beatitude #4: what’s driving your life?
"To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something." — James K.A. Smith
“For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.” — Ps. 107:9
In his fourth Beatitude, Jesus challenges you to think about what’s driving your life? At your core, what do you really desire? We live in a culture that tells us that being driven by personal success is the best path to flourishing. If you give everything you have towards succeeding in life, then you’ll be able to live a satisfying and enjoyable life.
But Jesus completely disagrees with this approach. Instead, he teaches that:
Flourishing are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness because they shall be filled.
At the core of the tension between these two approaches, Jesus wants you to reflect on the questions: deep down, what’s driving your life?
the secular approach to flourishing
Every human being is driven by something. We have one fundamental purpose that gives us an overarching purpose that drives our lives. In his book, You Are What You Love, James K.A. Smith said:
To be human is to be on a quest. To live is to be embarked on a kind of unconscious journey toward the destination of your dreams.
To be human is to be animated and oriented by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as “flourishing.” And we want that. We crave it. We desire it.
We’re all driven by some desire which acts as the main goal of our life. This desire always promises that if we can fulfill it, then we’ll be living the good life. You don’t get to choose whether your life is driven by an all-consuming desire, you only get to decide what it’s going to be.
In our secular culture, the most common animating and orienting desire in life is personal success. We are told that if we want to flourish, we have to be driven by the absolute pursuit of success and achievement. It has to become the main drive in our lives. We grow up learning that:
Flourishing are those who are driven by personal success because they will have it all!
And so our lives revolve around a deep desire for individual success. If we can just become successful, we think, then we’ll be able to create a life where we have everything we could ever want. Our recipe for flourishing is:
Pursue success above everything else —> become successful —> get the good life!
This creates a culture where our success becomes the most important thing in our lives. We live self-preoccupied lives spent chasing our self-interests, hopeful that we can achieve enough to flourish.
In our hyper-individualistic culture, the goal is personal, not communal, success. Everything comes secondary to our ability to succeed. Sure, we might say we want community, relationships, and commitment, but when the pencil hits the SAT booklet, our ability to achieve is what matters most.
so what is success?
While success can mean different things to different people, in our culture young people see success as consisting of three things:
Affluence: success means having abundant wealth, giving you the ability to spend it freely on whatever you want. The goal is to have so much extra money you can spoil yourself and be able to fulfill your idea of the good life.
Credentials: success also includes having the right background, achievements, and pedigree. These serve as credentials and are evidence of your status and authority. Your credentials prove that you followed the path that your community values most: you went to the right school, won at the right competitions, chose the right career, got married and had kids at the right time, and are associated with the right institutions.
Prestige: to be successful, you also need to become prominent in the exclusive circles of life. You need to be admired, esteemed, and well-respected, developing a reputation of being valued by the other influential people in your community.
These three aspects of success may sound abstract, but the pursuit of them drives so much of our lives, from the moment we get our first school report to where we choose to retire to. We become ambitious, hopeful that we’ll reach our dreams and become a high-achiever in everything we do.
This cultural view of success sweeps into our lives as an unseen current, drawing us into its power as it becomes the captivating vision of our lives. Every community has a localized definition of what it means to be affluent, credentialed, and prestigious, and pushes us to fit its narrative.
If you live in the Midwest or South, your view of success probably centers more around marriage, family, and equipping your children to succeed. You care about work, but because it allows you to buy a big house in a safe suburb with great schools.
If you live on the East Coast or West Coast, your view of success probably centers more around your career. You care about marriage and children, as long as they don’t get in the way of building a successful career.
Whichever cultural narrative you have been shaped by, we all live our lives pursuing a vision of what it means to be affluent, credentialed, and prestigious.
so how do you become successful?
One thing that has made the pursuit of success so important in our lives is that we’ve changed how we get it. Historically, success was something passed down from previous generations. If your parents were poor, you probably would be as well.
