Blessed Are The Hungry For Righteousness

When you find Jesus, righteousness begins.
It grows when you want to learn about Him;
The more you learn, the more you hate your sins
And want to live a new life without them!
Jesus told us, "If anyone loves me,
He will obey my teaching." * So you will
Want to study the Bible, and to be
Often in His church, an empty seat fill!
Righteousness grows as His Book you obey;
The road is long, but happiness is sure;
The more you hunger and thirst for His way,
More righteous you will be, and joyous endure!
In thia life, no one becomes righteous full,
But Jesus adds what's lacking in your pull!

*John 14:21

"Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for reighteousness, for they shall be filled." (Matthew 5:6)

Jesus' 4th promise of happiness, as He began His Sermon on the Mount, is for those who seek "righteousness" with a hunger and thirst, not merely an offhand desire. This was said to a poor people in desert country, those who knew real hunger and very real thirst. It is hard for us today to readily grasp the avidness with which we should pursue righteousness with God, which means to win His approval by our obedience to all of His commands. At the very beginning of one's pilgrimage to holy perfection, he may be miffed at being asked to accept Jesus as his Lord, when he knows very well the asker lives a life very short of perfection. And he is correct. There is no Christian, living or dead, who led a righteous life. There was only one man that lived a sinless life, and that man was Jesus, who is God living in the flesh of a man. He was crucified in 32 A. D. for claiming to be God to His Chosen People, and they rejected His claim at the time. However, He came forth from the grave, exactly as their Bible prophesized, and lives today. History verifies His life and death, but is reticent about confirming His resurrection and continued existence. Billions of people since have believed in Jesus as God, and that's what it means to be a Christian and to be eligible to enter heaven after death in this life, where the same Jesus promised that we, too, would live forever.

But salvation can be had by a simple belief in Jesus as God, while becoming righteous is an entirely different matter. Righteousness is gained only by hard work and study and making a complete change in lifestyle, as indicated in the poem. You must first learn what God commands from the Bible, beginning with the Ten Commandments that God personally engraved in stone with His finger (in Exodus), then the teachings of Jesus in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, followed by the rest of the New Testament. It requires a lifetime, and you cannot do it by yourself. Frequent church attendance, where other believers are in every imaginable stage of learning; learning to talk with God by prayer; and encouraging the Holy Spirit to guide you from within are essential to becoming righteous. Most of all, though, is learning self-control and how to live with others in accordance with the teachings of Jesus. It's not easy, and we all find life too short to do it all. When we reach heaven and meet Jesus face to face, He will lovingly add the things we need; living in heaven requires perfect righteousness. I must add, however, that Roman Catholic Christians have a different twist to the last statement. There is a kind of "waiting room", or "boot camp", called purgatory, where saved believers wait until they reach perfection before entering heaven, in their doctrine. Most other churches believe the believer's soul goes immediately to heaven at physical death.