Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Matthew 5:8
According to God’s Word, we all need a pure heart to “see” or comprehend God properly. If our heart is polluted with the sins of unbelief, covetousness and bitterness, our understanding of God and our relationship with Him will not be clear and proper. How does one get a pure heart? Well, apart from saving faith in Jesus Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, it cannot really be done. Jeremiah 17:9 states that “The human heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”. Of course we are referring to the inner nature of man, not the physical organ called the heart. Mankind by nature is bent with original sin away from God, and determined to establish self-will as the rule of life. The only remedy for this is a radical change of nature that is provided by putting faith in Christ and having God’s Spirit invade the soul to change the very nature of a person. After this great transformation has begun, the person must learn to “die to self” and to “live for God” by putting faith into action in daily surrender to the rule of God; this is why Jesus told us that to be His disciple, we must “deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow Him” in Luke 9:23. As we learn to trust and obey God, to “walk in the Light” as the apostle John wrote, and abide in Christ as recorded in John 15, we shall see our heart, our inner nature, begin to be purified, and our understanding and comprehension of God and His Word become clearer and more attainable to us. However, on the other side of this, if we choose to disobey God and not seek Him with all our heart, life with God will become more difficult and confusing for us. We will find ourselves lacking the peace and joy of God in our soul, and His Word will be very cloudy and hard to comprehend in application to our circumstances. We prove our love for God by our obedience to Him and our seeking a closer relationship with Him; if we neglect these pursuits, we shall suffer spiritually, and so will everyone we have contact with and influence on. Much more is at stake than we can realize in how pure we keep our heart; it literally affects all we do and do not do, and thus affects everyone in our life. Proverbs 4:23 tells us: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life”. If we desire to keep the two greatest commandments of loving God and people, we will be zealous for a pure heart that only God can provide by His grace and Spirit as we live for Him. May we all make this a daily priority for ourselves!
Pastor Gary Houdek