Amen. You can be seated. If you'll open your Bibles to the book of Matthew chapter 5, verse 6, and we'll dismiss our kids to children's ministry. And then, only if it's possible, but could I request that song for communion too? But if it screws things up, don't worry about it. But if you could do that, that would be wonderful. Matthew 5:6. I wonder how many of you have heard of the dilemma attributed to a fictional character in Plato's dialogues called the Euthyphro Dilemma. Have you heard of this? I mean, if you went to a classical school sponsored by a local faithful church, maybe. But more of that to come. Do not think that this is irrelevant to you. It is highly relevant, though not initially obvious why. But let me run through this.
The dilemma that Plato posed was to ask the following question: Is a thing good simply because the gods say it is, or do the gods say a thing is good because of some other quality it has? This is a problem presented, as I said, by Plato, and in his dialogue stumped Euthyphro. Probably one of the weightiest, most formidable atheists to have lived in the modern day is not any of the people that you would think of, Hitchens and so forth, would be a man named Bertrand Russell, who famously wrote a towering book of polemic against Christianity called Why I'm Not a Christian. And he looks to this question as a primary problem for the Christian faith. And I think the way that he articulates it is a a little bit more understandable. He would say it this way: is a thing right simply because God declares it to be right, or does God say it is good because he recognizes a moral code superior to him?
All right, so we're gonna— we're gonna talk. You don't have to grasp that fully right now as we're going to cover it multiple ways from multiple angles and so on and so forth. But I just want you to know my aim in bringing that up to you this morning is not so much an apologetic aim, but it is simply to help us to begin to think seriously about the word righteousness. And the reason why we need to think seriously this morning about the word righteousness is because Matthew 5:6 is our text, and it says, Jesus says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed, I think we understand. Hunger, I think we understand. Thirst, I think we understand. Satisfied, I think we understand. Of all the words in this verse, the one that seems to me to be the least well understood is the word righteous. What do we mean when we use that word? What is righteousness?
Now, this is closely aligned to this what I call the Euthyphronic— it's a made-up word— the Euthyphronic problem. Is something righteous because there is some sort of transcendent standard of righteousness out there that has always existed, to which God has aligned himself to. So is there some kind of standard of righteousness, some kind of invisible Ten Commandments-type law that exists apart from God, and the reason that God is righteous is because he obeys this law? Or is righteousness simply Whatever God says is righteousness, which is sometimes referred to as the Divine Command Theory. Well, I would say neither of those— one of them is quite close, which is the Divine Command Theory, the other one is way off. And it's funny because when you talk to an intellectual or philosopher, this, this dilemma actually causes them problems. But when you talk to the average Reformed Christian who like maybe went to Sunday school a few times, they're like, no, you can't have a thing that God's submitting to, right? It's just an instinctive— you just know this.
And one of the things I want to say at the beginning, I think it's very important, and please try to remember this toward the end: I'm not going to tell you anything that you don't know in a way that surpasses knowledge today in the Lord, if you're in Christ. Don't, don't think you've learned anything today. You've just learned names for things today. Um, you've just— I've just described a phenomenon that is already happening in in your life if you're a Christian. That's helpful, by the way.
But anyway, so the average Christian would already kind of be able to say, no, that doesn't make sense that there's some kind of law out here that God obeys, and that's why God is good. But there's this other troubling thing for some, and that is like, so then whatever is good is just whatever God says, and it's just sort of a divine fiat, and he just kind of arbitrarily decides what's good and what's not good? It's like, well, that's not right either. There's nothing arbitrary about it. What we have when we talk about righteousness— let's just break this down— is simply a description of God's own character. God's righteous decrees are simply mirroring the divine character. That's the truth.
