INTRODUCTION

Our modern society makes sure that we aren’t too hot, too cold, too hungry, too thirsty, or too tired. So, if you’re ever tempted to complain about these things, spare a thought for what life was like as a medieval monk about 500 years ago.

A monk’s day in the Middle Ages started between 1 and 2 am with the ringing of the bells to wake him up for the first prayers of the day. The group would sing hymns, and recite psalms and prayers. 

Then they were allowed a short nap before the bells rang again at sunrise for more prayers, and then every three hours after that. All the monks joined for prayers seven times a day.

Monks slept on slabs of stone with only straw for padding. They had only coarse blankets to keep them warm through the freezing European winters. Many of them used no blankets at all. They weren’t allowed to own anything except a crucifix and a begging bowl.

Monks regularly performed rituals designed to test their endurance and humility. This included fasting, lying in the snow, wearing uncomfortable prickly undershirts made of animal hair, and even beating themselves with whips.

And if this wasn’t bad enough, monks were required to work hard whenever they weren’t praying. They had to provide food for the monastery, and also to work for their communities.
But why did they put themselves through all of that?

Well, they were searching for something, and it’s still something that all of us are looking for. Join me, as we look at the story of one such monk, and how he found peace and freedom, and how you can find it too.

INNER PEACE AND HAPPINESS

I’m here by the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus gave us the Beatitudes. The centre of Jesus’s teachings about the kingdom of God is the Sermon on the Mount, and the very heart of the Sermon on the Mount are the Beatitudes.

So, if we want to really know what it means to be a follower of Jesus, and to live as a citizen of the Kingdom of God, then we must understand Christ’s teachings in the Beatitudes. 

But the Beatitudes aren’t just spiritual principles for Christians. They are arguably the body of principles that has been most influential in shaping western civilisation as we know it today. The word ‘beatitude’ is an old-fashioned religious-sounding word that not many people will recognise today. It refers to being blissfully happy.

When Jesus calls people ‘blessed’ in the Beatitudes, that’s literally what he means. He means that if you display these qualities you will be blissfully happy! This is a happiness that belongs only to God, and that can come only from God.

In other words, when in your life you display the qualities Jesus described in the Beatitudes, you will share in the joy of heaven here on Earth. It’s the only way to truly live! If you’re after hope, inner peace and happiness, this is where you’ll find it.

So, Jesus sat on a hill here so the crowd could hear him, and he taught the people the most radical and influential set of principles for living that this world has ever heard. Among the beatitudes He said this in Matthew 5:6:

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

Like each of the Beatitudes, there is a great truth hidden in this radical contradiction. And this great truth can be seen played out in the life of a German monk, Martin Luther.

MARTIN LUTHER

Young Martin was brilliant even as a child. So, when he was only 13 years old his father sent him here to the University of Erfurt to study law. He proved so skilful at public debates that he was given the nickname, “The Philosopher.”

But behind his many achievements, Martin was a young man in turmoil. That’s why he threw himself so relentlessly into his studies – to try to find peace. He was driven by fears of hell and the wrath of God. Martin Luther lacked the assurance of his own salvation.  He desperately wanted to be right with God and have God accept him, but knew that he wasn’t good enough on his own.

Then in 1505, at the age of 21, his life took a dramatic turn. He had been visiting his parents and was on the dirt road back to Erfurt when he suddenly found himself in the midst of a raging thunderstorm. Suddenly a bolt of lightning struck the ground near him. In terror, Martin screamed out a vow to St Anne, his patron saint,

“Help me, St. Anne! And I will become a monk!”

This doesn’t seem to have been just a random, spur of the moment decision. He had probably been thinking about this for some time.
So, when he saw that he had survived the storm, Martin immediately gave away all his possessions, left his studies of law and entered the Augustinian Order of Erfurt, becoming a monk.

