Today's Guest Devotional is by Mike Loveridge, assistant Pastor of Manor Park Church
Sermon on the Mount
The Pure in Heart
Today we carry on working our way through the beatitudes and have reached the sixth beatitude which is:
Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.
This beatitude searches deep within us as it deals with the heart of man. The emphasis on the state of a person’s heart is one of the things that makes Christianity unique and separates it from other religions. The kingdom of God and the life of a Christian begins on the inside, with the heart. Jesus himself pointed to this when He said that is it not what enters a man’s body that makes him unclean but what comes from the heart. At the root of all our actions, thoughts, words and deeds is the desires of the heart. So, to follow Christ and live a pure, holy, righteous life we need to deal with our heart.
What is purity of heart?
This surely has to be our first question when looking at this beatitude. Yet before we can address this, we need to understand what is meant by the heart of man. In our current culture, the heart is used to describe simply the emotional aspect of a person. The Bible’s meaning for the heart of man is much fuller and describes every aspect of the inner person. It means the whole self and as such refers to the intellect, emotions and will of a person. The heart therefore is the source of our beliefs, imagination, understanding, behaviour, words, inclinations. Proverbs 23:7 sums this up well when it says, “For as he thinks within himself; so he is”. An evil heart produces evil (Matthew 15:19). Without the gospel we all have an evil heart that is in rebellion against God. Before faith in Jesus, we have a heart that is enslaved to sin. Only the gospel can release us from that slavery. At the point of conversion God removes our unpure heart of stone and puts a new heart in us - one that desires to be pure. This is something we can never do ourselves. We can try and deal with the consequences of an unpure heart but really all we are doing is attempting to treat the symptoms not the cause. To treat the cause, we have to deal with the heart.
Now we know what heart means, what does pure mean? The meaning of pure is closely aligned to being set apart. It means a heart that has been changed by the power of the gospel and is now set apart for seeking godliness not worldliness. It means that our heart is not a mix of world and God but fully for God. Let’s be careful here. We are still human and will mess us. This means that pure cannot mean sinless since we know that even once we are saved, we continue to sin. No matter how much we try to be totally pure we cannot do it and continue to fall short of God’s perfect standard. 1 John 1:8 makes this clear, when John writes, “If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us”. There is a war going on between spirit and flesh and as Christians we need to strive for a pure heart knowing we will never achieve it, so repenting of our sin continuously along the way. Salvation breaks the power of sin and darkness, but it does not bring perfection in this life.
So, to sum it up, being pure of heart occurs through the power of the Spirit putting a new heart in us at the point of conversion. It does not mean perfection. We will all at times continue to struggle in the battle against our sinful nature. But it is a consistent and life-long commitment to repent of and fight this sin, a whole-hearted seeking after righteousness. It will mean that we no longer live a double life of looking good on the outside whilst being bad on the inside. Instead, as our inside is cleaned up, our outward actions will become good. This removes hypocrisy from the life of a true follower of Christ.
So, a question for us all to consider is are we living a divided or hypocritical life? Do we change our behaviour to fit the expectations of people around us, acting one way with Christians and another with non-Christians? The person who is truly pure in heart can have a transparency to their life that a hypocrite cannot.
Keeping a pure heart
We know that the Beatitudes build on each other, so we need the previous five to aid us in keeping a pure heart. The first four have told us what a right relationship with God looks like; poor in spirit, mournful of sin, meek and desiring righteousness. Of these I think the key one is be meek or humble. We need to realise that as Christians we do not fully know our own hearts since sin so easily clouds our judgement. In humility, we need to come to God and ask him for the discernment as to our motives and heart attitudes. Humility shows us that we cannot trust in ourselves but need to look to Christ.
Secondly, we maintain and increase our purity of heart through examining our hearts and actions in the light of God’s word. This means we need to know and spend time in God’s word regularly. So, are you exposing and questioning your thoughts, words, and deeds to the perfect penetrating light of the Bible?
Thirdly, we should be careful and discerning about what we allow into our hearts. We choose carefully what we watch, what we read, whose company we spend time in. If we fill our lives with trash, then we cannot expect to keep a pure heart. Keeping a pure heart means keeping a tight watch on every moment of our lives and how we spend it. A desire for a pure heart is a constant task as sin so easily slips in. So, do you commit each day to God, seeking to fill your time with things that is good, right, true, and honourable (Phil 4:8)?
The pure of heart will see God
And don’t forget the promise given to us all in this Beatitude. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. What an amazing blessing! Through desiring a pure heart, you are welcoming God into your heart to sanctify you day by day. As you spend time in God’s word examining you heart you will grow to know and love Him better. The end result of this is growth in our holiness. As we grow in our holiness we see more of God in this life as we also long for the day we will see Him face to face.
Song for today
Purify my heart
Let me be as gold and precious silver
Purify my heart
Let me be as gold, pure gold
Refiner's fire,
My heart's one desire
Is to be holy
Set apart for You, Lord
I choose to be holy
Set apart for You, my Master
Ready to do Your will
Purify my heart
Cleanse me from within
And make me holy
Purify my heart
Cleanse me from my sin, deep within
You can listen here
Prayer for today
Heavenly Father,
We once again thank you for Jesus. Thank you that because of Jesus death and resurrection we are forgiven for all our sin through faith in Him. Thank you for your abundant grace and mercy that you display to us day by day.
As we come before you today, we ask that you purify our hearts. We ask that you show us where in our hearts we are harbouring sin and that you will renew our desire to put all sin to death and live a righteous life striving to grow in our likeness of your son.
We ask all this so that we may glorify you name here on earth.
In the name of Jesus we pray
Amen.
Photo by Ashim D’Silva on unsplash
No comments:
Post a Comment