“Blessed are those who are pure in heart – for they will see God” (Matthew 5, 8)

When during the beatitudes Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure, for they will see God,” the religious people back then were very happy.

Why? Because they were experts at purity. They had all sorts of rules on what to eat, what to wear, how far you could walk on the Sabbath, and so on. They spent all their time trying to make the outside look good, to be seen as being pure.

In my very first lesson to my students at SMU I told them: You are a brand. You position yourself in order to be appealing to/accepted by your target. And we're experts at fine-tuning that positioning, showing a different face – or mask – to whomever we want to impress.

To our parents: The filial child.

To our teachers: The disciplined, well-mannered, hardworking student.

To our boss: The motivated, driven, responsible employee.

To our cell group: The pure, devoted Christian.

To our boyfriend, girlfriend, wife or husband: The faithful, caring spouse.

To our love – or lust – interests: The cool, interesting, daring rebel.

But who are we really? Who is hiding behind the faces, the masks, the false smiles and dressed-up facades?

And are we doing the right thing, spending so much time working on our outside appearance?

Jesus had a word or two to say to that. He told the religious people of the day: (Matthew 23:25-28) “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. [Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!] You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”

But then again, didn't he also say “Blessed are the pure - for they will see God?”

Actually no. They would have wished he said that. But what he actually said was:

Blessed are the pure IN HEART – for they will see God.

That's what God cares about, that's what He looks at: The Heart. He is not blinded by our attempts to “look good”, by our pretending. He looks inside, where we can keep no secrets, where all our lies are exposed.

In his book called, “Rumors of Another World,” Philip Yancey concludes one of his chapters with a quote from Malcolm Muggeridge to show the subtleness of sin: “It is precisely when you consider the best in man that you see there is in each of us a hard core of pride or self-centeredness which corrupts our best achievements and blights our best experiences. It comes out in all sorts of ways – in the jealousy which spoils our friendships, in the vanity we feel when we have done something pretty good, in the easy conversion of love into lust, in the meanness which makes us depreciate the efforts of other people, in the distortion of our own judgment by our own self-interest, in our fondness for flattery and our resentment of blame, and in our self-assertive profession of fine ideals which we never begin to practice” (Pages 123-24). That last line really rings true, doesn't it? As Christians we do a pretty good job of “mask management,” but if the truth were known, we often make “self-assertive professions of fine ideals which we never begin to practice.”

Remember the Little Prince in Auguste St. Exupery's fable? He said "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

What is essential is invisible to the eye.

(Another think we can learn from Jesus: To look beyond the outside – in this superficial world.)

But what does it mean, ‘pure in heart'?

Since we're constantly thinking about sex (is that pure?) we're also tempted to simply apply PURITY to sexual purity. But purity of heart means something much more than that. It means singleness of heart, integrity.

Devout Jews every day recite the Shema , the verse from the book of Deuteronomy:

You shall love the Lord with all your heart .

And in the psalms we say:

Blessed are those who keep the Lord's testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart .

The good person is the person wholly consecrated to the service of God and to the doing of God's will. As Jesus says later on in the Sermon on the Mount,

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

The opposite of a 'pure' heart is a divided heart. As we are told in James,

Purify your hearts, you men of double mind.

And how often we are men - and women - 'of double mind'? Quite a lot of our lives, in fact! It can be very frightening to realise that one bit of yourself is working against the other bit, that your feelings and your ideals, your desires and your beliefs, are pulling in opposite directions ... to realise that (to use the well-known biblical phrase) you are trying to serve God and Mammon. And these days it's more difficult than ever not to end up doing just that.

Jesus says that it's the person with singleness of heart who will see God ... which means that the people who are best prepared to share God's life, to enter heaven, are not necessarily the people we would think - they are not necessarily the people who have busied themselves doing piles and piles of virtuous things, but are very conscious that they have done them, nor the people who have spent their lives metaphorically flicking the dust off their shoulders, the people who've never done anything wrong because they've never taken the risk that's often involved in trying to do something right.

It always seems to come back to my very first sermon here at FCC, also those years ago, called “Have You Forgotten Your First Love?” It's about who and what comes first in your heart, in your life.

Billy Graham once said, “We're suffering from only one disease in the world. Our basic problem is not a race problem. Our basic problem is not a poverty problem. Our basic problem is not a war problem. Our basic problem is a heart problem.”

