Most of you know and could even quote this verse from the Scriptures, which says that the Lord looks at the heart.  This verse comes out of I Samuel 16:7 when Samuel is sent to anoint the next king of Israel.  Samuel sees the oldest brother who is strong, handsome and so clearly must be God’s choice for the next leader of Israel, but the Lord tells Samuel not to look at the physical appearance nor height, because God has rejected this man.  Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart is what Samuel is told.  And you remember that none of the brothers present is God’s choice either, but the youngest teenager, who has not yet fully matured is God’s choice, His anointed One to be king, for David was a man after God’s own heart!  At this age, David didn’t look like much, but God didn’t care!  Our text today speaks about this very topic, and will continue to challenge us with both God’s standards and how He has designed us to live.

We are continuing in our series on the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest sermon ever preached.  Jesus told His followers that they were blessed, meaning the favor of God was upon them when they took on certain mind sets, heart attitudes which in turn reflect the heart of God.  To be under the favor of God, we come to Him bringing our poverty, because we have nothing righteous in and of ourselves to bring to Him, and we are invited to enter the Kingdom of God.  Then we grieve over our sin and the sin of others and the pain it has caused and are brought near Jesus, the King, for comfort.  We lay down our gifts and strength before the Lord and ask Him to use these gifts to build His Kingdom, and as a result, we enjoy the fruit of the Kingdom.  We hunger and thirst for His character to be a part of our lives, and are stuffed with Jesus as a result–completely content.  And last week we looked at how we are to give away the mercy the Lord has given to us, and as a result, we receive His mercy in greater fullness.  We will build on this picture today as we look at Jesus’ theme idea as we become pure in heart, God reveals more and more of Himself to us.

I. What does it mean to be pure in heart?

The word “pure” in this verse is the word most often translated “clean”.  There is no doubt that Jesus is using this word in opposition to what the people of His day would have experienced from the religious leaders.  The Pharisees defined purity by the outside, following a prescribed set of rules, often to an absurd degree, so that they knew who was being pure and who was not.  This is why Jesus called them white washed tombs– they looked white on the outside, but were full of death on the inside.  Purity for them had nothing to do with the inward heart.  For example, they would place rules around the O.T. law to make sure they wouldn’t violate any law.  They defined how many steps you could take away from your house on the Sabbath before it could be defined as work.  Worse than this is the fact that they judged others by these same false standards.  Neither the Old nor the New Testaments define religion as obeying the law.  In the Old Testament, Abraham was made righteous by His faith, before the law was ever given.  The law was good, but the purpose of the law was and is to show us God’s requirements and to show us that we could never keep them on our own, with our own strength.  The law pointed to the need for a Savior, a Messiah, who would come as a sacrificial lamb to take away all our iniquities.  Paul uses this word to speak of freedom from defilement.  In Titus 1:15, he uses this word and idea, “To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure.”  In other words, if you are pure in your heart because of your relationship with the Lord through Jesus, then purity flows from the inside and purifies all things you do by faith.  For the person who does not believe, that one is operating out of an impure heart, so everything is impure, no matter what you do.

Christians can fall into the same legalistic mentality as the Pharisees in Jesus’ day.  We can be fooled into looking at the outside and judging a person– whether or not they are “really spiritual”.  I have heard a pastor in Florence judge another pastor because he had a glass of wine with his dinner at a restaurant.  I guess he didn’t see the beer I had with my dinner.  I am convinced that Jesus would sit down and have a beer with me with a certain meal.  I am careful about alcohol, but Jesus drank wine– not unfermented wine either!  The issue is the status of your heart– why are you doing what you are doing– not the action itself!  I had a student who had applied to go on a short term mission with us to Ukraine say, “My hair is kind of long right now, but I will get it cut before the mission.”  My response to this brother was this, “I care a whole lot more about the condition of your heart than the length of your hair.  What you need to take to the Lord is this– will the length of my hair hinder Ukrainian students from hearing or responding to the gospel?  If it does, then cut it.”  You see, it is not what goes into your mouth which defiles you according to Jesus, but what comes out of your mouth and out of your life.  Purity is not following a bunch of rules!!  Purity has to do with the status of your heart before the Lord.

So, how do we get to a place of being pure in heart?  Old Testament saints experienced this very thing.  Enoch walked with God until God took him away.  Noah walked with God.  The Lord Himself appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, who became Israel.  They walked with God by faith, trusting in the covenant work of God to cleanse them.  The same is true in the New Testament.  Hebrews 10:22 tells us, “Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.”  The idea of purity here has 2 senses. First, it speaks of a heart which has been cleansed by the washing in the water of the Word of God.  We believe the truth of the message of the gospel, and are in fact, clean in God’s sight because He looks a the purity of Jesus when He looks at us.  The other sense for the word is also in this passage.  It means we have a transparent heart before God.  We interact with the Lord, not through a rote series of liturgies, but through a heart response to our Lord.  Don’t get me wrong, liturgies can be beautiful and can help lead our hearts to a place of authentic worship.  But, liturgies can be a rote going through the motions without much or any heart engagement.  What we are looking for and urging from you as God’s people are heart felt expressions of adoration to our Lord.  This is part of the meaning of this word pure– meaning transparent, like a sheer cloth which one can see through, which is called pure.

