The Pure in Heart
1Seeing the multitudes, he went up onto the mountain. When he had sat down, his disciples came to him. 2He opened his mouth and taught them, saying, 3“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. 4Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 5Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. 6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. 7Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. 8Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. 9Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God. 10Blessed are those who have been persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. 11“Blessed are you when people reproach you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, for my sake. 12Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
In most horror films there is a crumbling house hung thick with cobwebs, and eerie music playing. Just seeing a filthy house, untidy and piled with dust, throws people’s minds into confusion and grips them with a fear that they are trapped. When the heart is dark and confused like this, you cannot laugh even if you want to, and frightening music is even painful. People are affected by what is outside them like this, so they must work at giving themselves good surroundings and good people to meet, and at keeping their hearts at peace. The human spirit is like the earth when it was formless and empty and darkness was on the surface of the deep, so even believers who have faith do not find it easy to come to God of their own accord. Even after receiving Jesus Christ, we cannot always be glad and joyful, so we must always keep our hearts pure and win the fight with ourselves. We have no choice but to live in a dark and confused world, so we believers must fight a spiritual war every day to keep our faith.
We must overcome ourselves in order to look on the bright glory of God. When the window is dirty, you cannot see the view clearly however beautiful it is. In the same way, only when our hearts are always clean and pure can we grasp God’s glory and love more surely and stay full of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said that he is the light, and he told us to live honest and faithful lives, as people who live in broad daylight. But when we see how hard Satan works to lead people into darkness, we can tell that this world is a spiritual battlefield. If you have made the decision of faith, the very first thing you must do is brush away the world’s cares, worries and greed that hang like cobwebs. Just as dirt shows up more clearly in a clean house, you can see sin more clearly only when your heart is clean and pure. Once you hand the cares of your heart over to God, you will finally see how great the grace God has given you is, and realize that the life you have lived so far came not from your own ability but from God’s protection. So when a person’s heart is hung thick with the cobwebs of greed and cravings, even the most beautiful music sounds like noise, and even advice given for their own good is suspected of having some hidden motive.
Being pure in heart does not mean being nice; it means that your faith has matured. A believer whose faith has grown has a full love that embraces many people and the wisdom to understand the truth, so they can carry out their mission well. If you keep training yourself to purify your heart through good conduct, you gain the room to look at the world’s problems objectively. When you train yourself like this, you can look fully at Jesus Christ, who rose above the world, feelings and people and embraced even sinners. Jesus knew that the end of every life is the seat of judgment, so he worked to save the disciples who did not understand his word, and even Judas Iscariot, who tried to have him killed. Such forgiveness is possible because he is pure, without a single flaw or sin. People who are not pure in heart think they have deceived others completely and satisfied their own greed, but such behavior is deceiving themselves, and it is the same as trying to deceive God. The sad thing is that they will think no one else knows how hard and narrow-minded they are, but people already know, just as they can see a house falling down, so they must work to turn back. With a conscience seared as with a hot iron, you may feel no shame even living a false life, but God sees what that person says and does, so he exposes their sin and puts them to shame. The one thing we believers must never forget for a moment while we live is that our faith now decides our life after death. People who know for certain the world after death, which we reach by faith, are not shaken at the center, so they can deal well with the world’s problems spiritually.
People who stand on the rock know that God is watching them now, so when they meet a problem they do not get confused, flare up, or say or do things that damage relationships. The problems we meet in life are there so that God can see our faith, so we must look at those problems with honest faith and come to Christ, who is able to solve them.
James 1:19-21
19So, then, my beloved brothers, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger; 20for the anger of man doesn’t produce the righteousness of God. 21Therefore, putting away all filthiness and overflowing of wickedness, receive with humility the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.
