Sermon: The Pure in Heart

Seeing God
#1665
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 06-Aug-22; 83 minutes

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We have said many times before that my dad's signature sermon, if you will, is "Do You See God?" The recording that we have on the website is dated January 11th, 1992. Some of you may know that that is the date Church of the Great God started or the first service that we had and we listened to that on tape that day, those of us that were gathered in Laguna Niguel. And I think that sermon that we heard was the recording of the sermon that he gave at the Auditorium AM church in the late 1980s before he was transferred to Charlotte. If not, it was one he gave in the Glendale/North Hollywood church area in the mid-80s sometime.

But the the title is what I am looking at most right now. "Do you see God" asks us, as God's children, ask a fundamental question of us. How do we answer? Do you see God, you as an individual? Of course, the question does not ask us if we literally see Him with our eyes. I think we all know that. Very few have seen Jesus Christ since He returned to heaven in AD 31. A few have, like the apostle Paul and a few others, but after that, He has not appeared to a whole lot of people. And if you read the New Testament, especially the gospels, you find out that the Bible tells us in no uncertain terms that seeing God in the flesh did not guarantee that a person would find any spiritual fulfillment just having laid eyes on Him. Obviously it did not incline those people in Judea and Samaria and Galilee to follow Him.

By the time He was resurrected and people were there in Jerusalem, waiting for the Day of Pentecost, they counted noses and came up with 120—after all that ministry, after all those miracles, after hearing all that astounding teaching and more. I mean, we do not have it all in the Bible. We only have basically what God thought was what we needed to know for our salvation. And John tells us that there is so much more that He did and said that if we tried to write it all down all the books in the world could not contain it.

So these people had a great witness and literally seeing Him and seeing Him perform, seeing Him speak all the things that He did, but He ended up with 120 on the Day of Pentecost. Of course, it exploded from that point. But seeing Him did not give people any head start, if you will. It did not help them without the giving of the Holy Spirit. So, in that case, seeing was not believing.

As we know, most of His countrymen rejected Him, the vast majority. It says in John 1:11, "He came to His own and they did not receive Him." Just write out their statement: They did not believe Him. The next verse, John 1:12, tells us that to the very few who received Him, those who were called and chosen, we might say, "He gave the right [or the ability or authority] to become children of God, to those who believe in His name." No mention of actually seeing Him, but believing in His name.

Notice, it says to those people He gave the right, the privilege, the authority to become children of God. This implies, and it is stated elsewhere much more explicitly, that all others, those who are not called and chosen, are blinded. They are kept from truly seeing, they do not have that right. God is, to them, cut off. They cannot understand Him and as Jesus tells us later on, they cannot understand us. They do not understand why we do the things we do because they are of the world. We are of God, and so the two have very few places of meeting of the minds. And they think we are weird. They think we are strange. And Jesus says, Well, they thought that of Me that way first. And if they thought of Me that way, they are going to think of you that way.

God's elect, on the other hand, not being part of the world, but being chosen of God, have eyes that see and ears that hear. He tells that to us in Matthew 13:16, and He says right before that in verse 11, "Because it has been given to them to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God." So we, then, have a right to see God as He is. Not as the world sees Him, not as books tell us He is, but we have a God-given right to see God.

Now, I am asking the question as we begin the sermon: Have you exercised that right? Do you see God? Have you taken the opportunity, because it has been granted to you, to see God? I am not trying to be dumb here because a lot of us just drift, I think, through much of our spiritual lives and we do not take advantage of the right we have been given to see God. That is human nature, which we still have a lot of. But this is a vital question. Are we exercising the right to see God? If God has opened the door to further understanding and insight and faith, have we taken advantage of it or are we just lingering outside the door? Are we turning away? Are we dithering there wondering whether we should go in or not? Are we wasting our time doing everything but going through the door? Are we squandering the opportunity that we have been given, the priceless opportunity? It is incumbent upon each of us to take up the challenge that the opportunity puts in front of us because our eternal life hangs in the balance.

Notice with me in John 6, verse 40.

John 6:40 [Jesus says] "And this is the will of Him who sent Me [speaking of the Father, this is the Father's will for us], that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day."

So seeing the Son and believing in Him are prerequisites to attaining everlasting life and a place in the first resurrection. I mean, this just kicks in the seat of the pants the Protestant idea of "once saved, always saved." You do not see the Son to any depth upon baptism, upon one's justification. We have a little idea, but that has to grow until we have a clear picture of what the Son is and what He wants of us and what He is trying to do.

We have to see the Son and believe in Him in order to have everlasting life, so if we are not expanding our knowledge of God and honing our abilities to discern Him and His truth and His activity in our lives, in other people's lives, and even in the world, we are stuck in neutral or we are grinding gears or we are in the mud or something. We certainly are not going forward. We are actually likely regressing toward the carnal state in which He called us. Christian life is always focused forward toward the Kingdom of God. Leaving those things behind let us press forward to the upward call. We have to try to attain the Kingdom of God.

