Blessed are the Pure in Heart

Matthew 5:8 Blessed Are the Pure in Heart
WCC 11-9-19

Introduction:

This morning we’re going to talk about knowing God. The Bible gives many accounts of people who have the privilege of knowing God personally. Adam—before his rebellion—walked with God in pure fellowship. The patriarchs had windows into seeing God. Moses enjoyed an unprecedented relationship with God and in Exodus 33:11, it says that the Lord spoke with Moses face to face just as a man speaks to a friend.

So, at some level—it is possible for a person to know God and walk with Him. Yet, if we are honest with our situation, we don’t see God face to face like Adam did or Moses did.

Often, people who “claim” to have a direct line to God usually are more in fellowship with their own emotions than they are with God. This was the case with me. Before I became a Christian, I was into all kinds of eastern mysticism and yet I had an incredibly whacked out theology. I would have said that I knew God, but the “little ‘g’ god” that I knew wasn’t the personal God of the Bible; and certainly not Jesus. But I thought I knew a spiritual being who gave us mystical powers, and I felt very close to that spiritual being.

But then on August 17, 1990 I surrendered my life to Jesus, and suddenly I felt completely out of fellowship with God! Everybody said: “Give your life to Jesus and you’ll have this rush of great emotions!” For me it was the exact opposite! Before I surrendered my life to Jesus, I felt very close to whatever “god” it was that I was following; but when I surrendered my life to Jesus, He felt very distant.

Now, why is that? I think it’s because I experienced something that is very common but rarely talked about. When I came to Christ my life, my thinking, my actions were so far from “holiness” that I could not have any direct fellowship with a Holy God because my lifestyle was just that sinful. Rather than feeling the “joy of the Lord” I felt a ton of guilt.

Now, I’m not the only one who has this experience. In fact, I believe it’s common. Over the years, I’ve talked with many new believers who were disappointed that God didn’t give them the emotional high they were promised. Sometimes they’ll even say: “I did the prayer thing, and nothing happened!”

But this phenomenon doesn’t just happen for people who got saved later in life, it’s also common for people who have been going to church all along. Maybe they were baptized as kids, and more-or-less kept their faith through their young adult years; and yet deep down the Lord has always felt distant to them. And so, to manufacture a sense of intimacy with the Lord they latch on to someone who’s passionate about Jesus and they hope some of that passion wears off on them. Or, they’ll find a church with powerful music and inspiring preaching to give them a sense of fellowship with Jesus— So-called “leaders” know this and they play on people’s emotions to lead them to “feel” like they’re walking with God when in reality they’re not. So often what these people “feel” is not actually real because they’re equating fellowship with God with an emotional experience.

Today I’d like to discuss how to have a real relationship with God and one of the most glorious statements in the entire Bible. It’s found in in Matthew 5:8 where Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Jesus, as God in the flesh, is telling us that God wants to be known, and can be known, and will be truly known and truly seen by those who are pure in heart.

These words are so profound we have a difficult time wrapping our minds around them. If we want to know God and see Him and walk with Him, we must be pure in heart.

Like me before I was saved, a lot of people are perfectly happy not having a relationship with a holy God because their “god” doesn’t require holiness. These people say: “I’m spiritual but not religious.” They think they know God when at best, they know the “god of this world” whom the Bible identifies as Satan. Satan has convinced them that there is a short-cut to knowing God: Be mystical, be spiritual, put up dreamcatchers and focus on the “power” within us.

But in these opening statements of the “Sermon on the Mount,” Jesus is telling us how to really know God; and there’s no shortcut. In verse 3, Christ’s people come to Him as those who are poor in spirit and recognize their spiritual poverty and beg for His mercy because they have nothing to offer. In verse 4, these people demonstrate that they are citizens of Christ’s kingdom because they mourn over their sin. In verse 5 through 7 they live out their citizenship with a new character that is gentle, and hungers for righteousness, and spreads mercy all around them. None of this is a short-cut to knowing God.

Then in verse 8 Jesus gives us this promise: Those who are pure in heart can, and will, see God. If all this happened immediately for every person, we wouldn’t need these promises and we wouldn’t need this teaching. But the believer doesn’t experience everything they would want to (with God) or always at the same level, and so we need our King to tell us that if we want to see God, we must walk the path of purity.

This verse is simple in its meaning but profound in its implications, and to understand what Jesus is saying let’s unpack what Jesus means by “Purity in heart” and what He means by “Seeing God” and then let’s talk about how to apply these principles.

