The Be-Attitudes #7 – Pure in heart
Matthew 5:8; John 14:1-7
By James Galbraith
First Baptist Church, Port Alberni
March 4, 2007
Text
8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
14 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. 2 In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4 You know the way to the place where I am going.”
5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”
Introduction - Is anyone pure?
Charles Swindoll in "Growing Deep in the Christian Life," writes about a man who bought fried chicken dinners for himself and his date late one afternoon. The attendant at the fast food outlet, however, inadvertently gave him the proceeds from the day’s business - a bag of money (much of it cash) instead of fried chicken.
"After driving to their picnic site," Swindoll writes, "the two of them sat down to enjoy some chicken. They discovered a whole lot more than chicken - over $800! Now many people would have kept the money, and bought themselves a lunch much nicer than KFC!
But this man did something unusual. He quickly put the money back into the car and drove all the way back. Mr. Clean got out, walked in, and became an instant hero.
"By then, the manager was frantic. The guy with the bag of money looked the manager in the eye and said, ’I want you to know I came by to get a couple of chicken dinners and wound up with all this money here.’
"Well, the manager was thrilled to death. He said, ’Let me call the newspaper. I’m gonna have your picture put in the local newspaper. You’re one of the most honest men I’ve ever heard of.’
"To which the man quickly responded, ’Oh, no. No, no - don’t do that!’ Then he leaned closer and whispered,
’You see, the woman I’m with is not my wife.”
Harder to find than lost cash is a perfect heart.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Being pure in heart does not mean being perfect.
No one can attain perfection, and if they could,
they wouldn’t “see God”, they would “be God”!
In fact, there are two meanings for this phrase that deserve our attention.
Inward/Outward
The first, and more common meaning, is keeping our hearts in line with our actions, and vice versa. Being pure in heart, in this sense, means that what we do truly reflects who we are.
The second meaning of being “pure in heart” is that we are focused.
I’ll explain that later, but let’s look first at this idea that
what we do reflects who we really are.
Ulterior motives
I’m going to share with you a couple of examples that have a common theme running through them. Hopefully, they will cast light on what being “pure in heart” means.
Have you ever been helped by someone, only to find out that they helped you because they wanted to get something from you?
Sometimes we expect this, and it is perfectly acceptable. We “help” our employers so that we will be paid by them; if they didn’t pay us we would not help them for long!
But what I’m referring to is called “acting with ulterior motives”
– someone tells you that they are helping you for one reason, but they have another reason that they are keeping hidden from you.
It’s the kind of help that, offered freely at the time,
we later find out actually came with a price.
And more often than not, that price is far higher than the help given.
Not keeping promises
Or have you ever had someone say they would do one thing, and then do another? This is not always bad either.
Jesus told a story about a man who had two sons:
He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’
29 ”‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went.
30 “Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go.
31 “Which of the two did what his father wanted?”
“The first,” they answered.
Neither son followed through on his promise, but the first son still did the right thing. He refused to help, but changed his mind and went to the vineyard. He had the wrong answer, but eventually did the right action.
This is a good thing. No one can rightfully call him a liar for not going through with his initial statement.
But the second son, the one with the right answer but the wrong actions, lies to make himself look good, and then doesn’t do what he promised.
He is certainly a liar and worse, for the ramifications of this kind of duplicity go far beyond the son’s laziness. What if another worker was hurt, and because the son wasn’t there, no one was there to help him?
Taken into our world, making a promise and not going through with it is just as wrong, and just as potentially damaging.
Hypocrisy
Did you catch the common theme running through both examples?
The common theme running through both is hypocrisy,
and hypocrisy is the opposite of maintaining a pure heart.
When our actions speak against our hearts, or when what we say does not match up with what we do, we are guilty of hypocrisy.
And hypocrisy was a sin that Jesus saved his harshest criticism for.
In Matthew 23 Jesus goes on the offensive with the rulers and religious leaders of his day. The passage contains what have been called “seven woes’, or seven different indictments of the ruler’s behaviour.
The word “hypocrites” comes up six times, each time reflecting a type of hypocrisy. Here’s an example of two of the woes:
25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
In each case,
dishes clean on the outside but filthy in the middle,
and tombs painted white to hide the inner corruption,
Jesus is bringing the leaders to task for not keeping their hearts pure.
They look good on the outside, but inside they are full of sin.
Jesus takes them to task for this, because their hypocrisy wasn’t just damaging to them; it affected the whole nation.
You see, these leaders were in charge of teaching God to the people.
We are used to priests and ministers doing the spiritual teaching, but in the Judaism of that day the priests served at the temple, and maintained the rituals and sacrifices.