6 · The pastor unpacks the core thesis: righteousness is fundamentally 'right-withness' — being rightly related to someone, specifically God
Now let's just set that little pile of thought aside over here for a second. Let's go from a different angle. What is righteousness? Well, righteousness is just rightness. Okay, rightness with what? Is it rightness? Is righteousness rightness with a transcendent moral code to which even God is subject? No. Is rightness just obeying an arbitrary law? No. What you need to understand, the big takeaway today, is that the most fundamental meaning of righteousness is right-withness. The most fundamental meaning of righteousness is to be right with someone. Right with someone. Not right with something, not an arbitrary standard, not a moral law, not a set of decrees, not right with something, right with someone. Friends, one of the little life hacks is that all of your big questions in life, like what is the point of life and what should I be living for and so forth, all of those kinds of big questions get solved immediately, or at least can be answered biblically when you change the word 'what' to 'who.' All of the deep questions in life are actually 'who' questions, not 'what' questions. This is a big problem for certain people who tend not to think relationally. But all of the deep questions are not 'what' questions, they're 'who' questions. And so it's not like, 'What should I be living for?' It's, 'Who should I be living for?' And, 'What is the purpose of life?' It's, 'Who is the purpose of life, and so on and so forth. It's not even like, what do I want to accomplish? It's like, who do I want to become? Translate— transfer all your whats to whos, like all your big ones, and you're going to make so much more progress. You're going to start thinking more biblically. So righteousness is right withness. That's what Jesus is commending when he says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. He's not saying blessed are those who hunger and thirst to adhere to a a moral code off here somewhere. He's not saying blessed are those who hunger and thirst to obey a set of arbitrary decrees. What he's saying is blessed are those who hunger and thirst to be right with God.
7 · The pastor grounds the 'right-withness' thesis in Old Testament theology, arguing that the relational dimension of righteousness pervades Scripture — from the Ten Commandments to the summary of the law to Micah 6:8
And the Old Testament understanding of righteousness was always something like that. It always had a deeply relational embedding. One commentator writes, the meaning here of Matthew 5:6, the meaning here will be that their one desire is for a relationship of obedience and trust with God. The ultimate satisfaction of a relationship with God unclouded by disobedience is chiefly in view. So we need to start asking who questions here and understand that Euthyphro's dilemma in many respects is a byproduct of sort of a pagan conception of God. We don't have that kind of God. We don't have a God who can be subject to other things. We don't have a God that's just like a person but with superpowers, which is what a pagan god is. We have a God before all things, an eternal God, the great I Am. So what Jesus is telling us to do here is to hunger and thirst after a right relationship with God. Now What does this mean for us? It's a simple idea, but what does this mean for us? I mean, honestly, I'm giving you 6, I could give you 60. This is pivotal. For instance, off the notes, Ten Commandments, what's going on there? It's a tablet of right withness. The first 5 are right with God. The second 5 are right with man so as to be right with God. Why does the summary of the law express itself in so relational terms when the law is so profoundly about, you know, all of these details and statutes and so forth? Why does Jesus say that the summary of the law is to love God with your whole being and to love your neighbor as yourself? Because fundamentally, righteousness is right withness. Why does God say, what does the Lord require of you, a man? What does the Lord require? To do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with your God. It's always the terminus, the focus, the end result of all forms of righteousness is right with this. The universe is fundamentally relational because it was created by a fundamentally relational being, the triune God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
8 · The pastor uses a cultural maxim — 'it's not what you know, it's who you know' — to illustrate that reality itself is relational because it was created by a relational God
When I was a kid, adults weren't afraid to tell you, 'It's not what you know, it's who you knew.' No, it was a legitimate life hack, not a cynical appeal to power, but it's simply like, get to know people. And the reason why that's the way the world actually works, it's not what you know, it's who you know, is because It was designed by a person. Reality is fundamentally relational. Epistemology, if you're interested in that sort of thing, is fundamentally relational. You will know me and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. I am the truth, the way, and the life.
9 · The pastor signals a structural shift from establishing the thesis to exploring its implications
So there are massive implications to this, this simple reminder. And this is why I said at the beginning, this— I'm not teaching you anything right now. If you have been born again, this stuff is actually already happening, perhaps certainly non-verbally and not the way I would say it. This stuff's happening in your life. It's just pretty amazing. But let's talk about some implications of, okay, we're understanding righteousness first and foremost as right withness. There are other questions we ask about righteousness, and I'll try to answer a few of those as we proceed. But we're not asking the first one, which is, what is it? We sometimes ask, for instance, what kind is it? Is it practical or positional? It's like, well, first let's decide what is it. What is righteousness? Righteousness is right withness. What does this do for us? What are the implications? 6 implications.
