How can any of us see God if we are expected to be pure? This devotion looks at how God can expect humans to be pure.
Nuggets
- God wants us to get back to where Adam and Eve were before the original sin, which we can through grace.
- Nothing we can do or give up will purify us.
- Only God can remove our sins — when we ask and repent of our sins.
- If we don’t have the pure heart — or at least are not working toward it — we don’t see God.
Devotions in the The Beatitudes Show Us How to be Docile series
Okay, I am not going to lie. To me, this verse is one of the scariest in the Bible.
How is anyone — especially me — going to get to see God?
We aren’t pure. Far from it.
But we are studying docile, so there is hope for us yet.
Let's Put It into Context
Docile means easily taught. As we grow in our relationship with God, we are blessed.
Blessedness means we have been perfected. For the disciple, perfection is holy, sanctified, and righteous.
Holy means to be set apart, perfect, and pure. Sanctification is the process where our lives are changed, and we made holy. Righteousness is the result of a solid relationship with God. Blackall said that righteousness is “living a life in sincere and perfect obedience to all the laws of God.”
Yep. Here we go with the heart again.
We talked about the greatest commandment before in How Do We Love God?. Depending on which book you read, it is love the Lord with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Heart is always listed first.
We’ve talked in Peace, Mercy, and Love about God’s peace, mercy and love being at our center. Our center — our innermost being — is considered our hearts. That is our foundation.
Also, we’ve talked in The Fullness of God’s Love about how Jesus is the Word (Jn. 1: 1) that we are to hide in our hearts (Ps. 119: 11). Jesus is a major part of that foundation.
In Have We Lost Our First Love?, we talked about how we have to open our hearts to allow Jesus to take full residence within them. We lose our first love when we either don’t allow Him full control or we kick Him out after a while.
Obedience has to come from the heart. In Getting Obedience to the Heart Level, we said God’s Word is supposed to be a part of us. His laws and commandments are supposed to affect our character or our core – our heart level. If we are to engrave God’s laws and commandments on our hearts, we internalize them, and they change us.
To read a related devotion, click the appropriate button below.
When we look up purity in the Holman Bible Dictionary, it sends us to the definition of clean/unclean, which we have also talked about before.
The Holman Bible Dictionary states that “cleanness was thus fundamental to the establishing and preservation of holiness in the Israelite community.”
It isn’t just knowing the difference between good and evil. It isn’t just keeping as far away from evil as we can. We have to discipline our minds to remain pure.
To read a related devotion, click the button below.
We Are Clean
“Blessed are the pure in heart …” (Mt. 5: 8 CSB)
God calls us to be pure in heart. He wants us to get back to where Adam and Eve were before the original sin. We can do that through grace (Caroming).
Jordan stated that purity is “… the purity of the thoughts and desires” and “… leads to purity of worship” and life. I can see this because it has to incorporate our mind and soul. All of that bubbles out of us as worship.
We know the concept. “Jesus replied, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind’” (Mt. 22: 37 NLT).
However, God know our hearts are not pure because of the sin in our lives. Hull wrote, “But, there is no purity apart from the absolute authority of God in the affections. Man is not made by negatives.”
Let’s break that apart. Human nature is not clean. Our hearts will always be wicked (sinful) because of our human nature (Jer. 17: 9).
Let’s restate that. Our hearts will always be wicked (sinful) unless we ask God in our hearts to purify us. Only God can remove the sin in our lives.
Look at the “… in the affectations.” There is no purity in the artificial or that which is designed to impress the worldview people.
We have to have God as Sovereign Lord to have the purity. Nothing we can do or give up will purify us. (Doing the do’s and not doing the don’ts doesn’t make us pure.)
Think about it this way. The worldview notion is that we have to fight for our success.
God’s notion is that purity comes from the heart. It is more who we are — our character — than what we do. It is where Jesus and the Holy Spirit live within us.
We can have motivations that are, in reality, taking us down a wrong path. We can do and do and do that will get us nowhere.