So, let’s start with what Jesus means by the phrase “pure in heart”

Point #1 Purity in Heart

In verse 8, Jesus says… “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The Greek word for “pure” in verse 8 is the Greek word “katharos.” When I learned this word in my first year of Greek 27 years ago, I learned its verb form which is “katharidzo”. The basic idea of “katharidzo” is to clean; like cleaning dishes or cleaning a window. In the Jewish system of sacrifices, “katharidzo” also spoke about being made “ceremonially pure” before God and in verse 8, Jesus is drawing the attention of His listeners to an inward purity in our “heart”.

In our world the word “heart” sometimes refers to our emotions and how we “feel”. People will say, “That movie touched my heart” and they mean that it made them feel emotional. Many times, our society uses the word “heart” to mean “emotions” and people will put bumper stickers on their cars which say in big black letters, the letter “I” followed by a big red “Heart” and then a picture of something like a “horse” or “prairie dog”… and they’re saying “I love that thing.”

But that’s not what Jesus is saying here when He talks about the ones who are “pure in their heart.” Jesus not simply saying that we need to be pure in our emotions—His point includes that idea—but it reaches far beyond that. The Greek word for “Heart” in verse 8 is “kardia.” And we get the word “Cardio” from “Kardia” and “Cardio” refers to things related to our physical heart. The human heart is one of the most amazing organs in our entire body. It has one job to do, and it does it over and over again. The heart beats (a lot). It beats slightly more than once a second, or about 100,000 times a day and 3.5 billion times in a life. And when your heart beats 100,000 times a day, it sends blood throughout your body so that your body gets all the oxygen and nutrition it needs to function.

Our physical heart is the core of our physical life. When our heart stops, so does our life (at least as we typically define it). So, the Greek word “kardia” has this idea of a critical core function. It is the core of our being that governs our thoughts our motives, our hopes, our fears and all the things that make up who we are.

So, in verse 8, Jesus isn’t talking about our physical “heart” He’s talking about the “core of our being” that drives our words, our thoughts, our actions and our emotions.

Now the Bible says that the core of our being needs spiritual heart surgery. Jeremiah 17:9 tells us that the heart is desperately sick. Jesus says in Matthew 15:18, that what comes out of our mouth, is driven by our heart. In verse 19 He says, "For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander." Genesis 8:21 says, “the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”

The problem is not simply that we sometimes sin, it’s that we have a driving force in our inner being where deep down we would choose to sin if we had the freedom to. If you’ve read the book “the Lord of the Flies” you’ll remember this is the premise of the book. A bunch of kids are stranded on a deserted island and once they realize they can do whatever they want, they become little monsters. The natural person has a heart that is corrupt and depraved and unable (and unwilling) to do that which is right without some clear, compelling external force. Even when a person seems to do what is right, they’re just a broken clock that’s right twice a day; it doesn’t mean they have an inward transformation of God in their life.

And so, because our heart is so far from God, Jesus frequently taught on the problem of our heart. He said in Mark 7:6, “Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: ‘this people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.’” In other words, the message of the Gospel is not about lip-service, it’s about a total orientation of life that is devoted to the Lord; and if there are places where our heart is not close to God, and if there are places where the orientation of our life is not devoted to Him, then there are the places where the Gospel still needs to be worked out in our life.

When the Gospel is worked out in our life, our hearts will be close to God and we will be walking a path of purity. In Matthew 13:15 Jesus lamented that the Jewish people did not have hearts that were even willing listen to or look at what He was saying. He said in Matthew 13:15: “The heart of this people has become dull, with their ears they scarcely hear, and they have closed their eyes.” Their heart condition led them to not being willing, or to be able to listen to or see what Jesus was teaching. The Jewish off shoots had reduced a relationship to God to outward rituals and in verse 8 Jesus tells them that fellowship with God is not a matter of external rituals, but inward purity.

This change occurs when the Holy Spirit enters our life and gives us a new heart that now is oriented towards purity. In the Old Testament God promised through the prophet Jeremiah that the “New Covenant” would change a person’s life. We’re in the New Covenant now and in Jeremiah 31:33–34, the Lord said: “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. “They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the LORD, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”" And so, those who participate in the New Covenant have the Law of God written on their heart where their life is orientated to God’s holiness.

God is a holy God. Habakkuk 1:13 says, God is to pure to look upon evil. In Psalm 5:4 there is no sin in His presence. James 1:17 calls Him the “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.” God is a God of light & holiness & purity. He does not delight in sin, or reward sin, or condone it, or abide in it; and if we want to have true fellowship with Him, we must abide in purity. That is the domain in which He abides. That is where we will find Him.

In Psalm 24, David asked the question: “Who may ascend into the hill of the LORD? And who may stand in His holy place?” And then, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, David answered that question saying, “He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood and has not sworn deceitfully.  He shall receive a blessing from the LORD And righteousness from the God of his salvation.” Those who dwell with God have clean hands and a pure heart.