10 · The first implication: understanding righteousness as right-withness transforms our view of God
First one, it really transforms our understanding of God. So if we were living in sort of a Euthyphrian kind of world where God is an adherent to a separate moral law, then we would have a sort of Mormon view of God that says something like this: God is the most successful adherent to the transcendent moral law. So God is sort of like a former champion who has become a coach. He won. He won the Olympics of morality. He did really well. In fact, he scored a perfect score. And so now God has come to help us compete in the moral Olympics so that we can win too, right? That's one view of God. That's not the biblical view of God. But what is this right-witness as righteousness and righteousness as right-witness? What does that do for us? It tells us that's not what's going on here. That's not who God is. It also tells us that God is not merely a moral tyrant handing down divine fiats simply to flex his power. So this right-withness idea tells us some things about who God is not, but it amazingly tells us something about who God is. If right-withness is righteousness, then when God calls us to that, we can see something quite surprising and unexpected emerge, namely that God is interested in being in a relationship with us, and he's telling us how to be right with him so that we can be in a relationship with him, which is a really profound thing to say about the creator of the universe, that he is telling us how to be in relationship with him. It's kind of amazing and kind of alarming. I think that you can understand why some people would just prefer the volcano god. It's a simple deal. Now this one you've got, as expressed, for instance, in Revelation 3, 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone opens the door, I will come in with him and eat with him and he with me.' This is a God who wants to get to know you. Well, that's a little troublesome. It's beautiful. It's also unnerving. But that's what we see. That's one of the implications we arrive to when we conclude that righteousness and right withness are sort of the same thing. You realize that God has his eyes set on you and that he wants you to be in his family and he wants you to be his son or his daughter and that he wants to dwell with you and he wants to feast with you and he wants to go to work with you and he wants to go home with you and he wants to talk with you. And he wants to take you on an adventure. That's the God of the Bible.
11 · The pastor reinforces the relational nature of God's purpose by tracing the biblical narrative from Eden to the New Jerusalem
Jeremiah 32:38, and they shall be my people and I will be their God. Where does the Bible begin? God walking amongst his people. Where does the Bible end? God walking amongst his people. The whole point is he is seeking worshipers who worship him in spirit and truth. He's seeking sons and daughters. Okay, absolutely amazing. And so one of the implications of Matthew 5:6 is simply Jesus is saying this: you are blessed if you want that back. That is not a guarantee. That is actually a miracle. Maybe we can talk about that as we proceed. I don't have plans to, but maybe we'll get there. It's really quite a miracle that we would want that back. But if you're in Christ, I want to assure you that you do. I want to assure you that you do, because I'm going to poke at you in a minute. I don't want you to be overly hurt by it. If you're in Christ, I want you to know, like, this is happening. At some level. Okay, so that's one implication.
12 · The second implication addresses the theological distinction between positional and practical righteousness
Second one— well, I doubt when anyone was reading Matthew 5:6 the last time you read it, anyone was like, oh, this reminds me of Euthyphro. But I bet you that a lot of people who are, you know, just kind of legitimate Christians who've been walking with God for a while might have read that, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and known about the distinction in theology between positional righteousness and practical righteousness, and might have read this and thought, well, which is Jesus talking about here? Is he talking about positional righteousness or practical righteousness? Let me explain those. This is pretty relevant to just your Christian life in general. By practical— positional righteousness, we mean the this one-time unbreakable thing, this covenantal thing that God does when he saves you. And theologians often refer to this as your union with Christ, your connection to Christ. This is sort of like signing the adoption papers, but it's much deeper than that because he actually kind of makes you— it gives you a new nature. You're not just adopted in the legal sense. You're really transformed into a partaker of the divine nature, is how Peter would talk about it. So that's positional stuff, like God imputes the righteousness of Jesus to your account so that you stand before him not only completely justified but full of the righteousness of Christ accounted to you on your behalf. And then there is Practical righteousness, which is sort of like how you're living out your Christian life. It's sort of like God just gave you a big grace account. What are you doing with it?
