Pure in Heart (eBook)

1

Promise

“I have spread my couch with coverings. . . . I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Come, let us take our fill of love till morning.”

The Seductress (Prov. 7:16–18)

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Jesus (Matt. 5:8)

Competing voices call to us. They offer promises. One is calling from heaven, the other from hell. We must choose which voice to follow.

Sarah felt trapped in her marriage. Passion for her husband grew cold while passion for a coworker warmed. Each day the coworker complimented her. He noticed her appearance and sought her company. The attention awakened something in her she thought long dead. Sarah liked it. She wanted more of it, though she knew it was wrong.

Slowly she walked along a perilous precipice of temptation. On the one side: intrigue and seduction. On the other: the voice of the good shepherd, summoning her to the sweetness of his pastures.

Truly Blessed

A temptation invites us to sin against God while promising happiness apart from God. The lips of the seductress “drip honey, / and her speech is smoother than oil” (Prov. 5:3). She knows exactly what to say—and how to say it. Slyly she affirms our attractiveness and importance. Escaping with her holds endless possibilities for enjoyment. You can bend the rules; she promises not to tell. Restrain sexual passion? That would be unnatural and unnecessary, she insists. The offer of her embrace is an invitation to ecstasy.

Now, Jesus also fulfills our passions and serves our pleasures, but of a distinctly different kind and in a vastly different way. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” he proclaims. The happiness he offers is unique. It cannot be known apart from holiness, and it arises from faith and obedience. It requires devotion, a willingness to forsake the flash of instant fulfillment for a joy that cannot be seen or tasted or touched.

The word blessed is rich with meaning. It refers to a deep and happy fulfillment. This kind of happiness does not blow away with the wind; it weathers the storms of life. It looks to riches stored in heaven, not on earth. The blessed person of Matthew 5 looks to God for satisfaction.

Why are the pure in heart blessed? Because “they shall see God.” According to Jesus, God will bless those who pursue clearer sight of his glory. In other words, the sinful images we seek or forbidden embraces we crave are illusory. They do not provide true blessedness—especially that of seeing God.

Jesus invites us to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8). Follow his commands, he beckons, “that [his] joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). Embracing his promise requires trust in his promises over and against sin’s promises.

Sin draws strength from the promise of immediate satisfaction. It offers a retreat from reality, whispering, You deserve it. Lust assures that a rendezvous with secret sin will not be costly, and a return to the Lord will be easy—or unnecessary. God is love, so he will certainly forgive you, right? But drinking sin’s lies only leaves us longing for more. A glass of saltwater may look promising to a thirsty man, but it only leaves him more parched. Jesus’s promises offer us a better drink. His living water does not turn our soul’s tongue dry, but refreshes it with everlasting happiness.

The question is simple: Will you believe his promise?

Sarah wrestled to believe God’s word. She read about the destruction promised to adulterers, but she was certain she could stop at any time. Yet with every deleted text message and inappropriate encounter, her resolve slowly faded. Her flesh screamed for more, and assured her any indulgence would be worth it.

Promise for Then—and Now

Again, sin can offer only immediate satisfaction. Sure, forbidden fruit is exhilarating when you bite into it, but its sweetness quickly vanishes. The bitter aftertaste of pornography or adultery—which seemed so promising at first—now haunts many of us. Sin promises sweetness, but its pleasure expires immediately and its aftertaste is always bitter. This is where we discover a chink in its armor. It has nothing to offer you down the road but regret and shame. As Matt Smethurst has said, “Sin always looks better through the windshield than the rearview mirror.”1

God’s promises are better. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” is a promise for the present and for the future. One day, the dim mirror of this life will give way to an unveiled encounter with the Lord (1 Cor. 13:12). Our “eyes will behold the king in his beauty” and we shall “see the glory of the Lord, / the majesty of our God” (Isa. 33:17; 35:2). Jesus’s promise of blessing for the pure in heart has that coming day in mind. A day when faith becomes sight and hope is fully realized. A day when sin will be a memory and temptation silenced forever. Sin’s corruption will be destroyed along with all desire to sin again.

Imagine being enraptured into the Trinitarian love that knows neither beginning nor end. Glory! “He will dwell” among us and will forever “be our God,” and forevermore we shall “see his face” (see Rev. 21–22). Those who love God are promised such a day.

But his promise is also for today. Right now, the pure in heart shall see God. Today we can know the blessedness—the happiness—of purity. I didn’t always believe this promise. I felt powerless over porn’s seduction and was easily charmed by the thrill of the moment. I conceded to being a child of God in chains. But Jesus came to free people like me from Satan’s propaganda.

Today, Jesus lays before your heart a more compelling beauty than the seductress. Yes, sin’s offering feels like it will fulfill you, but God’s offering will. You will never regret resisting sin. You will always regret giving in. I have never looked back on obedience with regret, nor on compromise with gratitude. Seeing God is both our eternal destiny and our daily delight.

God’s wisdom merges the promised then and present now in a way that strengthens us. Consider the words of the apostle John:

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. (1 John 3:2–3)

Longing to see God on that day propels his people to purity today. As we long to be with him then, we loathe for sin to be with us now. Hope in his presence then forces us to crucify anything that would make us unlike Jesus now. The promise associated with purity gives calendar-spanning hope.

Purity Clarified

Throughout the ages, religious subcultures have both tolerated and perpetuated clouded conceptions of purity. Some churches and “Christian” movements have forbidden sex apart from procreation, encouraged fleeing temptation in monasteries, or even outlawed marriage for church leaders. In the 1990s, thousands of teenage Christians vowed to wear “purity rings” as a pledge of abstinence until marriage. This well-intended gesture presented a narrow understanding of purity. For some, it gave the wrong impression that refusing to “go all the way” before marriage was enough to be pure. Those who embraced this perception of purity could have been prone to either pompous self-righteousness, if they kept on the right side of the line, or profound shame, if they caved to their passion.

But according to the Scriptures, purity can’t be reduced to a pledge to keep our pants on. Yes, God calls us to purity in our actions, but he also demands it in our affections. This, I believe, is a fuller understanding:

Purity is an orientation of the faith-filled heart that flees the pleasures of sin and pursues the pleasures of God by the power of the Holy Spirit.

For too long, I assumed “being pure” meant staying within a collection of lines in the sand. If I didn’t have extramarital sex or look at hardcore pornography or masturbate, then I was pure and kept God happy. If I crossed one of those lines, though, I dirtied myself and irritated him. This perspective produced a wearisome tossing between self-righteous assurance (when things were going well) and shameful guilt (when they weren’t). But Jesus teaches that purity is a posture of the heart, not a line in the sand.

Consider Jesus’s teaching on sexual purity: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt....