“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Matthew 5:8
A trip to the grocery store can be an educational experience in that you might learn some new words and phrases such as monosodium glutamate, sodium nitrite, sodium benzoate, and carrageenan, just to name a few. Rare is the product advertised as pure and unadulterated that excludes these items from the food label.
According to Jesus, the key to kingdom lifestyle is an unadulterated life. Our life food label, so to speak, needs to be purged of harmful additives that dilute and pollute the pure essence of a life centered on our Creator; much easier said than done.
Few things are easier than living a conflicted and distracted life. Urgent needs and pressing priorities demand our attention, and our energies and focus are easily fragmented into countless pieces. And yet making the main thing the main thing, as Stephen Covey states, is easily lost amidst the frenetic pace of life.
The pursuit of the pure heart is likely the goal of any who read these words. The goal may seem hopelessly elusive, but it is the goal nevertheless. As a fellow pursuer, I can only offer this bit of advice: the more we honestly face our true broken spiritual condition, and passionately seek a solution, the more we savor and value saving grace such that we pursue the pure heart. Deep, heartfelt gratitude stirs a pure heart desire.
The thing about Jesus’ entire Sermon On the Mount is that it seems to brutally assault any and all self-righteousness. He takes sin from the level of action to intention of heart. If we had even the slightest sense of self-righteousness that could cause us to curb action, we utterly fail when Jesus identifies thought as the root cause. But this may be His very intent in all that He teaches: to empty us of all pretense of personal righteousness so that we might come empty-handed before the throne of grace to receive what we could never earn.
I fail miserably at being pure in heart, but in that failure I may be in the best position of all to ever achieve what I do not have. The intent, then, of Jesus’ Beatitudes might be summed up this way: “Blessed are those who fully face their brokenness, because they are then truly ready to receive wholeness.”
©Steve Taylor, 2022 --Used by permission
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