His parents were bitterly disappointed. But Martin embarked on his monastic life in Wittenberg with great fervour. Finally, he thought, he would be able to learn to love God without fear and find peace for his soul.

As a monk, Martin focused on and even obsessed about his personal sins and worked hard to overcome them. He was determined to become good enough for God to accept Him.  He would begin each day in the early hours after midnight, and then he would try to purify himself through a regular routine which included confession, silently praying at almost every moment, and reading the Bible late into the night.

He was content with only a table and a chair in his unheated room. He slept without a blanket in the bone-chilling cold of the northern German winter. And as penance for his sins, Martin would beat himself with a whip and he would fast to the point of emaciation.

Martin was such a successful monk that in 1506 he gained full admission to the Augustinian order. Afterwards, Luther said, “If anyone could have earned heaven by the life of a monk, it was I.”

LUTHER’S TURMOIL
But still he found no peace.  His conscience told him that he was unworthy of heaven because of his sins and weaknesses. He wanted to be able to love God fully, but more and more, he was terrified of the wrath of God. And the more religious he became, the more his terror increased. Luther said, “When it is touched by this passing inundation of the eternal, the soul feels and drinks nothing but eternal punishment.”

While in the monastery, Martin continued to study, although now instead of studying law, he studied theology. The year after his ordination he began teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg, where he was also awarded two bachelor’s degrees.

A text in the Bible book of Romans that Martin often came across was Romans 1:17, which says,

“For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” 

Whenever Luther read this, his eyes were drawn not to the word “faith”, but to the word, “righteous.” For Luther, the text was clear: you had to already be righteous or morally upright, perfectly good, because only the righteous could live by faith. Luther remarked, 

“I hated these words, ‘the righteousness of God,’ by which I had been taught according to the custom and use of all teachers … [that] God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.”

Luther could not live by faith because he knew he wasn’t righteous – morally correct or perfectly good. And so, he knew that he was under the condemnation of God. This was at the core of Luther’s inner turmoil. He was hungering and thirsting for righteousness, but he didn’t know how to find it.  Even with all his good effort and good works, he knew in his heart, that he was still a sinner and full of mistakes and sin.

LUTHER IN ROME

In the year 1510, Luther made a journey to Rome. There, he thought he might find the answers to his questions that would satisfy the hunger of his soul. But instead, Luther was disturbed by the corruption and lack of spirituality among the clergy that he saw there.

And being scrupulously observant, Luther followed the traditional customs of pilgrims in Rome. One of these was the custom of climbing the Holy Stairs, on his knees, reciting the Lord’s Prayer at every step.

While Luther was doing this, the words of the Apostle Paul thundered in his mind, “the righteous shall live by faith.” He returned to Germany even more troubled than when he had left.

In an attempt to shift his focus away from his troubled soul, Luther threw himself into more study in Wittenberg, where in 1512 he earned his Doctorate in Theology. He went on to become a professor at the university.

TURNING POINTS

There, while he was presenting lectures on the Psalms and on the book of Romans, for the first time he began to see God and the Bible in a different way. He wrote,

“At last meditating day and night, by the mercy of God, I … began to understand that the righteousness of God is that through which the righteous live by a gift of God, namely by faith… Here I felt as if I were entirely born again and had entered paradise itself through the gates that had been flung open.”
Although light had dawned in Luther’s mind, and his hunger and thirst for righteousness was being filled by the gift of God, he still hadn’t lit the spark that launched the Protestant Reformation.

The spark that lit the Reformation was the sale of ‘indulgences.’ These came about because Pope Leo X needed to raise funds to rebuild the Basilica of St Peter’s, in Rome, so he sent preachers throughout Europe to promote their sale.

Basically, how an indulgence worked was like this: If you gave the required amount of money to the church or its representative, any and all sins would be forgiven for yourself or anyone else you nominated, living or dead.

It was a way of buying the righteousness of God with money, the very basic form of salvation by works. And when the preacher Johann Tetzel started selling indulgences in Wittenberg, Luther objected.