Rather than following Christ toward life and His Kingdom, if we are stuck in neutral like that, we are showing ourselves to be fools, not wise. We are showing ourselves to be fools. We are choosing, using one of Jesus Christ's own metaphors, the wide gate and the broad way that leads to death and destruction like the rest of the unconverted world. We find that in Matthew 7:13. We do not want to be of those who are just going along with the crowd along the broad way through that wide gate. We have been called to peel off from the crowd and go a different path, a much harder path. One where there are a lot of obstacles that we have to climb over, go around, kick down, or whatever so that we can go through the narrow gate where few go. They are the called and chosen—the elect.

We have to make sure that we take advantage of the authority and the right that we have been given to see God. What God offers us by His Spirit is truly unique understanding, comprehension, insight, and discernment of spiritual things. We have understanding, comprehension, insight, and discernment of physical things just by reason of being human and having the senses that God has given to humans to find things out and our reason to be able to think things through. Some people are better at it than others.

Some people have finer senses. Some people have really good noses and they end up working for perfume companies and stuff like that. They are able to just tell the difference between something that everybody else would say, no, they smell the same. But some people do have more attuned physical senses and that is great and they are considered unique among people because that is something that can be very useful.

But God is not dealing in the physical here. He has ramped up our spiritual senses, our spiritual sight, our spiritual hearing, our spiritual smelling even—"I smell a rat." Well, with the gift of discernment we can "smell" when people are acting on the Devil's orders. I think you understand what I am trying to say here. God has given us unique abilities to be able to see things with spiritual eyes. It is the Spirit that we are to be living in.

I was going to go to I Corinthians 2:6-16 but you all know it probably pretty well. That is where the apostle Paul teaches about the Holy Spirit being given so that we can discern and understand spiritual things. That is the gist of his teaching—that God has given us His Spirit and by that Spirit we can know the things of God. Just as the physical mind, the carnal mind, can know physical things, the spiritual mind that He gives us through the Holy Spirit can discern the spiritual things. In the final verse, verse 16, he makes it very plain what God has offered us and he says it in just a few words: "We have the mind of Christ." That is that unique thing that has been given to us.

Notice how positive it is. We have the mind of Christ. It does not say we could have the mind of Christ. Paul is very plain in saying that we have it. If we have been given the Holy Spirit, we have access to it. It is there for our use. This is very similar to what Jesus said, you have been given the right or the authority to become sons of God. You have been given the right or the authority to see Him as He is. Are we using it? That is the question of the day.

So we can actually, truly have the mentality and understanding of our Savior. Make that the subject of your meditation someday and watch your mind be blown! We can think God's thoughts! This is not hyperbole, this is not exaggeration. The Bible is very clear. We have the mind of Christ! It is possible. It is not magical or spontaneous, by any means, that we think the thoughts of God. Having the mind of Christ takes time and pain and submission, sacrifice and humility and a great deal of strenuous effort in putting down our carnality and making ourselves do what is right. And then we begin. We begin to start actually, we are just at the beginning of the process of thinking God's thoughts.

But if we have the Holy Spirit, we can see God. It is part of the package, but it must be used, it must be worked on. It takes deep study into God, His character, and His purpose, as well as careful unbiased consideration of oneself, which is almost impossible to do because we are all hypocrites and we always like to paint ourselves a whole lot better than we actually are. Also careful unbiased consideration of those around us and the circumstances unfolding around us. All very difficult things to do. And then we must apply faith and patience—a lot of patience—knowing that God will act in faithfulness and in His time. And if we practice this kind of meditation, this insightful observation and deep thinking regularly and then practice what we learn, we will come to know God better. It is inevitable that, if we do this right, we will come to know God better and see Him at work all around us and in us and through us. It is like A plus B equals C. It is going to happen.

This sermon is the 6th in my series on Christ's Beatitudes and we will be considering, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." That is Matthew 5:8. It should be clear from my introduction that one of the foundational elements for seeing God clearly is to be or to become pure in heart, which is what we will attempt to elucidate in the remainder of the sermon. What does it mean to be pure in heart?

Now back in Matthew 5:8 I want to go through a word or two here and make sure that we are all on the same page about what these words mean. They are not difficult but it is worth going over. So, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." The word pure is kataros in Greek obviously. That is Strong's #2513 and it means basically "clean." It means "without stain or blemish," "spotless," "clear," "unsoiled," "undefiled," and our word here today, "pure." If you were clean and undefiled and spotless you are pretty be sure to be pure. Now, metaphorically it can imply guiltless, you are clean of any kind of guilt, none is there. Or like words like blameless or innocent, and it can also mean things like sincere, upright, virtuous, absent of evil. These all come from the idea of being clean. Not physically clean, now we are talking about morally and ethically clean.

