This is the Pure Stuff

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

A few years back, our family took a trip to Chicago. One of the activities we had planned was to go to the top of the Willis Tower (that used to be called the Sears Tower). But when we got there, it was rainy and overcast, and we decided it would be a waste of time to go up in the tower. After all, the big reason to go up to the top is for the view. There is no sense in paying the entry fee and going up, only to realize that all you can see is the inside of a cloud.

This is a sticking point for God’s people since way back. In the book of Exodus, God brought the Israelites out of Egypt with great miracles: the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea… God led them with a cloud during the day and a pillar of fire at night. They could see God somewhat. Then God called Moses up to Mount Sinai and gave him the Law, and meanwhile, the people came to Aaron, saying, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.” (Exodus 32:1b) Basically what they are saying is, “I haven’t seen Moses our leader for a long time. I haven’t seen God in even longer. We need something we can see.” And they built a golden calf to worship.

Because they couldn’t “see” God, they needed to have something they could see to worship. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess. So the issue is, how do we see God? Or, how do we worship a God was cannot see?

This is one of the issues that brought forth Jesus’ incarnation – which is the church word for Jesus becoming flesh and living among us. John 1:18 tells us that “No one has ever seen God, but God the Only Begotten, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” So Jesus has seen God, and it is his job to make God known. In the Sermon on the Mount, especially through the Beatitudes, Jesus lays out the characteristics that God requires, the qualities God blesses. And today’s beatitude is: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. (Matthew 5:8)

To understand the concept of purity that Jesus was teaching, we need to understand his culture. I mentioned Moses and his trip up Mount Sinai earlier – Moses met with God and God gave him the Law, including the Ten Commandments. Most of us would probably agree that we’re pretty good on the Ten Commandments, right? We don’t have gods before the One True God. We don’t worship idols. We rarely misuse God’s Name. Well, some of us don’t. We remember the Sabbath day. Or at least we have had good debates about what that really means. We honor our parents. We don’t murder. Yeah, we are really good at that one. No adultery. No stealing. No lying. No coveting. OK, so some of those are harder than others. And we care more about some of them than others. And we’ll get into Jesus’ interpretation of the Law in a later sermon, but suffice it to say, keeping the Ten Commandments is a goal that many try and try to attain. Unfortunately, that is not the goal, but the starting place. James 2:10 tells us that “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.”

Jesus is saying that it’s not enough to keep most of the Law. God isn’t concerned with “degrees of holiness” where you’re “mostly holy.” God deals in absolutes, and anything less than God’s standard of holiness is unacceptable. In fact, Jesus even says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)

When it comes to perfection, we have to admit we have a problem. I have a friend who likes to bring evidence that there are levels of sin, that some are worse than others, and I have to agree, a so-called little white lie isn’t as bad as blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, but the fact is sin is sin, and one little tiny sin is a blemish on perfection and leaves the sinner impure.

To put it another way, if you are making fudge, how much excrement is too much to include in the recipe? If anyone answered anything more than NONE then make sure to show me what you made for today’s potluck so I can avoid what you made! Likewise any sin at all leaves the whole person impure.

But that’s not all. In college, I read a Russian short story about when electric lights were being brought into the countryside. They wired each house for electricity and brought them light bulbs. When they came back through to see how the electric lights were working, they found the houses dark. No, the bulbs hadn’t burned out. No, the electricity hadn’t failed. But what they found was that the new electric lights had illuminated just how dirty their homes were. Instead of dealing with the filth, they simply turned off the lights.

We cannot simply shut off the lights and ignore our sin and pretend it doesn’t exist.

And so we satisfy ourselves by being complacent with our own pet sins because at least I’m not hurting anybody, or at least I’m not like so-and-so. To address the former, of course we’re hurting someone – even if we’re hurting nobody else, we’re cutting off our own relationship with God. And Jesus addressed the latter in Luke 18, where he told a parable about two men who went up to the temple to pray, a Pharisee and a tax collector, and “The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ (Luke 18:11-12)

The Pharisee wasn’t the hero of this parable, that’s for sure. Yet we compare ourselves with others – robbers and evildoers and adulterers and tax collectors and at least I’m not Hitler or Osama bin Laden. Or we try to justify ourselves by our accomplishments and achievements – most world religions are all about earning your way to reward. Christianity isn’t like that, though. It’s all about what God did.

And so David writes in Psalm 24:3-4: Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear by what is false.

Having clean hands is all about having right actions. The saved are the ones who behave in a certain way. And having a pure heart is about the condition of the inner core of a person: our thoughts and motivation. Do we work really hard to try to live out Jesus’ commandments, or are we transformed to the point where our external purity flows from who we have become inside?

The Jews in Jesus’ time knew what purity meant. Their religion was all about purity – they had purity laws about everything: food; food preparation; skin diseases; clothing; you were never allowed to mix the pure with the impure. Here’s what happened: if something pure even came into the presence of something impure, it was all made impure. So they had special rituals they had to follow in order to become pure again, usually culminating with going to the Temple and offering a sacrifice.