The pursuit of purity is one of the first changes that happens in the life of the new believer. Before we came to Christ, our heart was chasing after sin. After we come to Christ, it’s running from it. I often use the analogy of when I visited the morgue of General Hospital in Los Angeles. I was once in the morgue of General Hospital (the one that the TV show was based on) and the morgue was this corridor about 30 feet long and 10 feet wide. On each side of the corridor were floor-to-ceiling walls of stainless-steel cabinets; like giant filing cabinets. And like a filing cabinet, you could pull out a drawer and it would extend way into the corridor. And you know what was in those drawers? Yeah, dead people wrapped in yellow plastic. And you know how I knew they were dead? They didn’t mind being in the drawer and they didn’t mind being wrapped in plastic! Think about it, when you pulled open those drawers, if anyone was alive, they’d pop up and probably freak you out, and frantically try to get that plastic off! They’d be begging for help! But these people weren’t doing that. They just laid there in those drawers in that plastic because they were dead.

It’s the same with the Lord. People who are spiritually alive hate their sin. They feel suffocated by it. They want to be free of it. They’re begging to have it taken from them. They just want to walk in God’s holiness and purity. The pure person hates their sin. The impure person hates God’s holiness.

That’s why our view of holiness is one of the best indications of being born again; because only people who are born-again actually want holiness! Paul said in 2 Corinthians 7:1, "Beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God." The author to the Hebrews said in Hebrews 12:14: “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” So, one of the clearest evidences of New Life in Christ is a life that is oriented towards purity. They are pursuing purity because they have a new heart given to them by the Holy Spirit that is now grieved by sin because sin is out of character with their true, spiritual heart.

And this ties back to the idea of the “Blessing” in Matthew 5:8. If someone wants “holiness” they are “blessed” because that orientation of their heart shows they are part of the citizenship that will one day see God. Genesis 8:21 is still true today; the motives and intent of the natural person is towards sin. Maybe not always and maybe they can do some good some of the time, but that goodness is not the outworking of their nature. And yet, when a person wants purity and wants to recalibrate their life to the Lord, that is a sign of God’s work in their life and they are blessed. We still sin because our flesh still influences us, but when we do sin, we hate it and repent and return to the path of holiness.

So, to be “pure in heart” speaks to a new focus on obedience to God, but there’s even more to this word “purity”. Purity is more than just the absence of sin it’s also conformity to God’s intended design.

Here’s how one of my old commentaries puts it: “A thing is pure when there is nothing in it out of harmony with its nature. Water is pure, air is pure, when they contain only their constituent elements, and in the right proportion. Gold is pure when it has been separated by fire from all foreign matter. The diamond is pure, the crystal is pure, when there is nothing in them which hinders the refraction and reflection of light.” So, the removal of sin that occurs in the heart of a person who has been born-again is like the refining fires of gold and when that refining work has removed all of the “dead nature” of Adam that we inherited from him, we are left with just the new nature we have been given in Christ. This is why the unconverted heart cannot truly be pure because the heart we inherited from Adam cannot ever become the new heart we receive from the Holy Spirit. You can’t purify lead to become gold! But if we are in Christ, we have received a new heart from Him and the path of the Christian life reorients our life to the new heart we have received so that our thoughts are aligned to God, and our motives are aligned to God, and our emotions are aligned to God, and our will is aligned to God.

This is why discipleship is so critical to the Christian life! Discipleship is teaching us all that Jesus taught. And we need to know what He says about every topic so that we can properly orient our heart towards Him.

So, a pure heart has its focus and affections directed towards God. That is holiness. That is purity. That is the path of our life and that path will lead us to see God. God is at the end of that journey. He’s not at the end of the journey towards sin. He’s not at the end of the journey towards self. But He is at the end of the journey towards purity. And those who have this life-orientation towards purity will one day see God.

Let’s talk about what it means to see the Lord…

Point #2 The Pure in Heart will see the Lord

I’ve mentioned that these beatitudes are like poetry and that different people might have different interpretations. Here’s how I understand what Jesus means by “seeing God”…

I believe He is speaking of 2 aspects of sight. One aspect is in the future and one is now. The phrase “they shall see” is a future tense verb. It’s a promise that will be fulfilled down the road. And, Jesus is saying that those who have a pure heart will one day see God.