Let us just see an example. Let us go back to the gospel of John in chapter 13, verses 10 and 11. This is when Jesus is washing His disciples' feet and Peter had just said, "Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head" because he wanted to be truly clean and Jesus has to explain.

John 13:10-11 [Jesus said to him] "He who is bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean; and you are clean, but not all of you." For He knew who would betray Him; therefore He said, "You are not all clean."

In the first part of verse 10, when He says "He who is bathed only needs to wash his feet, but is completely clean," He is speaking in a physical sense, He is talking about actually bathing in water, using soap and a wash rag and what have you, and getting all the dirt off of you. And so if you are bathed and then you happen to have to go out at night and walk along the streets, and you put on your sandals and you go down and it is dusty and dirty there and when you come into, let us say, a relative's house or a friend's house, they would have a servant at the time (back in Christ's time), to wash the person's feet because truly that was the only part of the body that was now dirty. And so they would just wash the feet and the person is clean again.

So Christ takes this very common example and He makes it into a spiritual truth, a principle, saying, "You are clean, spiritually clean, but not all of you. There is some dirt in here. And so I'm washing your feet as a symbol of this," of serving them by making them clean again because they are bathed in the waters of baptism and they are made clean. But when they walk along the streets of this world, they inevitably get a little bit dirty rubbing elbows with sinners in this world and following their own human nature. And so we come to Christ and He cleans us up again. We have been bathed, but we do need occasional washings.

He is using this term, kataros, that is used throughout these two verses, to speak of the physical meaning of the word and then He uses that as an illustration to apply it to the spiritual or ethical way of applying the term. So we get an idea here. It is a pretty good one-on-one correlation between the physical and the spiritual. So you are clean due to bathing as well as you are clean due to the forgiveness, the justification that God has given you. You are clean of your sins, you are forgiven of your sins, and you are then blameless and we go back to God for help along the way so that we can remain clean.

So we can see that at its root kataros deals with outward cleanliness and the metaphorical ideas of moral and ethical purity accrued to it over time. And it did the same thing in English. It is almost one-on-one there too, between the Greek and the English about how the word clean came to not just speak about our outward cleanliness, but also inward cleanliness. I mean, we have expressions like, "my hands are clean" in this mess. We are saying not that we just went to the bathroom and washed our hands. We are saying that we had nothing to do with whatever has occasioned, like fraud or some kind of destruction or whatever. "My hands are clean. I didn't have anything to do with this." So you are saying that you are ethically not at fault. We know we do not mean physically clean but morally or ethically blameless in the situation.

In the beatitude (Matthew 5:8), Jesus makes it clear that He is speaking metaphorically because He adds "pure in heart." He is speaking of something not seen on the outside. He is talking about something that is on the inside.

The word heart is the other term I thought I would give you a little information on. The Greek is cardia. You have a cardiac arrest, you have a heart attack. If you do cardio training, you are trying to strengthen your heart. The Hebrew word, by the way, just so you know, the equivalent of our word heart and Greek cardia is leb. And you know how they got that word? Onomatopoeia, the sound of your heart beat (thud, thud). So Greek, cardia, Hebrew, leb, English, heart. We are all talking about the same thing.

Clearly here Jesus is not talking about a washed and buffed physical heart that has been given a shower and cleaned off. He is not talking about that, but an upright, virtuous, inner being which expresses who we are. When somebody says, he has the heart of a hero, or something like that, they mean that his whole constitution is heroic. That is kind of what we are getting at, what a person is inside, what the core of the person is.

In both testaments, heart is used metaphorically for a broad spectrum of intangible and inner qualities. It could be anything from personality to character, intellect, memory, emotions, desire, and will. All of those are interior things and not exterior. Hearts can be good and God-directed or they can be evil and God-rejecting. The whole spectrum of the dirtiness or cleanliness of a person's heart, or many people's hearts, can be found in in the world. None of us are quite the same. We even say things like, "let's get to the heart of the matter," meaning that inner idea, that inner principle that will explain pretty much everything.

I want to give you a few quotations about how commentators have looked on this, what the heart is, what they think Jesus meant. This is from George Abbott Smith in his, A Manual of Greek Lexicon of the New Testament.

In a psychological sense, the heart is the seat of man's collective energies, the focus of personal life, the seat of the rational as well as the emotional and volitional elements in human life. Hence that wherein lies the moral and religious condition of the man.

To put it in a much smaller nutshell there he is speaking of the inner man, what a person is really like inside and encompassing all of those things that he meant there are energies to focus the personal life, seat of rational will, the emotions, and all the moral and religious ideas, feelings, and intents of a person.

