Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” As a 1 on the Enneagram, I’m well acquainted with an intense inner demand for moral perfection. By God’s grace, however, I am slowly becoming aware of the difference between the demands of perfectionism and the hunger for righteousness.
Notice that Jesus locates the desire for righteousness in the gut, not in the brain. He says, “blessed are those who hunger for,” not “obsessively think about” righteousness. This may appear like mere semantics, but in the work of disciple-making, this is crucial. It is crucial because it moves the pursuit of righteousness from a fear-center to a passion-center.
The gospel starts with being made right before God by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in our place. This means I’m free to make the sheer love, power, and mercy of God my mental focus rather than my own performance. This intentionally developed mental focus is part of how God’s perfect love casts out my self-protective fears. And the more my fears are cast out, the more I get in touch with the gut-level hunger for righteousness God is growing in me.
But I hear the inner critic saying, “It’s good to be set free from fear before God, but that doesn’t alleviate my fears at work,” or at home, etc. Certainly, right standing before God in no way guarantees our circumstances will always be pleasant or even good. But here is precisely where the gut level hunger for righteousness becomes greater than the mental obsession of perfectionism.
In contrast to self-protection, the hunger for righteousness is a deep longing to see the systems of this world, the people around me, and even my own soul, become all they were designed to be. So while the self-protection of perfectionism makes no room for the cross, the hunger for righteousness clings to the cross. The hunger for righteousness says things will, of course, go wrong. Welcome to a fallen world. But, if I choose to seek God’s will and to do what pleases Him, out of the ashes, righteousness will prevail. His Kingdom will advance.
This is a profound shift because I’m no longer trying to keep all the plates of life spinning out of fear that one may fall to the ground. Instead I’m moving forward in gut-level passion that I am seeking to please God and doing His will. This means when plates get knocked over, when good work gets misunderstood or overlooked, when life comes crashing down, I can say “blessed be the name of the Lord.” Not blessed be His name because I’m trying through mental gymnastics to turn a bad thing into a good thing. No, I can say blessed be His name because I believe in resurrection power.
This allows me to grieve the fact that things are not as they are supposed to be. People are not as they are supposed to be. It also allows me to look for the hand of God. To lean into my hunger for His righteousness. To seek right alignment with how He is working. To have a gut that is filled with passionate hope because no issue is ultimately about my immediate circumstances. “Issues” are rather about God’s Kingdom advancing in and through me.
So where are you or those you disciple? Are you operating from perfectionism out of a cerebral attempt to control all the things in your world? Are you motivated by a self-protective fear? Or, in the midst of things falling apart around you, are you motivated by a hunger for God’s righteousness? Are you compelled by hunger to join God in what He is doing around you? Lord God, free our minds from fear and increase our gut level hunger for your righteousness to advance in the world.