Only God can remove our sins — when we ask and repent of our sins. He wants to restore our balance.
Seeing God
“… for they will see God” (Mt. 5: 8 CSB)
We had a whole series awhile back on seeing God.
To read devotions in the Seeking God series, click the appropriate button below.
We generally think of “seeing God” to mean face to face. And we will — whatever that means. We will be in His Presence.
But we can see God now. We can see
- How He satisfies our desires.
- How He gives us hope.
- How He sustains us through our trials.
- How He is correcting us when we sin.
- How He is transforming us through sanctification.
- How He is fulfilling the promises in His Word.
- The peace and the joy that He brings.
But if we don’t have the pure heart — or at least are not working toward it — we don’t see God. He gets lost in the rat race of this world. We take our focus off Him and put it no ourselves and our own lives.
Making the Connections
One thing we don’t focus on is that it is not about us. The only way we begin to become pure is to admit our sins, believe Jesus is our Savior and Redeemer, and confess God as Sovereign Lord.
The ABCDs of Salvation
If you have not become a believer in Christ, please read through the
Plan of Salvation and prayerfully consider what God is asking you to do.A – admit our sins
B – believe His Son Jesus is our Redeemer
C – confess God as Sovereign Lord
If you have not become a believer in Christ, please read through the Plan of Salvation and prayerfully consider what God is asking you to do.
D – demonstrate that commitment by making any changes needed in our lives to
live the way in which God has called us
The Disciple’s Job Description
Once we do, God call us to have a change of heart. This happens two ways: regeneration and sanctification. Oh, yeah. Churchy words.
Regeneration is the change in us that God brings about when we go from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive. This change has to be in our hearts.
It is where God breaks Satan’s hold on us. Only God has the power to do that, and He only does when we admit our sins, believe on Jesus as Redeemer, and confess God as Sovereign Lord.
To read a related devotion, click the button below.
We’ve talked a lot about sanctification recently. It can be a little difficult for some to understand.
Sanctification is “the process of being made holy resulting in a changed life-style for the believer” (Holman Bible Dictionary). We are sanctified through faith. It is the evidence of justification and our conversion and how we get to righteousness.
It is learning — acquiring wisdom — so that we can grow in grace and knowledge. Sanctification happens at conversion, but it is also a growing process.
Sanctification separates us from our old lives and builds a new life in Christ. This is done by the work of the Holy Spirit’s promptings.
The transformation discussed in Romans 12: 2 happens in sanctification. This growth in grace and knowledge changes our nature.
Sanctification should be a complete deal. It should be mind, body, and soul. We are to submit to God’s loving kindness with all of our being.
To read a related devotion, click the appropriate button below.
Making the Connections to Self-Discipline
I love what Caroming said. He wrote, “[Purity] is a living principle, ever powerful, ever resisted, yet never beaten, growing daily in aspirations and likeness, until it is made perfect by seeing Christ as He is, when we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.”
It is a living principle. It is growing daily. It is being sanctified.
Being sanctified is a process built on our learning — our growth. We have to be disciplined in that growth.
How Do We Apply This?
Good cautioned us that we can have the purity without the holiness. But it won’t get us anywhere.
Well, that shoots down the worldview people’s assumption that they can just be good and get to heaven.
How do we achieve purity? Purity is:
- “the mind renewed,
- “the disordered spirit restored, and
- “conformed to the ‘image of God,’ in righteousness and true holiness.”
Talk about the outcome of sanctification!
But it has to be genuine. We must be working to transform ourselves to imitate God. We have to take responsibility for our actions and inactions.
God calls us to be pure in heart. I think that is another instance of the past, present, and future aspects in one word.
At conversion, we are made pure because we are given God’s heart. But it is a process to become like Him. That process won’t be complete until we reach heaven.
God calls us to be pure in heart. Let that be our goal today.
Father God. We want to have a heart like Yours — pure and holy. Lord, change us until that is accomplished. Amen,
What do you think?
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