Let's pray together before we begin the message.

Every week, Father, we're so conscious that the creation of the things extolled in the beatitudes in the hearts of your people requires more than a human act.

If people are to thirst and hunger for righteousness,

it's got to be of you.

And I beg you, Father, that you would be pleased in your great mercy to use the preaching of your word to

create that hunger and that thirst.

In Jesus' great and holy name we pray.

Amen.

Some of the most evocative words in the Old Testament come from the Book of Ecclesiasties,

don't look it up, I'm only going to allude to these in passing.

They go like this, God has made everything beautiful in its time.

Also he has put eternity into man's mind,

yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

Now what does that mean?

That God has put eternity in your mind and withheld from you a vision of the beginning in the

end that might satisfy that.

Augustine I think puts it like this he says we were made for the oh God and our hearts

are restless until they find their rest in thee.

Jeremiah put it like this.

He said, my people have committed two evils.

They have forsaken me the fountain of living waters and hewed out cisterns for

themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water and so there's a longing, an unsatisfied inconsolable longing. Let me read you a poem. I fell

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