A difficulty with this system is this: when you live in filth, a shower doesn’t help all that much. When I was in Russia, our dorm’s showers were scary. Very scary. Then we went to a summer camp and the bathroom situation was even scarier. But one day we walked an hour through the woods to this bathhouse with wonderfully clean showers, a pool, a sauna… it was wonderful. I hadn’t felt so clean the whole time I was in Russia. But when we left the Banyo, we had to walk back through the woods for an hour back to the camp, and it was hot and sticky and buggy in the woods, and by the time we got to the camp, we were just as sweaty and gross as we had been before we cleaned up.

The shower didn’t help all that much. In the moment, we were clean, but it didn’t last. And that’s exactly the situation that the Jews experienced with the who sacrificial system.

Only God can purify our hearts. This is why King David prays the prayer that we sang earlier: Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. (Psalm 51:10) We can’t purify our own hearts. The Bible says that our hearts are full of evil, and, honestly, who can argue. Even when we know what’s right, we find ourselves doing and thinking what we know is wrong. In Matthew 15:19, Jesus is talking about clean and unclean, and he says it’s not the things you eat that make you unclean. But your words and actions come from the heart, and listen to the unclean things that come from the heart:

For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. We must admit that our hearts are sinful and unless our hearts are changed, we cannot see God. Jesus calls for a pure heart, which means we are utterly cleansed from all of our filth and completely free from sin. It also means we have pure attitudes, complete integrity, and singleness of heart as opposed to duplicity and doublemindedness.

One of my favorite Bible passages comes from Ezekiel 36. Ezekiel is preaching to a people in exile, a people in the midst of their punishment for worshiping idols and shedding blood. Their conduct and their hearts were far from God. But God delivers this word of hope. Listen to verses 24-29a.

“For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. You will live in the land I gave your forefathers; you will be my people, and I will be your God. I will save you from all your uncleanness.”

That new heart? This is the pure heart that Jesus is talking about. It is a heart that is saved from all uncleanness. It isn’t just the old heart that is full of sin, but indeed a completely new heart.

In Exodus 33:20, when Moses was back up on Mount Sinai after the whole golden calf fiasco, Moses asked to see God’s glory. God responded that “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.

However, now Jesus is making the bold claim that the pure in heart will indeed see God. This is the greatest reward we can even hope for. Jesus is giving a taste of what is to come. In Revelation 21, John shares the vision of a new heaven and a new earth, and the new Jerusalem coming out of heaven as a bride prepared for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Revelation 21:3-4)

In that day, we will see God face-to-face and live. But it’s not just something we have to wait for. We can actually see God here and now! We can daily live in God’s presence. Many of us have experienced that mountain-top experience where we know that we know that we’re feeling God’s presence, maybe at a camp or a worship service or a retreat, but then we come back down to the valley of daily life and it’s harder to experience him daily. But with a pure heart, we can daily live in the presence of God. We begin to understand him. He cleanses the eyes of our souls so that we can see how he is working around us. We can see him in the people around us. His Word comes alive to us and speaks directly to our souls. And people around us know that we’ve been with God. There is this wonderful passage toward the end of Exodus, where Moses had come down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, and the scripture says that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord. (Exodus 34:29b)

When you are regularly meeting with the Lord, your face will glow. People will know there’s something different about you. The weekend when I moved to Wellston, I was out early for a run – it was really hot out – and I ended up talking to this guy I met. After we’d talked for a while, he asked what I did and I told him I was a pastor. He said he knew it. When I asked him how he knew, he laughed and told me, “You don’t have any tattoos or piercings and you’ve got all your teeth.”

That’s not what I’m talking about. But there’s a couple I see sometimes on the bike path and one day I was talking to them at McDonalds and they had already figured out before we even talked about churchy things that I was a Christian. She said, “There is just something different about you.” She wasn’t talking about my lack of tattoos or piercings! But when your right behaviors are springing from a pure heart, people can tell. They can see something different about you.

So, how do we get this pure heart? How does it happen? Understand that we can’t claim it on our own. We are bathing in dirty water, because we are impure people trying to make ourselves pure. We can’t just clean it up on our own – because it will soon be dirty again. But God isn’t limited like that. In Acts 15, the Apostle Peter is talking about Gentiles, those who weren’t a part of God’s people, and how God accepted them in. He says that God didn’t make any distinction between the Jews and the Gentiles, for he purified their hearts by faith. (Acts 15:9)

This is the same thing he does for us. Sin must always be paid for, but Jesus already paid the price for us on the cross, so we just have to receive what has already been done. Jesus says that his Word purifies his followers (John 15:3-4a: You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you.) So remain in him, in God’s Word, and meet with him in regular prayer. And your heart will be pure, and blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.