Matthew 5:8
Well, it is a joy to be here with you this morning. It’s a joy to bring God’s Word to you this morning. It’s a privilege. But we are in the middle of a series on the Beatitudes out of Matthew chapter 5. So if you want to turn there in your copy of God’s Word, we’re going to read that in just a few moments. But here in the Sermon on the Mount, in this section on the Beatitudes, Jesus gives his listeners spiritual spectacles, so to speak, in order that we might see the world clearly. Our sight is clouded, veiled by sin and sinful thinking. But here in the sermon, Jesus peels away the layers of false religion that the religious leaders had really papered over their dark hearts with.
Jesus exposes his listeners to what God truly expects from his people, the beatitudes we’re talking about today. Jesus really dealt a blow to that external facade of Pharisaical false religion, namely that as long as you looked good on the outside, you externally obeyed God’s laws, then you were good, even if you were filled with filthy sewage on the inside, as long as the outside looked clean, you were good.
Jesus makes some strong declarations against the Pharisees later in Matthew and he says in Matthew 23 starting in verse 25, he tells them, “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrite! For you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and the dish, so that the outside may become clean also. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees,” he continues, “hypocrites! For you are whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. In this way you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
Jesus goes on to continue to pronounce woes in that passage, but that word, translated as woe is a declaration of impending doom. The doom he’s talking about is the judgment of their souls when they stand before God. They knew God’s word, but they only cared to observe it externally for the praise and the glory of men, not because they loved and feared God. They covered over their evil hearts with religious looking garb, but inside they were dead, and their lack of understanding revealed their dead hearts.
And I think there can be the same problem in the evangelical church today, people who try to conform outwardly, but inwardly they’re still dead. And maybe you’re here today looking good on the outside. You go to church, you’re here today, you try to do the right thing, you try to live a moral life, but really, it’s just a facade that covers your dead, sinful, selfish heart. Well, today in the text, Jesus is going to expose our hearts. And I pray that he really lays us all open and reveals what’s truly in all of our hearts, that we might see our sin clearly and if you don’t know him, to repent for the first time or for those who do know him, that we might see where we need to grow, not only grow, but also find our hope and encouragement in the gospel.
If you’re there in Matthew chapter 5, let’s read our text for this morning. 5:1 through 10 is what I’ll read, “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him and he opened his mouth and began to teach them, saying, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the lowly, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied, and blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, and blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.”
Today we come to the sixth beatitude, which is found there in verse 8, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” In this passage, we see that true religion, pure religion, is not merely external, but it penetrates to the very depths of the person, to the heart. In this verse, I have three points for you this morning. The three things that we’re going to see here: The result of purity, the scope of purity, and the pinnacle of purity. These are going to help us walk before the Lord in true pure religion, not in false external religion, but let’s begin with Point one: The result of purity.
“Blessed are the pure in heart” or we could say, as we’ve mentioned, happy are the pure. While our world chases after happiness and satisfaction and blessedness by giving into every indulgence and sin, and while our world deems purity as a blockade to happiness, Jesus says those who are pure are the ones who are happy and blessed. It isn’t giving in to every sinful, selfish indulgence that makes one happy, but it’s the one who is pure that one is blessed and happy. This is the judgment of God, the judgment of Christ, that the person who stands in the position of divine favor before God is the one who is pure.
Pure in Scripture can refer to being free of adulterating matter, like a clean cup, being free of any contaminants, clean clothes, pure water, pure alloyed metals, like pure gold, nothing contaminating them. They’re pure. But here in our context, as in many other places in the New Testament, it refers to being free from moral guilt, free from sin, and this connection between purity and blessedness really isn’t a new thing for Jesus’s listeners there.
Turn in your Bibles back to Deuteronomy chapter 28, if you remember, in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses is reiterating the covenant to those people and this chapter, verse 28 is the reiteration of the blessings for obeying the covenant and the curses for disobeying the covenant. But Jesus here in the Sermon on the Mount is only saying what God revealed in the Old Testament over and over again, in really no uncertain terms.