13 · The pastor uses the marriage analogy to illustrate the distinction between positional and practical righteousness
Now, these issues are very important for Christians to understand as a way of diagnosing what's going on in their lives and sort of figuring out when things aren't working, why. Very often, as a Christian walks in disobedience and indifference to God, he will begin to doubt the reality of his salvation, the reality of his adoption, the reality of his positional place before God. And the truth is, is that there's a whole other dynamic in any relationship. There's a legal dynamic, a commitment, a promise, and then there's just sort of like, how are you treating the other person? This is very important as a Christian to understand this, and I think the best way to talk about it would just be to talk about marriage. Marriage is a covenantal relationship. Your relationship with God is a covenantal relationship. It's a better one, but they're both covenantal in nature. And the first idea of a covenant is that it's a promise and it's a commitment and it's not going to be broken. So that's the first layer of a relationship is just this. You have it, it's yours. So Jesus would say, 'No one's gonna snatch you out of my hand.' Christ is mine forevermore. You have it, that's your practical, your positional, your legal status in God is associated with this idea that Jesus's righteousness has been applied to you. And yet we understand that even in a marriage, well, especially in a marriage, you've got this thing and you could just have two people who are just simply not going to get divorced, ain't gonna happen. Fine, but what is the dynamic of their relationship?
14 · The pastor warns against over-emphasizing positional righteousness at the expense of practical righteousness
Well, that is not entirely disconnected from the commitment made. In fact, it's dependent on it, but it's also its own thing and its own reality. My concern in all of our gospel-centeredness, my concern is that we would do something like what Lewis describes in Abolition of Man. He's talking about something completely different, but he says— the quote is, 'In an act of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function.' And the reason that came to mind is I would be worried if we keep telling people constantly, because of your legal position in Christ, because of your positional righteousness— God is completely happy with you and it's all great. Because if we're doing that, we're removing the organ of a desire to have harmony and enjoyment and personal fellowship with God. We're removing the organ, but we're still demanding the function. And so one of the things to think about in all this is no matter whether we're talking about positional righteousness or practical righteousness, What is the point of both? Is the point of either for you to not feel bad about yourself? No, the point is to be with God. They're just doing two different things together to get you there. One is to put you in relationship with God, and one is to make you enjoy that relationship. I suppose you could even say to make God enjoy that relationship. Paul says figure out what pleases the Lord and do it.
15 · The third implication addresses the problem of false conversion
So one of the things we get from this right-withness understanding of righteousness is that that's actually upstream from our questions about practical and positional, because what we find out is, is that all righteousness is, always is, it's just relating with God. Now, third thing, this right-withness thing can help us to understand that grace has never been the problem in false conversion. Sometimes we talk about cheap grace versus real grace, and I'm always like, I mean, cheap is free, free is cheap, doesn't get any cheaper than free. I don't love that language, although some people I respect use it and I can see why. But the thing is, is grace has never been the issue. It wasn't the quality of the grace that made a successful convert or a fake convert. Here's what it was all along: a false convert wants grace in order to wipe his slate clean so that he can get on with his life apart from God. A true convert wants grace to wipe his slate clean so that he can get on with his life with God. The desire for relationship, the desire for God himself, is the distinction between a true and false convert.
16 · The pastor elaborates on the inevitability of false conversion and the pastoral complexity involved
You can take the gospel— your flesh can do this very easily, as we'll see in a moment— your flesh can just take the gospel and say, well, this is just what I needed to feel less bad about myself, and then I can get on living for myself again. There's no way of avoiding false conversion. Two of the primary parables concerning evangelism, the casting the nets and the sowing of the seeds with the tares, both involve just sort of the inevitability that when the gospel is proclaimed, you will get false converts. And that's up for God to sort out because there is a miracle needed in addition to the proclamation of the gospel A miracle needed to cause an individual to hear that and say, 'I want to be right with God.' And friends, that is not always something that someone's going to be able to articulate. And it is very rarely ever the only motivation going on. It's messy, it's complicated. But what's really happening— just wanted to be clear about this— what's really happening in true and false conversion is one is converted to desire God and the other isn't. It's not a grace issue.
