Purity and Peace
We are so used to the sayings of Jesus that they almost slip right past us. But in reality they are like spiritual torpedoes that burst and explode in our subconscious minds, and when we really start to think about them, we realize what startling statements they are. They contain the dynamite of the Holy Spirit to rip and tear and revolutionize the way we think. Today I want to encourage us – inspire us with courage and confidence in Christ. Our world is rapidly deteriorating before our eyes, hurtling towards hell and death and destruction. It’s easy to get discouraged and feel overwhelmed when we think about being pure in an impure world. Today’s word might be a hard word, but a good word, one that I hope will point us towards Christ and His Kingdom!
Matthew 5:8 (NIV) – “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
I have always loved this verse. My first name means “pure” so this verse often accompanies “Karen” on personalized name gifts in Christian book stores. But more than that, it’s prophetically something that God restored in my life. One of the results of my indulging in the sins and folly of my youth was that my mind was anything but pure. But when I reached a place of total surrender to Jesus, during my dark night of the soul many years after I had given my life to Christ, one of the many gifts the Lord graced me with was a cleansing and restoration of purity to my thought life. I praise Him for rewiring me in that way.
C. S. Lewis – “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.”
God created us with a desire to see Him.
God has created all people in His image, with a desire to see Him. Every religion, every set of beliefs and practices around the world, arose from this desire to see God, whether fully comprehended or not. We have a built-in craving for our soul’s hunger to be satisfied, whether we’re conscious of it or not, whether we understand who it is that can satisfy us – there’s only one – Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, through whom God made everything and through whom we have been given life. The hunger in our souls is very real. Our souls literally groan for sustenance. We try to take the edge off our hunger in any way we can – indulging the flesh or doing good works or practicing religious exercises. Although plenty of voices try to convince us otherwise, deep down we all know that none of these things will give us real and lasting satisfaction. There are all kinds of foods by which we can be tempted. If we reach into the wrong pantries to satisfy our hunger, not only will it eventually destroy us, but we will fail to see God, to abide with Him in the intimate union for which he created us. Seeing God a little bit, getting even a brief, fleeting glimpse of Him, does not even satiate us – it only intensifies our longing. Glimpses of God are like seeing a small part of His back – but we long to see His face. Charles Spurgeon wrote that, “You will thirst. Yet it will not be a painful thirst but one of loving desire, and you will find it to be a glorious thing to be panting after a fuller enjoyment of Jesus’ love. Someone long ago said, ‘I have been sinking my bucket into the well quite often, but now my thirst for Jesus has become so insatiable that I long to put the well itself to my lips and continually drink.’” God created in us a desire to see Him. He created us to be able to see Him. How? By being “pure in heart.”
Do I value a pure heart?
Pure. Like many words these days, it’s thrown around in so many contexts that it has lost much of its true meaning as Jesus spoke it. While our culture values things like pure air, pure water, and pure food, it seems to devalue the pure heart. Some people insist on a “smoke-free” environment but do not mind a polluted heart. You may have seen billboards around town recently that boldly proclaim “Purity is good” – advertising something called “smart water . . . the water with all the answers.” It’s described as “pure as the first drop of rain” and “purity you can taste.” My skeptical analysis of this statement stems from the fact that water is by definition a tasteless and odorless liquid at room temperature. “Pure” now has a diluted meaning. But I digress!
You may have heard this story before, but it fits so well and gets my attention every time I think of it, I just have to tell it again. Suppose I baked a delicious cake this morning that I’d like to share with you. It’s moist, rich, a special heirloom recipe, made with the freshest ingredients, has the perfect texture, and is still warm. Would you like a piece? Oh, I should mention before you eat it that I was sweeping the kitchen right before I popped the cake in the oven, and added just a little dust and dirt to the mixture. It was only maybe a spoonful – no big deal – it didn’t make a big difference. Anyway, who would like some? When I tell my kids this story, it’s usually poop in the brownies, but I thought I’d stick with floor sweepings for this early in the morning. The message is the same. It’s completely unacceptable to us to think of consuming dirt or filth on purpose, even a little. It makes all the difference in the world! The same should go for what we tolerate in our hearts and souls and minds. We are moral schizophrenics. We forget that there is no heaven with a little corner of hell in it.
