The Ingredients of Happiness
Part 6: Matt 5:8 ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God’.
Pastor Charles Price
Now if you have your Bible, I’m going to read to you again from Matthew Chapter 5. When I say again, those of you who have been with us in recent weeks will recall that we are looking at this series of statements that Jesus made at the beginning of His Sermon on the Mount that we call the Beatitudes. A series of statements that all begin with the word, “Blessed”, which is the Greek word “markariŏs” that literally means, “to be happy”. And I am calling these the “Ingredients of True Happiness”. And I want to read to you again from Verse 1 and go down to Verse 8 today. Verse 1 of Matthew 5 says,
“Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them, saying:
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
[Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.]
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy.’”
And here’s the one we’re coming to this morning; the sixth one:
“‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’”
That’s as far as we’re going to read.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
And I imagine that probably scares some of us silly. Because if I know anything about myself, it is this: I do not have a pure heart. And I suspect, if I were to say this morning, “Put your hands up if you’ve got a pure heart”, not many hands would go up. (I’m sure Reg would put his up, but then Reg doesn’t know himself as well as some people do.) My biggest battle in life – and I have no doubt, your biggest battle in life – is the corruption of our own hearts. The Bible isn’t very complimentary sometimes when it speaks about the heart. Let me read you in Jeremiah 17:9, the writer says,
“The heart is deceitful above all things” (And here’s the pessimistic bit he adds on) “and beyond cure.”
Now the King James puts it a bit differently:
“The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?”
That’s a good question. Self-diagnosis is the most difficult thing in the world, especially of your own heart. And our biggest problem lies not in the environment in which we find ourselves. Of course there are all kinds of stimuli’s in our environment that stimulate us to temptation and to sin, but I remind you of course, if you locked yourself away in a room for years on end, you’d still live with your biggest source of problem which is yourself.
As James writes in James 1:14,
“Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.”
Sin comes from within. It’s our old self, our natural self that is corrupted. If the devil died tonight, you’d probably sin tomorrow because the devil doesn’t need to be involved in every sin that you and I commit. The old nature that we have – our hearts – look after that. Most sin is an inside job.
Now, there are over 500 references to the heart in the Bible. Many of them are not very commendable. Here’s a great one I want to give to you from Ecclesiastes Chapter 9:3. It says this:
“The hearts of men are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live and afterwards they join the dead.
Pretty depressive, isn’t it? And I remind you, by the way, that when it says, “The hearts of men are evil and there is madness in their hearts”, that is a generic term, ladies, so please wipe that smirk off your face. “Madness in their hearts.”
So what are we talking about here when Jesus, in the midst of this list of ingredients of real happiness says, “Blessed are the pure in heart”, and you and I say to ourselves, “Well, that cancels me out; that’s where I fall off the rails, when we get to this one.”
Well, let me define two things. Let me define the meaning of the word “pure” and the meaning of the word “heart”. Let me talk about the word “heart” first. Of course when the Bible speaks about the heart, it’s not talking about the physical heart that is a pump in our chest, which causes our blood to circulate efficiently. When a boy says to a girl, “I love you with all my heart”, he doesn’t mean, “I love you with all my pump”. He says, “I love you with everything that I am”, because the heart is the seat of our personality. It’s where our mind and our emotions and our will come together and form the real you. It’s not just a mind thing; it is our whole personality. And this word describes the real person in their inner being.
You know, in Proverbs it says, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” It doesn’t actually say, “As he thinks in his mind”, because we don’t just think with our minds. We think with our hearts – that is, our emotions feed into our thinking, our desires, our aspirations, our will. It’s the real person that we are. And probably the most important thing about us is our heart. And in Proverbs 4:23 the writer says,
“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”
That is: out of it comes everything else.
Now having given you some of these pessimistic statements, there’s also hope for the heart in Scripture as well. When God spoke to Ezekiel about the New Covenant He said,
“I will give you a new heart. I’ll put a new Spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone (that hardened heart), that heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh” (that is pliable and softening).
Sometimes we use language where we talk about Jesus coming into your heart. That’s actually not in the Bible but we talk about that; we know what that means: into the center of your being and right into the heart of everything that you are. So there’s hope for your heart. Romans 10:10 says,
“It is with your heart that you believe and are justified.”
It’s not just with our minds that we believe. Our minds of course are crucial, but in the book of James, James says,
“You believe there’s one God.” Then he says in effect, “So what? Even the devil believes that and trembles.” The devil believes things with his mind but the implication of that for his heart is not there because to believe with the heart is to surrender; you recognize that God is God. But the realistic thing is that everyday I fight a battle with my heart and so do you. This is the real you.
Well, having clarified, or tried to, what is meant by the word “heart”, let me now define the word “pure”. You will be aware of course that the Bible was given to us originally in the Hebrew language for most of the Old Testament – some of it in Aramaic. And the Greek language in the New Testament – not that Jesus was Greek-speaking (he would have spoken this is in Aramaic) but Greek was the language of international commerce and trade and everything that wanted to travel was written in Greek. And so the early manuscripts we have, of course, are all in Greek. And that means that, as there is no exact equivalent between two languages in vocabulary, that sometimes the word in the Greek which has a meaning to the Greek mind, has different meanings to – in our case – the English mind.
And there are actually three words in Greek – separate words – that translate by the one word “pure” in English. And I want to just clarify this to understand the meaning here. The first word (and I don’t want to bore you with this, but just very quickly), the first Greek word that translates “pure” in English is the word “hagnŏs” which means pure in the sense of being clean. If you put your clothes into the wash and they come out pure, they come out “hagnŏs”, clean. It’s got the same root as the word “holy”. The Greek word for “holy” is the word “hagiŏs”. It’s the same root for it. And it’s used, for instance, in I John 3:3 where speaking of the return of the Lord Jesus, John says,
“Everyone who has this hope in himself, purifies himself, just as he is pure.”
“Hagnŏs”: this is clean. Now that’s a good word, but that is not the meaning; that is not the word used here. So the meaning is not “clean”.
A second word is the word, “ĕilikrinĕs” which means pure in the sense of being genuine, being sincere, having integrity, being honest. It is used in Philippians 1:10 where Paul says, “that you may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ.” The King James says, “that you may be sincere and without offence until the day of Christ.” So there the words “pure” and “sincere” are interchangeable because that is the meaning of this word, “eilikrines” – pure in the sense of being genuine, sincere – this is the genuine article; this is pure in that sense. Now that’s a good word too, but that is not the word that is used by Jesus here.