Scripture has much to say about seeing God on that day. Psalm 17:15 says, "As for me, I shall behold Your face in righteousness; I will be satisfied with Your likeness when I awake." In the Greek version of the Old Testament, it’s the same root word as in Matthew 5:8. It’s the same root word in Job 19:26–27 says, "“Even after my skin is destroyed, Yet from my flesh I shall see God; Whom I myself shall behold, And whom my eyes will see and not another!" Revelation 22:4 says, "they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads." And so, this promise relates to a literal fulfillment in the future where we will see God in eternity and for all eternity. We will dwell with Him face-to-face and we will behold Him in all His glory as we live as citizens of His kingdom. And so, in this sense, “seeing God” means to be with Him, and abide with Him, and dwell with Him, and walk with Him forever. That is still in the future with the Kingdom that is yet to come.

But I also believe Jesus’ promise in verse 8 also relates to “here and now”. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:12: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." Right now, we have the most basic of spiritual eyesight, it barely works, but there is an aspect where we can sort of see God; and one of the ways that we see Him is in His work of transformation in our life.

Turn over to 2^nd Corinthians, chapter 3. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 3:18: “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.” Purity is like a cleansing cloth on our eyeglasses that clears away the blinding veil of sin so that we can see the purity of God’s handiwork all around us.

The person who pursues God in purity sees God’s work in their own life because He changes their affections and the direction of their life and they have their own front row seat to watch the reality of God working in them.

Another way that the pure see God now is in connecting the dots and recognizing the value of pursuing Him. In many ways, purity helps us see the value of pursuing God. Impurity blinds us to that value. If you are speaking with a selfish person, and call them to unselfishness, they can’t see the value in it. If you are speaking with a violent person who is devoted to hatred, they cannot see the value in peace. If you are speaking with a greedy person, they cannot see the value in generosity. And the impure person cannot see the value of purity. That’s because, right now, there is a veil over their spiritual eyes.

If you still have 2^nd Corinthians 3 open, look at verse 14. In verse 14, Paul is explaining why the Jews reject the Lord saying: “But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ. But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart; but whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.” And so, there is a spiritual veil over the unbeliever’s mind that keeps them from seeing the greatness and glory of Christ. You tell them about Jesus and their response is, “Oh please…” and they cannot see the value of pursuing Jesus or His purity because they are blinded.

One of the reasons they are blinded to the Lord is because they reject His standards of what is right and wrong. This is what the Jewish people were doing back in the book of Judges. The Book of Judges says over and over, “Every man did what was right in his own eyes.” Everyone has standards for what is right and wrong. The impure person looks to some kind of standard besides the Lord for why they do what they do.

I’ve mentioned that friendship I had with a drug dealer in Los Angeles and how we had lunch together and he explained how he was a good person because he only sold good drugs.

The person who is “pure in heart” stops all that nonsense and let’s God define what is pure and impure, and this actually helps them see God because when we pursue God’s definition of purity, and not our own, we realize that His commands actually reflect His nature, and the more we weave these commands together the more we’ll see the framework of who God is and what He is like. It’s almost like those composite renditions that scientists do when they find a skeleton and use computer graphics and anatomy and physiology to put on muscles and tendons and tissue and skin and eye brows and ears and eventually they get a pretty good sense of what the person looks like. When you do that with God and go to the Bible, and let God define what is righteous and pure, you begin to get a picture of who God is and what He looks like.

This is why it’s so important that we read the Bible from cover to cover. Reading the Bible from cover to cover causes us to know God for who He really is. When you read through the Bible, you’re going to come to some unsettling stuff. It will challenge your faith and cause you to rethink your understanding of God. So many people come to those difficult passages and decide they don’t like what they find and so, they go to Walmart and buy a little devotional book that makes God into this super cool guy like some dude from the Hallmark Channel. They like that “little g god” because he fits what they want, but since their god is actually made up, they won’t have his abiding presence in them helping them to know him more, and when they hear accurate teaching from the Word of God, they’ll recoil at it.

But when you read the entire Bible and work through the difficult passages, you’ll have to give up all kinds of wrong beliefs about God and you have to embrace beliefs about God that our society rejects—and our flesh recoils at—but you’ll end up knowing God correctly and seeing Him for who He is.

The Christian life is a journey as you walk with God and walked towards God and the steppingstones of that path are flagstones of purity: moral purity, theological purity, biblical purity. When we walk down the paths of purity given to us by God in His Word, we will ever increasingly see God.

Let’s go to our final point which is some practical principles of having purity in heart.

Point #3 Application

We began this morning talking about how many people come to God thinking that the Christian life asks nothing of them but just say a Sinner’s Prayer and they’ll have some amazing spiritual experience and the rest of their life will be nothing but happy emotions. But that’s not the case and very often people do the church thing for a while and find that they don’t have this amazing spiritual experience and they don’t understand why not.

