Blessed are the Righteous | Nathan Cook

Welcome to the podcast of Christ Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee.

Join us as we dive into this week's sermon that challenges our hearts and minds to grow closer to Christ.

We pray that your heart is inspired and transformed by God's Word.

I'm going to ask you guys just for a minute to remain standing as we read our gospel message this morning.

This is from Matthew chapter 5, beginning in verse 1.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him, and he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

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

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

You may be seated.

One, I really love this verse, but when when I heard that this was kind of my assigned text for the day, it was like God just like deposited this sermon in my mind.

I was like, I'm not even gonna have to prepare.

Like I've I've got the whole sermon.

And then a week later, I realized I've got I'm I realized I'm remembering my own sermon.

I I've already preached on this text.

And I've preached on this text in this room, and and you guys probably don't remember it because I didn't really remember it.

But I went back and I listened to my own sermon to make sure that I didn't just say the exact same things today as I did a year and a half ago.

It was really good, guys.

Like if if if it doesn't hit this morning, November 2024, look it up.

It's my backup plan.

Okay, you can listen to that message because it was really good.

I cried.

I don't know how you, you know, I teared up when I heard the sermon, but it is one of my favorite passages of scripture.

And so it is a delight to be able to preach on this message again.

And hopefully, I have a few other insights that we can add to.

But this is this is part two of hungering and thirsting for righteousness today.

So in the scripture, Jesus teaches us to hunger.

Hunger is a desire, and desires can be cultivated in our lives through experience and memory.

So when we experience something that is good and we remember it, we desire to have that experience again.

Okay, and so in here, Jesus is teaching us to cultivate a hunger and thirst for righteousness.

And so when I was growing up as a kid, we spent most of our vacation time not going to the beach or to the mountains to ski or to those things.

We went to Dadeville, Alabama, which is where, oh, I heard a woo.

Is anybody somebody on Lake Martin maybe have a lake house down there?

Oh, got a handbook there.

Okay.

So there are, all right.

Yes, there are a few Dayville people in here.

Okay, so that's where my grandmother lived.

And my mom grew up on a farm in Dadeville, Alabama.

And so it was kind of like reliving farm life in some ways.

But one of my favorite things of going to my grandmother's house was the food.

She was an amazing cook.

And so at seven o'clock every morning, we would get up to have breakfast.

Now, as a kid, I didn't love getting up at seven o'clock, but I did love the breakfast, right?

So we would have eggs and bacon and sausage, two meats, and we would have grits, and there were like various cheeses and biscuits or toast, and then lots of different jams that my mom, my grandmother had made, either fig preserves or pear preserves or blackberry jam.

And it was our role as the kids to go out and pick the pears or the figs or the blackberries and bring them into the house so that my grandmother could fix all these preserves for us.

And they were delicious.

And then for lunch, we would have turkey and ham and usually collard greens and this squash uh casserole that we still make.

This is one of our favorite meals.

And then I don't know that I've had this anywhere else, but pickled carrots.

Any of you do pickled carrots that were kind of sweet and sour, they were delicious.

One of my favorite things about going to my grandmother's was that we were going to get pickled carrots.

Okay.

And so this isn't, I'm not describing Thanksgiving meal.

This is every, you know, just a regular Tuesday at grandma's, you know, this amazing food.

And man, it was satisfying.

And we would have fellowship as a family around the table, and we would eat this delicious food.

And so memories of going to my grandmother's were were memories of being filled with the delight of grandmom's cooking.

And so I learned to hunger for food.

This wasn't hungering for righteousness, but God used those positive experiences in my life to cultivate a hunger, to cultivate a hunger for food, to cultivate a hunger for relationship with my family through those times.

And so hunger, that's what God is telling us.

What Jesus is telling us in this passage is that we are to cultivate a hunger for his righteousness.

And so, what is righteousness?

Well, righteousness, it's basic, most simplest way of understanding it is it's God's will.

