Matthew 5:8
Let’s give our attention to Matthew
chapter 5. We’ll read chapter 5 verses 1
through 12. And then our verse this night
is verse 8. Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God. But let’s read together from
the fifth chapter, beginning at verse 1. It says of the Lord
Jesus, seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain. And
when he sat down, his disciples came to him. He opened his mouth
and he taught them, saying, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn,
for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they
shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger
and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the
peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are
those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile
you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you
falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad for your
reward in heaven is great. And so also they persecuted the
prophets who were before you. Amen. This is God’s holy word.
So Matthew chapter five, verse eight, blessed are the pure in
heart for they shall see God. Remember last week we considered
this fact that when you go up on the mountain and have a spiritual
experience, you have to come down and put it into practice.
So whether you go to Bonkarken and come away with, what is it,
a good clear view? Is that what it means? or you
go down to Florida and you go to one of the Ligonier conferences,
or you go somewhere and you experience spiritual renewal and feeding,
you have to come down off that mountaintop experience and go
back into the real world. And you have to put into practice
the things you’ve learned. And so in the Beatitudes, Those
who are poor, who recognize their sin, their spiritual bankruptcy.
Those who mourn, who are sad over their sin. Those who are
meek or submissive to God and his control, his lordship over
us. And those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
they then have to go and put into practice the things they
learned. They have to be merciful. They have to be pure in heart.
and they have to be peacemakers. And then of course there’s suffering
for living for the king and so there’s persecution as well. So tonight we land at Matthew
chapter 5 verse 8, blessed are the pure in heart for they shall
see God. Now there are two impossible
things in this passage. One is having a pure heart. The
second is seeing God. So how is it possible that these
two impossible things can become possible? Hopefully I said that
right. How is it possible that these
two impossible things can become possible for us? Well, what’s
the simple answer? It’s not the first catechism.
It’s Jesus. That’s the answer. How is it
possible that the impossible becomes possible for us? Well,
the answer is Christ. Well, the first is the impossible
call. Blessed are the pure in heart.
So what does it mean to be pure in heart? Well, you might understand
it from a perspective that’s not about the human body. A lot
of you have gold on your fingers. And the more pure it is, the
more costly it is. The more costly it is, the more
pure it is. And when it’s pure, it’s more
beautiful. Some of you are probably wearing
a diamond and it probably shines and sparkles. And the nicer it
is, the fewer imperfections it has. Some of you are maybe wine
connoisseurs and you like wine, you like its flavors, you like
the things it has to offer. And you know that when it is
mixed with other things, other foreign, juices or flavors, you
know, it’s mixed. It’s not good or what it ought
to be. And so what does it mean to be
pure in heart? It means to be unmixed. It means
to be pure, to have impurities out of your system, out of your
life, out of your heart. Now, why is it an impossible
call to be pure in heart? Well, we have to think about
some facts. One is we’re born with the sin nature. Because
of Adam and Eve’s fall into sin, because of the sin nature that
we inherit by being children of Adam, we do daily break God’s
law and thought, word, and deed. I think this morning in Sunday
school it came up, why, maybe something about babies going
to heaven. Yes, that’s it. And so we were thinking about babies.
They are born with a sin nature. And what is it they need in order
to display that sin nature. They just need some motor skills.
And it usually comes in the form of, you know, a loud squawk,
a no, or a fist on the table, or clearing away the beets and
the carrots and splattering it all over the wall. It comes in
that form, but our sin nature is there. The prophets Jeremiah
and Ezekiel both tell us that we have hard hearts. When they
speak of the gospel and the coming of the Messiah, they speak of
having hearts of stone, hearts that are hard. Jesus speaks about
our hard hearts. He speaks of guarding our hearts. Guard our hearts for they are
the wellspring of life, Proverbs 4 tells us. But from out of the
overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks, from out of the overflow
of heart comes all kinds of evil, murder, adultery, Theft sexual
immorality all kinds of wickedness comes out of our hearts Before
we’re saved by Almighty God our motives and our desires Are wicked
those are the facts and they’re not good ones and they don’t
make a very strong case for us to be able to be pure in heart
because what’s true all the scrubbing all the All the washing, all
the right practices, all the right rituals, all the right
religion cannot give us pure hearts. It’s impossible. But
we’re thankful for the gospel, because the gospel can do something
about our sin nature. The gospel can do something about
our hard hearts. The gospel can do something about
our motives and our desires. And so what does God do with
our sin nature? He puts it to death. He crucifies
it at the cross of Calvary. What does God do with our hearts
of stone? He gives us hearts of flesh. That’s what Jeremiah teaches
us. Now that can be a little confusing because what does then
Paul go and say in Galatians, live by the spirit, not the flesh.
So then you say, well, you took my heart of stone and you gave
me a heart of flesh. And then the Bible says, don’t live by the flesh.