God promised his covenant people blessings for pure religion, true religion, obedience to his word. We could read the whole chapter, but for the sake of, of time I’m just going to read the first nine verses again, connecting purity, walking in obedience to God, being without sin to blessing. Deuteronomy 28, beginning in verse 1 says, “Now it will be, if you diligently listen to the voice of Yahweh your God, being careful to do all His commandments which I am commanding you today, Yahweh your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. And all these blessings will come upon you and overtake you if you listen to the voice of Yahweh your God: Blessed shall you be in the city, blessed shall you be in the field.
“Blessed shall be the offspring of your body and the produce of your ground and the offspring of your beasts, the increase of your herd and the young of your flock. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out. Yahweh will cause your enemies who rise up against you to be defeated before you; they will come out against you one way and will flee before you seven ways. Yahweh will command the blessing upon you in your barns and in all that you send forth your hand to do, and He will bless you in the land which Yahweh our God gives you. Yahweh will establish you as a holy people to Himself, as He swore to you, if you keep the commandments of Yahweh your God and walk in His ways.” We’ll stop there.
So God long ago had promised Israel blessing upon blessing, happiness upon happiness, if they obeyed his commands and lived a pure life before him. Now take your Bibles, go back towards Matthew, but stop in Psalm 119, and while you flip there, I’m going to read the first verse of Psalm 1, because it reiterates a similar theme, but in the negative. In Psalm 1:1, David says, “How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers!”
The result of a righteous life is blessedness. We find this theme continued in Psalm 119. Let’s read the first eight verses of that. Psalm 119, beginning in verse 1, “How blessed are those whose way is blameless, Who walk in the law of Yahweh. How blessed are those who observe His testimonies, They seek Him with all their heart. They also do not work unrighteousness; They walk in His ways. You have commanded us, To keep Your precepts diligently. Oh, may my ways be established to keep Your Statutes! Then I shall not be ashamed when I look upon all your commandments. I shall give thanks to You with uprightness of heart, When I learn Your righteous judgments. I shall keep your statutes; Do not forsake me utterly!”
So the Scriptures are clear; the connection between pure religion and blessedness is really unmistakable. If those who seek to obey God’s Word, they will be blessed and a happy people. If you want to be blessed, if you want to be happy, obey God from the heart. It’s really that simple. You can turn back to Matthew chapter 5. We have these promises throughout Scripture. Walking in righteousness, walking in obedience to God’s Word, all of his commands, that’s what leads to blessedness and happiness.
But the confusing element in life is the sinfulness of sin. Sin promises the same happiness. In fact, sin promises a greater happiness, but it’s a lie. Solomon warned his sons in the book of Proverbs that while the adulterous woman promised pleasure and any who went into her would find pleasure, that’s what it promised, but Solomon warned his sons that rather than finding pleasure, they would be like an ox being led to the slaughter: The end is death.
In Proverbs Chapter 9, Solomon personifies wisdom and folly as two women calling out to the young to turn into them to find what they’re looking for. But what both Lady wisdom and Lady folly cry out to the young people is very similar. But Solomon says the way of folly leads to death and Sheol. The sinfulness of sin is that it promises what only God can deliver on, and that is blessedness and happiness, because God is the only blessed One. Only God can deliver on that, because he is the only eternal blessed one, full of joy and pleasure in himself.
We must not believe the lie of sin. It promises the same thing. It promises pleasure and happiness, but it leads to death. If we were to turn back to Deuteronomy 28, and if we kept reading, we would find the real results for those who seek their own pleasure, it is curse after curse. It’s a repetition of what we read, but instead of blessing, there’s cursing. And if you’re here today and you have spent your life learning that the hard way, you’ve chased after those lies looking for pleasure in all kinds of folly and sin, well, dear friend, the Lord stands ready with open arms to receive you. If you would repent and cry out to him for mercy and forgiveness, he would receive you.
If you’re young and naive, you aren’t old enough to have experienced this. I would warn you, as Solomon warned his children, don’t believe the lies of sin, the Satan, and the world. Don’t listen to folly. Stolen water isn’t sweet. The pleasure of secret sin is fleeting and short, and they only bring death and destruction. Sin promises joy and happiness, but it’s a joy and happiness that only Christ can deliver, because he is blessedness in and of itself and if you repent and turn to him, you can enter into the Triune blessedness of God and eventually into eternal joy.
We can’t have happiness, blessedness apart from God because he is those things and those things are only found in him. So the scriptures are clear, Jesus isn’t saying anything that these people didn’t already know. Blessedness only results from obeying God’s word and living a pure life. It doesn’t result from anything apart from God. That’s point one, the result of purity.