But since the 1950s this has changed, with the idea, at least, of greater mobility, it’s now up to each new generation to create their success, and if possible, expand on what their parents’ achieved.
To do this, personal success has to become the driving purpose of our lives. We’re afraid that if we don’t do everything within our power to succeed, we’ll fall behind and fail. This has caused young people everywhere to become increasingly obsessed with their success. This is shown by our collective obsession with our:
Grades: if I get a B then I’ll get off of the “success” track in life.
College: if I don’t get into a top school then I’ll be a failure.
Career: if I don’t get my dream job in my 20s then I’ll be stuck living in a run-down house in a bad part of town and won’t be able to afford the good life.
Marriage: if I don’t get married to the right kind of person, then not only will I be a failure, but my future children will be as well.
Money: if I don’t have plenty of extra money, then I won’t be able to do the fun things I want to, much less be able to retire by my target date.
The pursuit of success becomes our ultimate desire. It’s what we orient our lives around. It’s what we think about in our free time, what we talk about when we’re with friends, and what we scheme about at work, always wondering, “How can I become more successful?”
And so we hustle through life, looking for ways to increase our productivity and achieve more at work. The more we can get done, the better chance we’ll have at hitting our version of success, whether that’s to have the most picturesque family or to show up on the “Forbes 30 Under 30” list.
We look to the patron saints of success, people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, for insight, studying their lives through articles and podcasts, hoping to glean their secrets and imitate their achievements.
Even our Christianity becomes success-oriented. We gravitate towards “successful” churches and know that the most common prayer in our twenties is some version of: “God, please help me be successful!”
I hope it’s clear how much our society (and each of us) is driven by a longing for success. We’re all driven by a deep desire for success, afraid that if we don’t do everything we can to get it, we’ll fall behind and will never flourish.
how does success promise us the flourishing life?
So how does achieving personal success lead to the flourishing life? Our culture believes that success creates flourishing because it will:
Be inherently fulfilling: the idea we have when we’re young and at the beginning of our careers is that success will make us feel fulfilled, give us purpose, and provide meaning for our lives. We spend so much of our lives thinking that if we could just reach this level of achievement, then we’d feel satisfied.
People work such long hours at jobs they don’t enjoy, because they think that by the end of their lives they will achieve some amount of success that’ll make them feel like they have won at life. In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson calls this workism: the belief that if we obsess over work, it will someday fulfill us.
Give us the resources to live the good life: we trust that if we are successful, we’ll be affluent enough to buy and consume everything we need to live our best life. The culmination of our lives becomes using our resources to make sure we enjoy life as much as possible. This is why so many young people take a “work hard / play hard” approach to life.
This comes out in how young people talk about life. When sharing what they’re passionate about, I’ve heard so many young people list things like: skiing, restaurants, concerts, wine, the beach, mountains, Netflix, traveling, and other things like that. What they don’t realize, is that at their core they’re only passionate about one thing, though: themselves!
They would never admit that out loud, but all of their “passions” are only about meeting their own needs, not serving others or contributing to the greater community. Not that any of these things are bad, but you can see their mindset: I need to be successful so that I can enact my vision of the good life.
Allow us to create heaven on earth through retirement: The ultimate goal in our personal success culture is retirement, preferably as early as possible. Young people hope that they are so successful at work that they’ll be able to save enough money to stop working and enjoy the good life permanently.
Why is retirement so alluring? Because it’s our secular version of heaven. Since most people don’t live as if heaven is real, retirement becomes our cultural attempt at creating a utopian-esque heaven-on-earth, where you live in a beautiful place, like the beach or the mountains, and everything will be perfect. We’ll live a life of leisure and enjoy all of the good things that make us feel most fulfilled.
These beliefs cause young people to pick careers not on the basis of what work is important or worth doing, but rather on whether it gives you the ability to become affluent, credentialed, and respected.