And Jesus is our example of what it means to seek righteousness.

So Jesus in uh John 4, 34, he says this Jesus says, My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.

That's what satisfied Jesus was to do the will of the Father.

And that is what is to satisfy us.

John Wesley defines righteousness this way.

He says, Righteousness is the image of God, the mind which was in Christ Jesus.

It is every holy and heavenly temper in one, springing from as well as terminating in the love of God as our Father and Redeemer in the love of all men for his sake.

And so John Wesley summarizes the understanding of righteousness as this idea of holy love, a love of God and the love of man.

And in fact, it is it is holiness, it is the character of God Himself that God wants us to internalize and then to reflect back into the world.

So, so righteousness is both our standing, it's it's being in right relationship with God, it's being in right relationship with one another, but it is also these virtues and character characteristics of God that he wants us to live in society.

And Matthew teaches us that as we live righteous lives, we become salt and light in the world, right?

We are light that exposes the darkness of the culture around us, that we are salt that preserves the goodness.

He also talks about us being leaven, like leaven that that helps culture to rise to meet God.

And so we are to hunger and thirst for righteousness.

And he goes on, Matthew goes on to teach us in this Sermon on the Mount more specifically what is righteousness?

What does it look like?

And in fact, like as we go on and read the rest of the Beatitudes, he begins to define more specifically these different aspects of righteousness.

So the next Beatitude is about mercy.

And so mercy, being merciful people, is an aspect of what it means to be righteous in this world.

That God wants us to be merciful.

And so Jesus will go on and teach in the Sermon on the Mount of like, what exactly does that look like?

Well, one of the ways it looks like he gives this analogy of that before you take a speck out of someone else's eye, to take this log out of your own eye.

And so he's saying, like, don't be judgmental when someone else sins.

First, recognize and confess your own sin and repent of it and receive my forgiveness.

And then when you see someone else sinning, that you can approach them with mercy instead of with judgment, that you can be merciful and kind in helping them to overcome the struggles that they're experiencing their life because you have experienced God's grace in your own life.

He explains too that in the Beatitude after that, I'm sorry I'm taking everybody's sermons for the next couple of weeks, but the next one is about purity, being pure of heart, right?

And Jesus will go on to talk about adultery and lust, and that it's not enough just to obey God's commands, but that we're to internalize them.

So not only are we not to commit adultery, but that we're not even to commit lust, and that we're that our minds and our hearts need to be right before God, not just our actions.

And so he's showing us these deeper, deeper levels of like how God wants righteousness to penetrate not only our actions, but even the deepest desires of our heart.

And then he'll go on to teach in the next uh Beatitude about being peace, peacekeepers.

And Jesus will teach on that message as well.

He says that you are to love your enemies and to pray for those who persecute you.

And so, in all of these different ways, like what we see in these patterns is that righteousness begins in our heart, a condition of our heart, right?

And then it's to flow outward into the world and that we're to express God's righteousness in our relationships with those that are around us, that that's what righteousness looks like.

And Jesus is teaching us to hunger and thirst for righteousness.

And so I remember going on a mission trip where I, this is the first time that like I remember consciously thinking, oh, this is at least a part of what it really looks like to hunger for righteousness, is that we had a is just Diane Long and I went to Liberia to work with Dr.

Chris Henna.

Chris is a Liberian woman who grew up outside of Monrovia and has started a clinic there to help her friends and neighbors and families and people in the community to provide affordable health care.

And we were going to support her and to help her.

And uh one of the things that I noticed when I was in Liberia is that like it is just very poor.

Like there's poverty that was kind of everywhere.

But in addition to the poverty, one of the really positive things was like it was this rich, abundant, fruitful land.

And so, like in Chris's yard around her house, like she had all kinds of fruit trees.

She had a papaya tree and a mango tree and these pineapples that kind of grew.

And, you know, I try to garden.

I plant things, you know, I don't really get much out of the harvest.