Next we look at the scope of purity. Point Two: The scope of purity, because this is where the Pharisees went tragically wrong. They veered off into false religion. They had the Scriptures and they should have known this, but because of their darkened hearts, it was lost. Jesus says again, “blessed are the pure in heart.” The scope of purity for the Pharisee was wholly, external, as long as they obeyed the law of God outwardly, they presumed that they were righteous. In fact, they thought they were doing even better, because they had created all kinds of extra rules on top of what God said to keep them far away from ever breaking God’s laws. And then they patted each other on the back for making these rules and obeying them.
Walking in righteousness, walking in obedience to God’s Word, all of his commands, that’s what leads to blessedness and happiness.” Bret Hastings
But in one little prepositional phrase, in heart, “pure in heart,” Jesus pierced through this thin veil of legalism, mere external moralism, and exposes it for the false religion that it is. The religious leaders were masquerading as children of Abraham, but they were really children of Satan. Jesus said they were making all of their followers twice the sons of hell that they were.
Jesus wants us to see, and he makes clear here that the scope of purity that God is concerned with is far beyond what people could see on the outside. He says it is not just those who outwardly obey, but those who are pure down to the depths of their heart. So Jesus clarifies, the scope of purity extends to the heart. The religious leaders missed it. We want to make sure that we understand what that scope is, that we might examine ourselves accordingly, obey it accordingly. We don’t want to miss what God’s standard is for us either. So let’s spend some time examining what it means to be pure in heart.
Biblically, the heart is the, control center, of the person. It’s the inner life of a person that consists of the intellect, the will, and the emotions. So the thoughts, the will, or the volition, and the emotions. If you’ve ever seen the animated movie Inside Out, it’s the heart of a person is depicted as a room with a really, a computer Control Board. And they’re these characters in the heart of each person who control the levers and the knobs, which control the actions of the person.
But in that movie, all the characters in control of that computer switchboard, they’re all depicted as emotion, anger, joy, sadness, etcetera. I think it’s a bit of a parable on how Americans do truly view a person’s heart, that they are totally and completely controlled by emotions, which I think in our day accurately describes many people. They are solely controlled by their emotions. But biblically speaking, the heart consists not just of emotions at the control, but also our intellect and our will.
So our intellect, our will, and our emotions, the three aspects of the human heart, biblically speaking, and these are going to be three sub points for us to hang our thoughts on; three aspects of the human heart, the intellect, the will, and emotions. So first the intellect. Romans 1:21 says Paul says, “for even though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their thoughts and their foolish heart was darkened.”
So their thoughts becoming more and more futile is synonymous there with their foolish hearts growing more and more dark. Someone’s thought life is one aspect of the heart. Let me remind you of our definition for purity, so we can apply it to our thought life; to be pure refers to being free from moral guilt, free from sin. So Jesus says blessed are those who are free from sin in their thought life, not just mostly clear of, but totally free from, free from all adulterating and corrupting thoughts.
So just a quick show of hands. Who here has a thought life free of all moral guilt and sin? You’ve never sinned in your thoughts, never entertained doing something sinful. None of us are going to raise our hands. Can any of us make it ten seconds without doing that? Just one little sinful thought, one thought about doing something sinful, your thought life is no longer pure, your heart is contaminated.
In Genesis, Satan got Eve to just believe one lie, think one sinful thought and it led to contaminating her whole heart, leading to a corrupt will, her corrupt emotions, which resulted in eating the forbidden fruit and violating God’s command. Just one sinful thought. We are born in sin after Adam’s sinful likeness and corrupt nature. We’re prone to sin from birth. By the time we’re old enough to even learn and understand this, we have sinned in an innumerable amount of times, in our thoughts already.
And if the beatitudes are the characteristic of true sons and daughters of God, and the standard is a a pure thought life, who of us qualifies? Who of us comes even close? We’re all condemned right here, are we not? We fall so far short, but the tone of the text is clear. Jesus isn’t speaking judgment and condemnation on people; he’s declaring blessings. So while we fall short of this standard, we want to make sure that we know the hope that we have. This is really bad news if you can only see God, if you have a totally pure thought life, that’s really bad news, but there is good news here.