To be pure in heart is to love God.
The Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary defines the heart as the center of the physical, mental, and spiritual life of humans. The heart is the total person and is what Jesus emphasizes. God has commanded us to love Him with all our heart (Mark 12:30). Paul taught that the purpose of God’s command is love that comes from a pure heart (1 Timothy 1:5). The heart is the dwelling place of God. Two persons of the Trinity are said to reside in the heart of the believer (2 Corinthians 1:22, Ephesians 3:17, Romans 5:5). What kind of residence have you and I prepared for Christ, who dwells in our hearts, and the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us as a guarantee of everything God has promised us? Jesus’ assessment of the natural heart is not very encouraging. He says in Matthew 15:19 that “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” Despite this horrible diagnosis, today’s beatitude insists that purity of heart is the indispensable prerequisite for fellowship with God – for seeing God.
To be pure in heart is to love people.
God commanded us to not only love Him, but to love people. Just as God showed His great love for us by sending Jesus Christ to die for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8), we are to show our love for others by laying our lives down for them. Oswald Chambers says that “the process of being made broken bread and poured out wine means that you have to be the nourishment for other souls until they learn to feed on God . . . Has it ever dawned on you that you are responsible for other souls spiritually before God? If I allow any private deflection from God in my life, everyone about me suffers.” He goes on to say that “Our sufficiency is of God, and of Him alone . . . We have to be adjusted into God before we can be broken bread in His hands. Keep right with God and let Him do what He likes, and you will find that He is producing the kind of bread and wine that will benefit His other children.” Let’s be very clear on this – there is nothing in any of us to move God to be gracious or to continue His grace towards us. Christ alone is our sufficiency.
Let’s look at what the word “pure” means – it comes from the Greek word “katharos” –
- Clean
- Clear
- Innocent
- Singleminded
- Without folds
- Undivided
- Utterly sincere
- Transparent
- Unmixed with anything devious, ulterior, or base
- Unhypocritical
- Not deceitful
- Without guile
- In the open
- Without a mask
- Playing only one role regardless of the occasion
- Living in reality, not make-believe
- Singleness of purpose
- Something previously soiled that has been washed clean
- Winnowed, sifted, and cleansed of all chaff
- Like an army purged of all discontented, cowardly, unwilling, and inefficient soldiers and which is a force composed solely of first-class fighting men
- Unadulterated milk or wine
- Metal untinged with alloys
- Entirely unmixed motives
The popular interpretation of Matthew 5:8 is to regard purity of heart as inner purity, a quality for those who have been cleansed from moral defilement. Quoting Spurgeon again . . . he says that the Lord Jesus gives special revelations of Himself to His people, and that these special manifestations have a profound and holy influence on the believer’s heart. He lists the three effects of closeness to Jesus as humility, happiness, and holiness.
To be pure in heart is to be no longer divided, but fully integrated.
One of the best definitions of purity is given in Psalm 86:11 (NASB) – “Unite my heart to fear your name.” The trouble with us is our divided heart. One part of us wants to know God and worship God and please God; but another part wants something else. The pure heart is the heart that is no longer under the tyranny of a divided self. The Psalmist seems to say, “make it one, make it single, take out the pleats and the folds, let it be whole, let it be one, let it be sincere, let it be entirely free from any hypocrisy.”
It means we have an undivided love which regards God as our highest good, and which is concerned only about loving God. To be pure in heart means that we should live to the glory of God in every respect, and that that should be the supreme desire of our life. It means that we desire God, that we desire to know Him, that we desire to love Him and to serve Him. Jesus says here that only those who are like that shall see God. The whole object of Christianity is to bring us to the vision of God, to see God.
The pure heart is the single heart, the heart that is sincere, the heart that is fully integrated. Someone with a pure heart is the same person in every situation, regardless of who is or isn’t present. No masks. No pretense. No double-mindedness. No wavering. Ken Boa points out that “as we meditate on God’s Word, He shapes the way we think about our world and ourselves, teaching us to think His thoughts and lead an integrated life in which everything we do matters. There is no dichotomy between spiritual and sacred. God intends to govern all of life, rendering it all holy.”
