The Beatitudes 6

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

There are two steps in making and keeping something pure.

First, you must remove all of the impurities. This is often quite a long process, usually involving heat—lots of heat! At the end of the process you have a pure element free from any contamination.

Then, in order to preserve this purity, you have to refrain from mixing anything with the pure substance. The temptation is often to introduce a less valuable substance to dilute the one you have just purified. This is often done with gold. 24-carat gold is fine (99.9% pure), 18-carat gold is 75% gold, 12-carat gold is 50% gold, and so forth. Introducing copper and silver (nickle or palladium in the case of so-called “white gold”) to pure gold changes its properties as well as its value.

Likewise, there are two steps in establishing and maintaining purity of heart.

First comes the process of removing the impurities of pride, selfishness, fear and the myriad derivatives and variations of these noxious roots. Once people repent of these sins and receives Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, they are immediately made pure in God’s sight as Christ’s purity is credited to their accounts. But, in addition, they begin a life-long process of being transformed into Christ’s likeness. This process also involves heat—the firey trails used by God to refine our character. The result is a heart that ever more closely resembles the pure heart of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We must then take steps to preserve the purity of our hearts. Temptations will come to dilute the solitary devotion of our hearts to God with other far less valuable pursuits. Introducing anything that is in competition with the supremacy of Jesus Christ in our hearts is to sink into a form of idolatry and to cheapen our hearts through what amounts to spiritual prostitution.

But for those purify their hearts and refrain from diluting their pure devotion there is a promise of great reward: to see God. All people will one day stand before God and see Him in His glorious splendour. This will be an ominously terrifying experience for those whose hearts remain stained with sin, but the pure in heart will stand blameless before Him and be given the wonderful privilege of spending all eternity gazing in awe and wonder at the Object of their devotion.

Today, let’s pray that…
· Unsaved friends and family members will realise the impure state of their hearts and they would repent of their sins and allow God to purify their hearts.
· We would resist the temptation to dilute the purity of our own hearts by introducing anything that might compete with Jesus Christ’s number one place.