Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Matthew 5:8

Last time we saw that Christ-like wisdom is empowered by the Holy Spirit and is constantly being drawn toward more complete holiness both in our hearts and in how we live. To that we add today’s verse which was spoken by Jesus: “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.”

And there you have the goal of the Christian life: seeing God… Experiencing our Christian faith in such a way that we are seeing God. It’s all present tense here. Psalm 73:25 says, “Whom have I in heaven but you (that’s future) and on earth there is no one I desire besides you (that’s here and now).”

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that today’s verse is the glue that holds all the rest of Scripture together. It’s the context for the teaching, the history, the stories. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” How does that work in our everyday life…with our family, at work, in ministry…what does that look like?

To understand that we have to begin with the ‘heart’. In the Bible the ‘heart’ is used to describe the command center of our life. Who you and I are in our totality. It includes our emotions, our rationality, our reason, thoughts, decision-maker (where we make decisions), the place from which our words speak forth… Put it all together and we have a very comprehensive description of who we are. “As a mirror reflects the face, so the heart reflects the person” (Prov 27:19).

Next we need to understand ‘pure’. Pure means ‘undivided’. “Give me an undivided heart, O Lord, that I may wholeheartedly revere your name” (Ps 86:11). Sure, a pure heart is cleansed, but it’s clean because it’s undivided. It’s undivided between God and everything else. Jesus was still talking about this a chapter later when He said, “You can’t serve both God and Mammon” (6:24). You and I can’t server God and stuff—God and anything else. That’s not being pure in heart. That’s a divided heart.

If Jesus had just said, “Blessed are the pure,” the Pharisees would have loved Him. Because they had the pure behavior down pat. In their minds they were all about being right, pure, holy… In fact, if you’d asked them, they would have proudly told you that they were so zealous to follow everything in the rules that they made hundreds of more rules to make sure they didn’t even come close to breaking the original rules…And their whole lives revolved around checking off the lists of rules.

And the result was that they looked really good on the outside. But Jesus said that they were dead on the inside (Matt 23:27,28). And He didn’t say this to the sinners on the street. He didn’t say it to people we would hold up as the immoral, criminal people in our society. He said it to the spiritual leaders—the Bible-guys. Because they had a surface-only faith, when their own Old Testament warned them, “the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Sam 16:7).

When James says that ‘the wisdom that comes from God is most of all, pure” (3:17) it’s pure hearts that he’s talking about.