1 - Introduction - Living like a real Christian 5 - Blessed are those who hunger and thirst | Page 3

Monday
Reading: Matthew 5 v 6 / Isaiah 14
We come now to the issue that is presented to us in Matthew 5 v 6, the issue of what it
means to “hunger and thirst for righteousness”. At the outset let me state the obvious:
hunger and thirst are completely natural phenomena. In the physical realm, from the
moment you are born and cut off from your mother you begin to hunger and thirst. I am
always intrigued when I watch national geographic documentaries to notice that the first
thing a young animal does after its birth is look to its mother for something to eat. You see
it’s perfectly normal, in fact if you weren’t hungry we’d wonder if you were even alive! The
problem as we see it in the context of which Jesus is speaking, is not the problem of hunger,
but the problem is what we hunger and thirst for. Primarily there are three aspects of
perverted hunger which I would like to deal with over the next couple of days.
The first one is the perverted hunger for POWER. In Isaiah 14, Lucifer, who was God’s
finest angel and was in fact the worship leader to God’s holy choir. One day he looked at
himself and he was overawed by the power that he had been given. He spoke of himself in
the passage and you will notice that the common denominator is the word “I”. He says “I will
ascend into heaven. I will exalt myself above the stars of God. I will sit on the mount of the
congregation of the righteous. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the
most High God.” The most common word in the vocabulary of power hungry people is most
definitely “I”.
Whenever we read in the Bible about someone who wants to elevate himself we always
read of a subsequent downfall. The book of proverbs is full of warnings about people who
live for the big “I”. If you study human conversations you will notice that many
conversations cannot go long until the person begins to speak about himself. That is
because, to them, they are the most important people and even if they will not acknowledge
that you can see that, it is very obvious in their behaviour. King Saul was one such person.
When David came onto the scene and was beginning to make an impression on the people
of the nation of Israel, Saul became threatened by his growing popularity and it all came to a
climax one day when on returning from battle Saul heard the words of the song the women
had written, “Saul has killed his thousands, but David has killed his tens of thousands” (1
Samuel 18 v 7). This was a slap in the face of Saul’s ego and it was then that he began his
vendetta against David to kill him because he would not have one in his team who would
threaten the big “I”.
When it comes to the realm of leadership, my suggestion is never to follow too seriously the
person who leads from the position of power, where his power is based simply upon the
position that he holds. His position will tell him that he is the boss and therefore has the
right to tell everyone what to do. That form of leadership only lasts for as long as that
person can hold onto that position, as soon as he loses that position he loses with it his