This is Episode 5 of Coffee Chat with Hank and Day 5 of Daily Bread, our forty-day walk through the Sermon on the Mount. Today, Matthew 5:6.

Most of us have never been hungry. We get peckish around three in the afternoon and wander to the break room. We skip lunch because the meeting ran long, and by supper we tell everybody we are starving. That is appetite. Hunger is a different animal.

I have sat with parents who could not feed their children. The look in their eyes stays with you. Real hunger takes over the whole body until there is room for one thought. Thirst does the same thing to a man walking across a desert. After a while he can think of nothing but water.

That is the picture Jesus reaches for in the fourth Beatitude.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled.

Matthew 5:6, NKJV

The Ones Who Keep Hungering

Last time we looked at the strength Jesus calls meek. The meek have handed God the reins. Now Jesus names what they want.

The verbs are peinaō (πεινάω, G3983), to hunger, and dipsaō (διψάω, G1372), to thirst. Matthew writes them as present participles. A woodenly literal translation would say “the ones hungering and thirsting.” These people are still hungry and still thirsty, day after day. It is a condition they live in, and a single craving on a Sunday morning does not fit the grammar.

There is a small detail in the Greek that preachers have loved for a long time. When a Greek speaker said he was hungry for bread, he normally put bread in the genitive case, which carries the sense of some bread, a piece of it. Matthew puts righteousness in the accusative. William Barclay pointed out what that means. The person Jesus blesses wants the whole loaf.

Luke records a shorter form of the saying. “Blessed are you who hunger now, For you shall be filled” (Luke 6:21). In Luke the hunger is plain stomach hunger, and Jesus promises the poor a full table. Matthew gives us the same blessing with its object named. These people are starving for righteousness.

Two Halves of One Word

The word is dikaiosynē (δικαιοσύνη, G1343), and it carries two ideas you have to hold together.

The first is right standing with God. It is the verdict God declares over the one who trusts Christ. Paul wanted to “be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith” (Philippians 3:9). Nobody earns that verdict. God gives it.

The second is right living. Honest scales, kept promises, and treating people the way God treats them. Jesus uses the word this way a few verses later. “Unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20).

The Sermon on the Mount keeps returning to this word, in Matthew 5:10, 5:20, and 6:33. “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:33). Righteousness sits near the center of everything Jesus teaches on that hillside.

In Scripture the two halves belong together. The person God declares righteous begins to live righteously. The verdict comes first, and then it starts rearranging the life. So the hunger Jesus blesses runs in both directions. It wants to be made right with God, and it wants a life that shows it.

Underneath both is a hunger for God Himself. The psalmists knew that ache.

As the deer pants for the water brooks, So pants my soul for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

Psalm 42:1–2, NKJV

David wrote Psalm 63 in the wilderness of Judah, and he used his own dry mouth as the picture. “My soul thirsts for You; My flesh longs for You In a dry and thirsty land Where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1).

What the Appetite Looks Like

What does this hunger look like on an ordinary Tuesday?

Picture a man who sins and cannot rest until he has confessed it. What bothers him most is the distance between himself and his Father. Or a woman who opens her Bible before the house wakes up, because she wants to hear God’s voice more than she wants another half hour of sleep. Or a young man who walks away from a deal at work because it cuts corners, and he finds he cannot stomach being part of it.

The appetite is the evidence. Healthy souls get hungry. When a sick man stops wanting water, the doctors start to worry.

When a sick man stops wanting water, the doctors start to worry.

For most of us the danger is a spoiled appetite. Every parent knows what happens when a child fills up on candy an hour before supper. He sits down at the table and pushes the plate away. Isaiah put the same question to God’s people.

Why do you spend money for what is not bread, And your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, And let your soul delight itself in abundance.

Isaiah 55:2, NKJV

Hours of scrolling. A steady drip of entertainment. A calendar with no empty space in it. None of it has to be wicked to crowd out the meal. Amos warned of a day when God would send “a famine on the land, Not a famine of bread, Nor a thirst for water, But of hearing the words of Jehovah” (Amos 8:11). A man can live through that kind of famine for years and never feel a pang.

Fed Like Sheep on the Grass

Then comes the promise. They shall be filled.

The verb is chortazō (χορτάζω, G5526). It comes from chortos (χόρτος, G5528), grass or fodder. Greek farmers used it for cattle and sheep turned out to pasture, eating until they were full and then lying down content.