The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery makes this comment.

The heart is used metaphorically to describe the intangibles that constitute what it means to be human.

That is basically the definition I am going to be using today. It is pretty simple. "The intangibles that constitute what it means to be a human," but we are going to add to it: "The intangibles that constitute what it means to be a son or a daughter of God." And the key word is pure, for today.

However, The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery does recognize that God is often portrayed in Scripture as having a heart like a human. But it is not like, really, a human heart. It is a much superior spiritual heart and His is always golden, it is always pure. In that case, heart describes "the intangibles of what it means to be godly" and that is what we are trying to do. We are trying to be like His Son who is our God. So to have the mind of Christ and to be pure is to be as much like Jesus Christ as we can, and that our heart, all those intangibles inside, reflect that.

In the church we often use the term "character" to describe what the heart represents. So we say, put on the character of Jesus Christ. Hopefully one day we will have the character of God. You know, that sort of thing. However, we may say it in our sermons and articles and stuff, we are talking about this idea of a heart, those intangibles inside. Let us do a quick survey of a few very well known verses that speak about the human heart. Let us go back to Deuteronomy 6, verses four and 5. This is the most famous scripture among Jews, the most well known. It is the Shema they recite every day.

Deuteronomy 6:4-5 "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might."

This, of course, is that Hebrew word leb in verse 5. Love your God with all your heart. Now in this case, heart or leb appears in a triad of facets of the human condition, split into heart and soul and might. The three of them are supposed to conjure the idea in us of love God in every part of our life. So inside, outside, every activity. The idea of the triad of facets is trying to get across the principle of totality, of the whole being. You could have said it very simply: "You shall love the Lord your God with everything you've got, with your whole being." In modern terminology we are commanded by God to love Him with our mind, which is what basically the word heart here is getting at, our thinking, our rationality, and our emotions.

The word soul represents our inner nature and our will. It is almost like our life force, what we live for. That is our soul. That is the interior intangible that makes us what we are and do what we do. And then there is in the word might here the idea of strength in all of our physical activities and functions and capabilities.

So, we are supposed to love Him up here, with our mind, with rationality, and with emotion, and we are also supposed to love Him with our nature and will, what makes us tick, and all our various functions and capabilities. So everything. Totality.

Let us go back a few verses to Deuteronomy 5 where God bewails the amount of human nature in the people of Israel.

Deuteronomy 5:29 [He says] "Oh, that they had such a heart in them that they would fear Me and always keep My commandments, that it might be well with them and with their children forever!"

But people are people, Israelites are Israelites, and they never did have the heart in them that they would do these things, fear God and keep His commandments. They failed in that spectacularly many times. So here, when God says, "I wish they had the heart in them," the word heart suggests inclination. And also the idea of receptivity, that they had a soft heart rather than a hard heart. He wishes that they were inclined to listen to Him and to accept what He had to say because that would mean that they would begin to do these things.

So what He is using heart for here is an attitude of acceptance, of devotion, of trust. You know, the more you trust someone when they say something to you, the more apt you are to both believe and to do. And that is what He was asking for. Oh, that they had that inclination to receive what I say and act on it. But they did not. So we can see the heart through this little verse here as the seat of our attitudes and our inclinations. Things that we tend to want to do.

Let us go to another well known one in Jeremiah 17. A memory scripture.

Jeremiah 17:9-10 "The heart is deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? I, the Lord, search the heart [He is keeping an eye on the heart, especially of His people.], I test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings."

It sounds like Bill's [Onisick] sermonette, where he said, God is watching. We are those little kids that try to hide in plain sight. But God sees all. So we cannot hide a desperately wicked heart from God. That is why He wants it to change because He still sees it and He grieves that it has not changed and He is looking for ways that get you to go away from the tendency that we all have, having human nature, of sinning.

Here we see God considering the heart to be the source of all human depravity and difficulty. It is crooked. That is what that word deceitful means. We have a crooked heart, it does not walk straight. And then He says, it is not only crooked, but it is incurably diseased. That is, incurably in terms of human ability to change it, to make it well. So we are walking around as human beings with hearts of felons, crooked, and hearts that are about to die from disease. We are like some sort of victim of a bad illness and we cannot shake it, not on our own. And God, who knows the human heart better than anyone, knows that it is naturally this way. If it is left to itself, it will follow the crooked and incurably diseased ways of human nature. The only cure is an infusion of His Spirit once He justifies us, once He redeems us. So it takes a spiritual washing for it to have any chance of improving, of being better.

