By: Mike Kelly
Retired Pastor
As we continue in our series on the Sermon On The Mount, let’s look at Matt 5:8 :”Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.” In the Jewish culture of the day, purity was based on ceremonially cleanli-ness not heart cleanliness.
This is one of those places where he begins to lay out an entirely new understanding of the separation between our thoughts and our actions (like he will do a few verses later with adultery and lustful thoughts and anger and murder).
It’s not our external or ceremonial cleanliness that God desires. It is our heart’s purity that He wishes to see us grow in and be blessed for.
Also, in the Jewish culture, to see God was impossible except for the rare one like Moses but the idea conveyed was that if you got to see a VIP, it meant that you were friends with that personage, that you were one of their favorites.
So, the goal Jesus was sharing may not have been easy to grasp for his audience, but they did get the point that if you saw someone truly important, you were able to do that because you were their friend. So, to be friends with God you needed a pure heart.
So, the question for us is, how do we get to be friends with God? The answer seems clear: being pure in heart. However, here’s where our cultural understanding causes some confusion for us. We have come to see the word “purity” as involving sexual issues.
But it is much broader than that. It means anything that destroys or compromises our relationship with God. God wants nothing in our hearts that distances us from Him. Think of a pure white sheet of paper and then see a black stain on one corner.
That paper is no longer pure white. For its purity to be restored, that black stain needs to be removed. To do that, we have to go to someone for help. Spiritually, we have a tendency to run from God when we sin, have a black mark.
Funny, but we act as if we were ostriches who put our heads in the sand so God can’t see us. David tells us there is nowhere to go that God is not there. Yet, that is precisely what some of us do.
We mess up, we fail to trust, we outright sin, we doubt, we return to a compulsion that earlier was our idol. And in spite of our promises to leave these things behind, we mess up. So, we run.
Not to the one who is quick to forgive but to some dark corner hoping he won’t find out what we did. Hmmm. Seems like the story of Adam and Eve. Maybe we haven’t really come very far in all the 1,000s of years?
To see God, we need to be pure in heart. I’m not sure that means to be perfect but instead, I think it means to be able to stumble and fall and still have the kind of relationship with God (friend and favorite) that we immediately run to him for forgiveness and comfort and restoration. Think about the little boy who gets hurt doing something he shouldn’t do.
He may try to avoid daddy, but you can count on him running to his mommy where he knows he will be held, loved, restored. What makes us pure in heart is knowing that we not only cannot hide from God, but we also don’t want to hide from him.
No matter our struggles, fear, shame, doubts, God is there to lovingly restore us. He’s not angry with us. He hurts because we hurt. He wants us to climb into his arms. He wants to proverbially kiss our wounds and hurts and make the pain go away.
The pure in heart know to go directly to the Lord because he is their friend. And as time goes on and they find opportunity, they learn to share that with the less mature. And that teaches others to find peace and restoration quicker, gaining a pure heart.
How quickly our hurts would be resolved if we moved outward God and his mercy and grace instead of away from it. We can run so far that we get lost in the darkness of our own making.
That doesn’t mean that God isn’t right there waiting like the prodigal’s father. It just means we have our heads so deep in the sand we can’t see him. Blessed, cheered on, are the pure in heart who run to God.
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Mike Kelly is the founding pastor of Bryan’s Grace Community Church (retired) and Board Chairman of Bryan’s Sanctuary Homeless Shelter and Williams County’s Compassion (free) Medical Clinic.