We know we fall short, but in Christ we can stand justified before him. Really bad news, but Jesus gets through the good news in his Sermon on the Mount, just shortly in a few verses. There’s probably a couple years ago now, I taught through this on Wednesday nights with a student. Every night we do a short Q&A where they can ask any questions that they want about the Bible or really anything in life. And one night a student asked me, what’s your favorite Bible verse? And I said, that’s way too hard to pick one out of the whole Bible. So they said, okay, I’ll narrow it down.
What’s your favorite verse in the Sermon on the Mount? And so I was able to to narrow that down. And I told them it was Matthew 5:17 just after this, but that I need to start with Matthew 5:20 and Matthew 5:48 to understand why Matthew 17 was one of my favorite verses here. So Matthew 5:20 says, “Jesus says, ‘For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven.’”
The scribes and Pharisees were seen as the most righteous people in Israel. They were the standard of righteousness that other people felt that they could never measure up to. But Jesus tells them that even the scribes and the Pharisees aren’t God’s standards. You have to be even more righteous than them and he finalizes this statement in verse 48, where he says, “Therefore you are to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The standard is not just to be even more righteous than our religious leaders, but to be perfect as God is perfect, not the slightest stain of sin.
That’s the standard to enter the Kingdom of God, not one sinful thought that’s really bad news, but Jesus gave them some good news in verse 17, and this is the verse I pointed to as one of my favorite verses in the Sermon on the Mount. “Jesus said do not think that I came to abolish the law and the prophets. I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.” Jesus came to fulfill the law; yes, all of the prophecies about him in the Old Testament, but also the Law. Not because he needed to for himself, but because we needed it.
He came to fulfill all righteousness, to live his entire life and never sin, not one sinful thought. Jesus never thought about sinning once. He never entertained the thought of sin. When Satan tempted him, he didn’t weigh his options and ponder it. He didn’t even consider it. Entertaining such sin is or entertaining doing sin is a sinful thought. But Jesus did this in order to fulfill the law that he might fill his account up with righteousness and in his substitutionary death take all of our debt of sin to himself.
He took all of our debt and all of his righteousness and exchanged them. “He became sin that we might become the righteousness of God.” He fulfilled the law that we might receive his life unto ourselves, get credit for his perfect life. So what do we get for a life of sinful thoughts? Well, if we repent and put our faith in him, all the filth is washed away and it’s replaced before God. We’re justified, declared righteous, replaced with perfect righteousness, that’s why chapter 5, verse 17 is one of my favorite verses on the Sermon on the Mount. It gives us the good news that keeps the Sermon on the Mount from becoming just a weight that no one can bear.
Without this, we are condemned without hope, but our hope is not in us because we must be perfect as God is perfect. We’ve fallen short of that. We all know that we could never achieve that, but there is one who did, Jesus Christ. And in that we find joy and blessing instead of judgement and cursing. And so when we feel overwhelmed by this standard that Jesus gives in this sermon. We can remind ourselves that we’re blessed in Christ, not in ourselves.
We stand on his merits, not ours and while we know that we are justified in Christ, robed in his righteousness, we must still remember this is the standard that Christ wants his people to strive for day in and day out; namely here, a thought life free from sin. He still expects us to strive for this. We will never achieve it in this life with a sinful, corrupt nature that clings to us even after we’re saved.
But this means that we confess those wrong thoughts as sin to God, ask him to cleanse us from them, but having a pure thought life is not just about not thinking sinful thought, or not entertaining sin, it implies here that there is something pure and good there instead. Pure gold implies that there’s gold there, not just the absence of impurities, there’s gold there. A pure thought life means not just absent sin in your mind, but that you think right thoughts after God as well. It’s not just about not thinking certain things, but it’s about thinking the right things, at the right time.
So to be pure and perfect in our thought life is to think the right things at the right time, not just not thinking about the bad things. So how is your thought life? Can it be described as pure? Or we might think of it this way because none of us can answer that honestly with a yes, but from the point of your salvation, are you seeing growth in the purity of your thought life? Are you growing in your ability to take thoughts captive, putting those thoughts out of your mind, renewing your mind and thinking righteous thoughts instead? Are you growing in that? Is the frequency and intensity of sinful thoughts becoming less frequent and less intense, and you’re replacing those with righteous thinking? Are you growing in the purity of your thought life? That is what the Lord desires for us.