A person’s character is decided by what they say and do. In any situation, you can tell what kind of person someone is through the words that come out of their mouth and what they do, so you must train yourself to think carefully but judge quickly; only then will you not make mistakes. Once words have come out of your mouth, they are your own words but you can no longer control them, so the life of the one who spoke them can be changed by the person who heard them. The trust people give you is not built in a day or two. You earn trust only when the life people see stays the same over many years, so I hope you will not forget that a single mistake can bring down everything you have built up until now. So the way to be trusted is to be sparing with words, and when something must be said, to choose the right moment and show a good heart in action. Everyone has their own knowledge, experience and way of thinking. So when we meet someone who thinks the same as we do, we like them, and when we meet someone who thinks differently, we dislike them. You must shape yourself by the word into a vessel that can take in many people, and you must discipline yourself to have a pure heart. People who often make mistakes with their words do so because their words run ahead of their thoughts. If we speak and act after thinking a little more deeply about the other person’s intentions and situation, and with consideration for them, we will not make the mistake of regretting our words and making things much worse.
No one can say and do everything they want in life, because life never goes the way we think it will. To become a mature person, we must set the word of God at the center and live by testing our thoughts and judgments against the word. When our thinking runs up against the word and turns out to differ from the will of God, we must know how to turn back quickly and how to let go of ourselves. As we train ourselves to think deeply and let go quickly like this, our mistakes grow fewer, and as they grow fewer, we earn people’s trust. A person who lives well and wisely as a Christian and fights the spiritual fight can be lonely, because they must win the fight with themselves. Even so, others must not stumble because of us, so we must keep disciplining ourselves and bringing ourselves under control. I know how hard it is to keep the heart pure, but we are children of God who must show God through our lives, so we must live holy lives.
James said that when others speak to us or counsel us, we must be swift to hear and slow to anger, for only then can we bring about the righteousness of God; in the same way, depending on how we believers conduct ourselves, we can either extend the kingdom of God or become a stumbling block to it. If we believers think deeply and make gentle and sensible judgments, we can solve problems easily in any situation without creating them. When the water grows cloudy, the living things in the bowl die, so if you pour in plenty of water and let the cloudy water overflow, before long the water becomes clean. In the same way, when the word we have understood and the fullness of the Holy Spirit overflow in the spirit, the human thoughts, ways and habits that have pooled there can be changed. Such a person is a believer with a pure heart, so we believers must always fill ourselves with grace, love and gentleness through a full faith. When we are told to receive with humility the implanted word, it means that the human heart is like a field of thorns: only when those thorns are burned off does the soil of the heart become soft, so that the implanted word can take root. Only when we throw away all human thoughts and righteousness like this can the seed of the good word be sown there and a harvest be reaped.
Just as God drove Adam, who had eaten the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, out of the garden of Eden and made him till the ground from which he was taken, human beings were made from dust and filled themselves with sin. When we came into this world, we had sinful spirits and bodies, and we were impure, with Satan as our father. Yet God washed us clean with the precious blood of Christ, dressed us in white robes, and made us new vessels able to hold his grace. To be pure in heart means to be one whose human heart has been washed, one who is clean, one who is pure. To be blessed, you must purify your heart and live a pure life that looks only to Christ.
Proverbs 17:3
3The refining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold, but Yahweh tests the hearts.
Just as pure gold can be had only by heating it to 1,500 degrees Celsius, we can never have a pure faith unless God weighs our hearts and puts them through the fire. He has entrusted us with money, health and power as tools for gaining a pure faith. He throws the world’s problems at us and shakes our faith through that testing, to see whether we have treated these things as our strength and behaved proudly, or taken them as our own and behaved hard-heartedly. To us the process is a hardship so painful we feel we could die, but God wants us to overcome sin like the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and win. He tests us because only by winning against Satan in a harsh world can we go to heaven. Only those who know this heart of the Father can become the pure, who do not reach greedily for the world and do not complain. Of course, from a human point of view, we might say it is unfair when we see people doing well in the world, but whatever life a believer lives, they can enter heaven only by keeping their faith. Only with a pure heart can you fill the vessel of faith and show that you are a believer who lives wisely. When marathon runners race, running fast matters, but winning while keeping the rules matters more. However fast they run, if they do not run the race by the set rules, they must give back the prize they received.
You are believers loved by God. If you do your best and are faithful by the rules God has set, you can surely receive the reward. That reward is eternal life, unlike the prizes the world gives.
Exodus 19:24
24Yahweh said to him, “Go down! You shall bring Aaron up with you, but don’t let the priests and the people break through to come up to Yahweh, lest he break out against them.”
