Matthew 5:8 (Pure In Heart)
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).
One would be hard-pressed to find a passage of Scripture that is more difficult to apply than Matthew 5:8. Our fallen self, wretched of sin on a consistent basis simply wages war in opposition to it. Yet Jesus Christ did not hesitate in declaring that the ultimate prize of seeing God face to face will be reserved for those whose hearts are unconditionally pure.
What an amazing statement, although finding such a man may be rare today even within the church. For “who can say, ‘I have made my heart pure; I am clean from my sin?’” (Proverbs 20:9). Nonetheless, it is evident from Christ’s mouth that such a level of spiritual character does exist and therefore we should aim to seek it passionately for our sanctification.
This subject matter is so potent though that a man dare attempt to wrap his head around this concept because it strikes a cord between a man’s true self and his perceived and hopeful self image. For instance, no man seeks to be an adulterer or abusive husband/father, yet he will allow seeds of lust and anger to take residence in his heart and remain stifled but not eliminated.
What makes him think that if he allows lustful or angry thoughts in his mind that they will not overtake his heart and manifest themselves in destructive levels of behavior? Don’t be so foolish! A man cannot separate his thoughts and behavior from a discussion of purity. They are all interconnected and sin drives a stake in the heart of any man desiring to live a life of purity and divides it.
Remember that Jesus spoke these words to a mixed crowd, including Pharisees, addressing the ultimate impact of Pharisaical behavior (i.e. religious hypocrisy) in His closing remarks on the Beatitudes when He calls out how they suppressed the truth of God’s Word and “persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:12).
“If your language should be chaste, yet, if your heart is reveling in foul imaginations, you stand before God not according to your words, but according to your desires; according to the set of the current of your affections, your real inward likes and dislikes, you shall be judged by him.”
Nothing brought out the righteous anger of God more than the Pharisees’ behavior because of the impurity of their hearts, and nothing is of greater importance to God than our hearts, for they are the core of our being, our inner man and willful self. Therefore we must heed Christ’s warning: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean” (Matthew 23:25-26).
As men of character we cannot allow our inward thoughts, attitudes, affections and desires to be inconsistent with God’s Word, nor can we place disproportionate emphasis upon our heads and not our hearts. The church is full today of over-inflated theological giants who can recite verses by memory and expound in depth upon the truth of Scripture yet never apply a single word within their hearts.
We cannot fall into that trap and as D. Martyn Lloyd Jones states, “reduce the way of life and righteousness to a mere matter of conduct, ethics and behavior.” Our focus is not external but emphatically and purposefully internal to the core.
I have heard it said that there is nothing that comes out of the mouth of a drunk that wasn’t there to begin with. Jesus spoke a similar sentiment: “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander” (Matthew 15:18-19). This magnifies what Lloyd Jones once wrote.
“The heart is always the core of all our troubles. But the terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man’s troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but to change his environment. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell. It was in a perfect environment that he first went wrong, so to put man in a perfect environment cannot solve his problems.”
But if you can say, “I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members” (Matthew 7:22-23), then you are aware that purity of heart is the battleground between God and Satan in your life, and you have the choice to either live in hypocrisy and never see the face of God or cry out in humble depravity, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Matthew 7:24-25).
My advice: choose purity of heart “and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7), and inevitably you WILL see God for your heart WILL be made clean and pure by the blood of Christ.
