Pure In Heart
Matthew 5:1-8
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” vs. 8
A Fender Bender
Two young adults were involved in a fender bender and at first they were angry with one another and accused the other of being at fault, but finally, calmer heads prevailed and they decided to call the police and let the officials settle the matter. But as they waited for the police to arrive they got involved in a conversation and discovered that both of them were single, and that they had a lot in common, and the chemistry began to flow between the two. Finally the young woman said, “You know, maybe it was God’s will that we had this accident and we get to meet one another.” And the young man, who was really attracted to the young woman said, I think you are absolutely right! And then the young woman said, “It’s silly for us to stand out here in the cold. Let’s get inside my car & sit where it will be a little warmer.” And the young man agreed. As they sat talking in the car the young woman said, “You know, I just happened to be at the store and I bought a bottle of wine and I have some paper cups. How about if we have a toast to this chance meeting?” The young man thought that was a good idea. They made their toast, he gulped down his wine and then noticed she hadn’t toasted…And he said, “Aren’t you going to drink yours?” She said, “NO, I think I’ll just wait for the police to arrive to assess the damages.”
Read Passage – Matthew 5:1-8
Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them. He said:
3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 5 Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 7 Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
8Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Cleaning Up
We noticed last week that the first four beatitudes deal with our relationship with God and that in verse 7 a shift takes place where we discover God’s perspective in our relationship with others. A large part of our relationships is how others see us. That begs the question: When you are “cleaning yourself us” what do you do first. It seems to me that when we start to clean up our lives we usually start with the outside because that is what people see. In our culture we value the outward appearance and we are bombarded with products to help us do that. It’s good to have a clean outside but it takes more than that. This verse challenges us on that. You might even say that this verse tells us that we’ve got it backwards, in the wrong order. If you are trying to clean yourself up by taking care of the outside, you might be starting in the wrong place It is good to clean up our outside but maybe the order should be that we start on the inside and then work on the outside.
When The Two Don’t Match
There is a disconnect that takes place in some ways. We can clean up the outside but really only two people know what is on the inside. 1 Samuel 16:7 says:
“People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7
The two people who know what is in your heart are you and God. And most of us are aware enough of our own thoughts and motives to know that sometimes the heart and our actions don’t match. We can act one way on the outside, like the lady in our opening story, and being thinking and feeling much differently on the inside. This was true in Jesus day and it’s still true today. This verse challenges us to go against our culture and against our natural tendency.
Is Pure Really Necessary?
To me, the natural question I ask myself is; “Do I really need to be pure?” It’s a good question. Isn’t it good just to try hard, to put on a good face, to try to be good and be socially acceptable? Well, I think God not only gives us the answer to that but helps us with it as well. In 1 Corinthians 11:28-29 it says:
“Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup. 29 For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves.” 1 Cor. 11:28-29
Whenever we take communion, and in our church that is the first Sunday of the month, God calls us to examine ourselves, confess our sins, and really to put it in Christ’s words, to get pure, to clean up. God wants us to be pure. He wants us to have the outside match the inside and he built a way for us to do that; confession and communion. The bigger issue is how can we put some practical steps in our life so that we can always be moving towards purity?
The Refining Process
The analogy that comes to mind is the refining process that we use for precious metals like silver and gold. We can learn a lot from that and we can build practical steps into our everyday life that allow us to inch closer and closer to our inside matching our outside.
- You Can’t Do-It-Yourself
First, and this is a hard place to start because we don’t really want to hear this, you can’t do-it-yourself. This too is counter culture. We live in a world of Home Depot’s and Lowe’s that tell us and teach us we can do-it-ourselves, at least when it comes to home improvement. But the world tells us that too about how to live our lives. Go to the self-help section of a book store or library or online bookstore and you’ll see a huge section of books on how to improve your life. Probably 15 to 20 years ago that section didn’t even exist; or at least it was pretty small. Not anymore. When it comes to purity, you can’t do-it-yourself. Let me give you two verse to help you with this. First Isaiah 45:22:
“Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other.” Isaiah 45:22
And then Acts 3:19:
“Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord…” Acts 3:19
The real cleansing comes when we turn to God and give him our life. God can clean the parts of us that we can’t; our heart and our inner being. When we make a list of things we can do to clean ourselves up, and remember most of those are on the outside, we fall into the trap of legalism and to the illusion that we can do-it-ourselves.
- Admitting You Need Cleansing
Understanding we cannot do-it-ourselves and turning to God is a great first step but something else needs to be done as well, we need to admit that we need cleansing. A big trap that we are sold from an early age is that we are good; too much of that leads to the trap of pride. It’s hard to admit we need cleansing if we feel we are good in and of ourselves. The truth is that we all have things we need to work on, things that we do wrong, and to move forward comes when we are willing to admit our weaknesses and our need for God’s cleaning. Here are some verses to help us grasp this concept. First Isaiah 6:5:
“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” Isaiah 6:5
And then a verse of hope from 1 John 1:9:
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:9
This is a new way of thinking, in fact, it’s really the fact that we need to change our thinking.
Mark Twain put it this way, “The only person who likes change is a wet baby.”
