February 10
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8)
Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8) David said, “Who may ascend into the hill of the LORD? Who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, Who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood, and has not sworn deceitfully.” Psalm 24:3-4
I have to confess that purity of heart has not been a high priority for a good portion of my Christian life. I really did not think much about it. I suppose I just assumed that because I was a Christian, I automatically qualified. But now I look at it differently. I know that in Christ my heart is pure, but I am now aware more than every before of all the baggage and sin in my thoughts and heart that are not pure. I cannot say that every moment of every day I walk in the purity that Christ has secured for me. I do not actively work at appropriating Christ’s righteousness into my daily conduct. I think this takes desire, focus, and effort to achieve.
From my viewpoint, if a Christian is not actively praying to the LORD for his righteousness and seeking Christ to be fully visible and evident in his or her heart, unless the Christian realizes that daily victory in the Christian life is not automatic and that perhaps we are not as pleasing to the LORD as we may want to assume that we are, we will simply fall short. We have to actively pursue Christ, I believe, on a daily basis. We have to continually be seeking Him and asking Him to show us and remove from us any habit, sinful thought, evil eye, laziness, lack of faith, lack of compassion, and anything else that is not of Him or anything that does not reflect His character.
I want to be very clear in that I am not talking about salvation. I believe that once I place my faith in Christ for salvation, I am secure in Him, and I need not be concerned about losing my salvation if I fail. The scriptures are clear on this point. This is part of God’s purpose in giving us the Holy Spirit to indwell us; the Christian is “sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance” (Ephesians 1:14). Why would God use these kind of terms – “sealed,” “promise,” “pledge or our inheritance” – if He was planning to take it all away if we sinned against Him? Is He an on again, off again kind of God? Does Jesus promise eternal life to His sheep on the condition that they never fail Him or never sin against Him? No, He is not that kind of God, He is the kind who keeps His promises.
But the kind of person who should be concerned about their eternal destiny is the person who thinks they are a Christian not because of real faith in the death, burial, and bodily resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God and God in the flesh, but because they associate with Christians or go to church or have been baptized or have been born into a Christian family or have been accepted as a member in a church, or many other external, superficial reasons such as that. None of these things makes you a Christian. Read Romans 10:9-10 again, which is very succinct in stating the requirements for salvation. Take warning from those that Jesus spoke of in Matthew 7:21-23, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven…”
Real faith, my own, in my heart, in the resurrected Son of God, provides the basis on which I can have confidence of my salvation and my ultimate purity of heart and victory over sin. But the writer of Hebrews reminds us that there must be a striving against sin (Hebrews 12:4), and so we must strive against the impurity and sin in our own hearts on a daily basis. We must pursue purity of heart on a daily basis, I believe, or we may find that we don’t have as much of it as we need to live lives free from sin and pleasing to Christ. More on this tomorrow.