He objected on the basis that God alone had the power to forgive sin. The practice of selling indulgences took people’s eyes from the true source of righteousness, which is faith in Christ.

THE REFORMATION LAUNCHED

On October 31, 1517, Luther nailed his “95 Theses”  to the door of the church at Wittenberg, and the Protestant Reformation began. In 1521, Martin Luther was called to an assembly – really a trial – at Worms, Germany. There he uttered the famous words,

“Unless I can be instructed and convinced with evidence from the Holy Scriptures or with open, clear, and distinct grounds of reasoning … then I cannot and will not recant, because it is neither safe nor wise to act against conscience.”

Then he added, 

“Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me! Amen.”

Martin Luther had finally discovered the true source of righteousness. His hunger and his thirst had been filled by the righteousness of Christ, received as a free gift through faith. His fear of God, his wrath and hellfire, was gone. It had been replaced by assurance and peace.  

He finally had peace of mind.  He now knew that He was made right with God, not by what He did, but by what Jesus did.  He was accepted by God, not because he was good, but because Jesus was good.  All he had to do was believe in Jesus and accept Him as his Saviour.

And because his own hunger and thirsting for righteousness had now been satisfied, Luther was able to share the message of righteousness by faith to the world.

REAL HUNGER AND THIRST

There’s nothing worse than feeling hungry, is there? Fortunately, few of us know what real hunger is. But Jesus’ hearers did. They were subsistence farmers and fishermen, under tremendous financial pressure from their Roman rulers.

They knew what it was like to go for a day or two without a proper meal. The majority of Jesus’ audience was never far from starvation. And so, when Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst…” the people who heard him knew the light-headedness and weakness that accompanied hunger. 

They knew the desperation that they felt when they were without food. They knew nausea and the pain in their stomachs. They knew that to be hungry was a terrible thing.

And to be thirsty was even worse. Water was the most precious commodity of all, for its lack would soon be followed by death. Just think! We’re used to having cold water whenever we like.

The people who heard Jesus didn’t have taps with running water. The only water they had was what they could carry themselves from wells and streams. If you were travelling and didn’t know the lay of the land, dying of thirst was a real risk.

This is the kind of hunger and this is the kind of thirst of which Jesus is speaking. It is the hunger that will cause you to starve to death, and the thirst that will kill you if you don’t drink.

THE CHALLENGE

This beatitude is a challenge to all of us. It asks you, “How much do you want righteousness? Do you want it as much as a starving man craves food, or a thirsty man cries out for water?”

First of all, what is “righteousness”? At its most basic, righteousness is simply ‘right-doing’. A person who is righteous will do the right thing. When someone does what is right, we tend to think of them as a good person, don’t we? Most people want to be good people. As William Barclay, the famous Scottish Bible scholar says,

“The true wonder of man is not that he is a sinner, but that even in his sin he is haunted by goodness, that even in the mud he can never wholly forget the stars.”

But most people don’t crave goodness like a man dying of thirst craves water. Instead, what most often happens is that people’s desire to do what is right is prioritised below other desires.

For example, let’s say I want to do the right thing and be honest, but if I lie and cheat, I will end up with more money. Or, let’s say I want to do the right thing and admit something I’ve done wrong, but if I do, other people will think less of me. It’s usually easy to rationalise away why we shouldn’t do the right thing.

And the thing about doing the right thing is that it’s black and white. You can’t partially do the right thing. You either do the right thing or you don’t. It’s like being pregnant – you can’t be half-pregnant.

So, if righteousness means always doing what is right, then that’s a very high standard. And you have to do it all the time to maintain it. So, who can be a good person? Can anyone? Jesus gave us a perspective on this. Once, a man came running up to Jesus and addressed him as “Good teacher.”

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone.” (Mark 10:17-18).

