Want to have coffee?
September 29, 2019
National Coffee Day brings back memories of a new friendship which brewed over a long cup of coffee, and of many “catching up” kinds of conversations with friends. It also reminds me of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The first verses of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5: 1-12) are known as the Beatitudes, or supreme blessedness. Many might agree that coffee is a supreme blessing in life!
It has been suggested that the Beatitudes can also be understood as “be-attitudes” or the attitudes that should “be” true of citizens of God’s kingdom. All of the character traits mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount, are marks and goals of all Christians.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, and… here’s where we get to National Coffee Day:
6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Matthew 5: 6
The type of hunger and thirst for righteousness, mentioned in this verse, is a real, intense, and even painful passion, just as physical hunger and thirst are real. However, this passion cannot be satisfied by a simple snack or sip of liquid. It requires a more profound type of satisfaction!
We all know people who hunger and thirst for authority, success, happiness, power, but how many hunger and thirst for righteousness? It is good to remember that Jesus’ original audience lived in a day and culture which really knew what it was to be hungry and thirsty. But hunger and thirst is a foreign concept to those of us living in the western world of the 21st Century. Hungering and thirsting for our basic needs is difficult to imagine let alone hungering and thirsting after righteousness.
This type of spiritual hunger and thirst may express itself in a longing to be made more holy, a longing to have a more righteous nature, and a longing to righteousness abound in the world around us. It is not expressed in a hunger and thirst for our personal political parties to be in power, or for our own opinions to prevail. It is a longing for God’s righteousness to punctuate the land!
On this National Coffee Day, in 2019, I lift up my coffee cup to the supreme blessing of hungering and thirsting after righteousness. Jesus promised to satisfy the hungry and the thirsty; to fill them with as much as they could eat and drink. He promised to both satisfy and keep us longing for more!