The answer is two-fold: Often, the people who claim to have amazing spiritual experiences are actually having fellowship with their own emotions, and so their claims aren’t actually valid anyway. And two: Unless people pursue a life of purity—as defined by God—they won’t have fellowship with Him because they’re never part of the things He is doing.

We’ve said that these Beatitudes are the pathway to walking with the Lord and if we view “purity of heart” as a pathway. The first step is to reject our own righteousness and coming to the Lord seeking His righteousness. Paul demonstrated this principle in Philippians 3:9 where he said he wanted to be found in Christ, "not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith…" And when we call out to God in faith, like Paul, the Lord answers that prayer and forgives us of our sin and places His Spirit within us and instantly starts to transform the very heart of our life.

Part of this transformation is to show us His standard in His Word. God’s Word teaches us God’s path of purity. But it’s not always easy reading. It’s not always something we naturally want to hear. When you’re reading the Word of God, and you come to a passage that sits with you wrong, study it to understand what it’s saying about the Lord, the events, and the people involved. The whole time keep praying: “Lord, help me to understand you correctly. And help me submit to whatever Your Word is saying about You.” And as you pray that way, God will be transforming your beliefs about Him and you will increasingly know God rightly.

Don’t try to know God the way some preacher does, or the way some singer does, or the way some author does. Just try to know God the way He presents Himself in His Word.

Another aspect of walking with the Lord is to examine every detail of your life for its purity. Jesus is with you throughout your day. He’s with you when you’re talking to people. He’s with you when you’re listening to the radio. He’s with you when you’re watching stuff on TV or reading stuff online. Is all of that stuff pure? Would He be pleased that you’re focusing on that stuff? If not, let it go. It’s better to have fellowship with Christ, than to have whatever is harming your fellowship with Him.

God is always pure. He is never impure, and He is never on the path that leads to impurity. He’s not on a path that includes sharp words to our spouse or children. He’s not on a path that includes grumbling and gossiping about others. He’s not on a path that includes hatred towards others, or bitterness in our soul. If we want to have fellowship with God, we must pursue the paths that He is on.

Now, here’s the thing… all of us are going to have days when we don’t want the Lord’s purity. Sometimes a temptation will come along and we’ll give in. We think that God is not there, or that fellowship with Him is not worth it; and so, we step off the path of purity and take a side-path to somewhere else. In those moments, we need to embrace the promise of Hebrews 11:6 which says, “…he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” The greatest reason we stumble on the path of purity is because, deep down, we don’t think it’s worth it. We don’t believe it’s worth it to be pure, and righteous in our heart and mind and so when temptation comes along, we take the bait…hook, line & sinker.

Sin is like that game “Chutes & Ladders.” I haven’t played much of it, but I know you’re heading up towards and endpoint on the game board, and if you get the wrong number or something, you have to take a slide back down to some place earlier on the board. And when we get side-lined by sin we slide back down and need to repent and return to God’s path of righteousness.

This also means we need to regularly monitor our heart. Proverbs 4:23 says, “Watch over your heart with all diligence…” Be aware of what is in your heart. Consider your motives and what you’re working for. Consider your affections and what you are interested in. Consider your habits and what you do when you aren’t even thinking about what you’re doing. As you address what’s in your heart, constantly reset your motives and your affections and your habits back to the purity that you have in Christ. Don’t allow bitterness, and selfishness, and insecurity, and pride, and hate, and jealousy, and covetousness, and fear to sit in your heart and rot it from the inside out.

These kinds of sins can be like diverticulitis to the soul. Diverticulitis is a fairly common ailment that happens when we don’t chew our food properly, and it gets stuck in our intestines, and just sits there and ferments and rots and causes all kinds of disgusting problems. It’s pretty gross. Don’t allow the grossness of sin to rot in your gut it will ruin your fellowship with the Lord.

Conclusion

So beloved— How is your walk with God? Is it headed down a path that leads to Him? Or a path that leads to something in this world?

Jesus is calling His people to a life of purity. On the one hand, this is simply a character trait of God’s people. They have the Holy Spirit within them. They have the law of God written on their hearts. They hunger and thirst for righteousness and so they pursue purity because the very beating of their heart is for purity.

On the other hand, this is a great diagnostic tool. If our walk with the Lord seems distant and dry, maybe it’s because we’ve allowed our walk to stray into areas of impurity. Maybe we’ve been stained by things in this world. Or maybe we’re just not flourishing in the spiritual health that Jesus intends for us.

And here, Jesus calls us to look at our life and be sure that the heartbeat of our life is all directed towards Christ. That is the path He is on, and that is the path that leads to Him.