So that leaves all of humanity in a real bind, doesn’t it? Romans chapter 3 says it like this,

“…all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  (Romans 3:23)

But we were all created for goodness. That’s why most people instinctively admire what is good. We were all created to do the right thing. That’s why we recognise it when we see it. And that’s why most people instinctively desire it for their own lives. 

THE SOURCE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

But here’s the thing: only God has perfect goodness, and because of sin in our lives, we don’t. Righteousness is God’s alone. In this beatitude, however, the blessing – the perfect happiness – isn’t for the person who achieves perfect righteousness in his or her own life.

And that’s encouraging. Because the blessing is instead for the person who recognises his own hunger, and clutches at the wonderful goodness of God, despite the ups and downs of life, and despite their own stumbles and failures. And that’s what’s so encouraging about this beatitude.

Righteousness is all or nothing. It can’t be partial. A single selfish thought blots your copybook. In fact, this is emphasised in the original Greek of this beatitude, which emphasises that the blessing is for those who hunger and thirst for complete righteousness.

Of course, the only one in whom righteousness may be found is Jesus, the only source of righteousness. He is the only one who can satisfy your hunger and thirst for goodness in your life.

And the only way to be filled and satisfied with the righteousness of Jesus is through faith in him. It’s a gift! You take hold of it by accepting his sacrifice on the Cross for you, and submitting your life to him.

When you do that, Christ’s complete righteousness is credited to your account, as if it had always been yours! As the Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 2,

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2: 8,9)

The earliest followers of Jesus knew that righteousness was a gift that was received through faith. 

But sadly, at the time of Martin Luther, the main church taught something else. It taught that you could be righteous be performing the religious services that the church decreed, or by doing sufficient good works, or simply by giving the church your money.

So, by the time of Martin Luther, there was a huge desperation for righteousness. And God used Luther’s own hunger and thirst for righteousness to remind the world of the message of God’s righteousness as a free gift.

The church popularly taught that righteousness was something that you did. But Luther discovered from the Word of God that righteousness is something that God has done. He accomplished it at Calvary through Jesus Christ, and now He offers it to you as a gift.

500 YEARS LATER

Over 500 years have passed since Martin Luther rediscovered the message of how humanity’s hunger for righteousness can be truly satisfied. And since then, society has developed in ways so that the meaning of this beatitude has been once again forgotten by most.

Despite our modern sophistication and advanced technology, and even despite the rise of evolution and atheism, the essence of what it means to be a good human being remains. All of us, as human beings were created by God. We all have a desire for goodness in our lives.

But everywhere around us we see the results of evil. And within ourselves we fail to live up to who we ultimately want to be. And just like in Luther’s time, the world today has no answers.

Our hunger and thirst for righteousness can be met: as an absolutely free gift from God when you trust in Jesus. Isn’t that amazing! You are then counted as righteous before God.

SPECIAL OFFER

Are you distressed by the evil in the world? Are you disappointed by the failures in your own personal life? Are you hungering and thirsting for righteousness? If you would like to find out more about God’s gift of righteousness, then I’d like to recommend the free gift we have for all our Incredible Journey viewers today.

It’s the booklet, Martin Luther, Man of the Millennium. This booklet is our gift to you and is absolutely free. I guarantee there are no costs or obligations whatsoever. So, make the most of this wonderful opportunity to receive the gift we have for you today. 

CLOSING PRAYER

If you’ve enjoyed our journey in the footsteps of Martin Luther and his quest for the gift of righteousness that can be found only in Jesus, then be sure to join us again next week when we will share another of life’s journeys together. Until then, let’s reach out to Jesus and accept the free gift of grace that He offers us.  Let’s pray. 

Dear Heavenly Father, We thank you for the gift of righteousness through Jesus. We thank you that you have promised to meet every one of our needs and fill us with your Spirit. Please guide us as we accept the gift of salvation along with your promises of peace and assurance, and follow Your leading. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.