I recently heard an acquaintance sharing how excited he was to be done with medical school. Why? Not because he was looking forward to treating patients, but because he was one step closer to his dream lifestyle: a giant house, a new BMW, and enough money to do whatever he wanted.
This mindset is so common among young people today and shows how much we adopted our cultural drive: if you can achieve enough personal success, then you’ll be able to get the good life and truly flourish.
why doesn’t this approach work?
The problem, though, is that despite the promises, this approach doesn’t work. No matter what we do, no matter how much we achieve, no matter how much we consume, it can’t satisfy the longings of our hearts.
People work and work, hoping that they’ll make enough money to get the good life. The problem, though, is that no matter how successful they are, they are never able to find fulfillment for their deepest desires.
While some people blame capitalism for training us to never be satisfied, most people just assume their problem is that they just haven’t succeeded enough! So they double-down on trying to create a flourishing life through personal success.
But this never works. How do we know? Because the people who have reached the ultimate levels of success show no more evidence of feeling fulfilled than ordinary people does. Just read this interview with a 27-year-old Tom Brady:
Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and think there's still something greater out there for me? Maybe a lot of people would say "Hey man, this is what it is." I've reached my goal, my dream. Me? I think there's got to be more than this. I mean this can't be what it's all cracked up to be. I've done it. I'm 27. What else is there for me?
Then, after the interviewer asks Tom what's the answer, he stared at the camera with a blank face and replied, "I wish I knew."
Madonna, maybe the most successful musician of all time, said this in an interview:
My ego cannot be satisfied. My sense of self, my desire for self-worth, my need to be somebody----it is not fulfilled. I keep thinking I have won it from what people have said about me and what the magazines and newspapers have written. But the next day, I have to go back and look somewhere else. Why? Because my ego is insatiable. It's a black hole. It doesn't matter how much I throw into it, the cupboard is bare. I have become somebody---but I still need to become somebody.
We might think that we’d be different if we were famous, but the comedian and actor Jim Carrey warns us of this idea, saying:
I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.
Our surprise at these celebrity stories should alert us to the amount of trust we’ve put in our culture’s attempt to flourish through personal success. But the idea that success can’t fill the longings of our heart isn’t new, we just choose to ignore the evidence.
Solomon, one of the most successful people in the history of the world, wrote that:
He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves abundance with its income. All a man’s labor is for his mouth and yet the appetite is not satisfied.
We spend our lives hoping that this next thing will ultimately satisfy us, forgetting all of the other things that we thought would satisfy us but didn’t. The prophet Isaiah challenges our culture’s thinking, asking us:
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
No matter how much you achieve, you’ll never find satisfaction through these things. So may people live their entire lives thinking: “If I only had ______, then I’d be satisfied.”
But one of two things always happens: Either you get the thing you wanted and realize that you’re still empty. Or, you don’t get the thing and you become bitter and resentful towards whomever you think is holding you back, especially if it’s God.
the result of the secular approach
So if the secular approach to flourishing doesn’t give us fulfillment, then what do we get? Problems. All kinds of them, including:
Exhaustion: we work harder and harder, thinking that at some point we’ll be satisfied. This causes us to overwork, resulting in exhaustion, declining productivity, and burn out.
Manipulation: since everything becomes about our success, we tend to treat everyone and everything transactionally. We manipulate the people around us and use them for our own good.
Loneliness: we spend so much time pursuing our own personal success that we struggle with commitment and don’t prioritize relationships with others. We’re always moving to new jobs, new cities, new churches in order to find something that meets our needs and increases our ability to be successful.
Self-obsession: The only thing we think and care about is our personal success. We inflate our small problems until they are huge, allowing us to avoid ever thinking about how we could help other people in our communities. We feel a vague sympathy for less fortunate people, but never have any time to help.
Angst: in moments of failure or real solitude, we struggle with the big existential questions: what’s it all for? Why am I working so hard? Does any of this stuff actually matter?” and realize that we don’t have great answers."