Here, the word "heart" indicates what we call human nature or carnal nature. It is a person's inner being that includes his emotions and reason and will. Because it is out of it, out of this slurry of beliefs and intentions and desires and whatnot, that spring a person's words and actions. They all come from our nature, which from the very beginning tends towards selfishness. So this heart, if we are going to see God, must be thoroughly cleansed to be the source of good on a regular basis, rather than a source of evil. We have got to change its tone. We have got to change its inclination. We have got to change the attitude so we are more likely to do good than evil and keep progressing along that line until we become pure. Where our first inclination and every inclination is to do good, to be loving, to act in service, to think the best of others, to put them in the best light, to make things better for them before we care for ourselves. That is the job we have been given in order to become pure in heart.

Let us go to a New Testament one in Mark the seventh chapter. Jesus very much agrees with what is said there in Jeremiah 17:9 because He said it. He said it originally and He says it in the New Testament also. He just puts in kind of different words.

Mark 7:20-23 "What comes out of a man, that defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornication, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness [lewdness], an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these things come from within [from the heart] and defile a man."

Here, Jesus follows the Hebrew understanding of the function of the heart. That is, the human emotional, intellectual, and spiritual processes—our essential nature, our inner being, our character. That all comes from within. Anything outside, He says, does not defile a man, but what comes out of a person that is sin, that is defiling, that is what clings to us like a stench because it came out from us and it is showing, it is expressing what we are like inside.

So we can say that these things that He mentions in verses 21 and 22, they are not separate from us, they are us; our sins define us, that we have impure hearts, that we are sinful creatures. And Jesus wants His people, over time, to change that one hundred and eighty degrees so that our hearts are pure and every word and every action that we take is pure gold. That it is the same sort of thing that He would do or say, and we do it and say it because it springs from a changed nature, a changed core of being so that we are spiritual rather than carnal.

First, we are cleansed. We went over that in John 13. That God has done the job of cleansing us through Christ. He is the one that redeemed us by His sacrifice and then we are able to accept that sacrifice, believing in Christ, be baptized, having hands laid on us, having the Holy Spirit, and being made into the children of God by His Spirit. But that is not the end. We have to cleanse ourselves from that point on with a lot of God's help, so that the deep-seated pieces of our nature reflect the great God whom we follow. So we spend a lifetime and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears trying to make ourselves do what is right. We have to be partners with God in cleansing ourselves, of purging these evils from within, and purify ourselves of them so that the fundamental nature, our fundamental nature changes from wicked to righteous, from dirty to clean, from impure and defiled to pure.

And of course in this section here in Mark 7, He is trying to get across to the Pharisees that no amount of exterior or ritual purification can affect any kind of change. That is just pointless and hypocritical because they were wanting His disciples to wash the cups and that sort of thing. And Jesus is saying, "Come on guys, you don't get it! This is not going to defile you to drink from an unwashed cup. How silly." We are talking about very serious things here about the condition of the heart and that cleansing can only happen spiritually.

So this beatitude in Matthew 5:8 "Blessed are the pure in heart," commands purity at the very center of our being. And I just want to add here, we cannot fool God, He sees right into us. We could go to Hebrews 4, where He says He looks at us, right in the eye, and He can discern how we are, even between the joints and the marrow. He can get way down deep and see everything that we are. We are not hiding anything from Him. So Jesus demands purity in the place out of which evil flows from pretty much all of us, out of our very nature, and that necessitates a vigorous, prolonged cleansing.

This, of course, is a central part of what we call more theologically, the sanctification process, where we are becoming holy. That is what sanctification means. It is the the process of becoming holy, of being set apart. So following God's gracious justification and His forgiveness of our sins, where He declares us to be righteous based on the righteousness of Jesus Christ, then (I am saying this is only a starting point), we begin with His help to transform our minds and our behaviors into an imitation of Christ's own character using the mind of Christ that we have been given. We call it all kinds of other things like putting on the new man, growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ, and many other things besides, it is all the same thing. It is all a purification process where we do what we can with the help of God to become holy.

I mentioned this earlier in the Bible study. Go to Philippians 2:12-13 where we see right there that it is a process of where we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. And we find in the very next verse that Paul says God works in us to do these things. So it is a cooperative effort between the Christian and God to become holy, to be righteous as He is. Let us just pick up one verse here in I Peter.

I Peter 1:15-16 But as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, "Be holy, for I am holy."

We have it straight from the top that that is our marching orders. God is the Father, Jesus Christ is His Son, and God wants us to be like Them and He will not let us into His Family unless we are like Him, unless we look like Him, speak like Him, act like Him because that is the God way. That is how it is. To be godly we must act like God.

Another thing we need to understand here is that we cannot be pure in one area and defiled in another and then be called pure. Not if we are to consider ourselves whole beings, which we are. We cannot compartmentalize our spiritual purity before God. Can you imagine coming before His throne in the judgment and saying, "God, I never stole anything from anyone." And He says, "Well, what about all the lies you told? Or, what about your fornication? Or what about your divorces or what about your . . .?" You name it, "X" sin. Then you say, "Well, you know, I thought that maybe my ability not to steal from everybody would kind of lead the way and grant me entrance here."