17 · The pastor identifies the first pastoral error: mystical piety that uses relational language to dismiss the importance of moral law and holiness
Now I want to talk about these two kind of issues I see arise pastorally that I hope can help you related to this idea of rightfulness. And the one is what I would call the error of mystical piety. There are some people who hear what I'm saying and think, well, yes, that's right, Chris, it's really about relationships, it's not about rules. False, false. There are some people who would think that all of this talk about relationship means that we have somehow transcended the need for rules and that good old-fashioned holiness is no longer the goal. I wouldn't want you to think that. God is not your buddy. The relationship he wants with you is not a buddy relationship. He wants you to be his worshiper. He wants to be your God. It is a relationship, but not the kind you would make a summer road trip comedy about. Kevin DeYoung was deeply burdened for this issue probably 10-15 years ago and wrote an excellent book I wish everyone would read called A Hole in Our Holiness. Filling the Gap Between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness.
18 · The pastor quotes Kevin DeYoung at length to establish that biblical commands are not opposed to relationship but serve to protect and define it
So he writes— just want to expose you to two things, two thoughts that he said. First of all, he writes this: it sounds really spiritual to say God is interested in a relationship, not in rules, but it's not biblical. From top to bottom, the Bible is full of commands. They aren't meant to stifle a relationship with God, but to protect it, to seal it, to define it. Never forget, first God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, then he gave them the law. Hear that? First God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, then he gave them the law. God's people were not redeemed by observing the law, but they were redeemed so that they might obey the law. In another place, we usually think of law leading us to gospel, and this is true. We see God's standards, see our sin, and then see our need for a Savior. But it's just as true that gospel leads to law. In Exodus, first God delivered his people from Egypt, then he gave the Ten Commandments. In Romans, Paul expounds on the sovereign free grace and the atoning work of Christ in chapters 1 through 11. Then in chapters 12 through 16, he shows us how to live in light of these mercies.
19 · The pastor applies the correction to the mystical piety error by affirming the ongoing importance of God's moral law
So all of this emphasis on relationship does not remove the idea or the biblical category of the righteous law or the righteous rules of God or so on and so forth. We haven't moved beyond that. If you would just keep reading in the Sermon on the Mount, you would see Jesus say, whoever relaxes the least of these will be considered least in the kingdom of God. The truth is, is that God is giving you these rules for a reason, so that you can enjoy communion with him. He's not giving you those rules so that you can establish a union with him. He's not giving those rules so that you can be justified in his eyes. He's giving you those rules in the same way that any healthy marriage would have some rules. And any marriage that doesn't have some rules is not a healthy marriage. You know, I find often like this would be really helpful if anyone winds up sort of resenting this idea that God gives us all these rules. It's like, I guarantee you, you would leave your spouse for less than what you have done to God. And He actually cares about what you do, and He wants to be right with you. And those rules are as useful as rules in marriage are as a means of saying, 'Hey, let's be right with each other.' So we don't want to diminish the role of rules, but we do want to elevate the point. And the point is, what God's doing is he's just seeking a relationship with you.
