The Holy Spirit is your deep spiritual desire for bringing the life and ministry of Jesus into your life and ministry.

Mark 12:30 (NIV) Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

Strength, in this verse, is strength of will. Hungering and thirsting for righteousness is a strengthing of our will toward righteousness. This attitude brings a deep desire, “want,” or will to get the righteousness of Jesus flowing in and through us. The stronger your will beomes to want the righteousness of God, the more you will yield to God to empower you with righteousness. As you know, righteousness is doing good and not doing bad to ourselves, others, or the work of God. The life and ministry of Jesus fulfills this quality.

2 Cor 5:21 (NIV) God made Him Who had no sin to be sin for us, so that IN Him we MIGHT BECOME the righteousness of God.

Wanting, studying about, praying for, believing in, and taking faith-action toward hungering and thirsting is the way for you to increase the strength of your will. As you increase the strength of your will toward the righteousness of God, you will see the righteous living and ministry of Jesus flowing out of you. Hungering and thirsting gives God a greater amount of permission from you to do righteous things in and through you. Hungering and thirsting becomes an intense seeking for God’s righteousness. This speeds up the attitudes and character of Jesus coming into you. Soon the lives of the people around you are being changed in a miraculous way through your ministry.

2 Cor 6:6-7 (NIV) In purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the POWER OF GOD; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left.

We open our heart up to the desires of the Holy Spirit as we expose ourselves to the word of God. We seek to spend more and more time with God and His word. We look to Him to empower us to change in our thinking, feeling, talking, and deeds.

We are hungering and thirsting for a complete change in our behavior so we can see more of Jesus flowing through us to helpless and hurting people. God’s compassion flowing in our heart causes us to want to yield to everything that will enable us to serve as many people as possible. We cry out to God to use us in as many ways as possible so as to help these desperate people.

Righteousness then lived by us, proves to everyone that it can set them free. We explain to them that we are JUST LIKE THEM. We acted, thought, felt, and talked just like everyone else. Then Jesus came and changed all these things in us. We help them understand that He doesn’t love us any more than He loves them. He is willing to do in them, everything He is doing in us. All His provisions are just as available to them as they are to anyone else. As we minister these principles into their lives, it becomes a weapon of deliverance for them to be set free.

Gal 5:5 (NIV) But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope.

It is taking you a lot of time, effort, and study, as you pray and ask God to open each Scripture to you. You spend a lot of time with Him asking Him to change you and make you into a person who can completely yield to Jesus and His ministry. You could be doing a lot of other things; but you keep spending it with God instead. You want all He has to offer; so you use large quantities of the hours of your life hungering and thirsting for the deeds that will set people free. Your faith and hope are in Him shaping you into a vessel He can use to change this world into a place where people can come to God in large quanties.

Eph 3:16-19 (NIV) That out of His glorious riches He may STRENGTHEN you with POWER through His Spirit in your inner being, SO THAT Christ may DWELL in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to GRASP how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to KNOW this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be FILLED to the measure of all the fullness of God.

This is the condition we long for and seek in ourselves and in all who are willing to allow Jesus to live in and minister through them. Jesus will fill you to the measure of all the fullness of God. He will make you into a person who is mightily used by Him to change the people of this world. He will work miracles in and through you that are God-sized and awesome. He will be all that the people of this world need Him to be. You will be able to provide them with every answer and every healing they need. You give them all that God has to offer.