Matthew 5:8 - July 7, 2024

Mount Zion Community Church

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So I talk a lot about context and I talk a lot about making sure that we read scripture in the proper way, that we read scripture within the big picture so that we understand what it truly means and we don't take it out and have it mean something we want it to mean.

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But in a weird way, it's almost a little comforting to me to note that it's not only

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Bible verses that people just sort of brutally rip out of their proper context to misuse for their own benefit.

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So evidently, it's just human nature for us to do this and that's going to tie in very strongly with our scripture today.

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But as I was preparing this week and doing some research and reading some stuff, I ran across one of those lines that people love to use, one of those sort of catch phrases that we have now that people use to justify their behavior, to justify a variety of choices.

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And this one is actually even more interesting because it sounds like it could have come from the

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Bible. So the line that I read is this, to thine own self be true. I mean, it's got the word thine in it, right?

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So it sounds like it could have come straight out of the Bible, just like something else that has thee or thou or thus or whatever.

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It seems like something you might find in the book of Proverbs, but of course it isn't. And I know that some of you already know this, but this is a line from Shakespeare.

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And more specifically, it's a line from Hamlet, yet it's become almost a cultural cliche for a lot of people.

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And one of the ways that this would be commonly translated into modern English and applied directly to an individual's life would be with the phrase, follow your heart.

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But I have my doubts that Shakespeare, when he wrote this line, intended for it to be surgically removed from its context.

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So I looked up, I was just curious. This is one line in a play. How many lines does Hamlet have in it?

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Over 4 ,100, so 4 ,175 lines. So my point is that I doubt that he intended for this line to be removed as a standalone piece of cultural wisdom that people would use to justify making big decisions in their lives.

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So we see that context is important in a lot of different situations.

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And I didn't even get into the context of Hamlet, which we could have done that as well. Yet here we are, and the fundamental misapplication of this idea has become a fundamental guiding principle for a lot of people, this idea of following your heart or to thine own self be true.

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But just so we're clear at the beginning, I'll say this, I think the idea of following your heart is a terrible idea.

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I think it's terrible advice. I think if you've ever told anybody that they should follow their heart, you should apologize.

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And this is the same kind of advice that's along the lines of just do what makes you happy, or the heart wants what the heart wants, or if it feels good, do it.

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All bad advice for us. One pastor had this to say, follow your heart has ended more marriages, mutilated more bodies, destroyed more souls, and ended more lives than the devil could ever have imagined.

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It is hell's most effective slogan yet. But why is this?

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Because even though I said just a second ago, if you've ever told somebody to follow your heart, that you should apologize to them,

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I would say with a very high degree of confidence. And when you told somebody that, it was with the best of intentions.

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You didn't tell them that to try to send them down some path to hell. You were trying to hell.

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But if there's one thing that we should know by now, it's that intentions aren't really what's the most important.

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Outcomes are what matter. There's always secondary or unforeseen consequences to everything.

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Even what we think and feel is the best idea. But the real reason that the idea of following your heart or living based on how you feel is so tragically misguided is because of the sinful state of the human heart.

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And I'm not telling you anything that would surprise you at this point if you've been here for more than one week.

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And because of this, because of the state of our heart, your emotions and your feelings are not a good standard for you to live your life.

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They're not a good standard for you to make decisions on how you do things or don't do things.

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In fact, your feelings and your emotions are often going to lead you in a direction that is just completely contrary to the will of God.

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However, I feel happy right now because this gives me a chance to yet again bring out one of my favorite verses about the heart.

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And that's Jeremiah 17, nine. And I want to add verse 10 as well. Jeremiah 17, nine and 10 says, the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick.

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Some translations say wicked. This one, LSB says sick. Who can know it?

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And then verse 10, I, Yahweh, search the heart. I test the inmost being, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.

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And it's actually the second half of that, verse 10, that leads directly into our beatitude for this week.

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So we're now at Matthew chapter five, verse eight, and that says, blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see

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God. And a lot of people consider this actually to be the pinnacle of the beatitudes.

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They consider this beatitude to be the climax of this part of the sermon on the Mount. And it's because the five beatitudes that have come before are all essentially leading up to this point.

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And then the two that follow after it are essentially flow out of what we learn from this beatitude.

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And I also don't think that it's an exaggeration to say that for each and every one of us, God's greatest concern is the state of our heart, and specifically the purity of our heart.

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And we actually see this, going back to the idea of context, we see this in the context of the book of Matthew and where the sermon on the

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Mount is coming. As I've told you before, the Jews at this time, they were under the oppressive rule of the

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Romans. So politically, they were taken advantage of. Economically, they were taken advantage of.