When you try to find satisfaction and fulfillment through your personal success it doesn’t work. You’ll only find emptiness, isolation, and a profound dissatisfaction that you can’t shake no matter what you do. While our culture acts as if these side effects of our success-based system don’t exist, they do so much damage throughout our society
what’s the root problem with the secular approach?
But there’s a deeper reason that trying to flourish through personal success doesn’t work. The problem isn’t with success, though, but rather how we use success. After all, we should strive to be successful with the gifts that God has given to us.
Things go wrong, though, when we use the gifts of God to try to flourish on our own apart from God. That’s what happened in the Garden of Eden. When God created Adam and Eve, he made them to be in a relationship with him, and they flourished in his presence.
But after Satan tempted them to eat the forbidden fruit, they began to distrust God:
Maybe God’s holding out on us…he set up this rule so that we wouldn’t flourish. We all know that eating this fruit will give us more satisfaction than a relationship with God will.
And so, because they thought that satisfying their own desires would give them more fulfillment than desiring God, they ate the fruit. But rather than moving to a higher plane of flourishing, they rejected God and lost their relationship with him.
But since we were only made to flourish in relation to God, the Fall brought emptiness, loneliness, and a sense of disconnectedness, leaving us with, as Blaise Pascal put it, a God-shaped vacuum in our hearts.
We try to fill this hole with success, thinking that if we can just achieve enough then we’ll feel good. When you try to satisfy your deepest desires with anything but God, you’re setting yourself up for a life of emptiness and self-destruction. Your career is a good thing, when you try to make it an ultimate thing, it will be crushed under that kind of pressure.
Now, every human being tries to satisfy the spiritual desires that God’s given us, to have purpose and meaning and satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment, apart from God. But only a relationship with God can satisfy these spiritual cravings.
As Augustine said:
You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
Only a restored relationship with our Creator can give us the meaning, satisfaction, purpose, and fulfillment that we’re all longing for.
Part 2: Jesus’ approach to human flourishing
Jesus’ approach to flourishing is the exact opposite of our secular culture: it’s not those whose deepest desire is success that flourish, but rather those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, because they shall be filled.
Like all of the other Beatitudes, our culture finds this teaching strange: how can someone who’s starving and parched be thought of as flourishing? It seems the opposite of the good life in every way possible.
And then there’s the whole idea of righteousness. Who wants to be righteous in today’s world? When most people hear the word righteousness, they can’t help but think of pharisaical, legalistic religious types.
So what does Jesus mean in this fourth Beatitude? How does hungering and thirsting after righteousness lead to a flourishing life?
what does Jesus mean by this beatitude?
When Jesus says that it’s those who hunger and thirst for righteousness who will flourish, he’s telling us: flourishing are those whose deepest drive in life is a desire for righteousness.
By using the verbs hunger and thirst, Jesus wants us to examine our deepest desires. He wants to know: what are you starving and thirsty for?
Think about it, when you’re starving and parched, how do you act? You don’t just sit around and contemplate finding something to eat and drink, all of your thoughts, plans, and actions revolve around trying to satisfy your longing for food and water. You pursue these things and won’t let anything else get in your way.
That’s what Jesus wants you to see. He’s saying that if you want to flourish, a hunger and thirst for righteousness has to be the consuming desire of your life!
This means that the key to flourishing isn’t becoming successful or getting the good life, but rather pursuing righteousness with the same energy, effort, and desire that a person struggling with hunger and thirst has for food and water.
The person who follows this Beatitude sees righteousness not as an optional part of life, but has a life-defining passion and appetite for it.
so what is righteousness?
Righteousness, like meekness, is another one of those vague religious-sounding words that we’re not really sure what it actually means. At its core, righteousness means “one who is right,” not in the sense of being correct, but rather morally good.
When Jesus uses righteousness here, he’s ultimately referring to the moral goodness and holiness of God. He’s saying that flourishing comes by hungering and thirsting after the moral goodness and holiness of God.
