February 26, 2017 – Much Love, Rose

4th-beatitude-3

Hello Friends ~

Today we will look at the 4th Beatitude which is ~

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.

4th-beatitude-1

So one way to distinguish between being righteous and being holy is to say that we are righteous, and are becoming holy. We are righteous through faith in Christ, and we are becoming holy as we grow in faith in Christ. We have been declared righteous because of something that happened outside us: Christ died for our sins. This is God’s work for us. We are not contributing anything to that. We just receive God’s blessing of righteousness when we believe. We are becoming holy because something is happening in us: we are becoming more and more like Christ. This is the work of God in us. It is still God’s work, but we are fully involved, we are living it out.

We may thirst for things to be made right, for those who hate us not to hate us, for those we dislike to grow on us, for reconciliation, for the end of poverty and greed, for the end of division and grief. We may thirst to no longer feel compelled to compare ourselves with others, which fosters the death of both pride and shame, the dissolution of fear and the resolution of all conflict.

Jesus says on the Sermon on the Mount, “blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,” and it is this righteousness, the justice of God revealed in the person of Christ himself, to which he refers. It is a righteousness that not only reveals God to be just, but which justifies those who are in Christ, gradually makes them righteous, and the goodness and peace and justice of God spreads throughout the world, like a mustard seed that grows into a great tree. Being made righteous according to Paul in his epistle to the Romans is therefore the fruit of conversion, a real and living change in one’s heart and behaviors that results in being united to Christ — being in Christ —