Righteousness in Short Supply – by Jon Stevens

Today’s reflection in the series Easter Is Coming What Do You Hunger and Thirst For, comes from Jon Stevens proprietor of the Open Gate Farm on Camano Island

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Righteousness seems in short supply these days.  You know the kind.  The kind we’re supposed to be hungering and thirsting for.  Folks seem to be getting wrapped around the axle of the end times, the tribulation, the second coming, and all those life changing activities 2000 years of Christians hoped would start tomorrow.  Our vanity allows us to think it is going to be our generation that sees the rollout of the new creation.  So forward looking have we become that we’ve lost the view of the present moment, the now, and the gift of new life it holds.  And we’ve lost our hunger to live righteously, that is, in right relationship with God.  Actually it may be we have not lost it because we have never had the true thirst and hunger for righteousness and have only been faking it.

If we live in the right relationship with God now, all that other end of the world stuff drops out because if you read the Bible carefully you may spot that salvation (which precedes righteous living) solves any fears we might have of where we’ll be when all Hell breaks loose literally.  When we’re saved, the only question remaining is will we see our friends and family after the dust clears and the new world is in place and we on it.

So it doesn’t matter if the Mayans have the right date.  It doesn’t matter if an old man sitting on a mountain called it for the end of the world.  What matters is that the fruit of our personal salvation has us hungering and thirsting for righteousness.  And we have to remember to keep the cart before the horse…first salvation, then hungering and thirsting.  If we get that wrong we’ll be thirsting for more than righteousness when the world falls apart.  And hungering for those apples hanging from the Tree of Life we saw once in a garden.