Now, don't miss this: Are you aware that happiness in your relationships requires such things as hungering and thirsting after righteousness?

Righteousness key to happiness

The only way to be happy in relationships is to be seeking righteousness, fairness, justice, equity. You can't expect to have happy relationships as long as you are trying to come out on top. You must seek justness, equity, fairness in all your relationships if you are going to find happiness. There's nothing that makes a fight get worse faster in our home than me insisting I'm right and trying to 'win.' It usually goes like this, Coreena wants me to help with something. I slight her. She speaks angrily, I feel justified in my slight because now she's playing dirty, so I refuse to give in. I'm right, and what would I be teaching her if I gave in? Eventually she backs down, but I can tell that she doesn't trust me. I feel alone. I won the fight, but I lost her trust. I got to be 'right', but lost relationship.

Even if I 'win' there is no joy in it. What's the use of winning a fight with someone that you want to love you. You've won the fight, but made an enemy. You may end up right in the end, but you'll also be alone. Righteousness is essential for living together for having relationships or being a society.

How do we get it?

But how can we who are so used to being sinful treat others with righteousness? It's not enough to have good instructions on what righteousness is. We must have Jesus living out His righteousness in us. To hunger and thirst after Righteousness means to hunger and thirst for Jesus. You can't separate a righteous life from Jesus.

And sure enough, after the Red Sea, God made it very plain that their lives were to be totally dependent upon Him for food and water. He sought through their physical hunger and thirst to get them hungering and thirsting after Him. I'm shocked when I read how the Israelites complained at every turn when they didn't have water or food. Couldn't they remember how God saved them from Egypt with miracles? Why did they think He would stop sustaining them the same way? You and I have not power to free ourselves from sin, nor to sustain a righteous life, but by the same miraculous power with which He has freed us from guilt, He will continue to free us to Righteous living. Why do we doubt? Only because we so quickly forget how He freed us from guilt.

Hungering and thirsting after righteousness and feeding daily on Him really means to take seriously all the things we looked at in the outer court moment by moment. It means to praise Him that 1. though I am a helpless sinner, 2. He is an all sufficient savior, and 3. I am depending on Him to save me. –Do you understand? We don't leave the cross behind to move on to righteousness, we come to the cross daily, moment by moment in order to let the Righteous One live in us.

After seeing what God has done for me. Now we turn to what He wants to do in me. We move from the realm of our relationship with God as individuals to how our relationship with God affects our relationships with others. Hunger and thirst after righteousness is not for me alone. Righteousness is primarily a way of relating to others–so it make sense that the next beatitude is about relationships.

Peacemakers

Where is this pointing?

Notice that this points back to which section of the beatitudes and which section of the sanctuary?

Instant peacemakers

Conclusion? You don't have to be a mature Christian to be a peacemaker. All that's necessary is that You be at peace with God yourself–and then you can share the peace you have with others. A lot of people think you can only bring others to Christ if you have been 'in the way' for a while. Not so. The only qualification is being at peace with God. You can be a peacemaker immediately upon receiving justification by faith.

This is the bare minimum, however

Likewise don't go around fooling yourself that you are a Christian if you have not become a peacemaker. If you are not a peacemaker it is because you yourself are not yet at peace with God, and you need to go back and accept His justifying grace for your sin, and His generous riches for your poverty.

Are God's people recognized by their level of sanctification–whether they've become righteous and holy, stopped wearing jewelry and eating cheese? No, they are identified by their insatiable desire to bring peace between their fellow-men and God. Why is this so much more important than some list of dos and don'ts.? The whole sin issue is one of relationship. You can come to church on Sabbath and eat Fri-chik and pay tithe without a right relationship with God, but you can't be a peacemaker without knowing Jesus. (This doesn't mean that you don't try to get people to become church members, no, some of the most active people in outreach are the kind who aren't sharing peace with anyone. "You compass the world to make proselytes, but make them 2x the sons of hell you yourselves are." Jesus condemned such proselytizing because it doesn't come from peace or result in peace.

But if any sinner on this planet has been restored to a right relationship with God, it will show in their works of peacemaking. Their works are investigated in order to learn something about their relationship with God.

Did you notice the flow from what Jesus has done for us to change our status, to what He's doing in us to change our character, to what He is doing now through us to restore peace in others–utlimately in the entire universe?

Overview of the Sanctuary:

Justification, Sanctification, but what's going on in the most holy place. We associate it w/ judgment, and that's right. Someone else said glorification, and that's right. We also have spoken previously of vindication.