The third word is the word that Jesus uses here and it’s the word “katharŏs”. And it means “pure” in the sense of being unmixed with other things. It means “pure” in the sense of not being diluted. Let me give you some instances in which this word was used. If you were to harvest some wheat and you cut away the stalk and then blow away the chaff, you are left at the end of it with pure wheat. Now that’s the sense in which it is used. It may not be the best wheat, it may not be “Grade A” wheat, but it’s pure wheat in the sense that there is no chaff and stuff mixed in with it.
Or if you have wine that has not been diluted with water, it is pure wine. It may not be good vintage quality; it might taste like vinegar, but it’s pure wine. That’s the use of the word; it’s not mixed. Or milk that’s not been diluted: the milk might be sour but it’s pure milk in the sense that it has not been diluted with water, and so on.
So the meaning of the word, “katharŏs” is to be unmixed, undiluted. It is used several times in the New Testament. I Timothy 1:5,
“The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart.”
That is: an unmixed heart, a single-minded heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. William Barclay in his commentary on Matthew says that this could be written, “Blessed is the man whose motives are always entirely unmixed.”
Now let me talk about this from three perspectives. First of all, I want to talk about this as a position – it’s a position. By that I mean, it’s a standing, it’s a stance in our lives. It’s one of being honest, of being real. You see, very often we find ourselves living inside an outside image that we want to portray to other people round about us. And so what you see is not always what you get. And what is portrayed may be in public or when we’re around people we would like to impress in some way, it’s not really the real you. But if we understand this in the sequence of these beatitudes, when you face your poverty of spirit and you’re absolutely honest about that poverty of spirit (there’s nothing to cover up anymore) and you mourn that poverty, you bring it to God and you mourn and you are comforted by the Comforter, so the Holy Spirit is there to replace all that we are in our weakness with what He is in His strength. And if we meekly submit to Christ as our Lord, if we’ve gone through those early stages of these beatitudes, we’re actually liberated from the need to pretend anything, or to prove anything. If you find yourself pretending to be somebody you’re not, you really have not faced honestly these early issues and the beatitudes that we have looked at earlier. It’s a wonderful thing to be liberated from how other people think of you.
I love the statement about Jesus: “He made himself of no reputation”. All that means is: He couldn’t care less what people thought about Him. So what did He care? He said, “I do those things that please the Father.” That’s what He cared about. And in the process of course, He got into all kinds of trouble with people who thought badly of Him for all kinds of reasons which He never defended, never tried to explain what was really going on, because He was interested in proving anything, which is a liberating place to be at.
I’ve said before that these beatitudes are really fleshed out in many respects in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, 6 and 7. And in Matthew 7, Jesus talks about this in Verse 15 when He says,
“Watch out for false prophets”.
And then He describes them.
“They come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly they are ferocious wolves”, he says.
So here’s a problem with these prophets. The outward and the inward are different. Outwardly they are in sheep’s clothing, they look like sheep, they smell like sheep, they sound like sheep, they act like sheep, they say things like “Ha-a-llelujah, A-a-men” and you wouldn’t know they weren’t a sheep. But inside, he says, they are actually ferocious wolves.
A little bit like the Red Riding Hood fairy tale; do you remember that? It’s a long time since I read it. When Little Red Riding Hood went to visit Grandma who had been gobbled up by a wolf and the wolf was sitting in her bed with Grandma’s hat on and Grandma’s shawl on and Grandma’s nightdress on and the clothes pulled up to Grandma’s chest. And Little Red Riding Hood came in and said, “Hello, Grandma, what big ears you’ve got.”
“All the better to hear you with my dear.”
“What big eyes you’ve got.”
“All the better to see you with.”
“What big nose you’ve got.”
I’ve forgotten if that was in there because I’m not sure what she said if it was….
“All the better to smell you with”, I guess.
“What big teeth you’ve got.”
“All the better to eat you with”…and leapt out to eat her. And of course Little Red Riding Hood ran off and the hunter was coming by and I think he shot the wolf and they opened him up and there was Grandma sitting undigested in his stomach. And they lived happily ever after.
But the point is: there was this wolf sitting up, dressed like Grandma. And maybe you’re here this morning dressed like a sheep and you look like a sheep and you smell like a sheep and your “ha-a-allelujah” is like a sheep. But you know that when you are at work tomorrow morning, you are not the same person that you appear to be in church on Sunday morning. In fact, when you get home in an hour from now, the way you talk to your wife may be very different what the folks sitting next to you might assume here this morning. Because we lack that position of purity of heart where the person on the inside is the one you see on the outside because a lot of times we find ourselves on the inside hiding behind an outside image that we want people to think of us.
And if you are someone this morning and on the inside you are hiding behind an outside image that you want to portray to folks around you. I don’t mean by that, that we let everything hang out - of course we don’t. We don’t like people who let everything hang out – we’ve got to show a bit of discipline – but I’m talking about pretence, I’m talking about trying to create a reputation. And if we do it long enough, we’ll even begin to convince ourselves of our own pretended image. And then we are in real trouble because you don’t know who you are anymore. The inside and the outside become inconsistent and in conflict.
And to be pure in heart, “katharŏs” style, is to be completely honest and real – that what you see is what you get. And when people meet you on Sunday in church and when they meet you on Monday at work, when they meet you on Wednesday at the gas station or Thursday in the gym, or wherever it is they meet you – Saturday on the golf course – you’re the same person.
Well it’s a position, but the second thing I want to point out to you is it’s a pursuit as well. It’s not just a passive thing where we sit back. And I think the best way to describe this as a pursuit is to be single-minded. I think that’s what the word “katharŏs” implies. If it’s milk that’s not diluted or wheat that’s been separated from all the chaff – it’s been separated and become “katharŏs”, this idea of being single-minded – and I say this because Paul talks about this in Philippians 3 when he talks about himself. And I’ll read to you what he says in Verse 13:
“Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it” (that is: I’m not arrived where I’m supposed to be; I’m not perfect so by the way, don’t anybody pretend to be because you’re not and we know you’re not and nobody ever is), “I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining forward to what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize which God has called me in Christ Jesus.”
I love the fact Paul says, “I haven’t arrived but one thing I do:” The King James says, “This one thing I do”, not “these 25 things I dabble in”. Paul says, “I’ve narrowed my life down to “the this one thing I do”. That didn’t mean that Paul was boring without wider interests, it doesn’t mean a person like that doesn’t have a business to be involved in or a family to be concerned about or hobbies in which they spend their spare time. But rather he is saying, “In the midst of my business life and my family life and my recreational life, there is an under girding, ‘this one thing I do’ that is the backbone, the spinal cord of everything in my life.”