How do we gain this kind of heart?  First, by faith.  We believe the gospel.  We know that we belong to Christ and are born again.  We know that we are justified in His sight, which means the Judge pounds down His gavel and declares us not guilty!  The blood of Jesus has paid the price to cleanse our hearts.  Second, we become pure in heart as we offer our sin and our hearts to our Lord.  The Scripture speaks of being saved in the past when I said yes to Jesus Christ.  But it also speaks of being saved in the present, as I yield more and more of my heart to Jesus, as I fall more and more deeply in love with my Lord.  Purity of heart is unmixed passion for the things of God.  I long for this in my own heart, but also for you.  If you are still seeking the Lord on Sunday during worship, and mean it, yet on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning you are seeking after the lust of the flesh or the covetousness of your eyes, then your heart is mixed, not pure before Him.  You can hide things from others, but the Lord knows your heart.  Ask the Lord to continue to purify your heart, your motives so that you are without guile. A person one time asked me, is holiness what God does in me, or what I do in my actions?  The answer to that question is yes!   It is both of these.  God makes you holy, by faith in His Son Jesus.  Then you walk with Him and learn to lay down your independence and pride and sin, receiving His forgiveness and yoke.  You walk according to your new identity in Christ.  You live this life on earth by faith, discerning and living in faithful expectancy, asking your God, even begging Him to make you into that pure sacrifice He wants you to be on the inside. 
The whole of this sermon by Jesus is linked together.  We have no righteousness, but bring Jesus our poverty.  We mourn over our sin because we hate what it has done to us and to others.  We lay down pride and self– our strengths and receive His abundance instead.  We hunger after His righteousness, His character, and God fills us with great contentment.  We extend His mercy to others, and receive a greater measure of it in return.  And then we ask for His purity to be in us, so we reflect His holiness to the watching world. This statement by Jesus summarizes all that goes before it.  God is holy, and as His children, He calls us to both holiness and to honest transparency with Him and with His body, the church.  This is the meaning of purity in this passage.

II. What Does Jesus mean that we will see God?

The word “see” God has the connotation of gazing at something remarkable– the way I looked at Niagra Falls the first time I saw it, or the amazement I felt when Ann and I rounded the bend and saw the Grand Teton mountains in all their majesty for the first time.  But this statement by Jesus runs into passages that say no one is able to see God and live– Ex 33:20, “But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”  The Lord said this to Moses when Moses asked to see God’s face.  Then, God places Moses in the cleft of the rock and passes by and Moses sees the afterglow of His glory and is changed by that experience.  In another place, Jesus tells His hearers that no one has seen God except the One who is from God, meaning Himself.  So, how does Jesus’ statement fit with this declaration by God?  The tense is future.  This is the highest reward we could ask for– to look at God face to face.  There is nothing you have known or ever will know which compares to this incredible reward of seeing the Lord.  There will be no greater joy, no greater fullness, no greater blessing than to gaze at our Lord in wonder and awe.  When we pass on from this life and see Him face to face, that is what we correctly call heaven!

But, there is a present idea here also. As we grow in inward purity, as our hearts more and more reflect His character of holiness, then we will receive greater revelation on earth of who He is.  We see these things dimly, as through a glass, but one day we will see Him face to face.  The more we grow in our love relationship with our Lord, the more clearly we can see Him for who He is, the more we see His work in and around us.  When I was a teenager, I was born again; but the way I see things of God and everything around me now is so much different than the way I saw things when I was a teenager.  I can see so much more clearly.  When you read some of the Christian forefathers and mothers, godly people who knew the Lord through disciplined prayer and meditation, you get this idea from many of them.  As they sought the Lord day in and day out, as they spent much time in prayer and worship, seeking to know their Lord, they had powerful encounters with Him.  These encounters would keep them pressing in for more of God and less of self.  You might be thinking to yourself, that is strange, to spend so much time in prayer and the only reward is to see the Lord more fully for who He is.  Their response to you would be, “What is strange is to not seek the best, the most fulfilling, the most vibrant relationship with your Lord and King, so that you are walking in His peace, delighting in His joy and He is changing lives through your touch.”  They would think us strange for settling for so little when God is offering us so much.  Why would anyone put up with the little taste of God you have been given when He Himself is offering you so much more.  I think they are correct in their view and hunger for more of God.

So, seeing God is having a heart capacity which is able to embrace more of who He is, and daily delighting in the journey of intimacy with your Lord.  Who is this for?  For anyone who longs to know God.  It isn’t for the impure.  If you think about it, the impure would not want nor dare to see a holy God.  There would be no pleasure in the impure gazing at the perfectly pure God.  This would make their state much more horrible.  No, it is those who are seeking to be pure as He is pure who will both see God and enjoy seeing Him.
 
III. Living us God’s people with pure hearts before Him.

In the Spring of 1995, revival broke out on many Christian campuses.  One characteristic of this visitation from God was students dealing with sinful habits that they had previously let linger in their lives.  One student at Asbury was interviewed and said this, “I was a leader on campus.  We had invited Wheaton students to share first, as revival had broken out there first and we wanted what they had been given.  I stood for 3 hours, waiting for my turn to speak and to pray, all the time thinking ‘How can I be up here and admit I struggle with sin.’.  I had struggled with lust and wasn’t alone.  Personally, I wanted the chain broken and the stuff out of my life.  I was willing to eliminate anything so I could gain purity of heart.  Many of us signed a pledge stating our desire for purity which we placed in a box on the alter.  My deepest desire was and still is to be pure in my heart and thoughts.”  This student’s testimony highlights the truth that Christ makes us pure in God’s sight, but revival comes when we desire for greater purity in our hearts, and then actively and forcefully pursue it.  This is where we all begin.  We believe the promise of the gospel, that in Christ, we are pure in His sight.  This is who we are and our identity is firmly rooted there.  Then, we both ask God for grace and strength to live according to who we are, and we resolves in our hearts and minds to be pure.  It is God who is at work in us both to will and work for His good pleasure.