Hungering and thirsting after righteousness, as Jesus describes in Matthew 5:6, reflects a profound, innermost drive to fulfill a spiritual desire. This longing mirrors a continuous cycle of seeking vital nourishment for spiritual life and strength. It follows naturally from being poor in spirit, mourning over sin, and embracing meekness, as these attitudes expose deficiencies in our character that God graciously reveals. This hunger and thirst become essential steps toward salvation, urging us to make choices and sacrifices to align with God's desire for us. His will is that we prepare to live with Him as He lives in His Kingdom. Righteousness, in this context, encompasses seeking all of God's spiritual blessings, favor, image, and rewards, as Jesus commands in Matthew 6:33 to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. This pursuit is the top priority in life, far surpassing worldly ambitions. Jesus emphasizes that it is our responsibility to seek what God has made available through His grace, ensuring we have the means to accomplish it. This hunger and thirst apply to three kinds of righteousness, all vital to Christian life and development within our relationship with God and fellow man. The first is the righteousness of faith, received when God justifies a sinner through the redemption in Christ Jesus, imputing His obedience to provide legal righteousness before Him. Despite our past sins and blindness, God's mercy leads us to repentance, revealing our spiritual bankruptcy and offering a perfect righteousness in Christ, which demands total surrender of our lives to His rule. This creates an intense hunger and thirst for justification leading to salvation, though it is only a beginning. Even after justification, a true, godly hunger persists, recognizing that God has only begun a good work in us. The third kind of righteousness, social righteousness, involves hungering and thirsting for righteousness not just for oneself but for the community, encompassing civil rights, justice, integrity in business, and honor in family. Though our citizenship is in heaven and we are sojourners in this world, we are called to let our light shine before men through good works, glorifying our Father in heaven. Like Jesus, who laid the groundwork for internal change through preaching the gospel and doing good, we have the authority to perform good works within our role in His body, representing our Savior with gratitude. God creates this hunger and thirst when He calls us into His Family, intending to fill it both initially and continuously. He fills us with what He is and what we need to navigate our pilgrimage to His Kingdom, providing understanding, wisdom, peace, thanksgiving, knowledge, faith, hope, and love, so we might be like Him and be done with sin forever. Ultimately, as promised, we shall neither hunger nor thirst anymore, for the Lamb will shepherd us to living fountains of waters.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled, as declared by Jesus Christ in Matthew 5:6. This profound statement stands at the heart of His teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, offering a solution to humanity's deep spiritual longing. Physical hunger and thirst, so prevalent in the ancient world and throughout biblical history, pale in comparison to the spiritual hunger and thirst that afflicts all humanity. Only God, through Jesus Christ, can satisfy this deeper need. This hungering and thirsting for righteousness requires a recognition of spiritual bankruptcy, a mourning for sin, and a meekness before God. It is a longing for a righteousness that we urgently need but do not fully possess. To be filled, one must desire righteousness intensely, not merely seeking happiness or blessings, but pursuing a perfect, godly righteousness. This desire must be as desperate as a starving person's need for food or a dehydrated person's craving for water, reflecting the harsh realities of hunger and thirst known to Christ's contemporaries. The pursuit of righteousness is not for a partial or imperfect state, but for complete righteousness, equal to and identical with God's own. This intense longing, created by His Spirit, drives the heart to seek relief outside oneself, to find in Jesus Christ the embodiment of righteousness. As Scripture reveals, He is our righteousness, and to seek Him is to seek righteousness itself. This hungering and thirsting is both an initial experience before turning to Christ by faith and a continual yearning in the heart of every believer until their final day. It is a panting of the renewed heart after God, a passion for a closer walk with Him, and a longing to conform more perfectly to the image of His Son. God creates this hunger and thirst in people so that He may satisfy them, drawing them to Christ as their only righteousness before Him. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled, initially and continuously, with the righteousness of God through faith in Christ. This filling is not with fleeting experiences or worldly blessings, but with the peace and divine blessing that surpasses understanding, a foretaste of the abundance He has prepared for His people.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled, as Jesus declares in Matthew 5:6. This beatitude reflects a deep, continuous longing for God and His ways, akin to a life-or-death thirst experienced by soldiers in a desert, desperate for water to survive. God desires that we yearn for Him and His righteousness with such intensity, as if our very existence depends on it, for indeed, our eternal lives do. This hunger and thirst are not mere fleeting desires but an ongoing, active pursuit. Jesus emphasizes a constant, wholehearted attitude of seeking righteousness, not just as a one-time act but as a perpetual spiritual appetite. It is a vivid expression of desiring to be like God, to purify ourselves as He is pure, driving us to reflect His character in all we do. The metaphor of thirsting for God is not about ordinary need but a desperate, survival-level craving. Just as a dehydrated person will do anything to find water, we must actively seek righteousness, not passively wait for it. This beatitude calls for earnest, habitual pursuit, a passionate concern to practice what is right and to see justice done through personal conduct and obedience to God's will. Jesus illustrates this through His own life, showing an unyielding commitment to doing God's will, even to the point of death. He hungered and thirsted for righteousness, finding satisfaction in fulfilling God's purpose, leaving us an example to follow. Our chief desire should be a relationship of obedience and trust with God, unmarred by disobedience, compelling us to put off the old self and put on the new, striving to live as He does. This pursuit is a cooperative effort between us and God. We supply the attitude and effort to build godly character, while He fills us with what we lack, providing the strength and Spirit needed to grow in righteousness. The promise of being filled means receiving a full measure of real, personal righteousness, a character honed by minute-by-minute obedience and godly living, a process of sanctification that continues until our resurrection. Ultimately, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness eagerly anticipate the Kingdom of God, the dwelling place of righteousness, where all will live according to His way. This beatitude follows naturally from the first three—poverty of spirit, mourning, and meekness—which strip away self and sin, creating a void that must be filled with a great desire for God's righteousness. As we put aside human things, we must seek godly things, knowing that God will provide all we need to become like Him.