What is “this one thing”? Well Paul says, “forgetting what’s behind”. And by the way, it’s good to forget what’s behind. Otherwise sometimes there’s a ball and chain that pulls us back. Forget what’s behind. I know that’s a big thing. It’s not easy to forget what’s behind sometimes (and that’s another subject), but “forget what’s behind and straining forward to what is ahead, I press on towards the goals which God has called me heavenward in Christ.”
What has God called me heavenward for? Well He tells us in the rest of that passage: “that I might know Christ; I might know the power of His resurrection in my life, I might share in his sufferings.” That is, I’m equipped to live a life that has its toughness to it and its difficulties and its hardships - that I may know Him in all His fullness. And you and I need to narrow our interests down to: what is Jesus Christ’s interest in my life?
And there’s a single mindedness to this. You know James 1:8 says, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” That’s just a double-minded man; that’s not a triple-minded man or quadruple-minded man, or a multi-minded man; this is a double-minded man – two directions pulling in your life. And he says he’s unstable. And that’s why he goes on to say later in James, “Purify your hearts you double-minded.” That is: purify, “katharŏs”, single down your heart that you’re not double-minded, and everything else begins to fall into place.
Jesus talked about this in Matthew Chapter 6, and you can read this some other time, when He talks about the fact that people worry. He uses the word “worry” I think it’s six or eight times. “Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or drink. Don’t worry about your body, what you will wear. Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Don’t work about clothes. Look at the lilies of the field; they don’t labour or spin that they have plenty of beauty. Don’t worry saying, ‘what shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we wear?” He talks about people who worry. He says, “The pagans run after all these things.” And then He says this: “But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness” and do you know what happens? “All these things will be given to you as well.”
He says, instead of worrying about, with all these different areas of your life (and there are multi facets to our lives of course) but He says, “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness”, and you know what happens? He says, “all these things fall into place.”
And you find that the antidote, He says there, to worry, but the antidote to double-mindedness is that you seek first His kingdom.
Psalm 86:11 says,
“Give me an undivided heart that I may fear your name.”
An undivided heart - and I will tell you this: the secular issues will always swallow the sacred issues in the divided heart. The secular issues will swallow the sacred issues in a divided heart. You put a tiny bit of poison in a glass of milk and it will impact the whole glass of milk. You can’t say, “Oh well, I’ll just drink the non-poisoned bit.” And in a divided heart, the sacred will be swallowed by the secular. So it’s a pursuit. “This one thing I do.” What is my goal in life?
But the third thing I want to point out to you from this statement, if it’s a position and it’s a pursuit, is that it gives a perception, a new perception.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
It’s a new perception; they will see God. Now this does not mean in the sense in which we’re told every eye will see Him - there will come a day when every eye will see Him -that isn’t what He is talking about. But rather you begin to see God in ways maybe you didn’t do before. You begin to see God – let me suggest a few: You begin to see God in creation; God is there to be seen in the beauty of His creation. Psalm 19 says,
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”
And the Psalmist is saying there that every time you look at creation, you actually not only look at creation but you hear God speak by His handiwork and you see His beauty. Now I know we are in a fallen creation and that’s going to be rectified, but we see His beauty.
I remember somebody saying one day that when an artist paints a picture, he does two things. He normally copies something so that you recognize something that is intelligible – it’s not just a mass of color. If you look at a cubist painter like Picasso for instance, you might look at it from different angles and eventually say, “O-oh that’s a woman. That’s a leg coming out of the back of her head but I recognize there’s a woman. He’s copying something; there’s some meaning here.”
But the second thing an artist does is express himself. He tells you something about his perspective on the world. And so you look at a Picasso and you probably say, “I think Picasso is weird”, because that’s what we say about people who see things differently usually. And he did have a rather unusual view of life. That’s why the history of art is such an interesting subject because it tells you how people saw the world and saw life.
But when God as the great Artist, created the world, He did only one of those two things. He didn’t copy anything for there was nothing to copy. So all He did was express Himself. And the heavens declare the glory of God. And you realize from His creation some pretty obvious things: One, God is big. We live in the little part of the Milky Way. You put two dinner plates on top of each other with the bulge either side – that’s roughly the shape of the Milky Way. We’re just on the ledge, out on the rim you know, where you, just at the edge where it starts to deepen. That’s why if you look up you see it’s thick at one place - it’ thin out there, because we’re looking up to the dinner plates. That’s the shape of our milky way. It’s one hundred thousand light years across. Light travels three hundred thousand kilometres a second, seven and a half times around the world every second. And this is one hundred thousand light years across. And this galaxy is one of billions, it is supposed, and there is evidence for it. That filled our universe. And you say, “God is big! Man, He did that on a Wednesday afternoon. It says on the fourth day in a half a sentence, ‘And he made the stars also.’ A bit of time left before supper – just make the stars also! He’s big!”
I remember once sitting at my desk. A little money spider ran across my desk and I watched that, put my finger down and when he saw my finger come down just an inch or two ahead of him, he stopped, didn’t like the look of that, turned around and began to go back. So I put my finger down the other side and him and he stopped, looked at that again, turned about and went back. And I moved this finger closer and this finger closer until eventually he was in my fingers and I picked him up and he was on my fingernail. I looked at that tiny little money spider and I thought of his tiny little brain, thinking, “What do I do now”? He’s got yards – metres - of intestine and arteries and veins. He’s made up of millions of little cells, little hairy legs, little heart that is incredibly efficient that’s probably pumping very fast at that point, little eyeballs. If you ever wonder if God is interested in detail, just pick a money spider up like that - or anything - and you see the intricate detail. And this is the same God who said “bllp” and a hundred thousand light years of one of His billions of galaxies came into being. Incredible!
When you know God is so big, you don’t get frightened in this lonely world. And when you know God is so small, you don’t get frightened because you know He cares about you. You begin to see God and the beauty of creation. There is a hymn that we used to sing when I was young. I don’t know if you folks know it. It has a great line in it. It says, “Heaven above is softer blue, earth around is sweeter green, something lives in every hue that Christ-less eyes have never seen. Birds with gladder songs o’erflow, flowers with deeper beauty shine. Since I know, as now I know, I am His and He is mine.
And we sang there that when you know God, you know the heaven is a softer blue, the earth a sweeter green. Something lives in every hue Christ-less eyes have never seen. You can see it as a phenomenon but you don’t see it as a handiwork of a God that you know.