Okay, two different things. A heart of stone is just a hard
heart. A heart of flesh is tender and it’s malleable, it’s of use
to the kingdom. And so when the apostle Paul
speaks of the flesh, he’s referring to our sin nature. But the gospel
gives us new hearts, gives us a heart of flesh. And what happens when we have
that new heart? From it springs forth, from it springs forth
new obedience. Our Shorter Catechism speaks
of it very well when it asks us what is required of us to
escape the wrath and curse of God. He requires of us repentance
unto life. He requires that we endeavor
to live in the way of new obedience. We desire to live the right way,
not the wrong way. And we surround ourselves with the means of grace
in order that we can be fed, and we can be nurtured. And so
that new heart leads us to a new way of life. If anyone is in
Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone and the new
has come. And so you say, okay, that’s
all settled and done. I’m gonna have a pure heart because
of Jesus. I’m gonna have a pure heart because of salvation. I’m
gonna have a pure heart because of conversion. I’m gonna have
a pure heart because of sanctification. Well, bad news for you. The battle
of motives continues. Romans chapter seven is a wonderful
example where the Apostle Paul says, I know the thing that I
ought to do, and that is the very thing I do not do. And then he goes on to say, now
I know, did I get this right? I know what I ought not to do,
and that is the thing that I do. So what we’re not supposed to
do, we do. What we’re supposed to do, we don’t do. And that’s
the nature of the Christian life. Our sin is pardoned in our justification. God has forgiven us past, present,
and future. But our sin nature in us is only
subdued. It’s still there. It still rears
its ugly head. I like to liken it to like a
hot fire that you have in your life. You wake up in the morning
after that fire’s been hot and heated your house during the
night and you have a gray looking set of ashes. But if you scrape
those ashes back, there’s hot coals. And what will it take
to get that fire raging again? Well, you get the hot ashes back.
You add some fuel to that fire. You put a little oxygen in there
and you’ve got the fire going all over again. That’s what our
sin nature is like. It’s pardoned sin and it’s subdued
sin. It’s like those ashes have burned
down But all it takes is a little stirring. All it takes is a little
fuel. All it takes is a little something,
and that fire is raging again. And so we have a battle in our
Christian life of motives. Now, Sigmund Freud, the great
theologian, y’all know who he was, he said what motivates human
beings are two things, money and sexuality. And that can be
something that drives us as Christians. We want those two things just
as bad as others. But what does God tell us in
the scripture? He tells us to seek first the kingdom, to seek
first the things that he loves, to seek after them. And so if
God is promising here, blessed are the pure in heart. Is it
possible for us to have a pure heart? It is through the power
of the gospel. Is it going to be easy? No. We
have to think of the Christian life as two steps forward and
three steps backwards, sometimes it’s five steps forwards and
a step or two backwards. But in this life, until we reach
heaven, when our hearts are fully pure, we have to desire God,
we have to seek after him. We have to have some sort of
regimen, some sort of routine in life in order to follow after
him. Now, after the Reformation, there
was a group of people a set of recommendations that came from
the Westminster Divines. It comes through our Puritan
forefathers and it’s been handed down to us. And it’s simply this,
we have personal and private worship. We have family altar.
We have morning and evening church in our local congregations. We
have prayer meetings. We put ourselves in this regimen
of being near to God, being near to others, being close to God
and prayer. Now we’ve seen in the last 50
years, what have most churches done? They’ve shut down the prayer
meeting. They’ve shut down the evening
service. They’ve made spiritual life Sunday
morning only. The Lord’s day has turned really
into the Lord’s hour. And most people, if they make
it to church, it’s only to head off to be at the next thing of
the day. And we know life is busy. We
know all those sorts of things. but that has done something negative
to American culture, a culture that used to be steeped in Judeo-Christian
values. I was listening to an interview
with one of the men who taught me in seminary, and they asked
him what was his secret to 50 years of Christian ministry,
and he said simply, it was morning and evening worship and prayer
meeting. It was the study of the catechism. Reading my Bible
privately, he said, three chapters a day, five on Sundays. It was
being together with his family around the word of God. And then
they asked him, how did you raise such good kids? And he said,
well, I took them to church on Sunday morning, Sunday evening.
We went to prayer meeting together. We read the Bible. We read the
catechism together. He talked about how he used to
give them chocolates for every catechism, they would say. He
said a little motivation to the human heart helped. But you see,
there’s something about a regimen, a daily routine, a weekly routine,
a Sabbath routine that helps us grow in grace so that we can
be pure in heart. How many people go to the gym?
How many people go to a personal trainer? How many people go to
their karate instructor and follow, what is it, his dojo? How many
people have a routine that they follow about fundamental things
in life, may it be the body how they maintain their yard, or
how often they wash their car, or their yearly checkups at the
doctor, their diets, whatever the case may be. But we so often
neglect simple things, simple routines that can help us love
and follow God. We have to put God before our
eyes often. And we know the setbacks that
come when we get away from the Lord, when our Bible stays on
the nightstand, it’s unopened, Maybe it stays in the car or,
heaven forbid, we leave it at church, holding the pew down
all week so it doesn’t blow away. We know the danger that comes.
Now, some might say having a regimen or a routine, maybe it’s legalistic. Maybe it’s not called for in
the Bible. But wouldn’t we rather be found
going hard after God in the same way that we go after others?
