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

What does it mean to hunger and thirst? It has to do with desire. And by the way, a great and intense desire.

Food and water are necessities, beloved. So is righteousness. That’s the first indication of this Beatitude. You need righteousness like you need food and water. It isn’t wrong to hunger. It isn’t wrong to thirst. It is the most normal thing. It is the most common drive. It is the most necessary drive, and so it is with righteousness.

There’s pain in verse 3, broken in spirit. There’s pain in verse 4, mourning. There’s pain in verse 5, meekness, the death of self.

But there’s the comfort of verse 6. Hungering and thirsting, that’s the solution. You get to the place where you start to reach out to God. It’s kind of negative at the beginning. You just hurt a lot. You see your sin and then you begin to move toward God. You begin to hunger and thirst after righteousness. So that’s why this Beatitude fits here because it makes sense. You take a man broken over sin, you take a woman broken over sin, meek before a holy God knowing he has nothing he can do in himself to gain or inherit anything, who then reaches out in a hunger and a thirst for that which only God can give.

Adapted from a message by John MacArthur “Happy Are the Hungry”