We see God in creation, we see God in circumstances. We all know that verse, “All things work together for good to those who love God.” We quote it sometimes when things go wrong just as a kind of cover-up, you know, “hope this will do”. The better translation is, “In all things God works for good”; things are passive, God is active. “In all things God works for good.”
And you begin to see God in circumstances that otherwise might take you by surprise and sometimes frighten us. I want to read to you from a circular - a man I know just sent out this week – he’s just been diagnosed with cancer. He sent it to a number of people and I got it this week. And he wrote, “Life expectancy is a fragile thing. For all we know, some plan may be brewing in the mysteries of providence that will take me to be with Jesus by some other means in a totally surprising way (in other words, this cancer may not be the way I die; there may be some other way.)” And then he says, “We do not put our hope in the odds; we put our hope in God and the final joy of fellowship with Him, the One who appoints our days according to His infinite wisdom.”
How do you frighten a man like that? How do you frighten a man who says, “I am living right on schedule with a God who has appointed my days with infinite wisdom and the doctors tell me I have cancer and the prognosis is not good and my life expectancy may be reduced. Who knows? Maybe I’m going to die earlier than that anyway from some other cause. It doesn’t matter. I know what’s going to happen – I’m going to be brought into fellowship with God’s Son in a way that I can’t in this life, but I will enjoy for all eternity.”
Isn’t that releasing? It doesn’t mean of course, there aren’t the human anxieties and concerns. We don’t for one moment run glibly over these nor do we in our own experience. But we see through them to a God in whom we place our hope and we see God. When you’re single-minded, pure in heart, “This one thing I do”. You see God in your circumstances as well as in creation.
When I looked up this particular hymn, because I wanted to quote that verse to you just now, I read through the whole hymn. And there is another verse, which I want to read to you as well. It says, “Things that once were wild alarms cannot now disturb my rest. Enclosed in everlasting arms, pillowed on the loving breast. O, to lie forever here, doubt and care and self resign, while He whispers in my ear, I am His and He is mine.
It’s a wonderful place to be. And those who are pure in heart see God in their circumstances. I guess one of the most well-known parts of Scripture is Psalm 23, David’s great psalm.
“The Lord is my Shepherd”. Here’s the result: “I shall not want.” I don’t have any other needs now because He meets those needs. And in that psalm, he talks about death. He talks about the shadow of death. And he says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”, and that’s a journey that we’re all going to walk, “I will fear no evil”. Why? Because You are with me. “Even as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I don’t see death; I see God”, he says. “And so I don’t fear evil.”
Again, none of us are running to death. None of us are excited about death. It’ll bring its anxieties but I don’t fear evil in death – that’s the point he makes. I love the way he calls it a “shadow of death”. Shadows don’t hurt you do they? If you are on the street and a truck comes down the street and its shadow comes down the sidewalk, the shadow of a truck will never run you down. The shadow of a dog will never bite you. The shadow of a stick will never hurt you. The shadow of a stone will never hit you. And the shadow of death will never kill you. And David says, “It’s a journey I’m going to make.” It’s a journey we’re all going to make. You’ll have the privilege one day of being announced from this platform I’m sure, because it happens every week. It’ll come. It’ll come to me. But blessed are the pure in heart, they’ll see God. “And though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me.”
I wonder where your heart is today. The wonderful thing is, is that the heart is redeemable. David also wrote in Psalm 51:10,
“Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast (stable) spirit within me.”
David cries out to God, “Create a pure heart”. And maybe this morning that’s what you and I need to say: “Lord, create a pure heart in me.” You know God specializes in heart surgery. Actually, He goes beyond that; He specializes in heart transplant. Because Ezekiel 36 (which I read earlier) says in Verse 27,
“I will give you a new heart. I will put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
“I will remove that old callused, hardened heart and I will put a heart that is going to be soft and tender and vulnerable, but it’s going to be a heart that’s pure. And let me say to you this: if you don’t know what it is to have a pure heart, just walk back through these beatitudes because they build on one another. And ask yourself, “Am I merciful? Am I compassionate?” Because the previous one says, “Blessed are the merciful; they will receive mercy.” If you’re not merciful, is it because you’re not hungering and thirsting for righteousness – there’s not appetite in your heart for God? He’s one of the things in your life – He’s not the “this one thing I do”.
If you’re not hungering and thirsting for righteousness, check whether you are meek, whether you are walking humbly in submission to Him as your Lord and King.
And if you’re not meek, go back a step. I’ll tell you why it is: because you’re not mourning your condition and allowing the Comforter to be your life and your strength.
And if you’re not mourning your condition, I’ll tell you why: go back a step; you’re not aware of your poverty of spirit, you’re not living with this awareness that “in myself there is no good thing.” You still think you’ve got what it takes within yourself.
If you’re not aware of your poverty of spirit, I’ll tell you something about you that you know – maybe you’ve tried to cover it up – you’re not happy. These are the ingredients of happiness according to Jesus, a deep inner sense of well-being and contentment.
And I know most of us here this morning are already Christians and that’s great but we can slide away from the main thing so easily. Maybe you need to come back this morning to God and say, “Lord, create that pure heart in me again. I’m too mixed up in too many things. I want that single-mindedness.”
And if you’re not a Christian this morning, my prayer for you who are not yet Christians - those of you watching on television, if you’re not a Christian - is that God the Holy Spirit will draw you because He will reveal to you the attractiveness of Jesus and why it is that in Christ the fundamental needs of our life are met, because we were created to be in relationship with Him. That’s the only way life works.
And you, this morning, can come to Him and say, “Lord I’m sorry I’m outside of You. Please forgive me for my sin and by Your Holy Spirit come and live within me, indwell me. Because of the cross my sins may be forgiven; I confess them to You. You rose again from the dead. Now come and live in my heart, the very center of my being, as my Lord and King.”
Would you do that this morning? Because that’s the starting place, if you’re going to know this journey we are looking at in these beatitudes that brings you that deep sense of contentedness and happiness that you are right with God and therefore you can live in right relationship with the world, with confidence and certainty.
Let’s pray together. Father, we thank You this morning that Your Word is not theory, it’s not just presenting some idle dream that we might go home and think about when we want to escape the harshness of real life. But Your Word reveals to us Your purpose for us here and now as we live on this earth in dependence on You and in obedience to You. And that as we live this life in relationship with You, we find that deep satisfaction and that certain confidence that when, one day we do walk the valley of the shadow of death, we fear no evil for we awaken to be alive forever in Your Presence. What a glorious prospect and we thank You for it. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Part 6: Matt 5:8 ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God’.