That is compartmentalizing things because you considered one sin to be worth more than another. That is not going to work that way. God is going to look at our whole being, what we really are at our core to determine our reward. What are we really like? Did we really make good faith efforts to become pure in all things, in everything. To repent of all our sins, to search out the secret sins, things that we are ignorant of. I mean, it is a big job!

I am not trying to be funny about this or minimize anything. God has given us a huge task and that is why He gives us the rest of our lives, in most cases, to do this. He wants to see progress along the line of working with Him to overcome all of these things. And then He makes a judgment. This is enough. This is what the person is at the core of his being. He really wants to be like Me. So we cannot sow our wild oats on the six days of work and be saints on the Sabbath. That is just as bad as compartmentalizing things. We cannot justify ungodliness in certain situations, as long as we are righteous in others. That is situation ethics and that does not fly with God.

To be pure in heart, as Jesus says here in Matthew 5:8, is to be pure throughout. From inside the deepest recesses of our inside, all the way out to our expressions of it on the outside. So He want us pure at the center and if the principle follows, and it will, what we do from our center, if it is pure, will also be pure.

Now, in this life, ironically in a way, in this body, we cannot be completely pure as Jesus wants us to be, and as Jesus is. But He sets the standard terribly high because He wants us to stretch and strain toward it. He wants us not to be content with only so good. He wants us only to be content with the purity of His heart. So in this light, we could say that the beatitude has the practical meaning of "blessed are those who are determined to be pure in every way." That is not what it literally says, but because of our limitation, that is kind of what He means. It assumes this kind of purity, it assumes that we are succeeding most of the time, and that the progression is that if we lived long enough and kept up the hard work, we would reach the goal—but only by the grace of God.

Earlier I mentioned God's justification of us at the beginning of our conversion. By His grace, then, He has declared us guiltless because by accepting Christ as our Savior, His shed blood has paid for our sins, and we can return to Him through Jesus Christ and be forgiven as we go on. So we are redeemed and forgiven and declared upright, that is, just before God. As it says in Colossians 2, that the record of our transgressions has been nailed to the cross, right? The record of it. So those have been cleared. The record of our transgressions has been erased. It is this process of God showing His grace and justifying us, forgiving us, wiping away our sins that the New Testament calls "purifying the heart." So there is the initial act of purifying the heart, which God does. It is an act of grace.

Let us see this in Hebrews 9 and then we will go to a couple other scriptures. I just want to point this one out.

Hebrews 9:22 And according to the law, almost all things are purged [cleansed] with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no remission.

This is what Christ did in giving Himself. That He gave His blood so that our sins could be remitted, paid for. We can be redeemed.

Titus 2:13-14 Looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works.

By His actions already completed, He has redeemed us and purified us of all our lawless deeds.

Let us go back some more to the book of Acts, in the 15th chapter. This is Peter's speech to the Council of Jerusalem. He said, speaking about the baptism, the conversion of Cornelius and his household.

Acts 15:8-9 So God, who knows the heart, acknowledged them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He did to us, and made no distinction between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith.

So that was the initial action that God took to give us a pure heart. Jesus Christ sacrificed Himself. His blood was made to pay for our forgiveness, for the justification, and he gave the Holy Spirit to those He converted. And it is this process by which the heart is purified initially. In this initial time, it is a lot of theological legality that takes place, if you will, that God does this by decree. He says, "The blood of Jesus Christ pays for these sins. I judge you blameless, guiltless, sinless from this point," or at this point, maybe would be a better way of saying it. "I judge you guiltless at this point, you're clear, your heart is pure."

So we have been made pure in this theologically legal way through Jesus Christ. So purged of all sin, cleaned up in this process, this spiritual process, we are pure in the moment of justification. And this spiritual purification sets us apart as Christ's own people, His special people, and it sets the foundation as we saw there in Titus for our good works. We could also go to Ephesians 2:8, that says, "By grace we have been saved through faith." But then in verse 10, it says that He has prepared us for good works. A lot of people miss that.

Yes, we have been purified in our hearts through God's grace, but that sets the stage for us to do the work of purifying our hearts. Peter phrases this act as "purifying the heart by faith." Have you not ever heard of justification by faith? He just talks about it in a slightly different way, purifying the heart by faith. It was because we showed faith in Jesus Christ and went through the process of repentance and believing in Christ, that God said, "Okay, I'm going to acknowledge you and your faith and I in turn am going to justify you because of that faith. Not by anything you've done—by no means or merit do you deserve this." But He gives grace. It is not a reward, it is not because of any goodness in us, but just because He is showing His love to us because of our faith in Jesus Christ.