I'm not a great gardener.

Like it's there's a lot of work that goes into, I mean, you have to weed, you really do have to like weed and like, you know, put water on stuff.

And like, you know, it's it takes discipline and I'm just not that great at it.

And I was looking at her garden, I was like, Chris, you've got to be like an incredibly disciplined person to like grow all this fruit.

She's like, no, not really.

She's like, I was like, well, how did you grow all this stuff?

She's like, well, you just put a seed there and it grows.

And I was like, well, you don't like have to fertilize the the soil or like pour water on it.

She's like, no, like it's the the the land is just really fertile and the conditions are just natural, like things just grow here.

And I was like, wow, that's that's unbelievable.

You know, that's that's amazing.

And so, like, you're we're living in this rich, abundant, fruitful land that God has blessed, and yet there's all this poverty.

And so, like, this question the whole time we're there is just like stirring me like, why is there so much poverty here?

And so, Chris also, one of the things that's amazing about her is she she like knows everybody in Liberia.

Like, Liberia is a small country, and they're not nearly as many people that live in Liberia as live in the United States, but it's like everybody knows Dr.

Chris.

And like she Chris was like served as the as the physician for the former president of the country.

And while we were there, she took us to to meet the the former mayor of Monrovia and had a conversation.

And again, like as we were talking, like I was asking, because I'm still thinking about like this poverty problem here, and so I'm thinking about their economics.

Now I know this is a long story, and just bear with me for a minute.

This is gonna have good payoff at the end, I hope.

But so we're talking to the mayor, and the mayor's telling us this story about how there was a wealthy businessman who had come to Liberia and he wanted to buy cassava.

Okay, cassava is this like tuber plant, it's like a potato, it's really rich in starch, and that you can take cassava and you can chop it up and dry it, and it stores the starch in there.

You're like, what is this science thing coming in?

But you can store starch, and then you can use that to convert it to industrial starch, and then you can use industrial starch basically to create all kinds of different products that are instead of using a petroleum base to make it, you can use this plant starch base.

And so, like, there are all kinds of things like paint that's made out of petroleum that can be made out of plant starch, and there are actually different kinds of pharmaceuticals, that there are just all these different things that can be made out of industrial starch from plants.

And so we go on to learn that that in addition, like there's this huge demand.

So the the businessman was asking the mayor and one of these kind of farmers, like, he's like, How much cassava, like how many of these containers, like a container, like one of those 40-foot shipping containers, right?

How many of these containers can you sell me per month?

And they were saying, Oh, maybe one or two a month, probably.

And he's like, No, no, no, no, no, no.

I need hundreds of containers a month.

You see, like I'm coming to you because you're, you know, Monrovia is on the port, like has a port city, and like you can just, it's really cheap just to ship out of there.

And like that, that's that's a part of why I'm coming.

Like, I need hundreds.

And so what they had done is like they had actually built a manufacturing plant outside of Monrovia to process this cassava, and so they could get thousands of farmers to bring their cassava in to be manufactured and begin the process of creating into industrial starch because apparently this is a huge, there's a huge global demand for this industrial starch, and Liberia is kind of like perfectly positioned to take advantage of it.

And now I'm even more like enraged, like, why is there so much poverty?

Like, there is this huge economic demand.

You have all that you need to process and to meet that demand.

I still can't get it.

And so I'm asking Chris, I'm like, Chris, what's going on?

Why is there so much poverty?

And so she begins to explain to me.

She's like, Well, the port that the mayor mentioned, like, there are people that are at the port that like they the only way you can ship things into and out of the country is by paying a bribe.

And the the bribe is is pretty high.

And then this industrial plant that we're talking about, like, the problem with that is that it's not actually like converting any cassava to starch.

Like the plant's never opened.

This has been a project that's been going on for years, and we can't get the project done because there are government officials that are taking the money that is intended for finishing this plant, and they're spending it on themselves.