Matthew uses those same two words when Jesus feeds the five thousand. “Then He commanded the multitudes to sit down on the grass” (Matthew 14:19). The grass is chortos. Jesus took five loaves and two fish, blessed them, and broke them. “So they all ate and were filled, and they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments that remained” (Matthew 14:20). Filled is chortazō. The crowd sat down on the grass and was fed the way a shepherd feeds his flock, with twelve baskets left over.

A chapter after the Beatitudes, Jesus points to that same grass. “Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:30). The Father who dresses the pasture in green is the Father who fills the hungry.

He is generous with them. He sets a table, and the portions are large. Jesus said it plainly in Capernaum. “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst” (John 6:35).

Augustine opened his Confessions with a prayer the church has repeated for sixteen centuries. “Our heart is restless until it rests in You.” The God who made you with this appetite intends to fill it.

The Words Under the Words

Word	Original	Strong’s	Meaning
peinaō	πεινάω	G3983	To hunger, to be famished. Matthew 5:6, Luke 6:21, Revelation 7:16
dipsaō	διψάω	G1372	To thirst. Matthew 5:6, John 7:37, Revelation 7:16
dikaiosynē	δικαιοσύνη	G1343	Righteousness. Right standing with God and right living. Matthew 5:6, 5:20, 6:33
chortazō	χορτάζω	G5526	To fill, to feed until satisfied. Used of livestock at pasture. Matthew 5:6, Matthew 14:20
chortos	χόρτος	G5528	Grass, fodder, pasture. Matthew 6:30, Matthew 14:19
tsame	צָמֵא	H6770	To thirst. “My soul thirsts for God,” Psalm 42:2, Psalm 63:1
tsedaqah	צְדָקָה	H6666	Righteousness. Psalm 106:3, Isaiah 56:1

When the Hunger Goes Dull

Look again at who Jesus blesses. He blesses the hungry. It is easy to confuse comfort with maturity. We pick up some Bible knowledge, a few years of faithful attendance, a handful of answered prayers, and somewhere along the way we stop being hungry. We settle into a faith that keeps the lights on and asks for nothing more.

Jesus had a word for a church like that. Laodicea said, “I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and did not know it was “wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked” (Revelation 3:17). A full stomach can lie to you.

If your appetite for God has gone dull, ask Him to give it back. Tell Him you are not as hungry as you used to be and you want to be. In two thousand years He has never refused that prayer.

And the hunger has an end. John saw the redeemed standing before the throne. “They shall neither hunger anymore nor thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any heat; for the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to living fountains of waters” (Revelation 7:16–17). Those are the same two verbs from Matthew 5:6. The ones who keep hungering now will one day sit at a table where hunger is over for good.

Pray It This Week

Later in this same sermon Jesus says “when you fast,” and He does not say if (Matthew 6:16). So try this. Skip one meal this week. When your stomach starts to complain, let it be your cue. Open to Psalm 63 and pray the first verse out loud. Ask God to make the hunger in your soul as sharp as the hunger in your belly. If your health will not allow a fast, set aside the phone or the television for an evening and use that time the same way.

Father, make me hungry again. Hungry for You, and for Your righteousness in me and through me. Do not let me settle for a comfortable, well-fed faith that has lost its appetite for You. Fill me, Lord, the way You filled that crowd on the grass, with baskets left over. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Discussion Questions

1. What is the difference between appetite and hunger? When have you been truly hungry or thirsty?
2. Matthew writes “the ones hungering and thirsting,” a hunger that keeps going. What changes when you think of hunger for righteousness as a condition you live in day after day?
3. Dikaiosynē means both right standing with God and right living. Which of the two are you hungrier for right now? Why do you think Scripture keeps them together?
4. Read Isaiah 55:1–2. What fills you up without feeding you?
5. The crowd in Matthew 14 sat on the grass and ate until they were filled, with twelve baskets left over. What does that tell you about the way God answers hunger for Him?

Going Deeper

Read Psalms 42 and 43 together, then Psalm 63. Mark every place the psalmist talks about thirst, water, or his own body. Then read Isaiah 55:1–3 alongside John 6:35 and John 7:37–38, and watch Jesus take up Isaiah’s invitation in His own name.

For a book, John Piper’s A Hunger for God is a study of fasting and prayer and the longing for God that sits underneath both. It pairs well with the practice above.

Follow Along

New episodes of Coffee Chat with Hank come out twice a week on my YouTube channel. Subscribe there and you will get each one as it posts. If you would rather read along, Daily Bread is available as a book under my H. R. Garner name on Amazon.

Next up is Day 6, Blessed Are the Merciful, from Matthew 5:7.

So pour a cup, open your Bible to Matthew 5, and come hungry.