Pastor Charles Price
Now if you have your Bible, I’m going to read to you again from Matthew Chapter 5. When I say again, those of you who have been with us in recent weeks will recall that we are looking at this series of statements that Jesus made at the beginning of His Sermon on the Mount that we call the Beatitudes. A series of statements that all begin with the word, “Blessed”, which is the Greek word “markariŏs” that literally means, “to be happy”. And I am calling these the “Ingredients of True Happiness”. And I want to read to you again from Verse 1 and go down to Verse 8 today. Verse 1 of Matthew 5 says,
“Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them, saying:
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
[Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.]
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy.’”
And here’s the one we’re coming to this morning; the sixth one:
“‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’”
That’s as far as we’re going to read.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
And I imagine that probably scares some of us silly. Because if I know anything about myself, it is this: I do not have a pure heart. And I suspect, if I were to say this morning, “Put your hands up if you’ve got a pure heart”, not many hands would go up. (I’m sure Reg would put his up, but then Reg doesn’t know himself as well as some people do.) My biggest battle in life – and I have no doubt, your biggest battle in life – is the corruption of our own hearts. The Bible isn’t very complimentary sometimes when it speaks about the heart. Let me read you in Jeremiah 17:9, the writer says,
“The heart is deceitful above all things” (And here’s the pessimistic bit he adds on) “and beyond cure.”
Now the King James puts it a bit differently:
“The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?”
That’s a good question. Self-diagnosis is the most difficult thing in the world, especially of your own heart. And our biggest problem lies not in the environment in which we find ourselves. Of course there are all kinds of stimuli’s in our environment that stimulate us to temptation and to sin, but I remind you of course, if you locked yourself away in a room for years on end, you’d still live with your biggest source of problem which is yourself.
As James writes in James 1:14,
“Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.”
Sin comes from within. It’s our old self, our natural self that is corrupted. If the devil died tonight, you’d probably sin tomorrow because the devil doesn’t need to be involved in every sin that you and I commit. The old nature that we have – our hearts – look after that. Most sin is an inside job.
Now, there are over 500 references to the heart in the Bible. Many of them are not very commendable. Here’s a great one I want to give to you from Ecclesiastes Chapter 9:3. It says this:
“The hearts of men are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live and afterwards they join the dead.
Pretty depressive, isn’t it? And I remind you, by the way, that when it says, “The hearts of men are evil and there is madness in their hearts”, that is a generic term, ladies, so please wipe that smirk off your face. “Madness in their hearts.”
So what are we talking about here when Jesus, in the midst of this list of ingredients of real happiness says, “Blessed are the pure in heart”, and you and I say to ourselves, “Well, that cancels me out; that’s where I fall off the rails, when we get to this one.”
Well, let me define two things. Let me define the meaning of the word “pure” and the meaning of the word “heart”. Let me talk about the word “heart” first. Of course when the Bible speaks about the heart, it’s not talking about the physical heart that is a pump in our chest, which causes our blood to circulate efficiently. When a boy says to a girl, “I love you with all my heart”, he doesn’t mean, “I love you with all my pump”. He says, “I love you with everything that I am”, because the heart is the seat of our personality. It’s where our mind and our emotions and our will come together and form the real you. It’s not just a mind thing; it is our whole personality. And this word describes the real person in their inner being.
You know, in Proverbs it says, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” It doesn’t actually say, “As he thinks in his mind”, because we don’t just think with our minds. We think with our hearts – that is, our emotions feed into our thinking, our desires, our aspirations, our will. It’s the real person that we are. And probably the most important thing about us is our heart. And in Proverbs 4:23 the writer says,
“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”
That is: out of it comes everything else.
Now having given you some of these pessimistic statements, there’s also hope for the heart in Scripture as well. When God spoke to Ezekiel about the New Covenant He said,
“I will give you a new heart. I’ll put a new Spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone (that hardened heart), that heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh” (that is pliable and softening).
Sometimes we use language where we talk about Jesus coming into your heart. That’s actually not in the Bible but we talk about that; we know what that means: into the center of your being and right into the heart of everything that you are. So there’s hope for your heart. Romans 10:10 says,
“It is with your heart that you believe and are justified.”
It’s not just with our minds that we believe. Our minds of course are crucial, but in the book of James, James says,
“You believe there’s one God.” Then he says in effect, “So what? Even the devil believes that and trembles.” The devil believes things with his mind but the implication of that for his heart is not there because to believe with the heart is to surrender; you recognize that God is God. But the realistic thing is that everyday I fight a battle with my heart and so do you. This is the real you.
Well, having clarified, or tried to, what is meant by the word “heart”, let me now define the word “pure”. You will be aware of course that the Bible was given to us originally in the Hebrew language for most of the Old Testament – some of it in Aramaic. And the Greek language in the New Testament – not that Jesus was Greek-speaking (he would have spoken this is in Aramaic) but Greek was the language of international commerce and trade and everything that wanted to travel was written in Greek. And so the early manuscripts we have, of course, are all in Greek. And that means that, as there is no exact equivalent between two languages in vocabulary, that sometimes the word in the Greek which has a meaning to the Greek mind, has different meanings to – in our case – the English mind.
And there are actually three words in Greek – separate words – that translate by the one word “pure” in English. And I want to just clarify this to understand the meaning here. The first word (and I don’t want to bore you with this, but just very quickly), the first Greek word that translates “pure” in English is the word “hagnŏs” which means pure in the sense of being clean. If you put your clothes into the wash and they come out pure, they come out “hagnŏs”, clean. It’s got the same root as the word “holy”. The Greek word for “holy” is the word “hagiŏs”. It’s the same root for it. And it’s used, for instance, in I John 3:3 where speaking of the return of the Lord Jesus, John says,
“Everyone who has this hope in himself, purifies himself, just as he is pure.”
“Hagnŏs”: this is clean. Now that’s a good word, but that is not the meaning; that is not the word used here. So the meaning is not “clean”.
A second word is the word, “ĕilikrinĕs” which means pure in the sense of being genuine, being sincere, having integrity, being honest. It is used in Philippians 1:10 where Paul says, “that you may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ.” The King James says, “that you may be sincere and without offence until the day of Christ.” So there the words “pure” and “sincere” are interchangeable because that is the meaning of this word, “eilikrines” – pure in the sense of being genuine, sincere – this is the genuine article; this is pure in that sense. Now that’s a good word too, but that is not the word that is used by Jesus here.