But to achieve this single-heartedness, this decisiveness is not easy, and we can't do it on our own. Many people have tried over the years – see which sect you are following:

Legalism. This can be defined as a harsh set of rules that one must follow in order to gain favor with God and impress people. An example of this was the PHARISEES. This system doesn't work because it doesn't deal with the heart.

Modernism. This is the opposite end of the spectrum as some people have thrown off Scriptural standards and beliefs. The SADDUCEES rejected key doctrinal truths during the time of Jesus, as they just picked and chose what they wanted. This is very popular today.

Activism. Some people believe that the only way to bring purity into our world is through political change. While we certainly need to participate in the democratic process by voting, only a change of heart will bring about a change in our society. The ZEALOTS of the first century believed a political change was needed and were willing to do anything to bring it about.

Monasticism. Some individuals believe that they must totally disengage from society in order to be pure. The problem with this is that sin lurks in the heart, not just in the world. The ESSENES practiced this withdrawal from the world and gained popularity about 150 B.C.

All these different approaches have one thing in common: They don't work.

We need God's help to purify our hearts. We need to follow the 6-step-purification-programme for our heart:

1. Admit our sinful impurity. The first step is to acknowledge that we can't change on our own. Jeremiah 13:23: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil.” Proverbs 20:9: “Who can say, ‘I have kept my heart pure; I am clean and without sin?'” Have you ever admitted to God and to others how unholy your heart really is?

2. Ask God for a new heart. This is what happens at salvation. Acts 15:9 teaches that our hearts are purified “through faith.” If you haven't put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ for forgiveness of sin, it's time to do so.

3. Pray for purity. David knew how impure his own heart was as he thought back to his moral mess-ups. After confessing to the Lord, he prayed for a holy heart in Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” John Piper writes: “Jesus did not come into the world simply because we had some bad habits that needed to be broken. He came into the world because we have dirty hearts that need to be purified.” When's the last time you prayed for purity? Psalm 139:23-24: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

4. Draw close to God. When we come close to God, His very holiness will have a purifying effect in our lives. Proverbs 8:13: “To fear the LORD is to hate evil…” James 4:8: “Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” There is no way to be pure without cultivating the IMPACT priorities into your life: Instruction in God's Word, Mobilizing for Ministry, Praying with Faith, Adoring God in Worship, Caring for One Another, and Telling others the Gospel.

5. Meditate on the Word of God. In Psalm 119:9, the psalmist asks a question, “How can a young man keep his way pure?” The answer comes in the second part of this verse and in verse 11: “By living according to your word…I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.”

6. Focus on our future hope. If you're serious about pursuing purity, you'll quickly discover that this is a lifelong battle. Don't despair. Don't bail. Keep your eyes focused on what's to come for the believer. Longing for Christ's return will purify our hearts because we become what we love. 1 John 3:3: “Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as He is pure.”

“Blessed are those who are pure in heart – FOR THEY WILL SEE GOD.”

To paraphrase:

“You're blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.”

God reserves intimate fellowship with Himself for those who are unmixed in their devotion, and unmasked in their relationship with Him. The nearer we approach to purity of heart, the surer we become of God; and the closer we get to God, the more pure we will become. In our heart of hearts, above all things, we want to see Him. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God has put eternity in the human heart. Pascal wrote about the “God-shaped vacuum” inside each of us. Augustine said that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God.

Paul Thigpen writes: “Unfortunately sin has blinded us, leaving our spiritual eyes swollen shut. Unable to see God, we grope in the darkness, searching desperately for someone or something to make us happy…our heart is splintered and scattered. We run to and fro, gathering first this trinket, then that one, dropping both for the next shiny one we spy…the result is a civil war of the soul. All the while our Father stands close by, waiting for us to turn around and run into His arms…if our vision of God is to grow wider, clearer, and brighter, our will must be united in a single focus on Him and an overriding desire to know and love Him” (Discipleship Journal, Issue 138, Pages 64-65).

We are promised God's help to purify our hearts – why don't we start today?

Let us pray:

“Lord, unlike us, you look beyond the facades and the outer layer. You look into our heart. And you see that it isn't pure. So many worldly passions crowd you out. But we want to change. We want to make space for you in our hearts and in our lives, Lord. Please help to purify our hearts, that you may live within us and we in you. Amen.”