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But one thing that they had was religion. And they thought that they were good at religion. So they thought when the

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Messiah was coming, that he was gonna congratulate them on how good they were with their religious stuff, and he was gonna take care of all the political, all the economic oppression, all that kind of suffering.

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But Jesus didn't come to change political systems. I've told people that before.

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He didn't come to change economic, he didn't come to change tax policy, or to change what politicians were doing.

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He came to address the hearts of individual believers, and that is the way that change comes from society.

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That's what Jesus came to address. If you strip everything else away, we see that Jesus came to deal with our hearts.

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Now, one of the most common criticisms that people outside the church have of Christianity, and when

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I say outside the church, what I actually mean is people that are outside of a true saving knowledge of what

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Christianity is, or what it means to be a Christian. And I have to make that distinction, because you can be in a church and still be outside of the church.

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You can be here every single week and still not understand this. You can come every week and still think that what we do is just a bunch of rules and a bunch of behaviors that we have to follow.

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And that's a misunderstanding. It's not a bunch of oppressive rules that stop people from doing what they want.

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It's not a bunch of ideas that keep us from having fun. There's a couple of things wrong with that idea.

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And not so ironically, they both point back to issues of the heart. What I'm mainly referring to here is the idea that you can boil the essence of Christianity down to a checklist of external behaviors.

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And again, if you've listened to me even a couple of times, you already know that I'm gonna tell you that that's not the case.

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It's not about behaviors. It's not about checklists of right and wrong things that you do to get where you wanna go, which is heaven.

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Even beyond the fact that you could never earn your salvation through good deeds or good works. I wanna highlight two other important points about this.

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Now the first one is that you can sincerely believe, or if you prefer, you can sincerely feel that you are doing the right thing even when you're not.

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And the second is that you can do good works with an impure heart.

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So let's look at the first one. You can sincerely believe that you are doing the right thing even when you're not.

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And a perfect example of this in scripture is the prophets of Baal.

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If we turn to 1 Kings, we're in 1 Kings chapter 18, and we're just looking at verses 26 and 28, but what's going on here is this is when

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Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal to prove that their God was real, while he was gonna prove that Yahweh, the one true

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God, was real by burning the fire on the altar. So we pick this story up in verse 26, it says, and this is the prophets of Baal.

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Then they took the ox which was given them, and they prepared it and called on the name of Baal from morning until noon, saying,

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O Baal, answer us. But there was no voice and no one answered. And they limped about the altar which they had made.

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Now it happened at noon that Elijah mocked them, and this is probably one of the greatest jokes in all of scripture, that Elijah mocked them and said,

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Call out with a loud voice, for he is a God. Either he is occupied or relieving himself or is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and needs to be awakened.

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Elijah said, Maybe your God's going to the bathroom. So they cried with a loud voice and gashed themselves, according to their custom, with swords and lances until the blood gushed out of them.

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Now just so you know how that story ends, in case you haven't read it, their God never did bring fire down on that altar and burn up their sacrifice, whereas God did.

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But I would suggest to you that for whatever reason, these people sincerely believed they were doing the right thing.

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These prophets, for whatever reason, sincerely believed that they were worshiping the right

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God to the point where they had this tremendous level of commitment. I mean, again, if you look at verse 28, they're cutting themselves, they're harming their own bodies, and that's commitment.

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That, for whatever else you think of it, that is truly a commitment to your cause. But it was all for nothing, because no matter how sincere they were, no matter how much they truly believed in their heart that they were doing the right thing and that Baal was truly the

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God of the universe, they were chasing a lost cause. And that's part of the reason why my heart absolutely is broken.

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For certain people, people that I consider friends, like these are people that I know, who they're sincere, they're committed, they're honorable

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Muslims or Mormons or Roman Catholics.

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They're sincere, they're committed, they think that's right, but they're headed down the wrong path.

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They are sincerely committing to something that's not going where they think it's going. The scripture tells us that Jesus himself is literally the only way to heaven in John 14 6.

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I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. That obviously means other gods, but it also means yourself.

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It also means there's nothing you can do, there's no work, deed, action you can take to get in that direction.

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But on the topic of sincerely believing you're doing the right thing, or even not knowing that you're doing the wrong thing, we have the story of Abimelech in Genesis.

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So Abimelech was a king, and when

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Abraham and Sarah went into his land, Abraham was so scared that they were gonna kill him that he told

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Abimelech that Sarah was his sister, not his wife. So Abimelech thought she was beautiful and took her to be one of his wives.

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Now, and I think that we can all agree that sexual intimacy with another person's spouse is wrong.

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End of story. There's no case where it's right. There's no excuse you can make for that.

