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PURE IN HEART

Matthew 5:9

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

One of my favorite spiritual songs is Change My Heart O God by Eddie Espinoza. The lyrics read,

“Change my heart oh God.

Make it ever true.

Change my heart oh God

May I be like you.”

Purity of heart goes deeper than actions. It is purity of motives, purity of desire, purity of devotion to God and His righteousness. Purity of heart is purity in the very depth of your being. Purity can mean sinlessness. There is a sense in which purity means single mindedness. It also means transparency especially before God. And the promise here fits this latter meaning well. If you are open and transparent before God, He can reveal Himself to you. Purity of heart does not mean ultimate sinlessness except in the life of Jesus. But it does mean a willingness to be honest with God about our sins.

And I think it must extend to honesty with people, not operating with hidden motives. Someone once told me about hearing someone say about a friend, “He pretends to like me, but he probably talks about my behind my back.”

The man answered him, “No, you're wrong. He (the friend he was talking about) is as pure as water.” But to be honest, it is easier to give examples of underhanded motives than pure hearts. That is until we think about Jesus. One of the best places to observe His pure motives is when He was attacked and accused by the religious leaders. His purity always showed up their false motives.

In the 21st chapter of Matthew Jesus entered the temple not long after driving out the money changers. The scribes and Pharisees challenged Him asking by what authority He did those things.

Jesus said, “I will answer you if you will answer one question. ‘The baptism of John was it from heaven or from man?’”They talk among themselves saying, 'If we say it is from Heaven,’ he will ask us why we didn't believe in John. But if we say, 'It was from Men,’ We will lose popularity because all the people held John as a prophet.” He had them by their own prejudices. This is not the only example of their duplicity. Again and again they revealed their false motives.

So in Matthew 5:20 Jesus told us,

“Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

But Jesus was saying much more about our righteousness in this verse. He was saying unless His righteousness, His purity of heart, was given to us by God, we could never in our own righteousness enter the kingdom of heaven.

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How polished should our prayers be when we pray to God? It's one of many questions Christians, and many non-Christians alike, carry with them in life.

Recently, I was reminded about how beautiful the prayer of a newborn Christian can be. It's a prayer spoken from the heart, in their own natural vernacular (which likely isn't politically correct, and may include swear words, unrefined verbiage, poor grammar, and more linguistic faux pas). It's a prayer that's raw, transparent, authentic, personal and speaks directly to God's heart.

I've witnessed men receiving Christ while reading a prepared "sinner's prayer," only then afterwards to pray/speak similar thoughts directly from their hearts to God, using their own words. Sometimes coarse words fly during the prayer, but it's obvious that they're not said in vengeance. They're spoken in confession and repentance. It's rather a beautiful context to hear those words spoken that many legalistic Christians would outright dismiss!

While I don't condone the use of foul language in prayer (especially if the Christian has been growing in his/her faith and walk with God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit), for someone who has yet to come to faith, or who is beginning to place his/her faith in Jesus, God will not ignore the prayer from a person's heart towards His.

We're reminded by Jesus in Luke 18:9-14 that a prideful heart hinders prayer, but a humble heart is honored by God:

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

As a Christian who can fall into a trap of feeling his prayers must sound a certain way, possibly with a certain flow or elegance; it's a humbling reminder that we need not perform before our Father. He's impressed with the position of the heart (especially a heart humbled towards Himself), and not the outward words or actions in prayer that can often appeal far more for man's impressions than to God Himself. Prayerful actions will flow out of the humbled heart, and it is God who searches the heart, not man.

We should never feel paralyzed from praying simply because we're not sure if we can word a prayer "correctly." Jesus gave us an excellent model of prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) that we will do well to both pray, and study in depth!

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PURE IN HEART

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