So the thought life is one aspect of the human heart. Next let’s consider the will. So sub-point B: The will. We had the thought, the intellect, the thought life, now we consider the will. Romans 2:5 again Paul says, “But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and the revelation of the righteous judgment of God.”
James Boyce says that stubbornness here refers to the will of man, which Paul makes parallel to the unrepentant heart. If someone is stubborn, we all often refer to them as strong willed. When we refer to the will, what do we mean by that? I would describe it this way, that the will is the decision making faculty of the heart. Our decisions are informed by our intellect and our thinking. Sometimes decisions are made with without any thought at all or very little thought. But you think and then you decide I’m going to do this or I’m going to do that.
In the book of Acts, you probably remember Ananias and Sapphira. They lied about the amount of money that they sold a property for. They were confronted by Peter and Peter said, “While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your authority? Why is it you laid this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.” Other translations use the word like, why did you plan this thing in your heart? Why did you conceive this, purpose this, decide this in your heart?
So Ananias and Sapphira, they thought about lying, they conversed with one another. That was a sin, in and of itself and then they decided, they purposed and they planned the execution of the sin, which was more sin and then they did it. They acted it out, which was even more sin, but the will is the decision making faculty of the heart. Some people know what is right or wrong. They can’t bring themselves to do what they know to be right. They can’t resist what they know is wrong. They know something’s wrong, but they lack the willpower to resist. They lack the will to do what’s right instead. And if you really lack any willpower to resist sin at all, it might be because you have not been given a new heart by God; a will empowered by the Spirit to make right decisions.
If you can’t resist sin, maybe you still have an unregenerate, cold, dead heart that lacks the grace to do what is right. Cry out to God for forgiveness for your failure to do what is right, your lack of will, and beg him to give you a new heart, that is then empowered by the Spirit, by grace to obey.
But practically, what does it mean to be pure in heart with regard to the will? There’s a myriad of things that we could talk about, but let’s just consider Eve in the garden again, and the first couple, our first parents, Adam and Eve. So Satan got her to believe a lie. She believed false information, and thinking this false information, she then purposed in her heart. She decided, planned, and executed on eating the forbidden fruit. She thought about sinning. She entertained the lie of Satan, which is where sin entered her heart, and then she sinned further when she decided to eat the forbidden fruit.
A righteous exercise of her will would have been to come to a very different decision. Even after entertaining sin, even after thinking about all the options of doing it or not doing it, to have a righteous will would have been to decide not to do it. We can sin by entertaining sin, but then we can also determine in our hearts to do what’s right and stop that sinful pattern in our heart. But we all know Eve didn’t do that. She continued to make sinful plans by taking the fruit and then giving it to her husband, Adam.
Then Adam sinned by deciding to engage his will to go along with it, not resisting or correcting Eve, but going along with it. We aren’t told what Eve was thinking in giving it to Adam, nor are we told what Adam was thinking when Eve gave it to him and he ate it. What we do know, as they engage their will, their decision making faculties for sinful purposes and not righteous, not resisting wrong decisions, but doing wicked decisions.
I think this sinful pattern that we see from Adam and Eve, I think it persists between husbands and wives even today. And I want to expose just what I see going on there and just to challenge you to examine your own heart and grow in the righteous use of your will. What we see in this scenario with Adam and Eve is really the wife out front making decisions absent her husband’s input and his leadership. And then we see a passive husband without much thought, just going along with the decision that Eve made.
This is quite backwards from the pattern set in Genesis and really the explicit teaching from Paul in Ephesians that husbands are to be the head of the household, the head of the home, and lead just as Christ is the head of the church. So I want to help us think through in our own marriages and our own families, how we can work out a righteous use of our will. I think in the home, many women have good intentions. They’re making good decisions throughout the day.
The husband comes home, and I think in part because the wife, the mom sees what needs to be done more quickly. She’s home all day with the kids that she just resorts to telling her husband, okay, do this, do this, do this. And like Adam, he just kind of unthinkingly goes along, not giving a whole lot of thought to it. Especially moms at home ordering kids around all day. It’s easy just to resort to ordering your husband around when he gets home.