To be pure in heart is to be transparent in relationships.
Psalm 24:3 – 4 speaks of our relationship with both God and man – “Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart . . .” Someone with a pure heart is free from falsehood in all relationships. Those who are pure in heart are completely transparent, in public and in private, before God and man. Every thought and motive is pure, unmixed with anything devious, ulterior or base. Hypocrisy and deceit are abhorrent to them; they are without guile.
William Barclay points out that this beatitude demands from us the most exacting self-examination. Do we work from motives of service or motives of getting paid? Do we serve from unselfish motives or motives of self-display? Do we pray and read the Bible to meet with God or to feel better about ourselves? What do we think about when our mind slips into neutral? How do we respond on the inside to shady humor? What do we want more than anything else? Examining our own motives is a daunting and a shaming task, for there are few things in this world that even the best of us do with completely unmixed motives.
How few of us live one single, integrated life, and live it in the open! We are tempted to wear a different mask and play a different role according to each occasion. Wikipedia defines “reality television” as a genre of television programming that presents purportedly unscripted dramatic or humorous situations, documents actual events, and usually features ordinary people instead of professional actors. But the article goes on to say that reality television frequently portrays a modified and highly influenced form of reality, utilizing sensationalism to attract viewers and so to generate advertising profits.
How often do we live our lives like reality tv? Play-acting is a nice way of saying “hypocrisy.” Even tools that are meant to be helpful like identifying our personalities or spiritual gifts can provide us with masks to hide behind, if we try to obtain value or identity from those things rather than just resting in who we are in Christ. We can recite lines as if from a script, but talking about doing something good isn’t the same as doing it. Living an even slightly divided life results in weaving around ourselves such a tissue of lies and confusion that we can no longer tell which part of us is authentic and which is make-believe. As Johnny said last Sunday, true spirituality is to be immersed in reality. Jesus Christ is the most real person who has ever lived, and the only person who was absolutely pure in heart.
To be pure in heart is to mourn the impurity of our hearts.
D. Martin Lloyd-Jones says that the pure in heart are essentially those who are mourning about the impurity of their hearts. The only way to have a pure heart is to realize you have an impure heart, and to mourn about it to such an extent that you do that which alone can lead to cleansing and purity. What the gospel does is to bring us out of the terrible pit we are in and raise us up to the heavens. It’s a supernatural work. 2 Corinthians 7:10 (NLT) – “For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There’s no regret for that kind of sorrow. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death.”
Purity of heart is God’s work, God’s gift . . . but we must desire it.
Before we can see God we need to have holiness, a pure heart, an unmixed condition of being. Yet our tendency is to reduce all this to just a little matter of decency, living outwardly moral lives, or just intellectually accepting Christian doctrines. But God requires total commitment from my whole person. Only those who are like Him can see God and be in His presence. The pure in heart are those who put God’s glory above all else. To people like this He reveals Himself.
Some people erroneously think that the way to obtain a pure heart is to focus on that and that alone, and to segregate ourselves from the world as much as possible. But all such efforts at self-cleansing are doomed to failure. We can start trying to clean our hearts, but at the end of our long lives they will be as filthy as they were at the beginning, perhaps worse. The only way we can have a clean heart is for the Holy Spirit to enter into us and to cleanse it for us. A day is coming when we who belong to Christ will be faultless and blameless, without spot or wrinkle, without any defilement.
That doesn’t mean that we just stand around passively. We don’t just walk around in the gutters of life waiting for God to cleanse us. We must do everything we can, knowing that it’s still not enough, that it’s God’s work. But we can proactively and fastidiously get rid of anything and everything that stands between us and purity of heart.
Purity of heart, the heart that desires only what God wants, is not the result of personal effort. In other words, a pure heart is not the same as maturity of Christian experience. A pure heart is clean of sin – something only Christ can do (Psalm 51:10 – “Create in me a pure heart, O God”). Although purity of heart is not something we work towards, it is something we desire and God grants.
