myself something to make me happy, and I was even emptier than before because I could see that nothing could possibly satisfy the longing, the hunger that was deep down inside me.

I tried throwing myself into my career, into sports, trying to see how far I could go, and when I achieved every goal I could think of, I was right back where I started.

Empty, empty, empty, and nothing I could touch.

That deep, lonely, nothing I did could touch that deep loneliness inside of me.

This is a man that was at the pinnacle of his career.

He had it all, the envy of the sports world, and he said, I was just coming up empty every single time.

The existential void that we all experience.

And the irony is most of the world wants to be Deion Sanders.

And I think of this quote from Ecclesiastes 3, verse 11.

God has made everything beautiful in its time.

Also, he has put eternity into man's mind." The Bible tells us that God has put eternity into our hearts.

There's something in human nature that we are grasping for, desiring for something more than this finite world can offer.

Lewis put it this way, 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." C.S.

Lewis in the previous paragraph says, look, if I'm hungry there is food to fill that need.

He says for almost every human desire, there is something to fill that need, but he says that there's something more.

There's a real void in our hearts and it seems that nothing in this world can fill it.

It really points to an aspect of the divine.

And Blaise Pascal, the mathematician, wrote in his monumental work called Pensees, And he says, what else does this craving and this helplessness proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace.

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Series

The Beatitudes

Blessed are Those Who Hunger for Righteousness

Transcript

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