Of course, He has done most of the work in that area too. He is the one that drew us to Jesus Christ. He made all that possible, but He is giving us the benefit of the doubt at that point and giving us His Spirit so that we can do some work. He has given everything and done everything. That sets the stage for the good works to come.

So, without this initial purification, after which He gives us His Spirit of course, no attempt to purify our hearts could take place. If He did not do what He did, there is no way that we could do what we need to do. So upon conversion we are supposed to take up the task of purifying our hearts because our wicked human nature has not been purged. The sins have been forgiven, Jesus Christ's righteousness has been placed upon us so that we have access to the Father, access to a relationship, but our core has not been changed. The way we act and react has not been changed. We have been set up to do that to begin the process. We have been given a clean slate. But the core of our deceitful heart is still there. That is why it takes so much work.

Purifying our hearts, also called transforming our minds, is the lifelong process of removing the works of the flesh and replacing them with the fruit of God's Spirit. It is an absolutely necessary part of the sanctification process during which we can form our lives to the life of Christ, His very attitudes, His character, His conduct until we are, as Paul said in I Corinthians 2:16, functioning with the mind of Christ.

James 4:7-9 Therefore [consider yourselves justified, given grace through faith] submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

What does he say there? Especially verse 8 gives us a template for what we need to do. Obviously, we start with submission to God—humility. We reject the Devil and all his works. We draw close to God. We work on the relationship, because if we draw near to Him, He is going to draw near to us. And then he says, get to work, cleanse your hands. This is usually where it starts with us. We quit doing physical things that are wrong. So we work on the outside, we wash our hands. Hands are almost always a symbol in the Bible of actions, of activities, of work. So we start cleansing the outside, as it were, the acts and works that we do, and we make them into good actions and works. We start doing good things toward one another. We start speaking good words rather than bad. We start giving rather than taking. That sort of thing.

Then he says purify your hearts. Once we start doing these outside things with our hands then some of the feedback will begin to change the inside. Purify your hearts; and notice what he calls them. You double-minded people, you hypocrites. Now it is interesting that he used double-minded because when we are given God's Spirit we become double-minded. We have the mind of Christ and we have our carnal, fleshly mind and they are warring against one another. Obviously we want the mind of Christ to win. But we have been so much inundated with the carnal way of life, it is strong and we listen to it. It has not done us wrong yet, has it? Oh, yes it has! But we think, "Oh well, I've gotten a few good things from this, you know, helped me get my job or whatever. So what if I lied on my resume. I thought I could get away with it." blah blah blah.

You know, we justify all these things that our carnal mind tells us to do because it does something for us that we deem advantageous. But it is that mind that is in you that you have got to get rid of. And of course, Galatians 5:17 tells us very plainly that "the flesh lusts against the Spirit." It wars with the Spirit that is in you, the mind of Christ that you have. It wants to suffocate the mind of Christ, put it down as soon as possible, and remain in charge.

And so you are actually double-minded. You have the mind of Christ, you have the mind of a man or a woman, and it is always engaged in battle. And we have to get rid of the other side of the battle. We have to put it down. And that is why Paul uses such strong metaphors as "put to death your members." You have got to be ruthless and relentless and put that other mind down because we want the mind of Christ to be on top and telling us what to do and urging us to do what is right, urging us to display the character of God in everything. So that is why he calls them double-minded because we all still have human nature within us and it is fighting us tooth and nail.

Let us go to I Peter 1.

I Peter 1:22-23 Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart, having been born again . . .

He is meaning once you have been converted, this is what you have to do. And this purifying the heart comes out as showing love to one another. That is where we begin to see the heart actually being purified, when we love one another. He says here, we do this purification of the heart by obeying the truth, what has been revealed to us, what we are being taught. Once we obey the truth and make it a practice, it is at work purifying the heart. Because in any habit, once you keep doing that habit, it becomes ingrained, and soon, if it is a spiritual quality, it becomes character, something that we we do just because, it is part of us, it is part of the core. And what we are aiming for is to make those acts of love be so habitual that they are part of our character and we would not do anything else.

So, the process here moves on toward learning to show fervent love for the brethren with a pure heart. That is a major goal, showing fervent love. You might want to write down I Timothy 1:5, where Paul says the purpose of the commandment, that is the purpose of God's instruction, is love from a pure heart. That is why He gives us commands to do things. That is why He says keep the Sabbath. That is why He says honor your father and your mother. That is why He says do not covet. It is all, right in that, love from a pure heart. We, in practicing those things, obeying those commands that He gives us, we purify our hearts.