I guarantee you the world will not teach you this. Mostly the world teaches not to admit our weaknesses or mistakes but to put on a good face and to “be strong.” I have found that the more I admit my weaknesses, the more understanding and the more patient people are with me and that I experience real forgiveness and greater patience from others.
Ex. Do you remember the name Terry Anderson? In 1985, he was taken hostage by Shiite Hezbollah militants and held until 1991.He was held hostage in Lebanon for 2,454 days. On March 16, 1985, Anderson had just finished a tennis game when he was abducted from the street in Beirut, placed in the trunk of a car, and taken to a secret location where he was imprisoned. For the next six years and nine months, he was held captive, being moved periodically to new sites. His captors were a group of Hezbollah Shiite Muslims who were supported by Iran in supposed retaliation for Israel‘s use of U.S. weapons and aid in its 1982–83 strikes against Muslim and Druze targets in Lebanon. He was the longest-held of the American hostages captured in an effort to drive U.S. military forces from Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War. Terry Anderson was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, but had not practiced for years. During his captivity, however, he was given a Bible. He said that Bible came to him as a gift from heaven. He read. He pondered his life. He had lots of time to ponder his life – 2,454 days. He looked back and found many things that brought him shame. In his mind, he began composing a litany of confession. As time went by, he gradually learned about other American hostages confined in cells around his own cell. He found out one was a priest – Father Jenco. He asked if he could confess to the priest, and his wish was granted. They were brought together and their blindfolds were removed. Terry Anderson at last began his recitation of all he had done wrong in his life. When he finished, they were both in tears. Father Jenco laid his right hand on Anderson’s head and said, “In the name of a gentle, loving God, you are forgiven.” Anderson’s faith grew deeper and deeper through his long captivity, but his first formal step back was his confession. In the darkness of captivity and abandonment, Terry Anderson turned back and found the grace of God. But wait. It took months of confinement to get Terry Anderson started.
- Be Malleable (Changing Your Attitude Towards Fire)
The third step is to be malleable, that means workable or “moldable,” capable of being stretched or bent into different shapes or capable of being easily changed or influenced. Are you ready to reconsider the “fires” or tough times in your life and to look at them differently? This point will challenge your attitude towards fire or toward the tough times in life. Listen to Malachi 3:2-3:
“For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver.” Mal. 3:2-3
Let’s talk about some precious metal things for a few minutes. Gold is extremely malleable – that means it can be worked easily; changed if you will. Gold is so malleable that a single ounce can be beaten out into a thin film (less than 1/282,000th of an inch thick) that it could cover a hundred square feet. And gold is so ductile (able to be stretched) that one ounce can be drawn into a fine wire one hundred kilometers miles long. How does this happen? The gold must be heated with fire so that it is in a liquid form and the impurities will rise to the top. This gets it pure. Then it is heated to be stretched or molded. The other way is that it is beaten with a hammer or metal mallet and formed and beaten to the form or shape that it needs to be. This is not a gentle thing, this is rough.
Here’s the point: we grow though our tough times and we are shaped by the difficult things we go through. Unfortunately, most of us don’t grow too much in good times. We get comfortable and we get stagnant. When things are tough, we get stretched, we get refined, we get beaten into shape. Being malleable means we are willing to go through the tough tims so that we can grow and change and be changed by God so that we look, act, and think like Jesus.
- Turn to someone and say, “Give me your hand and let me mod it with fire or this hammer.”
- Claudia the hotel situation she had this week.
- Allowing the Impurity To Leave
That leads us to the fourth point which is that we have to allow the impurity to leave. 2 Cor. 7:1:
“Therefore, since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.” 2 Cor. 7:1
Purifying is getting rid of the contaminates. The point here is that we need to get rid of them and then keep them out. Many times we can get rid of something and shortly thereafter put it back in our life. No. We don’t want to contaminate our bodies, our heart, again.
God only wants good for us. He won’t give us something or put us through something that would harm us. We put the contaminates in our life. We also have to be willing to work at keeping the contaminates out so that we don’t become contaminated again. This is tough and it takes a lot of work, determination, and continual giving of ourselves to God. Usually we get some type of reward or benefit from keeping the contaminate there and we don’t want to lose that.
Dr. Phil puts it this way; “You are doing this behavior for some payoff.
Most of the time we are unaware of how the “bad” thing is hurting us but it might feel good at the time or it might feel that we are getting something that helps us when in reality we are better off without it.
Ex. Getting drunk may help us feel less pain for a while but it is hurting us internally and hurting those around us.
(Repeat)
This is so much of a continual process that once we have completed it, we have to start over again. This really is an pngoing process in our life.
A New Sight
Now for the great promise that comes in the second half of this verse”
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” vs. 8
The stuff we don’t need in our life stops us from fully seeing God and his work in our life. The promise we have here is that the more we get rid of the contaminates and junk, the more we see God. We’ll see him places and ways we would have missed before. We’ll see him in the good times but also in the tough times of fire and testing.
Ways we might see God
In History
In Nature
In the events of our and others lives
We also see him
-We begin to comprehend his ways
-We begin to comprehend his purposes
-We begin to comprehend his truths
