The Bible speaks of hungering and thirsting after righteousness as a cardinal virtue in the Christian life and a defining mark of the true believer. To be a child of God is to share in the righteousness of God through his Son. Jesus died for us so that we might, through Him, have such righteousness.

The problem for many of us who bear His name is that we think the thing we are supposed to be hungering and thirsting after is perfect performance in keeping the law and avoiding sin. Of course the earnest Christian desires to do both. A lifestyle of lawlessness and transgression is part of what we were saved from when we cried out to Jesus and put our faith in Him for our salvation. Striving for moral excellence is a good thing if we strive for it in the strength of our risen Savior. The problem is that a lot of us strive for it in the power of the flesh and have come to believe that perfect ethical performance is what it means to be filled with righteousness. Actually such performance, if it stems mostly from human effort, is inevitably wedded with self-righteousness. Such "righteousness" is a lie and an abomination to God.

That we do this, even as professed Christians, should not come as a surprise to us if we know something about the nature we are all born with. All human beings have an innate sense of right and wrong. This is a function of being created in the image of God and existing in a moral universe. We have a similarly innate sense that we do not measure up to the right and tend inexorably towards the wrong. Be it on a conscious or unconscious level we cannot escape this truth. Our perhaps equally sinful instincts, as fallen, morally compromised beings, is either to try to be "good enough" to rate acceptance by the One who sets the standard or to ignore the standard and hate Him who set it. This instinct does not necessarily disappear at conversion although Christians, of course, tend towards the former sin rather than the latter.

So what, then, does it truly mean for a believer to hunger and thirst after righteousness? It means to deeply desire God and His righteousness and to understand that He gives us a good heart through our faith in His perfectly good Son. We do not have a good heart and we cannot give ourselves one. Christians must give up both of these illusions completely. To do so is only to take God at His word. The Bible makes it clear that only our Lord’s shed blood makes us righteous and then only as we put our faith in Him to do so.

When a child of God comes to want the righteousness of Jesus Christ above all else he or she will be filled with that righteousness. True moral and ethical excellence will ensue because God will give to His child of His own nature. This is perhaps the greatest miracle of all and it is the fulfillment of the deepest hunger and thirst of the redeemed heart.