Revival and Renewal

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” Matthew 5:6

Often, when looking at the beatitudes, we focus on the first part of the statement and forget the conclusion. We agree that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed. But catch the result: “they shall be satisfied.” For those people who desire and yearn for righteousness, or specifically for “Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 Jn. 2:1), what they will find is that they are fulfilled, content, satisfied.

 Satisfaction. Fulfillment. These concepts are like ghosts to us, far off realities that only provide a sort of haunting presence in our minds. The scandal of the western world is that amid a thousand technological advances to make things easier, the dire conclusion has revealed itself to us: easy doesn’t fulfill. The old mantra “an easy thing isn’t worth doing” has proved true, and now we must look in horror at an easy world: easy transportation, easy dating, easy love and easy food, easy connection and easy chores. With every technological advance the potential for fulfillment seems to be further and further away.

But if easy doesn’t fulfill, neither does hard. Work for its own sake is no more fulfilling than a sedentary life, nor does a whole-hearted commitment to the face-less world result in fulfillment. The world destroys every bit of “you-ness” from your personality, fits you into boxes and psychological formulas to classify you, making you another person within a long chain of personal I.D. numbers in a database entitled “Human Resources.”  What once was the Image of God (unique and valuable) is turned into a cog in the vast machine of the modern world.

This makes Jesus’ statement all the more startling. “They the will be satisfied.” That is, they will have what they hunger and thirst for. There will be a sense of fulfillment, of being refreshed and made new. The remarkable fact of Jesus’ statement is that only in him there is true satisfaction.

This, I believe, is the reason so many of us struggle to actually rest. It is amazing to me how many times I had looked forward to a period of rest and relaxation, only to be frustrated at the end that I didn’t get what I longed for. In the times in which we are supposed to be resting we are dwelling on the reality that what is going on is not rest at all but leaves us longing for more. We want renewal, rejuvenation, a sense of fulfillment, but instead we end up back at work on a Monday feeling worn out and a bit angry. “Why isn’t this working?”

We rest not, it would seem, because we ask not. While the easy-mentality elevates relaxation and a lack of work to be done to a level of contentment, the work-mentality does the opposite, looking to a job or some other form of self-sufficiency as a source of purpose and fulfillment. Yet both make the fundamental mistake of a misplaced emphasis, an incorrect understanding of means as ends and of the transient as eternal. Rest and work, both part of a two-part rhythm of God’s created order (cf. Ps. 104:15-15, 21-23; Gen. 2:1; Exod. 31:17; Eccl. 3:12-13), are intended to set the stage for how a person is to live, how to navigate between doing and being in a way that maintains their essential value but also gives them a task to do in this world. When we work, we are “doers,” but Sabbath reminds us that we are also essentially persons in ourselves, the image of God ontologically as well as existentially. Work gives life to people’s story, but rest reminds them that it is their story in God’s world, that they are more than simply machines but rather are the objects of God’s redemptive love in need of rejuvenation.

But neither work nor rest is Christ. This may seem obvious, but when we elevate rest to a place of ultimate contentment and fulfillment, in essence we are saying “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for relaxation, for they shall be satisfied.” Any created thing, sought for its own sake, will crumble under the pressure. The Christian longs, not for a state of affairs that is free of work, but rather for Christ in the midst of any state of affairs within which she finds herself. If she longs for anything but Christ or outside of Christ, she will leave hungry. But if she looks to Christ, she will find fulfillment.