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And even non -believers, even people that aren't Christians will mostly believe that to be the case just on the basis of commonly held moral beliefs or commonly held ethical beliefs, which all come from the

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Bible, by the way, but that's a different day. Although in the case of unbelievers, a lot of times that follow your heart will allow them to make up an elaborate system of justifications or excuses for why it's okay in this situation.

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But back to Abimelech. So again, Sarah was Abraham's wife, and Abimelech, he didn't know this.

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He had been told that she was not. Now, this opens up, the fact that he added her to his group of wives, it opens up another rabbit hole where we talk about issues related to polygamy and other things like that.

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And that's not what we're talking about today. But I do want to say this because this is a question that comes up a lot when people say,

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I don't understand the Old Testament. We have incest, we have polygamy, we have all these things.

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But if you look at the greater context of Scripture, if you look at the Bible as a whole, and I am going down a little bit of a rabbit hole here, you will see in the context of it, if you want to see this, that because the

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Bible is a historical record in addition to the other things that it is, when it describes incidents of polygamy or other sexual sins, these stories are descriptive.

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They're not prescriptive, which means they're describing something that happened, but they're not saying that you should do it.

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It's part of what happened. And that is an interesting way to me to actually defend the truth of the

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Bible, is that all the bad stuff is not taken out so that everything looks perfect and everything looks right.

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We see that even great people of God, great men of God and women of God are sinners.

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But back to our story. Well, again, sorry, one more thing. A lot of groups will use these kinds of stories to justify things.

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They'll say this is the biblical standard, polygamy, multiple wives, whatever it is, not the purpose.

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So now back to the story. So how do we know that Abimelech was not simply exercising his power as king?

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How do we know that he was not just doing whatever he wanted because he could do whatever he wanted?

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We know this because God himself tells us. Genesis 20, verses 3 through 7.

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But God came to Abimelech in a dream of the night and said to him, behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is married.

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Now Abimelech had not come near her. Then he said, Lord, will you kill a nation even though righteous?

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Did he not himself say to me, she is my sister? And she herself also said, he is my brother.

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In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands, I have done this.

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But again, watch out for these phrases, the integrity and innocence of my heart.

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Then God said to him in the dream, indeed, I know that in the integrity of your heart, you have done this.

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And I also held you back from sinning against me. Therefore, I did not let you touch her.

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So now return the man's wife, for he is a prophet and he will pray for you and you will live. But if you do not return her, know that you shall surely die, you and all who are yours.

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So God intervened, but God intervened because what he was doing was a sin, even though he didn't know that it was a sin, even though he had been lied to, that was still somebody else's wife.

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So the point here is that despite whatever assumptions you have, and despite how sincere your beliefs are, you can still be doing something wrong.

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When you follow your heart, you can still be going in the wrong direction.

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So ignorance is no excuse, and neither is a sincere belief in your righteousness. Now, point number two, you can do good deeds with a bad heart.

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So you don't have to be a good person to do good things for other people. And I think this confuses

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Christians in a lot of cases, which is why it's important to understand what the Bible teaches about the heart and the

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Beatitudes here. I think that part of the reason for this is it comes from this deeply ingrained belief that we can still earn

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God's favor. We feel like there's still something that we can do to earn our salvation.

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And the reason we feel this way is because this is how we interact with other people. We are nice to somebody, and they're nice to us.

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It's kind of a quid pro quo type of interaction that we have. So there's that, but we also have a deep suspicion of anything that's free.

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And God's grace has been freely given to each and every one of us. Again, Jesus paid the cost for those sins.

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And he didn't say, Jesus paid for your sins. Now, if you do this, this, and this, you will be saved.

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Well, I guess the this, this, and this is to believe, and that's pretty much it. Have faith, and you'll be saved.

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But again, that's not the way things work in our everyday life. That's not the way things work in 3D, where we are right now.

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Maybe you've heard the phrase, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. That's a pretty common one. And in the world, it is true.

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There's always, always strings attached to free stuff. For example, social media, Facebook, that kind of stuff is free.

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But as a result of that service being free, there is an unfathomable amount of data about you that is collected and sitting in a cloud somewhere.

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I mean, I don't know if this is true or not, but I've even heard that if you start a post on Facebook, and you type stuff up, and you put a picture on there, and then you decide not to do it, it's still stored somewhere.

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Again, I don't know if that's true. But, so social media is free, but that's because you're the product.

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Another example, do you want that free meal? Or do you want that free hotel stay?

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Or the free tickets to that show? Well, you can have them, but you have to sit through a multiple hour, high, high, high, high, high pressure timeshare sales pitch.

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So that free stuff comes with a very, very high cost.

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It's just not financial. So when it comes to that free offer of the grace from God through Jesus, we can intellectually accept it.

