LEARNING DAILY

 

Matthew 5:8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. “   Jesus

 

Think back over the Beatitudes we have examined.  Poor in spirit, mourning, and meekness are concerned with our need.  When we hunger and thirst for righteousness, we are filled.  It is then that we see the result of being filled; we become merciful, pure in heart, and become peacemakers.  To be merciful we need to be poor in spirit and those who mourn over their sin and the sinfulness of others will be pure in heart. 

 

The pure in heart are those who have been delivered from sin’s power by God’s grace and are striving to please, to be like Him.  They seek to have the same attitude of heart that God has – the love of righteousness and a hatred of evil.  Their hearts (includes their will, their minds, their emotions) are in tune with the heart of God.  Purity is what the gospel of Christ is about; Jesus’ message has always been about the heart.  Jesus condemned the Pharisees for being concerned about their outward appearance while ignoring the inside.  Following Jesus is not just knowing the information contained in the Bible.  It is about loving God, living in His presence, and loving your neighbor.   

 

To be pure in heart, we best know what the Bible says heart is.  In Scripture the heart includes a person’s emotions, their will, and their mind.  The Bible also tells us the heart is the center of all our troubles.  Jesus said. “Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, and blasphemies.” (Matthew 15:19).  Jeremiah said, “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).  So much time is spent on making a person good through education, improving the environment, and so many other things.  Nothing works because the trouble lies with the heart. Only when one’s heart is changed does the person change.

 

One cannot change their heart because by nature the heart is not pure.  In Romans 7, the apostle Paul struggled with trying to change what he struggled with.  He said, “For what I am doing, I do not understand.  For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate I do.  O wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?”   Lloyd-Jones states that a pure heart is without hypocrisy.  Nothing is hidden.  The heart is no longer divided.  It is to be like the Lord Jesus Christ – spotless, sinless, pure.  He says it means to desire God, desire to know Him, and to serve Him.  In this Beatitude, Jesus says only those who are like Him will see Him.  Lloyd-Jones emphatically states, “No one can reduce this to a matter of decency, of morality, or an intellectual interest in the doctrines of the Christian Faith.”  That is a serious statement.    It must be understood that in the spiritual realm light and dark cannot be mixed.  Only the pure in heart will see God.

 

Keep reading!  There is Good News, in fact a contemporary Christian group sings It’s the best news ever!  When you are able to grasp what this means, everything else should become insignificant to you.  You are going to enjoy God’s presence forever by doing what follows.

 

You can join a monastery and become a monk; that should do the trick!  Nope! No amount of effort to try to do a self-cleaning is not going to work.  Paul is our example.  To answer his question above you allow the Holy Spirit to cleanse you.  David prayed in Psalm 51:10, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”  Only God can do it and He has promised to do so when you desire Him to.  That’s our hope – our only hope for a pure heart.  You place yourself in His hands, asking Him to cleanse you, to keep purifying you and believe He is doing so.  Understand it is an ongoing process that will continue until you enter heaven.   Yes, you have a part.  You must draw close to Him, do everything you can to live a life pleasing to Him, even though it is never enough.

 

One of the most tremendous thought in Scripture is that I am going to see God.  Preparing for it is a continual process!

 

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