20 · The pastor introduces the fifth implication — the error of moral self-improvement — through personal testimony and an Arnold Schwarzenegger analogy
The fifth issue is simply this, something kind of on the opposite side, I suppose, in some respects, and it's somewhat related to Euthyphro. And this one is, you know, the other ones, they're all deeply personal, but this one had specific memories of walking in this error. The error of moral self-improvement. The error of moral self-improvement. So I was laying in bed when I was 18. I still remember this because I think it just felt so heavy on my heart, so urgent. Laying in bed, college, 18, and I cried out to God, God, set everything that's wrong in me right. I cried out Psalm 139, search me, O Lord, and know me and see if there is any unclean way in me. And I very sincerely felt a desire to live a fully moral life. And yet I believe now that as God heard that prayer and saw my heart, what he observed was not mostly a young man hungry for him but a young man hungry for righteousness in a misunderstood form. Not necessarily apart from him, but definitely not for him either. I wouldn't have recognized that in myself at the time, but years later I read Well, there's a guy version of this joke and a church version of this joke. I'd love to tell the guy version, but Arnold Schwarzenegger describes kind of the early part of his career and, well, before he had a career, actually. And he would stand naked in front of the mirror for hours looking for any flaw that he could fix. And then he would go into the gym. And work and work and work and work to get rid of that particular flaw. And I think, you know, well, yet again, Chris Oswald and Arnold Schwarzenegger have a lot in common. The truth is we were both in some respects young men in love with the ideal version of ourselves. His physical, mind, moral, but the same really. A hunger for righteousness that wasn't a hunger for right withness with God.
21 · The pastor diagnoses the error of moral self-improvement: treating righteousness as a depersonalized standard to achieve for self-glory rather than for communion with God
Uh, think of it this way, a hunger for righteousness that if God had granted it would've made me immediately not poor in spirit. So I'd be basically checking the Beatitudes off like a, a list, right? It's like, okay, I got that one. Now I can stop being that one. And I can do this one, I can stop being that one. It's like, that's not what God's about. So there is a kind of error associated with this idea that there is some standard of righteousness that exists apart from God, and that we're all sort of just trying to get our lives in line with the right. But the right becomes super depersonalized from the right one. And the one we're trying to get right with is ourselves and our own conscience and our own sense of potential and our own hope for our own lives and the way we look at ourselves in the mirror naked morally, you know, like it becomes all about us. And the person we're trying to get right with is our own standards for ourselves and our own hopes for ourselves and so on and so forth. And I would feel super embarrassed to tell you that if it weren't for the fact that for decades now I have sat across in counseling conversations mainly from Christians who on the surface seem to be very hungry and thirsty for righteousness, and they are usually obsessed with the presence of some sin or the absence of some duty Do you ever go through that phase, like in your early 20s, where you're just like, man, if I could just read my Bible every day, I would just be— I would be like king of godliness. It's like you listen to people and they sound very hungry and thirsty for righteousness, and then you start asking some questions and you begin to realize that they are not actually hungry for God. They're hungry to be like God in an Eve Eden kind of way, not a Romans 8:28 kind of way. You listen to them and you feel for them because you've been there. It's like all of your moral indignation, all of your fierce rights and wrongs all of your craving for to know the truth, to be right, and so forth. If you could flip a switch, because this is the real challenge of youth, if you could flip a switch and suddenly make all of that for the glory of God and not the glory of you, you'd be amazing. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of times it takes like 15 years and 20 pounds of body fat to find the switch. And praise God that he's a good father, because he listened to that 18-year-old man's prayer with confidence that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to the day of completion.
22 · The pastor applies the diagnosis of moral self-improvement directly to the congregation
You would think this Euthyphro thing is just like some kind of academic nonsense, but the categories are actually things that happen in our lives. And pretty quickly, without our realizing it, the standard of rightness, completely apart from God, becomes our religion. Not God achieving the standard of rightness. And if this goes on for long enough, we make a god in our own image. And then we have sort of explanations for all sorts of things. I mean, we have explanations for deconstruction there. We have explanations for the problem of evil there. We have the explanations for nominal Christianity there. So there's all sorts of stuff you could think about there. But I just say it this way, friends, if you're there, I just, I want you to not get overly discouraged and think that the whole thing is hollow. But you are walking in the flesh. And if you're hungering and thirsting for a righteousness that will bring glory to you, I can just tell you, you will not be satisfied. And if you're wondering, like, why isn't this thing going away, I think I'd give you two answers. Keto? No, uh, I'd give you two answers. One, like, look at some practical things, like make sure you're actually, like, doing practical smart things with your life. But the second one is, is, dude, like, why do you even want to be holier? So you look better in the mirror. God's not going to bless that.