The third word is the word that Jesus uses here and it’s the word “katharŏs”. And it means “pure” in the sense of being unmixed with other things. It means “pure” in the sense of not being diluted. Let me give you some instances in which this word was used. If you were to harvest some wheat and you cut away the stalk and then blow away the chaff, you are left at the end of it with pure wheat. Now that’s the sense in which it is used. It may not be the best wheat, it may not be “Grade A” wheat, but it’s pure wheat in the sense that there is no chaff and stuff mixed in with it.
Or if you have wine that has not been diluted with water, it is pure wine. It may not be good vintage quality; it might taste like vinegar, but it’s pure wine. That’s the use of the word; it’s not mixed. Or milk that’s not been diluted: the milk might be sour but it’s pure milk in the sense that it has not been diluted with water, and so on.
So the meaning of the word, “katharŏs” is to be unmixed, undiluted. It is used several times in the New Testament. I Timothy 1:5,
“The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart.”
That is: an unmixed heart, a single-minded heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. William Barclay in his commentary on Matthew says that this could be written, “Blessed is the man whose motives are always entirely unmixed.”
Now let me talk about this from three perspectives. First of all, I want to talk about this as a position – it’s a position. By that I mean, it’s a standing, it’s a stance in our lives. It’s one of being honest, of being real. You see, very often we find ourselves living inside an outside image that we want to portray to other people round about us. And so what you see is not always what you get. And what is portrayed may be in public or when we’re around people we would like to impress in some way, it’s not really the real you. But if we understand this in the sequence of these beatitudes, when you face your poverty of spirit and you’re absolutely honest about that poverty of spirit (there’s nothing to cover up anymore) and you mourn that poverty, you bring it to God and you mourn and you are comforted by the Comforter, so the Holy Spirit is there to replace all that we are in our weakness with what He is in His strength. And if we meekly submit to Christ as our Lord, if we’ve gone through those early stages of these beatitudes, we’re actually liberated from the need to pretend anything, or to prove anything. If you find yourself pretending to be somebody you’re not, you really have not faced honestly these early issues and the beatitudes that we have looked at earlier. It’s a wonderful thing to be liberated from how other people think of you.
I love the statement about Jesus: “He made himself of no reputation”. All that means is: He couldn’t care less what people thought about Him. So what did He care? He said, “I do those things that please the Father.” That’s what He cared about. And in the process of course, He got into all kinds of trouble with people who thought badly of Him for all kinds of reasons which He never defended, never tried to explain what was really going on, because He was interested in proving anything, which is a liberating place to be at.
I’ve said before that these beatitudes are really fleshed out in many respects in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, 6 and 7. And in Matthew 7, Jesus talks about this in Verse 15 when He says,
“Watch out for false prophets”.
And then He describes them.
“They come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly they are ferocious wolves”, he says.
So here’s a problem with these prophets. The outward and the inward are different. Outwardly they are in sheep’s clothing, they look like sheep, they smell like sheep, they sound like sheep, they act like sheep, they say things like “Ha-a-llelujah, A-a-men” and you wouldn’t know they weren’t a sheep. But inside, he says, they are actually ferocious wolves.
A little bit like the Red Riding Hood fairy tale; do you remember that? It’s a long time since I read it. When Little Red Riding Hood went to visit Grandma who had been gobbled up by a wolf and the wolf was sitting in her bed with Grandma’s hat on and Grandma’s shawl on and Grandma’s nightdress on and the clothes pulled up to Grandma’s chest. And Little Red Riding Hood came in and said, “Hello, Grandma, what big ears you’ve got.”
“All the better to hear you with my dear.”
“What big eyes you’ve got.”
“All the better to see you with.”
“What big nose you’ve got.”
I’ve forgotten if that was in there because I’m not sure what she said if it was….
“All the better to smell you with”, I guess.
“What big teeth you’ve got.”
“All the better to eat you with”…and leapt out to eat her. And of course Little Red Riding Hood ran off and the hunter was coming by and I think he shot the wolf and they opened him up and there was Grandma sitting undigested in his stomach. And they lived happily ever after.
But the point is: there was this wolf sitting up, dressed like Grandma. And maybe you’re here this morning dressed like a sheep and you look like a sheep and you smell like a sheep and your “ha-a-allelujah” is like a sheep. But you know that when you are at work tomorrow morning, you are not the same person that you appear to be in church on Sunday morning. In fact, when you get home in an hour from now, the way you talk to your wife may be very different what the folks sitting next to you might assume here this morning. Because we lack that position of purity of heart where the person on the inside is the one you see on the outside because a lot of times we find ourselves on the inside hiding behind an outside image that we want people to think of us.
And if you are someone this morning and on the inside you are hiding behind an outside image that you want to portray to folks around you. I don’t mean by that, that we let everything hang out - of course we don’t. We don’t like people who let everything hang out – we’ve got to show a bit of discipline – but I’m talking about pretence, I’m talking about trying to create a reputation. And if we do it long enough, we’ll even begin to convince ourselves of our own pretended image. And then we are in real trouble because you don’t know who you are anymore. The inside and the outside become inconsistent and in conflict.
And to be pure in heart, “katharŏs” style, is to be completely honest and real – that what you see is what you get. And when people meet you on Sunday in church and when they meet you on Monday at work, when they meet you on Wednesday at the gas station or Thursday in the gym, or wherever it is they meet you – Saturday on the golf course – you’re the same person.
Well it’s a position, but the second thing I want to point out to you is it’s a pursuit as well. It’s not just a passive thing where we sit back. And I think the best way to describe this as a pursuit is to be single-minded. I think that’s what the word “katharŏs” implies. If it’s milk that’s not diluted or wheat that’s been separated from all the chaff – it’s been separated and become “katharŏs”, this idea of being single-minded – and I say this because Paul talks about this in Philippians 3 when he talks about himself. And I’ll read to you what he says in Verse 13:
“Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it” (that is: I’m not arrived where I’m supposed to be; I’m not perfect so by the way, don’t anybody pretend to be because you’re not and we know you’re not and nobody ever is), “I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining forward to what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize which God has called me in Christ Jesus.”
I love the fact Paul says, “I haven’t arrived but one thing I do:” The King James says, “This one thing I do”, not “these 25 things I dabble in”. Paul says, “I’ve narrowed my life down to “the this one thing I do”. That didn’t mean that Paul was boring without wider interests, it doesn’t mean a person like that doesn’t have a business to be involved in or a family to be concerned about or hobbies in which they spend their spare time. But rather he is saying, “In the midst of my business life and my family life and my recreational life, there is an under girding, ‘this one thing I do’ that is the backbone, the spinal cord of everything in my life.”