Remember last week’s sermon, on the Apostle Paul saying that
he pursues holiness. And what is it? He pursues it
with all he has until he captures it, until he sees it. And so
there’s a high calling for us to strain towards the goal, to
lean in towards the prize. You might even say, and someone
probably said this about you when you first became a Christian,
so-and-so is a Christian fanatic. You know what it means to be
a fanatic, right? We go yesterday to the Duke football game, and
I mean, some of us wore blue, but the fanatics, what did they
do? They had the wig on. They had their face painted.
They had the little blue devil on their cheeks. And on and on
it may go. You go to a Tar Heel game or,
you know, the local Williams High School football game on
homecoming night, and there are the fanatics. They’re really
into it. They want to be all in. And God calls us to be that
about himself, to have no other rivals in our lives. You know, we say things like
anybody but Duke, or anybody but Carolina, or anybody but
whoever our favorite team is, and we get pretty fastidious
about it. We’re pretty firm on our sports
convictions. But aren’t we that way about
the things of the Lord? Are there other rivals in our life? I mean,
after all, what does the first couple of commandments say? I
am the Lord your God. I brought you out of the land
of Egypt. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not
make for yourselves graven images. You shall not make, or you shall
remember the Sabbath day, keep it holy. You shall not take the
name of the Lord your God in vain. You see, the first four
commandments teach us our allegiance towards God. And in that allegiance
toward God, we can then serve others on the second portion
of God’s table and law. There’s another impossible call,
blessed are the pure in heart. Okay, that’s gonna be difficult,
but it’s possible. God makes it possible. The word makes it
possible, the spirit, but there’s another impossible call. And
that is this, it’s to see God’s face. You read throughout the
scriptures, those who wanted to see God’s face, they could
not. For what did God say? If you see my face, no man can
see my face and live. The holiness of God is a terrifying
thing. The holiness of God is something
that a sinful person cannot stand to be in the presence of. And
so we cannot see God’s face and live. Moses, who was the closest
to God, the closest to God, God passed by his backside. He passed
by the back of him and Moses’ face shone with glory. He came
nearer to God than anyone else. We have to remember this, though.
God has made us with a God-sized hole in our lives. In our body,
there’s a void. In our daily life, there’s a
void. It’s a God-sized void. And until we get back into the
presence of God, life is unfulfilled. Remember that back in the garden,
when Adam and Eve sinned, one of the most difficult things
that came to them as a curse, not necessarily the pain and
childbearing or the relational struggles, or the hard red clay
of the dirt and the weeds and all that, although that is a
curse. It’s we lost fellowship with God. We lost communion with
God. We lost the face-to-face relationship
with God and only through the redemption that Christ has accomplished
on the cross is it possible that we can have fellowship with God.
But how is it that we are going to be in the presence of God
and see His face and live? Well, again, the only answer
is Christ. He’s made it possible for us to be clothed in righteousness
and to be able to enter the presence of Almighty God. And so one of
the things God is at work doing is He’s making us now fit for
heaven. And that’s a process that will
take our entire lives. It’s a process that will be up
and down and back and forth It will be painful, it will be demoralizing,
it will be fraught with difficulty, but that’s what God is at work
doing. And when will we be made able to enjoy the presence of
God? It’s only upon death. It’s only
upon our glorification that we can enter into the presence of
Almighty God. We will see His face and we will
live. So what’s the greatest thing
as Christians that we can possess? Well, it’s to be in the presence
of Almighty God. In John chapter 14, Jesus promises
his disciples, in my Father’s house are many rooms, many mansions,
but were not so, I wouldn’t have told you. I’m gonna go and I’m
gonna go prepare a place for you. What does Thomas say? How
do I get there? Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except
through me. And then a few sentences later,
Thomas the doubter says to Jesus, show us the father and that will
be enough. What does he wanna say? He wants
to behold the face of almighty God. And what does Jesus say
to him? If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the father and that should
be sufficient. One of the blessings that we
have as Christians is that in this life, it is possible for
us to be pure in heart. It’s difficult. And what do we
say about somebody when they’re not all in? We say they’re half-hearted. And we can be half-hearted Christians.
We can be in the Lord’s house on Sunday, wearing our suit,
looking nice and neat. We brushed our teeth. We did
our hair. We come and we look religious. We look happy. We
look full of the spirit. But all during the rest of the
week, we can live as if Sunday never happened, if Calvary never
occurred, if the word wasn’t sufficient or able to change
us. But it is possible for us by God’s grace to live a life
of purity and heart on this earth. But it’s especially possible
in heaven through Christ and the blessing. The blessing of
it is that we will see God as he is face to face. Let’s pray
together. Our Lord and God, we thank you
and bless you for this wonderful truth that You’re at work in
our lives and part of the reward of that work is that we will
see you face to face in Glory. We pray that you’d help us to
love you more to set our affections on you into greater things and
we long for the presence of Almighty God when we will see our God
our creator and our Redeemer face to face forever and we pray
for your help and grace in this in Christ’s name. Amen.