And then in fact, there's another problem that's going on, and that even the farmers can't get along because the the farmers like they're stealing crops from one another.

And so they can't even get the crops to the plant, even if the plant was working to get it to the shipping yard because there's corruption among the farmers.

And I was like, okay, all right, that I there's still one more question, Chris.

Like, before I came, I did my research on Liberia.

And what I read was that 90% of the people in Liberia are Christians.

And so explain to me what is going on.

Why are there these such high rates of corruption?

And she's like, Nathan, even in the churches, the pastors are taking the tithe that is intended to be redistributed to the poor, and they're spending it on themselves.

And so they're living in nicer, in nicer houses, but the poor are continuing to suffer.

We are Christians in name only.

We do not have the righteousness of Christ.

I left Liberia as depressed as I've ever been in my life.

It's true.

And I I realized in my depression, what was happening is that I was hungering and thirsting for righteousness.

Because I realized like this isn't just happening in Liberia.

This is happening in the United States.

This is happening all over the world.

That sin and greed and corruption has so penetrated our hearts that it affects our society.

That we're poor because we don't share what we have.

We're living for ourselves, we're pursuing our our own best interests to the exclusion of others.

And man, I was depressed.

But then in God began to kind of speak to me, and he helped me to realize he's like, Nathan, you know already how to fix this problem.

And it's it's not through advocating for better political policies, although that might be helpful at times.

It's through discipleship.

What the world needs more than anything else is the righteousness of Christ.

And God's plan is to get his righteousness into the world through us, through the people in this room, through those who follow Christ.

So this is what it looks like.

When when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, the scripture says, You will be filled.

It's not that we make ourselves righteous.

Righteousness is a gift from God.

It's something that we receive.

As we cultivate this hunger and we seek God for it, he gives it to us.

And this is how he gives it to us.

It says in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 21, for our sake, he, God, made him, Jesus, to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him, Jesus, we might become the righteousness of God.

2 Corinthians 5:21

This passage of scripture is what theologians call the great exchange.

When we put our faith in Jesus Christ, he takes our sin upon himself.

He takes the judgment for that sin, death upon himself, and in exchange, he gives us something that we don't deserve.

He gives us the gift of his righteousness.

Now, for all of us in here that have proclaimed faith in Jesus Christ and we've gone through that great exchange, we've given Jesus our sin, he's given us his righteousness.

My question to you is what are we doing with it?

How are we stewarding this gift of righteousness that's been given to us?

Because there are two aspects.

One, like when we come into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, he declares us to be righteous and we are made right with God, not by our own doing, but by Christ's doing, right?

We are made righteous before God, but it is not just, righteousness is not just a standing before God.

It is what our life is supposed to look like as those who have been transformed by the love and grace of God.

And so Peter will talk about the second aspect of receiving righteousness, sanctifying grace.

We we receive right standing before God through the justifying grace of Jesus Christ and through what he has done on our behalf.

And then we also receive sanctifying grace, which literally makes us holy, which makes us into the image of God, restores us into the image of Jesus Christ, so that we might live righteous lives in the world.

Second Peter chapter 1, verses 3 through 4 says this His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence, by which He has granted to us the precious and very great promises, so that, and here it is, so that through them, so that through Through the promises of God, you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.

2 Peter 1:3–4

Peter lays it out.

This is the solution to the corruption of the world that drives all of us crazy.

And I know that that many of us here in this church have a heart and a desire and a passion to see our own city to come out of the poverty that and the brokenness that is experiencing it.

And we pray that God will change and transform our city.

And that's a good that is good, and that is righteous, and that is hungering and thirsting after righteousness.

But remember, the way in which our city is going to change is not by it just like something happening out there.

It's going to happen through something that happens in here, in this room.

As we decide to steward this gift of righteousness in our own life and disciple others in the Christian faith and help them to experience the righteousness of God, that that's how society is leavened.

It is through one person at a time, one discipling relationship at a time, that we begin to see change and transformation in society.