23 · The sixth and final implication is introduced: if righteousness is fundamentally about right-withness, then heaven — the consummation of that right-withness — will be staggeringly glorious
Okay, so that's number 5. And then number 6, and we're going to be done pretty early. The 6th implication is simply this: heaven is going to be amazing if the whole point of righteousness and everything— because God talks about it a lot— and if everything God's showing and telling us everything God's commanding, if the whole thing he's doing the whole time is to find and create worshipers who will worship him in spirit and truth, to bring many sons and daughters to glory, if God is this relational, if he is this about being right with you and you being right with him, oh my goodness, it's just, it's just unbelievable. It's hard to conceive. It's my job to figure out how to help you think about things that are hard to think about. So let me try.
24 · The pastor uses a series of personal, physical illustrations — exhaustion, hunger, chronic pain — to describe the phenomenon of normalized deprivation
Did you ever work really hard all day and then sit down, and then when you sat down you realize, I'm really tired? This happens to me fairly often. Have you ever laid down in bed and thought, oh my goodness, I cannot believe how good this feels. Did you ever fail to recognize that you were hungry until you smelled food? You haven't eaten in a while, you're actually hungry, just didn't know it. What I'm trying to describe are feelings associated with being awakened to a sense of deprivation that had become normalized in your life. You sort of like, if somehow God got rid of all of my chronic pain, I just wouldn't know what to do. It'd just be so weird. I've just gotten used to it. It's just normal for me. It'd kill a lesser man, but I'm okay. This is what I want you to think about. This sense where you start carrying things and those things are just the way things are, and you don't know how heavy and hard or deprived you are experiencing until suddenly that thing is gone.
25 · The pastor makes the climactic pastoral claim: believers miss God more than they know
You miss God more than you know. When he saved you, He put His Spirit inside of you, and deep calls out to deep. You don't know it now, and your flesh is really annoying and making things more complicated than we would like, but you really do miss God. If you're in Christ and His righteousness has been applied to you and He's made you a new creation, then you actually do hunger and thirst for him. Your flesh is throwing up all of these flares and using the language of the Bible— how dare it— to make an idol out of righteousness. It happens, my friends, that you're going to get to heaven one day.
26 · The pastor reads Revelation 21:3-4 as the climactic biblical vision of God dwelling with His people
Let's— let me just read Proverbs— or Revelation 21:3. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.' This is what he was after. Behold, the dwelling place— the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with him. This is just Jeremiah again in Revelation. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, And God will be with— God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
27 · The pastor offers a pastoral interpretation of Revelation 21:4: some of the tears God wipes away will be tears of recognition — believers will finally realize how deeply they longed for God all along
I think I need you to just trust me when I say that when he wipes the tears away Some significant percentage of those tears will be, oh my goodness, I cannot believe how much I missed you. I cannot believe how much I really just did want to dwell with you, and I just wanted you to be my God, and I wanted to be your son, I wanted to be your daughter. I Friends, heaven is the ultimate fulfillment of God's ultimate revealed desire to glorify himself by being a father and bringing many sons and daughters to glory. That's where we're headed. So when Jesus says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for right withness, for they will be satisfied I think the only way that satisfaction reaches what we really need it to be is in the new heavens and the new earth.
28 · The pastor concludes by transitioning to communion, presenting the Lord's Supper as a symbol that sustains believers until the wedding feast of the Lamb
So communion, we go to 1 Corinthians 11, and one of the things we rarely talk about with communion is just the way this is meant to to hold us until the wedding feast. I meant to hold us over in some respects until the wedding feast. I received from the Lord, Paul writes, what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it. In remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. And we say, come, Lord Jesus. The very most important desire of our lives is the desire to be with him, to walk with him, to dwell with him. And that is, if you're going to ask God to do one thing for you today. It'd be like, God, make me more aware of my— and give me a greater desire to be with you, to be right with you. And help me to see how everything you're doing is about that in my life. Everything you've done on the cross, everything you've done, period, is about that. That they will be my people and I will be their God. So if you're a follower of Jesus, would you come and be refreshed and encouraged by this symbol, this reminder of what the Lord is doing? He's bringing you home. He will bring you home.