So let me start with the husbands. I think what it means to be pure in heart with regard to your will is that you are leading well at home, thinking through things well, and making good decisions, being engaged and in tune with what’s going on. So you can be quick to engage your will when necessary, as you ought, make decisions when you see things that need to be done, whether it’s decisions about discipline, duties, or how your family spends their time. Everything. You have to engage your will, men and plan for those things and decide those things, not absent your wife’s input. She’s your greatest advisor. But you can’t be passive, can’t be content to be thoughtless and just go along with whatever decision your wife makes.
I think it’s a major sin in the lives of men to be lazy, to fail to engage their will for good and just sitting back and not doing anything. James 4:17 says, it’s sin. “Therefore, to one who knows to do the right thing and does not do it, to him it is sin.” It’s a sin of omission failing to do what you know you should do. So I would encourage you men to step up and lead when the decision needs to be made. You make it. Use your decision making faculties as God designed you. Don’t be content sitting by thoughtlessly. That is not growing in the purity of your will.
And ladies, when you see something that obviously needs to be done and your husband is right there to do it, don’t be quick to just order him around to do it. Kindly and respectfully, make the need known and let him engage his own will in the matter. I know it’s hard to sit by and wait patiently when a decision needs to be made, but you’re not helping him become the leader he needs to be and the husband he needs to be by just telling him what to do. And you are also stepping into a role that God made for him, usurping his authority.
So we have to engage our wills rightly, engage our decision making faculties rightly, righteously. We have to think deeply about the decisions that we make, how we have failed to make decisions that we needed to make, how we make sinful decisions against the pattern that God has set for us. There’s a myriad of other ways that we could explore being pure in our decision making faculties, but I’ll just leave it to the Spirit to bring those things to your mind, but examine your own mind and heart. Where do you have a pattern of failing to make decisions in your life? Are you guilty of just being lazy and letting other people make decisions that you really need to make? Have you stepped in and made decisions where it wasn’t your place? Where do you need to grow in resisting sinful thoughts, sinful decisions, in order to make righteous decisions and plans?
Though we’ve covered the intellect or the thinking aspect of the heart and the will, the decision making faculty of the heart. Now we look at the emotions. Sub-point C: The emotions. The heart has been called, the seat of the emotions. Biblically, several emotions are attributed to the heart. Love in Romans 5:5 it says, “God has poured His love into our hearts.” So love is connected to the heart. Joy, Psalm 47, “you have put gladness in my heart.” Anger in Deuteronomy 19:6 says, “Lest the avenger of blood pursue the manslayer when his heart is angry.” Sorrow, Psalm 13:2, “How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart all the day,” and then fear, 1 Samuel 25:37, “his heart died within him so that he became as a stone” and that euphemism for died there as he became paralyzed by fear.
So Love, joy, anger, sorrow, fear, all these things are directly attributed to the the heart in scripture. So the third aspect of the human heart is the emotions or the affections. If our society associates anything with the heart, it’s emotions. And this is biblical, but it’s our society gives way too much weight, way too much power to emotions, as if emotions alone control a person’s actions and emotions are in fact uncontrollable themselves. We’re just driven along by our emotions and there’s nothing we can do about it.
I remember when I was a kid, you might remember these too, but I remember seeing, I think over in a room over here in the church, a poster of a train, and it had multiple train cars. It had the locomotive, the engine, multiple train cars, and at the back was the caboose and the caboose had labeled on it, emotions. There’s some message on this poster about how decisions made with emotions, as the locomotive leading the train was not a rightly ordered heart. Rather, emotions belong at the back of the train, pulled along by whatever good thinking in decisions you made.
Now that is a very good illustration of a rightly ordered heart. We ought not to be driven along by our emotions, but they ought to be pulled along by our right thinking and our right decision making. So we, especially as emotional Americans, we do need to be especially on guard that our emotions are not out front, leading in the decision making process. They inform our decisions and our decisions inform our emotions, but when our emotions are out front, there’s certain disaster ahead.
Jesus says in our text here, “Blessed are the pure in heart.” We’re examining now the emotions of the heart, the standard that we are to be pure in our emotions as God’s people. What does it mean to be pure in our emotions; emotions that are free from moral guilt and sin. It might, even to the American mind, be anathema to say you can be sinful in your emotions. In the American mind emotions are never wrong, but to be pure in our emotions means that we feel what we should feel when we should feel it, and we don’t feel what we shouldn’t feel. Let me give you a verse as an example, Matthew 10:28, Jesus tells his followers, “do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul, but rather fear him who is able to both destroy body and soul in Hell.