What is “this one thing”? Well Paul says, “forgetting what’s behind”. And by the way, it’s good to forget what’s behind. Otherwise sometimes there’s a ball and chain that pulls us back. Forget what’s behind. I know that’s a big thing. It’s not easy to forget what’s behind sometimes (and that’s another subject), but “forget what’s behind and straining forward to what is ahead, I press on towards the goals which God has called me heavenward in Christ.”
What has God called me heavenward for? Well He tells us in the rest of that passage: “that I might know Christ; I might know the power of His resurrection in my life, I might share in his sufferings.” That is, I’m equipped to live a life that has its toughness to it and its difficulties and its hardships - that I may know Him in all His fullness. And you and I need to narrow our interests down to: what is Jesus Christ’s interest in my life?
And there’s a single mindedness to this. You know James 1:8 says, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” That’s just a double-minded man; that’s not a triple-minded man or quadruple-minded man, or a multi-minded man; this is a double-minded man – two directions pulling in your life. And he says he’s unstable. And that’s why he goes on to say later in James, “Purify your hearts you double-minded.” That is: purify, “katharŏs”, single down your heart that you’re not double-minded, and everything else begins to fall into place.
Jesus talked about this in Matthew Chapter 6, and you can read this some other time, when He talks about the fact that people worry. He uses the word “worry” I think it’s six or eight times. “Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or drink. Don’t worry about your body, what you will wear. Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Don’t work about clothes. Look at the lilies of the field; they don’t labour or spin that they have plenty of beauty. Don’t worry saying, ‘what shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we wear?” He talks about people who worry. He says, “The pagans run after all these things.” And then He says this: “But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness” and do you know what happens? “All these things will be given to you as well.”
He says, instead of worrying about, with all these different areas of your life (and there are multi facets to our lives of course) but He says, “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness”, and you know what happens? He says, “all these things fall into place.”
And you find that the antidote, He says there, to worry, but the antidote to double-mindedness is that you seek first His kingdom.
Psalm 86:11 says,
“Give me an undivided heart that I may fear your name.”
An undivided heart - and I will tell you this: the secular issues will always swallow the sacred issues in the divided heart. The secular issues will swallow the sacred issues in a divided heart. You put a tiny bit of poison in a glass of milk and it will impact the whole glass of milk. You can’t say, “Oh well, I’ll just drink the non-poisoned bit.” And in a divided heart, the sacred will be swallowed by the secular. So it’s a pursuit. “This one thing I do.” What is my goal in life?
But the third thing I want to point out to you from this statement, if it’s a position and it’s a pursuit, is that it gives a perception, a new perception.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
It’s a new perception; they will see God. Now this does not mean in the sense in which we’re told every eye will see Him - there will come a day when every eye will see Him -that isn’t what He is talking about. But rather you begin to see God in ways maybe you didn’t do before. You begin to see God – let me suggest a few: You begin to see God in creation; God is there to be seen in the beauty of His creation. Psalm 19 says,
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”
And the Psalmist is saying there that every time you look at creation, you actually not only look at creation but you hear God speak by His handiwork and you see His beauty. Now I know we are in a fallen creation and that’s going to be rectified, but we see His beauty.
I remember somebody saying one day that when an artist paints a picture, he does two things. He normally copies something so that you recognize something that is intelligible – it’s not just a mass of color. If you look at a cubist painter like Picasso for instance, you might look at it from different angles and eventually say, “O-oh that’s a woman. That’s a leg coming out of the back of her head but I recognize there’s a woman. He’s copying something; there’s some meaning here.”
But the second thing an artist does is express himself. He tells you something about his perspective on the world. And so you look at a Picasso and you probably say, “I think Picasso is weird”, because that’s what we say about people who see things differently usually. And he did have a rather unusual view of life. That’s why the history of art is such an interesting subject because it tells you how people saw the world and saw life.
But when God as the great Artist, created the world, He did only one of those two things. He didn’t copy anything for there was nothing to copy. So all He did was express Himself. And the heavens declare the glory of God. And you realize from His creation some pretty obvious things: One, God is big. We live in the little part of the Milky Way. You put two dinner plates on top of each other with the bulge either side – that’s roughly the shape of the Milky Way. We’re just on the ledge, out on the rim you know, where you, just at the edge where it starts to deepen. That’s why if you look up you see it’s thick at one place - it’ thin out there, because we’re looking up to the dinner plates. That’s the shape of our milky way. It’s one hundred thousand light years across. Light travels three hundred thousand kilometres a second, seven and a half times around the world every second. And this is one hundred thousand light years across. And this galaxy is one of billions, it is supposed, and there is evidence for it. That filled our universe. And you say, “God is big! Man, He did that on a Wednesday afternoon. It says on the fourth day in a half a sentence, ‘And he made the stars also.’ A bit of time left before supper – just make the stars also! He’s big!”
I remember once sitting at my desk. A little money spider ran across my desk and I watched that, put my finger down and when he saw my finger come down just an inch or two ahead of him, he stopped, didn’t like the look of that, turned around and began to go back. So I put my finger down the other side and him and he stopped, looked at that again, turned about and went back. And I moved this finger closer and this finger closer until eventually he was in my fingers and I picked him up and he was on my fingernail. I looked at that tiny little money spider and I thought of his tiny little brain, thinking, “What do I do now”? He’s got yards – metres - of intestine and arteries and veins. He’s made up of millions of little cells, little hairy legs, little heart that is incredibly efficient that’s probably pumping very fast at that point, little eyeballs. If you ever wonder if God is interested in detail, just pick a money spider up like that - or anything - and you see the intricate detail. And this is the same God who said “bllp” and a hundred thousand light years of one of His billions of galaxies came into being. Incredible!
When you know God is so big, you don’t get frightened in this lonely world. And when you know God is so small, you don’t get frightened because you know He cares about you. You begin to see God and the beauty of creation. There is a hymn that we used to sing when I was young. I don’t know if you folks know it. It has a great line in it. It says, “Heaven above is softer blue, earth around is sweeter green, something lives in every hue that Christ-less eyes have never seen. Birds with gladder songs o’erflow, flowers with deeper beauty shine. Since I know, as now I know, I am His and He is mine.
And we sang there that when you know God, you know the heaven is a softer blue, the earth a sweeter green. Something lives in every hue Christ-less eyes have never seen. You can see it as a phenomenon but you don’t see it as a handiwork of a God that you know.
