Blessed Are the Pure In Heart

Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.” But what exactly does it mean to have a pure heart? And how will they see God?

In the Bible the heart is the center of one’s being. It is the intersection of mind, will and emotion, the place where life’s most important decisions are made and carried out. No wonder wise Solomon warns us to “Keep your heart with all diligence, for from it flow all the issues of life.” (Proverbs 4:23). His warning also tells us that the heart is prone to wantonness. We have to actively engage in managing the heart, taming it and training it to right habits of thought and action lest it run us headlong into hedonism or deceive us into slavery.

Thus, to be pure in heart is to have an attitude of complete sincerity. It is to be the same in the dark as we are in the light, without hypocrisy, free from all deceit. To have a pure heart is also to care more about God and the things of God than we care for this world.

The model for this of course is Jesus, of whom the Bible says “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.” (1Pet. 2:22.) He was the same in the dark as he was in the light.

Yet you and I know people who, as John Stott says, “weave round themselves such a tissue of lies that they can no longer tell which part of them is real and which is make-believe.” You see, sometimes we are so afraid of the truth about ourselves that we pretend to be something other than what we really are. It is a great shame to live like that. We fear the opinion of others more than we fear God. Worse, we expect that if we were to be honest with God he would treat us with the same disdain that the world would treat us with. What a tragic deception!

Jesus is doing more than making a pithy saying about spirituality. He is making a promise: “Get real with God and He will get real with you. He will reveal himself to you in ways you cannot imagine.”

If you have been afraid of letting God see the real you take courage from Isaiah’s prophecy: For this is what the high and lofty One says-- he who lives forever, whose name is holy: "I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite. (Isa 57:15 NIV). When that happens, when contrition comes, we go from impurity to purity in a brief moment. Then the promise of Jesus comes true.
Proverbs 3:32 says God “takes the upright into his confidence.” He shares his thoughts with the pure. So blessed are the pure. God talks to them. And they can hear.