The people of Israel who had come out of Egypt arrived at Mount Sinai. On the third day after they arrived, Yahweh came down in fire and thick smoke, called Moses himself, and commanded him to come up the mountain. God called Moses by name himself and told him to come up close, and that shows how hard Moses had worked to live a pure life. For Moses, his mission came before his own life, so God entrusted him with a special mission. For a human being to part the Red Sea is utterly impossible, but Moses believed in God’s almighty power, so he could lift his staff and part the sea. Moses was human too, so he must have been afraid of what would happen if the Red Sea did not part. But he let go of his own thinking and obeyed with a faith that said, if I die, I die, and so the Red Sea parted. And Israel could walk across safely, on dry ground. God is absolute, so people cannot meet him directly. That is why God commanded Moses that when he came up the mountain, he must not let the people follow him up. If a people who were not holy came up because they wanted to see the holy God, they could die. God is not someone people can see just because they want to see him.
Do you want to see God? Then I hope you will purify your heart, because he said that the pure in heart are blessed, for they shall see God. If you live with wisdom, being swift to hear, slow to speak and not angry, and serving from a low place, God will ask to meet you first, as he did Moses, and embrace you with the grace of heaven.
When the people of Israel arrived at Mount Sinai, God gave them the law and showed them how people ought to live a normal life. He also gave them, along with the law, the tabernacle where sins are forgiven, and this shows how deep and wide the love of God is. The law makes us aware of sin but has no power to forgive it, so in the end we could only die because of sin. That is why God did not give only the law but gave with it the tabernacle, where sins could be forgiven, and forgave through the sacrifice of blood. God accomplishes the whole work of salvation like this, so all we have to do is long for God’s grace and throw away our own righteousness. To make us pure, God prepared the sacrifice of blood and cleaned out our spirits, tangled with dirty sin like cobwebs.
Luke 17:21
21neither will they say, ‘Look, here!’ or, ‘Look, there!’ for behold, God’s Kingdom is within you.”
When the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God would come, he said that the kingdom of God does not come with observation. These days some people say, as though they knew where the kingdom of God is, that it is here or there, and some even speak as if they themselves were Jesus, but all of it is a lie, because the kingdom of God is in the spirits of believers. We believers want to see God with our eyes, so when someone says they have been to heaven we envy them, and when someone says they have heard God’s voice we envy them. But as Jesus said, the kingdom of God is in the hearts of all believers, so what matters most is to know how precious a believer you are. If your heart is pure, you will have met God, who has already come into your heart, and you will be full of the help of the Holy Spirit, who is always with you. When the Holy Spirit changes a person on the inside, that person naturally shows the character of Jesus. We are broken earthen vessels, soiled earthen vessels, earthen vessels thrown away as useless. But the Lord gathered up the fragile earthen vessels the world does not care for and made every one of them new, as holy vessels.
Gold buried in the soil is not worth much, but once its impurities are filtered out and it is made into a necklace, it is worth a great deal. To be reborn as pure gold of such worth, the hardship of going into the furnace is essential. To finish a gold necklace, a strong flame must touch the cut ends so that they melt and join into one. Only when gold and silver, which were so hard, turn liquid in the flame and fuse into one do they become a necklace that will not break. Like gold and silver, we too at first had hard, evil natures that kept us from coming close to one another. But when the Holy Spirit melted us with the strong flame of the Spirit, our hard spirits, each on its own, melted and became the church. This is not something stitched together with thread, as clothes are made from cloth; the two were melted into one, so they cannot be separated even if you try. This is what brothers and sisters in faith are, what the relationship between God and believers is, and what the relationship is between the church and Christ, who nailed himself to the cross for our sins.
Jesus said that he is in us and we are in him, and urged all of us to remain in Christ, which shows that this is a relationship that can never be separated. You who have received such an astonishing blessing have become, through the glory of God, the pure in heart, believers blessed to see God. Christ will always help you to be born again. I hope that you too, in order to be sanctified, will endure even when it is hard, will not speak rashly even when your temper rises, and will live gently. Then he will entrust more to you, who are gentle and humble, and let you meet the pure and living God, so that you live as the pure every day. I earnestly hope that you will become believers who see God with a wise and pure faith, and enjoy peace in his grace.