We often wrongfully and sinfully fear what men will do to us, which then influences our decisions, that clouds our judgment, causes us to make sinful decisions. Maybe we need to speak to somebody who is in sin, but we hold back because we’re afraid of how they might respond, that’s one way that we sin in our emotions, that sinful emotion leads to sinful decisions, and this sinful fear. We’re fearing what we shouldn’t fear. We’re fearing man, that we shouldn’t fear, and we’re not fearing what we should, which is God.
If we really fear God, we’ll do what’s right, fearing man is sinning in our emotions or if we think about another emotion, joy. Psalm 122 says, “I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house of Yahweh.” Do you love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, that when you come to church you feel a great gladness and joy to be here all the time? Every week you walk through those doors regardless of what’s happened that morning, and you are ready to worship. You’re joyful. No, we always have things happen. We get here and our hearts are often not where they should be. Our emotions are out of line with where they should be, entering God’s house, and we have to reflect and get our hearts right when we come in here.
The standard is not just to be even more righteous than our religious leaders, but to be perfect as God is perfect, not the slightest stain of sin.” Bret Hastings
Are you always joyful when you should be? Do you feel sorrow when you should be? Paul tells us to be sorrowful with those who are sorrowful, weep with those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice. Do you do those things at the right time, an appropriate time? Or we can even think of love. Do we only love what is pure, like Jesus did, or do we love the things of the world? Are our affections drawn to the things of the world?
To be pure in our emotions is to feel what we should feel in every circumstance, and to not feel what we shouldn’t feel. I don’t know about you, but just, even as I think about that standard, I feel wrongly about it. I can feel despair about that standard and feel wrongly about it, and that’s sin. This is a good and perfect and righteous standard that God has and this is what really amazes me about our Lord; he never felt a wrong emotion; he never made a sinful decision; he never thought a sinful thought.
And not only that, but he always thought the right thoughts, he always made the right decisions, and he always felt the right emotions, because his emotions were perfectly informed by his perfect knowledge of the truth. Even when he was being put to death on the cross, he didn’t feel a wrong emotion. He extended forgiveness to his enemies. He had compassion on the man next to him, who was mocking him just before that, but he repented and Jesus had compassion on him and told him that he would be with him that day in paradise.
Jesus never had an errant thought, never had an errant emotion or decision. It’s absolutely amazing to think about instead of sinning in our thoughts and in our feelings by thinking that this is an impossible standard and feeling despair, we need to be reminded of a few things. First, we need to be reminded of what we talked about earlier, that Christ has fulfilled this perfectly for us, that we stand justified before God. We can praise him that he hasn’t left us to ourselves to fulfill this standard.
But second, as we grow in the purity of our hearts, we must remember that we as Christians, we have been given the mind of Christ. 1 Corinthians 2:16, Christ in this life. He has not left us to ourselves to do this. He has given us his own mind. We can think Christ’s thoughts after him. Third, we have to remember that we have been given the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, that we might be influenced by him in our decision making. Paul talks about this in Philippians 2:2 through 3. We have been given the Spirit who can fill our heart with love for God, strengthen us to keep our emotions rightly ordered and rightly oriented. He’s given us the Spirit who can fill our hearts with the right emotions that we need to have.
So beloved, let us seek to work out our sanctification with fear and trembling, knowing that it is God who wills and works in us for his good pleasure, for our good. Let us strive to be pure in our thoughts, which inform our decisions. Let us bring our emotions in line following that train, for the one who stands justified in Christ, having all of his sinful thoughts, decisions, and emotions cleansed by the blood of Christ, it is this one who will see God.
And that brings us to our third point: The pinnacle of purity. The pinnacle of purity, Matthew 5 verse 8, “Blessed are the pure in heart.” For the explanation for why they are so blessed, “they shall see God.” The word, they, is emphatic in the Greek. It means they and they alone, the pure in heart, they and they alone will see God. Some commentators make mention of how Christians, we’re the ones who see God in this life. We’re the ones who have had our eyes opened. We’ve been given spiritual eyes to see God working in the world. We’re the ones who’ve been cleansed from sin and can see God clearly, understand his word, and while all of that is true, I don’t think that’s what Jesus has in mind.
