Hunger And Thirst

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” – Matthew 5:6

“To be hungry is not enough; I must be really starving to know what is in His heart towards me. … When the prodigal son was hungry he went to feed upon husks, but when he was starving, he turned to his father.” – J.N. Darby

What is righteousness? Unfortunately, in modern English that word often has the negative connotation of a condescending, rigid morality, a meaning almost synonymous with self-righteousness. But Biblically, the Greek word daikos has a relational side that the English word lacks: it means “to be right with”—as Keller puts it, “to be presentable,” “to pass inspection in the eyes of a significant other,” “to be found pleasing in the eyes of someone I want to please.” Righteousness here means wanting to be right with God: it encompasses both justification and sanctification. We receive righteousness by faith, but I think here too there’s a sense of the desire to be free from sin and its power, a longing to be positively holy.

What does it mean to “hunger and thirst”? Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes: “It means a consciousness of our need; it means a deep consciousness of our great need even to the point of pain. It means something that keeps on until it is satisfied. It does not mean just a passing feeling, a passing desire… Hunger is something deep and profound that goes on until it is satisfied. It hurts, it is painful; it is like actual, physical hunger and thirst. It is something that goes on increasing and makes one feel desperate.”

That’s true, isn’t it? Ellie came back from farm one day when I picked her up from school (yeah, their school has a farm), cheeks red and hair plastered with sweat, and she pretty much couldn’t think or talk about anything except drinking a glass of water, which she did as soon as she got home. When you’re truly hungry or thirsty, it’s the top thing on your mind. It’s something we’re active about. And it doesn’t stop. Isn’t it odd that we are designed such that, no matter how much we eat or drink, we will inevitably become hungry or thirsty again? 

In fact, the more we are filled, the more we hunger and thirst for what filled us. Our appetites are malleable. My friend who weaned herself off sugar, for example, found that after a few weeks, foods she found normal before now seemed distastefully sweet. I think of my appetite as something valuable to me—it is coinage I can spend on some kind of intake; once satiated, the appetite is gone, and what I have chosen to intake has changed me, and changed what I will long for, in some way or other. If I really hunger and thirst for righteousness, I will not only avoid anything patently harmful or sinful, but I will avoid anything that dulls my spiritual appetites. If I knew we were going to an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ for dinner, would I go eat a bunch of snacks that afternoon? Of course not!

As Lloyd-Jones writes, “There are so many things… that are quite harmless in themselves and which are perfectly legitimate. Yet if you find that you are spending much of your time with them, and that you desire the things of God less, you must avoid them.”

What do my thoughts, feelings and actions say about what I am hungering and thirsting for? Jesus does not say, “hunger for happiness and you will find it,” but “hunger for righteousness and you will be happy.” Not only happy, but “satisfied”—Greek chortazo, which literally means “to gorge.” To feed in abundance, the same word used to describe the feeding of the four thousand, when there were seven full baskets of food left over (Mark 8), and the feeding of the five thousand, when there were twelve baskets left over (Luke 9). So much of what we hunger and thirst for leaves us unsatisfied: but deep longing for holiness, to be right before God, will leave us chortazo—fully satisfied, with more left over.