Pastor Chuck Swindoll says that a person who hungers and thirsts for righteousness has an:
Insatiable appetite for what is right, a passionate drive for justice...and is engaged in the pursuit of God. They have a hot, restless, eager longing to walk with Him and to please Him.
When we are hungering and thirsting for righteousness, we are longing to be like Jesus in every area and relationship of life. We have a deep appetite to follow God’s will and do what he says is right, resulting in us becoming more and more like Jesus.
Too often, though, Christians just see righteousness in its individualistic, legal sense: that because of Christ’s righteousness I am justified by God and seen as righteous in his sight. But Biblical righteousness is more than this, and as we are declared righteous before God, a desire to be holy will spill over into every area of our lives, causing us to desire:
Moral righteousness: when we are justified through Christ’s righteousness, the Holy Spirit begins to work in our hearts to make us become more and more like Christ in every area of our lives.
Social righteousness: when we grow to become like Christ, we begin to desire for more than just personal holiness, but also societal holiness. We grieve over the brokenness and destructiveness of sin that’s all around us, causing us to pursue what God sees as right and good in every area of society.
When we hunger and thirst after righteousness, our lives are no longer driven by a need for personal success or fulfillment, but rather by a deep longing for the goodness and holiness of God in all of life: we want to live like Jesus Christ.
so what does this look like in real life?
It’s so important to note, though, that when Jesus tells you to hunger and thirst for righteousness, he’s talking about your internal appetites, not your external actions. So many people around Jesus tried to act righteous, but never desired righteousness.
The Pharisees obsessed over appearing like they were the ultimate followers of God. But deep down, they didn’t desire God, they just wanted the praise of other people. We can do the same thing, using Christianity not to get God, but rather to gain religious affluence, credentials, and prestige.
But a real appetite for righteousness doesn't just come from outward behavior, but rather from a regenerated heart. A true craving for God can only flow out of a heart that has been changed by the Holy Spirit. If you skip the heart change, you’ll just succumb to self-righteousness, thinking that you can achieve moral and social righteousness on your own.
When our hearts are regenerated by God the pursuit of him becomes the most important thing in our lives. We see this in Psalm 42, where the psalmist writes:
As a deer pants for flowing streams, so my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
For the person who is hungering and thirsting after righteousness, their deepest appetite is for God: they want to spend time with him, to become like him, and to see our world follow him. They want to leave sin behind and pursue an ever-increasing righteousness in every area of your life.
how do you get this appetite for righteousness?
It’s easy, though, to go through the motions of being a Christian without hungering and thirsting for righteousness. So how do we cultivate a greater appetite for God and his kingdom?
The answer is that you have to work up a spiritual appetite by:
Living for God: spiritual appetites are like physical appetites, they grow when you do things that require nourishment. If you are spiritually lazy, you’ll never hunger or thirst for righteousness. But if you are living for God and loving your neighbor, praying for your enemies, and serving others, you’ll need the spiritual calories and will develop an appetite for God.
Quit eating spiritual junk food: it’s so easy to ruin our appetite for God by filling up on spiritual and emotional junk food. We spend our lives consuming the empty calories of TV, movies, Instagram, and inspirational Christian content. It tastes good and is fun to eat, but it causes us to never hunger and thirst for God.
Getting rid of distractions: if we’re not careful we can get so distracted by the cares and concerns of life, like buying possessions, upgrading our apartment, or having a bustling social life (especially on Sundays) that we never have any time to go to church, read our Bibles, or fellowship with God through prayer.
God doesn’t force us to hunger and thirst after him. He never says, “Do this or else!” But Jesus makes clear that if we ever want to experience a truly flourishing life, we have to pursue God and make our desire for him the driving passion of our lives.
why does hungering and thirsting lead to flourishing?