It was the teachers of the law, the Pharisees, that were supposed to teach the people about God. And they were concentrating on keeping themselves looking good, instead of pointing the people to God.
To make matters worse, their hypocrisy was spreading to the general population: Jesus actually condemns them for this in another of the woes,
15 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.
We’re not used to hearing Jesus speak such strong words; and he doesn’t stop with “a son of hell”; other terms in the chapter include “blind guides”, “snakes” and “brood of vipers”.
I share all of this to make one point – Jesus could not stand hypocrisy, in any of its forms.
These “woes” were directed against the religious leaders of the day, but the underlying message applies to us all. Those who want to see God, that is both dwelling with him in Heaven and seeing Him at work in our lives here on earth, must strive to avoid hypocrisy at all costs.
Is hypocrisy forgivable? Of course it is – all our sin can be forgiven by Christ, when we confess it to him. But that does not take from the away from our need to keeping our hearts pure before him.
Focused
I shared earlier that there are two different meanings for being “pure in heart”. The first, avoiding hypocrisy, is the most common view. But being pure in heart can also means being focused.
Now what do I mean by that? Being focused on the right thing can make the difference between life and death.
Warren Bennis in "Why Leaders Can’t Lead", writes:
"The flying Wallendas are perhaps the world’s greatest family of aerialists and tightrope walkers.... I was struck with (Karl Wallenda’s) capacity for concentration on the intention, the task, the decision. I was even more intrigued when, several months later, Wallenda fell to his death while walking a tightrope without a safety net between two high-rise buildings in San Juan, Puerto Rico.... Later, Wallenda’s wife said that before her husband had fallen, for the first time since she had known him, he had been concentrating on falling, instead of on walking the tightrope. He had personally supervised the attachment of the guide wires, which he had never done before."
Often the difference between success and failure, life and death, is the direction we’re looking.
Now, to bring this idea of focus home, let me talk for a bit about photography. I like to take pictures. When I want a good picture, I’ll pick my subject, aim the camera at it, and then adjust the focus of the lens make sure the subject is clear.
If you try to use two different objects for focusing, neither will turn out well. The best pictures focus on one subject and let the others blend in. The background distortion actually adds to the quality of the picture; a blurred background to an action shot emphasizes the speed of the subject, and a fuzzy horizon brings out the features of a close up.
Jesus is calling us to bring that focus to our faiths, our hearts.
He wants us to focus our spiritual attention on God alone,
and we do that through Jesus Christ.
We can learn about God through his creation,
but it is only a blurry backdrop to God himself.
We can learn bit and pieces about God from other religions,
but focusing on them puts Christ “out of focus”, and that is why he told us,
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”
When we focus our attention on Jesus, we are seeing God in our midst. One of his names, “Emmanuel”, means “God with us”.
He isn’t just God’s representative; he is God in the flesh,
and he came to Earth to point us back to our creator.
We can’t see him in the flesh now,
but if we ever want to, we have to focus our hearts on him.
We cannot merely give him a nod or wink,
we have to bring our sights to bear on him,
and through the lens of the word of God we can focus our hearts on Him.
There is no other person on the face of the earth that can help us really see God. Jesus is the way, the truth, the life.
In a society that treats spirituality as a mystic vending machine,
come and buy what you want, mix and match to suit your needs,
we are called to give our hearts solely to Jesus Christ.
In a society that demands acceptance of every conceivable spiritual path to every imaginable image of God,
we are called to stand on the reality that there is one way to God, and that way is Jesus Christ.
We are to show that world that we trust in Jesus and Jesus alone to be our guide to God.
We still need our instincts, our folklore, our upbringing, our families, our schools, our governments and all the other institutions that help us in life.
But when it comes to pointing the way to God, all these and everything else must bow before the one way to God - his son Jesus Christ.
When we take this stand - we will see God. We will see him at work in our lives now, and we will see him in Heaven for all eternity.
To wrap up today,
Being pure in heart does not mean “being perfect”.
No one will leave this earth saying ‘I was perfect”.
But we can leave this earth saying, “I was God’s”.
I have said that being pure in heart has two different meanings, and both of them are important to us. We must strive to make our actions match our hearts, and our hearts match our actions.
In Christ’s strength, this interaction between our heart and our actions brings us closer to seeing God. As we strive to keep hypocrisy away, we will see God at work in our lives.
We also stay pure in heart by keeping Christ in the centre of the picture. Other sources can give us snippets of truth, tastes of glory.
But Jesus Christ is the only authentic revelation of God himself.
If we want to see God, we need to look at Christ and Christ alone.
When we lose sight of Christ, we lose sight of God himself, for Christ was and is God revealed to us.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