We see God in creation, we see God in circumstances. We all know that verse, “All things work together for good to those who love God.” We quote it sometimes when things go wrong just as a kind of cover-up, you know, “hope this will do”. The better translation is, “In all things God works for good”; things are passive, God is active. “In all things God works for good.”
And you begin to see God in circumstances that otherwise might take you by surprise and sometimes frighten us. I want to read to you from a circular - a man I know just sent out this week – he’s just been diagnosed with cancer. He sent it to a number of people and I got it this week. And he wrote, “Life expectancy is a fragile thing. For all we know, some plan may be brewing in the mysteries of providence that will take me to be with Jesus by some other means in a totally surprising way (in other words, this cancer may not be the way I die; there may be some other way.)” And then he says, “We do not put our hope in the odds; we put our hope in God and the final joy of fellowship with Him, the One who appoints our days according to His infinite wisdom.”
How do you frighten a man like that? How do you frighten a man who says, “I am living right on schedule with a God who has appointed my days with infinite wisdom and the doctors tell me I have cancer and the prognosis is not good and my life expectancy may be reduced. Who knows? Maybe I’m going to die earlier than that anyway from some other cause. It doesn’t matter. I know what’s going to happen – I’m going to be brought into fellowship with God’s Son in a way that I can’t in this life, but I will enjoy for all eternity.”
Isn’t that releasing? It doesn’t mean of course, there aren’t the human anxieties and concerns. We don’t for one moment run glibly over these nor do we in our own experience. But we see through them to a God in whom we place our hope and we see God. When you’re single-minded, pure in heart, “This one thing I do”. You see God in your circumstances as well as in creation.
When I looked up this particular hymn, because I wanted to quote that verse to you just now, I read through the whole hymn. And there is another verse, which I want to read to you as well. It says, “Things that once were wild alarms cannot now disturb my rest. Enclosed in everlasting arms, pillowed on the loving breast. O, to lie forever here, doubt and care and self resign, while He whispers in my ear, I am His and He is mine.
It’s a wonderful place to be. And those who are pure in heart see God in their circumstances. I guess one of the most well-known parts of Scripture is Psalm 23, David’s great psalm.
“The Lord is my Shepherd”. Here’s the result: “I shall not want.” I don’t have any other needs now because He meets those needs. And in that psalm, he talks about death. He talks about the shadow of death. And he says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”, and that’s a journey that we’re all going to walk, “I will fear no evil”. Why? Because You are with me. “Even as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I don’t see death; I see God”, he says. “And so I don’t fear evil.”
Again, none of us are running to death. None of us are excited about death. It’ll bring its anxieties but I don’t fear evil in death – that’s the point he makes. I love the way he calls it a “shadow of death”. Shadows don’t hurt you do they? If you are on the street and a truck comes down the street and its shadow comes down the sidewalk, the shadow of a truck will never run you down. The shadow of a dog will never bite you. The shadow of a stick will never hurt you. The shadow of a stone will never hit you. And the shadow of death will never kill you. And David says, “It’s a journey I’m going to make.” It’s a journey we’re all going to make. You’ll have the privilege one day of being announced from this platform I’m sure, because it happens every week. It’ll come. It’ll come to me. But blessed are the pure in heart, they’ll see God. “And though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me.”
I wonder where your heart is today. The wonderful thing is, is that the heart is redeemable. David also wrote in Psalm 51:10,
“Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast (stable) spirit within me.”
David cries out to God, “Create a pure heart”. And maybe this morning that’s what you and I need to say: “Lord, create a pure heart in me.” You know God specializes in heart surgery. Actually, He goes beyond that; He specializes in heart transplant. Because Ezekiel 36 (which I read earlier) says in Verse 27,
“I will give you a new heart. I will put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
“I will remove that old callused, hardened heart and I will put a heart that is going to be soft and tender and vulnerable, but it’s going to be a heart that’s pure. And let me say to you this: if you don’t know what it is to have a pure heart, just walk back through these beatitudes because they build on one another. And ask yourself, “Am I merciful? Am I compassionate?” Because the previous one says, “Blessed are the merciful; they will receive mercy.” If you’re not merciful, is it because you’re not hungering and thirsting for righteousness – there’s not appetite in your heart for God? He’s one of the things in your life – He’s not the “this one thing I do”.
If you’re not hungering and thirsting for righteousness, check whether you are meek, whether you are walking humbly in submission to Him as your Lord and King.
And if you’re not meek, go back a step. I’ll tell you why it is: because you’re not mourning your condition and allowing the Comforter to be your life and your strength.
And if you’re not mourning your condition, I’ll tell you why: go back a step; you’re not aware of your poverty of spirit, you’re not living with this awareness that “in myself there is no good thing.” You still think you’ve got what it takes within yourself.
If you’re not aware of your poverty of spirit, I’ll tell you something about you that you know – maybe you’ve tried to cover it up – you’re not happy. These are the ingredients of happiness according to Jesus, a deep inner sense of well-being and contentment.
And I know most of us here this morning are already Christians and that’s great but we can slide away from the main thing so easily. Maybe you need to come back this morning to God and say, “Lord, create that pure heart in me again. I’m too mixed up in too many things. I want that single-mindedness.”
And if you’re not a Christian this morning, my prayer for you who are not yet Christians - those of you watching on television, if you’re not a Christian - is that God the Holy Spirit will draw you because He will reveal to you the attractiveness of Jesus and why it is that in Christ the fundamental needs of our life are met, because we were created to be in relationship with Him. That’s the only way life works.
And you, this morning, can come to Him and say, “Lord I’m sorry I’m outside of You. Please forgive me for my sin and by Your Holy Spirit come and live within me, indwell me. Because of the cross my sins may be forgiven; I confess them to You. You rose again from the dead. Now come and live in my heart, the very center of my being, as my Lord and King.”
Would you do that this morning? Because that’s the starting place, if you’re going to know this journey we are looking at in these beatitudes that brings you that deep sense of contentedness and happiness that you are right with God and therefore you can live in right relationship with the world, with confidence and certainty.
Let’s pray together. Father, we thank You this morning that Your Word is not theory, it’s not just presenting some idle dream that we might go home and think about when we want to escape the harshness of real life. But Your Word reveals to us Your purpose for us here and now as we live on this earth in dependence on You and in obedience to You. And that as we live this life in relationship with You, we find that deep satisfaction and that certain confidence that when, one day we do walk the valley of the shadow of death, we fear no evil for we awaken to be alive forever in Your Presence. What a glorious prospect and we thank You for it. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.