The Ladder of Perfection. Though there is, and evidently there is meant to be, a progression, an ascent upwards, both in the characters that are blessed and in the blessings that are given, yet it is not meant that we are to be perfect in the lower character before we proceed to the higher. Far otherwise, for indeed the very first of all is humility; but if we waited till we were perfect in humility, before we attempted to rise to that which stands next above it, we should wait all our lives. A certain measure of humility is the condition of being a Christian at all, and perfect humility is the crown of Christian perfectness.
I. So, then, it is true that mourning for sin stands on a lower level than hungering and thirsting for righteousness. But for all that, we are not to wait till our sorrow for our faults shall be in some way commensurate with the evil of them before we endeavour to rise above faults altogether, and to render positive service. To mourn over faults and fight against them is not only right, it is indispensable. But some men's lives are quite filled with this. Such men are in some degree a burden both to themselves and others on this account. They have a much keener sense of the wrong of doing wrong than than the necessity of doing right. They hate disobedience, but their obedience is too anxious, too disturbed by fears that they are not obedient enough, to be hearty and cheerful.
II. While both are needed, both true penitence and true longing for holiness, yet the latter is the higher. It is of course possible, perhaps it is not very uncommon, to have neither the the one nor the other. But I speak to those who, while conscious that they are often wanting either in the one or the other, yet are not altogether without a sense of both. And to them I say it must be remembered that the desire for good is higher in its own nature than the sorrow for evil. The Christian is penitent, and the Christian strives to be a loving child of God, but he knows that the love is more than the repentance. Let not, then, your sorrow for sin stop at sorrow. Try to attain nobleness of obedience, and not mere preciseness.
Bishop Temple, Rugby Sermons,2nd series, p. 210.
What is hunger? It is to want, to crave, to feel an aching sense of emptiness, to long for that for the lack of which the very life seems to fail, the wheels of being to move slower to want and not to get. Hunger is the goad of nature that makes us work; but the natural man hungers for that which effort can gain him. He hungers for bread. He hungers for wealth, for ease, for honour, for affection. We expect of life and of human organizations of it that hunger of other kinds should gain its satisfaction. But the Christian hunger is hunger that must remain hunger. The very paradox of the blessing pronounced is that those who follow the shadow shall find it the substance: "they shall be filled." The impossible is, in a deeper sense, the possible, the real. It is those who clutch, as they think, the substance, the solid, calculable "good things of this world," who find them turn to emptiness in their grasp. What does the text mean for us?
I. For ourselves in our own hearts, remember that the blessing, the high place in the kingdom, the real attainment of what they long for, is for those who hunger for goodness, in whose heart it is a real, passionate, unsatisfied craving.
II. Not for ourselves only. God has not set us each by himself to purify, as best we may, each his own heart. He has set us together. He has formed us into societies one with another, binding us by a thousand links to our fellows, so that none can stand without helping others to stand, nor fall without dragging others down with him; linking even generation to generation, so that the effect of our acts seems to echo through all time. We shall not love goodness, hunger and thirst for it, in ourselves, unless we love it, long and crave and cry and strive to see it also ruling in the world about us.
III. "They shall be filled." To be filled is to be satisfied, and to be satisfied is to cease from hungering; and that in this case would be death, not life. Yet in many cases it is a truth which we can verify. Those that hunger most have most. It means (1) that those who long most to find good in this world find it most in place sundreamed of, in hearts given up as desperate. (2) That if they do not see it, those who look on see the wilderness round them blossoming; and, even if they do not fully realize it, that must carry peace into their hearts and joy of the Holy Ghost. (3) That God's chief way of rewarding effort is to open the way to further effort.
E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons,p. 51.
I. Though springing out of the three first Beatitudes, which I call the circle of humiliation, there is a new element apparent in this fourth one. These were negative: they weakened, they lowered, they discouraged; they were the emptying, saddening, and bruising, consequent on a knowledge of sin. This one, on the contrary, is positive and strong. It lifts itself up with wholesome and cheerful desire, and reaches out after far and high achievements in virtue. It is when Christian experience has plunged to the bottom and touched ground that, like the fabled giant, it leaps up with mightiest resolve to win heaven.
II. The features of special blessedness in the moral appetite of the Christian next deserve notice. (1) The Christian appetite has in it this excellent blessedness that it has found the right object of desire. The soul's true food has been set before his eyes, and he has been taught to hunger after that. The hunger of a Christian soul after righteousness is now a hunger simply to be like Jesus, a hunger whetted evermore by the vision of Him in His beauty. The conformity of righteousness is desired now, not as conformity to a hard or cold imperative from heaven, but as assimilation through sympathy to the very heart which for ever beats and glows in holy love within the Beloved of our hearts. (2) A second blessedness, and the central one, attached to this Christian appetite for righteousness is that it shall be filled. Those who have tasted once of the Lord's grace need never suffer the pain and hopeless consumption of unsatisfied desire; but they ought to have a hunger, more regular, if less painful hunger day by day for daily bread. Satisfaction, contentment for Christian men, there can be none short of righteousness in its supreme form the righteousness of the Son's perfect likeness to the Father's character. For that let us hunger on; after that let us thirst: so shall ours be the blessedness, first, of desire, and then the better blessedness of attainment; for we "shall be filled."
J. Oswald Dykes, The Beatitudes of the Kingdom; see also The Manifesto of the King,p. 81.
References: Matthew 5:6. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 221, vol. xxii., p. 92; Preacher's Monthly,vol. x., p. 56; Bishop Barry, Cheltenham College Sermons,p. 119; C. G. Finney, Sermons on Gospel Themes,p. 398; F. W. Farrar, In the Days of Thy Youth,p. 21.