Let me just put it in another nutshell here: God's words or His instructions are ultimately designed to teach us to love like God does. That is the big goal. When He gives you a command in His Word, He is doing it for the express intent of you learning how to love Him. We go back to the Shema in Deuteronomy 6, "You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might." That is why He gives commands. Now, it is easy to say that, but it does take a lot of instruction and faith and experience to truly love one another with a pure heart. It is just not going to come easy. But know that God's intent in giving you all these instructions that seems so hard and onerous is to develop that character in you so that your every inclination is to show love like He does.

Let us go to I John 2, verse 28 and we are going to go down all the way through verse 3 of chapter 3. John explains here who will see God.

I John 2:28-29 And now, little children [notice he calls us children], abide in Him [continue in Him], that when He appears [second coming], we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming [because we accomplished what He sent us to do]. If you know [that is, if you realize, if you acknowledge] that He is righteous [we all do, He is perfect], you know that everyone who practices righteousness is born of Him.

If we know that God is righteous and He has called certain ones to be members of His Family, His very children, you know, then, that these ones will practice righteousness too. Right? Because the apple does not fall very far from the tree and God makes sure that His children look exactly like Him, as much as possible.

I John 3:1-2 Behold [he says] what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! [it is a great and wonderful thing that He has done for us] Therefore the world does not know us because it did not know Him. [we are going to get the same reaction from the world that it gives to Him] Beloved, now we are children of God [we are currently children of God because we have been called to that and we have been justified and we have been set on that path]; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be [it is very murky about our future after the first resurrection, we know a few highlights, but there is a lot more that God could reveal to us about it, but has chosen to not do that at this time], but we know [this is something we know has been revealed] that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, . . .

Because we have not only been called to it, we have been doing it, we have been purifying our hearts, to put it in the language of this sermon. We have been going through all the steps to overcome and grow so that we shed our humanity and put on His divinity, godliness. We are working in that direction.

I John 3:2 . . . we [it says] shall see Him as He is.

That is the culmination of it all. That we know we have this knowledge, we have had it revealed to us, is this is how it all works out. We are called, we go through a period of overcoming and growth, and the ultimate goal is that we are going to be just like Him. We are going to be able to actually see Him because we are like Him, we will be Spirit like Him at that point. And the seeing of Him will not be difficult. As a matter of fact, we will be glorying in the fact that we can see Him.

And here is the kicker, all that wonderful stuff that we just thought about.

I John 3:3 And everyone [all the children of God] who has this hope [of seeing Him as He is] in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.

If you want to see God in all His glory in the first resurrection as one of His children, then you have to purify yourself. You cannot be content with the way you are right now.

Let us come back around to the beginning. Do you see God? Your answer after going through all of this, a truthful one, is probably something like, "Yeah, but not as well as I'd like. I've been along this road for a long time and it still seems pretty fuzzy. It's gotten better. I may be 20/100 when I used to be 20/50 and that's an improvement. I see Him a little better, but I need to improve."

So how do we see God more clearly? The answer is simple: Purify your heart. When we learn His ways, when we put off our sinful attitudes and behaviors and practice living as He does, God does come into sharper focus. We begin to understand Him. We begin to understand why He thinks as He does and why He acts as He does, and as we gain experience with His character, it starts to become our character too. And who He is at that point takes on greater and greater, clearer and clearer definition. We begin to see Him as He really is. Unlike the world—the world has no idea what God is like—but we have been given the authority, we have been given the right to see Him.

Let us conclude in Psalm 24. This is actually a Messianic psalm. Psalm 22, Psalm 23, and Psalm 24 are a group in here, but I will not get into that anymore. We just want verses 3-6. The question is asked:

Psalm 24:3-6 Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who may stand in His holy place? [in our lingo, Who will be the firstfruits, who will make it into the Kingdom of God, who will be there in the first resurrection] He who has clean hands and a pure heart [remember James 4], who has not lifted up his soul to an idol [because he puts God first in everything], nor sworn deceitfully. [he does not take vows that he means ultimately to break but he is true to his word, especially his word to God] He shall receive blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is Jacob . . .

I want you to think of Galatians 6:16 where Paul calls the church the Israel of God in more understandable terms. What is being said here in verse 6 is that these people, the ones who have just shown these attributes in verses 4 and 5, these are the true descendants of Jacob. They are the true Israel. They are the ones, the people with clean hands. Pure hearts, not idolaters, not hypocritical givers of their word. These are the ones that are God's children.

Psalm 24:6 This is Jacob, the generation of those who seek Him, who seek Your face. Selah

They are the generation of those who seek to see God and he tells us, Selah, think about this.

So if we are God's true sons and daughters, if we are members of His chosen people, the Israel of God, we will be seeking Him, cleaning our hands, and purifying our hearts so we can, in that day, stand in His holy place and serve the King of glory throughout eternity in His Kingdom.

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