As with all of the other Beatitudes, Jesus isn't telling us that hunger and thirst are inherent states of flourishing. He's not encouraging you to literally starve yourself, physically, emotionally, or spiritually, in order to flourish.
So why do those who hunger and thirst for righteousness flourish? Jesus says that it's because they shall be filled.
Jesus uses what’s called the divine passive here. Since Jewish people in that time avoided using God’s name, they developed the divine passive in order to refer to God, without saying his name.
Jesus is saying that those with an appetite for righteousness will flourish because they will be satisfied by God! Those who pursue him above everything else will find in him the fulfillment to their deepest longings in life.
The idea behind the word filled is that we are STUFFED, so satisfied by God that we couldn’t take another bite. It’s like the feeling we have after Thanksgiving dinner, when we finally admit that we can’t eat any more food. We’re so satisfied.
Jesus makes it clear here: only God can satisfy the deepest longings of your heart. There are so many good things in this world, but created things can never fill your heart. Only your Creator can satisfy the aching emptiness of our hearts, and provide the peace, meaning, fulfillment, and hope that we’re all trying to find.
How does this happen? Jesus tells us that it’s through him:
I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
When we pursue Jesus, he meets us in our deepest longings, promising to meet our needs and give us the abundant and eternal life that we all want. But Jesus doesn’t just give us a promise, he shows us through the Lord’s Supper: when we eat his body and drink his blood, we are spiritually nourished as we remember his atoning sacrifice for us.
Because of Christ’ body and blood we are welcomed back into a relationship with God, and will be reunited with him in the New Heavens and New Earth. Just listen to how John describes it in Revelation:
They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; The sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
This is ultimately what our hearts yearn for: to be in God’s presence in a place where there is no more hunger or thirst or crying, as Jesus satisfies us in every way.
but how are we going to flourish in this life?
But, you might be wondering, what about your day-to-day needs? How are you going to flourish if you don’t make personal success the driving desire in your life? We worry, afraid that if we don’t do everything we can to become affluent, credentialed, and prestigious, then we will never flourish.
But Jesus gives us his promise later in the Sermon on the Mount. If you seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, everything else that you need will be given to you as well!
This is why you can hunger and thirst, not for success, but for righteousness, because Jesus will make sure that you have everything you need to live.
The result of this promise: because Jesus is caring for us, we are set free from our self-interested obsession with personal success, and can now use our lives not to work for the flourishing of things. When you no longer have to devote your life to your kingdom to ensure that you flourish, you are able to serve God and help usher in his kingdom, leading to a world where more and more people flourish.
where do we get the power to follow this Beatitude?
So where do we get the ability to let go of our desires and instead hunger and thirst after God? By understanding Jesus’ love for us on the cross. It was on the cross that the wrath of God, the judgment that we deserved, came down on Jesus, leaving him cosmically thirsty. In Psalm 22, the psalmist foretells Jesus’ death, saying:
My mouth is dried up like a piece of broken pottery, and my sticker to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.
Jesus experience the ultimate spiritual thirst while he was on the cross, so that we might have access to the refreshing living water of a relationship with God. Jesus allowed himself to be cosmically thirsty so that we could welcomed back into God’s presence and be eternally satisfied. That is the ultimate good life!
NEXT POST: Beatitude #5: how do you create social change?
This is a major reason why investing content is so popular on social media: it promises to give us the tools to create this heaven on earth without God. If you can just get to $5 or 10 million, then you’ll be able to create a life of total fulfillment.
It’s no accident that dating apps are designed to let you instantly gauge the affluence, credentials, and prestige of the other person, by showing you where they went to college, what kind of work they do, and what type of lifestyle they are able to afford.
When I lived in South Sudan, the intense heat of the dry season would dehydrate you so quickly. If you went more than a few hours without water, your throat would turn dry and your body when start to shut down. When that happened, finding water didn’t become an optional errand to put on your list, but rather the most important task in your life. It would dominate your thinking until you found something to drink.