My children have all gone to East High School, and we've had some good experiences with teachers at East High School, and we've had some bad experiences with teachers at East High School.

We've we've experienced righteous, godly men and women, and we've experienced ungodly, selfish, self-serving teachers.

And so one of the stories that one of my children told me is that like a teacher comes in, gives an assignment, gives some worksheets to do, then goes over to her desk and begins texting with her friends, even talking to her friends on her phone while the kids are doing their assignment.

That is an ungodly, corrupt teacher that is creating this negative ripple effect in our society because children are not learning, they're not growing, because she's living for herself and not living to serve the children that are under his her care.

Now, we've had a blessing of also having some great teachers, and all of them, almost all of them, were able to identify that they've come through MTR, Memphis Teachers Residency.

And these are teachers that when they teach, they engage our children's mind.

They engage their creativity, they they prepare their lesson plan in advance.

They come and they they they really care about if our if our children learn.

And they're smart.

They've put the time in and the discipline in to learn for themselves before teaching the kids.

And they they care about our kids not only like during school, but after school, and they make themselves available to do extra tutoring.

This is what righteousness looks like in our society.

And that has a real leavening effect on our culture.

One of the most fruitful times in my life, spiritually fruitful for me personally, and is when I was working at Christ Community Health Services.

And I had an opportunity over and over again to disciple young medical students in their faith and to help them learn how to integrate their Christian faith with their medical practice so they could serve the poor in our city and so they could use their gifts to gain access to unreached people groups all over the world.

And they were going into some of the hardest places in North Africa, in the Middle East, taking the gospel of Jesus Christ, proclaim the good news of Jesus, and also serving in our inner city communities and praying for their patients and caring for their patients, not only caring for them what was happening to them when they came to the clinic, but helping connect them to social workers and other people who could help them in their daily lives outside of the clinic.

These are righteous men and women.

They were embracing the righteousness of God.

They were expressing mercy and purity of heart towards their patients.

They were accepting patients who couldn't pay for themselves.

They were accepting Medicaid patients.

This is righteousness.

And it makes a difference.

That's not my role as a financial planner, right?

And I finally met one financial planner that said, yeah, that is actually a part of what he does, is that he not only helps to steward people's finances to make their wealth grow, but he talks to them about how they might give and be generous and to use that wealth as a blessing to others.

Guess what?

Was this guy a Christian or a non-Christian?

He was a follower of Christ.

And even though the firm that he worked for didn't really appreciate the fact that he's giving away assets under management, he felt like that was the right thing to do.

As a follower of Christ.

If we're going to help people steward their wealth, we need to help them to be financially generous to others.

Leaven, salt, light, righteousness.

It makes a difference.

So how do we cultivate a hunger for righteousness?

Well, the same way in which we just cultivate hunger.

If you just, if you want to cultivate hunger, what do you do?

You fast, you stop eating, and eventually you're gonna get hungry, right?

And fasting has been a tradition of the church all forever, right?

Jesus, again, in the Sermon on the Mount, he'll talk about fasting.

And so what we're doing without in fasting is we're doing without something that's important to us to cultivate a desire, right?

And so as we're fasting, we need to be cultivating a desire for righteousness by filling that time that we would be eating with prayer, with seeking God, or with reading the scriptures.

And what's happening in our when our in our culture is that like there is all of our time is filled up.

I know this because like I'm trying to organize time for us to serve together, and I regularly hear, oh, like I've got time, I'm spending time with family, or we're going on vacation, or I've got things to do.

Like, I don't have time to do that.

So we have all of these cultural pressures that are appealing to us and are trying to create their own desire for worldly things.

We're under constant pressure, TV, commercials, advertisements, social media.

What all of these marketers have realized is like they they have figured out how to cultivate desire.

And then they offer a product to fill that desire that they've just created.

And you know what the beginning of all that process is?

How they cultivate a desire in us?