We see what we are able to see.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
It is one of the simplest facts of life that we see only what we are able to see; and that is true not only in the physical sense; it is also true in every other possible sense.
When I look at the night sky, I see a few pinpoints of light. But one of my uncles, an astronomy professor, can call stars and planets by name and talk about them like old friends. Navigators can find paths across trackless seas by looking at the same sky.
On the negative side, there are people with filthy minds who can see in any situation material for sniggering innuendo and a dirty joke.
Once Paul and I visited an art museum in Richmond, VA. Later that evening, as we described to another of my uncles what we had seen, we mentioned some pieces we really liked, and one piece that seemed particularly unimportant and worthless. But my uncle, an art historian and head of the art department at the University, spent the next 30 minutes expounding on the meaning of the painting in the context of the artist’s greater body of work.
In every sphere of life, we see what we are able to see. As Jesus said, it is only the pure in heart who shall see God. The corollary of this is that the impure in heart shall not see God. They won’t see Him because they can’t see Him – they remain blind to who He is. Sanctification, the process of conforming us to our Lord, is like the opening of windows both to allow light into our shadowy homes, and to permit us to gaze outside. Only as sanctification changes us can we begin to comprehend heavenly things. Let’s pay attention to this as both a declaration and a warning. We choose to either keep our hearts clean by the grace of God, or to soil them by giving in to sin – we are either preparing or unpreparing ourselves to see God, both now and in the future.
Do I allow my gaze to rest on anything vile, vulgar, or worthless?
Hebrews 1:3 assures us that Jesus’ mission was to provide perfect purity for His chosen people, indicating that His mission was accomplished by sitting down at the right hand of the majestic God in heaven. God makes us pure by His sovereign grace, but we have something to look after, too. Not only must our inner sanctum be kept right with God, but the outer courts also need to be lined up with the purity God gives us by His grace. Our spiritual understanding immediately goes blurry if sin contaminates our outer court. If we want to see God, if we want to enjoy an intimate relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, it will mean there are some actions we must avoid doing, some thoughts we must avoid thinking, some things we must avoid touching.
Strong’s concordance says that “to see” in the context of Matthew 5:8 means “to gaze with wide-open eyes, as at something remarkable; earnest but continual inspection.” Psalm 101:3 – “I will refuse to look at anything vile and vulgar” (NLT), “I will set no worthless thing before my eyes.” (NASB) A hard question to ask ourselves is – do I allow my gaze to rest on anything vile, vulgar, or worthless? May we gaze with earnest and continual inspection and wide-open eyes at our remarkable God!
Scripture itself does not attempt to adequately describe God’s Being. Why? Because of the glory of God. Our terms are so inadequate, and our minds are so small and finite, that there is a danger in any attempt at a description of God and His glory. All we know is that there is this glorious promise that, in some way or other, the pure in heart shall see God.
The pure in heart will see God, nothing less.
As with all the other Beatitudes, the promise is partly fulfilled here and now. Genuine purity provides an immediate and profound experience of the presence and power of God. Because God has opened our spiritual eyes, we followers of Christ can see God in a sense that nobody else can. The Christian can see God in nature, in the events of history. We also see God in the sense of knowing Him, a sense of feeling He is near, and enjoying His presence. Another way we see Him is in our own experience, in the way He deals graciously with us. Jesus is Immanuel, “God with us.” Note that our perception of God and His ways, as well as our fellowship with Him, depends on our purity of heart. But of course all of this is just a small taste of what will be when we see Him face to face! If we lived like we really believed this, it would revolutionize our lives. The pure in heart shall see God, nothing less than that. How foolish we are to rob ourselves of these glories that are held out here before our wondering gaze. If we spend any time at all thinking about the glory of God, the greatest concern of our lives will be to have a pure heart. Knowing that we are already in the Kingdom, we are concerned with purity because we recognize that the King is pure, and the Kingdom in its perfected form will admit only purity.
I want to close with a precious promise from God’s Word.
1 John 3:2 – “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
May the Lord grant us pure hearts, so that we will see God.