In thinking about this, I’m reminded of Isaiah chapter 6. You don’t have to turn there. You can if you want, but I’m just going to read the first few verses of Isaiah chapter 6, where Isaiah was standing before God in a vision. Isaiah says in 6, starting in verse 1, “In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up with a train of his robe filling the temple. Seraphim stood above Him, and each having six wings, with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew, and one called out to another and said, ‘Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory.’
“And the foundations of the threshold shook at the voice of Him who called out while the House of God was filling with smoke. Then I said, ‘Woe is me, for I am ruined, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the king, Yahweh of hosts.’ Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs, and he touched my mouth with it and said, ‘Behold, this is touched your lips, and your iniquity is taken away, and your sin atoned for.’”
So Isaiah sees this glorious, beautiful vision of God, but he’s a man of unclean lips. But that is taken care of by this Angel who touches his lips with a burning coal and declares that his sin as iniquity, he’s been atoned for, taken away. He was cleansed in order to be there in the presence of God, to see God with his own eyes. But this, the beauty, the wonder, the glory of this scene, seeing the King of glory is what Jesus has in mind.
There’s another use of this very same word, the same tense, same conjugation in Revelation chapter 22 that I think Jesus has in mind. So take your Bibles there and just go to Revelation chapter 22. I don’t think Jesus’s reference to, the pure will see God, as a reference to seeing God throughout your life, in the world that you live in. In the scriptures, rather, I think it is talking about what is called the beatific vision of God. Seeing God in our glorified state, with eyes unveiled from sin. We see him clearly.
Revelation 22, I’m just going to read the first seven verses, John writes, “Then he showed me a river of the water of life, bright as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb in the midst of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of Life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there will no longer be any curse, and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his slaves will serve him. And they will see his face,” exact same Greek word, “they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be any night. And they will not have need of the light of lamp, nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them, and they will reign forever and ever. And he said to me, ‘These words are faithful and true.’ The Lord, the God of spirits of the prophet, sent his Angel to show his slaves the things which must soon take place. And behold, I am coming quickly. Blessed is he who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.”
So having been cleansed from all unrighteousness, robed in Christ’s righteousness, we will one day stand before the throne of God, as Isaiah did, filled with wonder and joy. But we won’t be fearful, as Isaiah was, because we’ll have been cleansed of all unrighteousness. We won’t be concerned about our past sins. We’ll be able to perfectly enjoy the presence of God and beloved, just think about whatever joys you’ve experienced in this life. Think of the greatest joys you’ve experienced in this life. The joys of marriage, the joys of children, salvation, whatever has brought you the most joy in life, the most pleasure in this life. When we get to gaze upon the all pure, eternally blessed One, all of the joys of this life will pale in comparison. That is the hope that we have.
Don’t despair with the standard that Christ lifts up here to have a pure heart. Strive for it, knowing that Christ has purchased this for you already. But let us be reminded with Christ’s declaration here, that it is the pure in heart. It isn’t just what we do outwardly as believers. We have to seek to be pure in heart, pure in our thoughts, pure in our decisions, pure in our emotions, and because of Christ’s fulfillment of those things perfectly, we and we alone will one day enter into eternal blessedness and infinite joy. We will enter into the joy of our master, that is our hope, beloved. Let us not grow weary in doing good, but strive to excel still more in the purity of our hearts. Let’s pray.
Our gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you for sending us your Son. We thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for this marvelous message that you preached so many years ago that is recorded for us here. The perfect standard that you put before us, and yet you have not left us hopeless. You have declared that you have come to fulfill it, that you have fulfilled now all righteousness, as you declared from the cross. It is finished and we are so filled with gladness and joy that you have accomplished our salvation for us. It was not left to us.
We pray Lord, that by the power of your Spirit, even today you would help us go out from here and help us to rightly order our hearts that we might act with true thoughts; those true thoughts informing our wills to make good decisions and that our emotions would then follow the truth that we know to be right and good for us. This is something we fail at daily Lord, and we beg of your strength by your Spirit to help us to grow in this area. And when we fail, remembering that it is your son who has accomplished this for us, we need not despair, but only press on, not growing weary in doing good. We pray all these things in Jesus’ name, Amen.