Is that they have to have our attention to capture our attention and our imagination.

And so they keep putting themselves in front of us over and over and over again to capture our attention.

And it's intentional.

There was just a a lawsuit uh in California with Facebook, like uh over over this issue of like capturing the attention of of children and and feeding products to them.

This was this was known when when the iPhone was being created.

Steve Jobs knew, like, when he designed this phone, you know, the first design of the iPhone was that you had a stylus, right?

And you're supposed to touch the screen with the stylus to make it work.

And Steve Jobs was like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Don't do that.

Use your finger.

Design it to where you use your finger, because then that creates this constant tactile interaction and it'll keep people coming back to their phone over and over and over again.

He knew how addictive he was creating this to be, so much so that he forbade his children from having an iPhone.

We have been targeted over and over and over again by our culture.

Our culture is appealing to us to pay attention.

Pay attention, guys.

It's SEC season, it's football season, it's time for old mess LSU, the revenge game.

We're gonna spend an hour, a whole day thinking and contemplating and being with our friends around that.

It is that is not God.

It is our culture that is appealing to us, that is appealing, keeping our attention, spend time doing this and not doing the things of God.

Now, I'm not saying like I love college football, I love more than college football, I love the Memphis Grizzlies, I love going to Grizzlies games, but I also realize I love it to the extent that sometimes it gets in the way of my faith.

God wants us to hunger and thirst for righteousness, and it is his way of redeeming the planet that as we experience the fullness of his righteousness in our own lives and share that with others and cultivate a desire for righteousness through discipling relationships, and then we begin to live in it through our careers or through through being great moms who care for our children and being great dads who care for our families, and in investing our lives, seeking first the kingdom of God with all of the gifts that he's given, that that's where God's blessing comes to the world is through us expressing his righteousness in the world.

So I want to just conclude in prayer, asking that God would do that, that he would help us to cultivate a desire for him and to make space for him to come and to fill the void, the time that we're going to create by saying no to all these other things that the world is making appeals to us for.

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we I'm just I'm remembering right now just Daniel, who was a righteous man.

He was a prophet, and he realized that he and his people were under judgment, and that they'd been experiencing your judgment, and so he fasted and he prayed and he confessed his sin and he confessed the sins on behalf of his people, and he asked for your forgiveness, and that you would fill him with righteousness, that you would fill him and your people with blessing.

And so, Lord, I come to you confessing, Lord, that um I don't do the things that I preach.

Lord, I confess that I don't live up to the standard of your righteousness.

Lord, I don't hunger and thirst for your righteousness the way that I should, Lord.

Uh and I give in to feelings of discontentment and I allow my own discontentment to take me in directions that aren't healthy for me to go in.

And Lord, I know that um, Lord, our culture and this church and every church in the city, every church in the world, like we struggle with sin, Lord.

We struggle with sinful desires that that pull us away from you.

And Lord, I just I pray that you would give us the wisdom and the discernment to see when that's happening, to see when when we're giving in to the desires of the world.

And Lord, how to cultivate this hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Because we really do.

I know the people in this room.

These are friends and family people I've known for years.

I know that we hunger for your righteousness to be displayed in the world.

But Lord, yet knowing that and practicing what it's gonna take are two different things.

And Lord, we need your grace, we need your love, we need your justifying grace, we need your sanctifying grace to fill us.

Lord, so that we might become the children that you've designed us to be, and to and to grow into the gifts that you've given us, and to use those gifts to display your righteousness in the world, to defeat the powers of sin and corruption that are all around us.

Lord, help us to be faithful stewards of your righteousness.

Grow your hunger in us.

It's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the podcast for Christ Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee.

We pray that today's message has inspired and encouraged you in your walk with Christ.

To stay connected with our church community, visit us online at ChristchurchMemphis.org.

We hope to see you this upcoming Sunday for worship as we seek to glorify God and make disciples of Jesus Christ among all peoples.