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We can process it in our mind. We can agree to it based on the concept.

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But in the back of our head, we think there has to be a catch. We think nothing else is free.

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How can this really be free? Surely we have to do something so that we don't trust, even though it's clear in scripture, we don't trust that it's just simply through faith that we earn our salvation.

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And that's super ironic, right? We don't even have faith in faith. So when we see people who are just vocally anti -God, who are militant atheists, and we see them do good things, they treat us well.

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They treat other people well. We wonder how that could be, because Christians are the ones that do good things.

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And to make it worse, we'll see people that are vocally pro -God, or who claim to be

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Christians doing bad things, or even just less than good things. And that causes such a huge conflict in our mind.

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But that's why we have to come back to the foundational principle here, that scripture doesn't teach us that it's the good works that make a

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Christian, or that make a saved Christian. It's not good works that make us right with God. It's the heart.

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And this is why we see such a focus on the heart. Now, the prime example of this is the

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Pharisees. We talked about that system of Jewish religious law a little bit ago, and they were the masters of it.

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Some people say that there are over 600 laws, which could condemn you if you broke even a single one of them.

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And the Pharisees were renowned for being able to perfectly keep all those laws. You know that list of behaviors that we talked about, that people say, oh,

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I don't wanna be a Christian, you gotta do all this stuff. Well, that's what the Pharisees were masters of. The Pharisees were the experts at those things.

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Yet, despite the outward appearance of religious perfection, their hearts weren't right, and Jesus knew this.

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Matthew 23, 25, he says this, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self -indulgence.

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And a little bit after that, in chapter 23, verse 27, he says, again, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.

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So those are basically two ways of saying that you can look good on the outside while you're rotten on the inside.

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Because everything, everything comes back to the heart. We have to talk about this issue of the heart a little bit as well.

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One of the most well -known and often quoted verses on this is Proverbs 23, even though there's tons of verses that talk about the heart.

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But this one says, guard your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.

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Now again, we gotta spend a little bit of time here, because the concept of the heart is something that we actually have to fully understand in order to grasp the meaning, not only of this beatitude, but to grasp the meaning of a lot of things that are going on throughout

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Scripture, throughout a lot of verses that you'll come across. And the reason

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I say we have to understand the heart is because in the context of the time that this is being written, or in the time that this is being preached, their idea of what the heart is is way different from ours.

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It's a difference of degrees. As we think of the heart, you know, physically, on one hand, we think of the heart as an organ that pumps blood throughout our body, and it keeps us alive.

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Okay, great. Well, that's, you know, in a medical textbook. But in a more metaphorical sense, we think of the heart as the source of our feelings and the source of our desires.

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And while this is also true in the biblical context, it's not really a complete description of what the heart is.

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So the writers of Scripture, the people listening to Jesus as he preached, they would have understood the heart as something much more than this.

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They would have understood the heart as literally the center and the foundation of everything that a person was.

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Martin Lloyd -Jones says this, according to the general scriptural usage of the term, the heart means the center of the personality.

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It does not merely mean the seat of the affections and emotions. And he goes on to say this, it is the center of man's being and personality.

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It is the fount out of which everything else comes. It includes the mind. It includes the will.

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It includes the heart. It is the total man, and that is a thing our Lord emphasizes.

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So if we understand the heart to be the center of who we truly are, I mean, again, everything comes out of this.

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Your spiritual life, your mental life, the things that you do, they all flow out of the heart.

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It's not just temporary fleeting feelings. It is your whole life.

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So understanding that, hopefully we see that this idea of the heart and this understanding of the heart is much more than just something that comes and goes, is essential to understanding this beatitude and essential to living out this beatitude.

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As your heart is, so shall you be. Which means if your heart is dirty, if your heart is corrupt, if your heart's even a little bit stained or damaged or broken or somehow deficient in another way, it's gonna spill out into the other areas of your life.

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And this is why the idea of purity of heart that we see in this beatitude is so important for us.

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And now that we have an idea about the importance of the heart, we can start to look at the idea of purity and we can start to talk about how purity of heart shows up and how it shows up in a lot of other places in scripture.

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And just for the sake of a brief non -exhaustive survey, I've got a few examples of this.

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Psalm 73, one says, surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.

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First Timothy 1, five, but the goal of our command is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and an unhypocritical faith.

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Second Timothy 2, 22, now flee from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace with those who call on the

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Lord from a pure heart. First Peter 1, 22, since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a love of the brothers without hypocrisy, fervently love one another from the heart.

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And now James 4, eight, draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double -minded.

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And while we could go on and on here, the last verse, the last verse, James 4, eight, has something really interesting, an idea that will contribute greatly to our concept of what it means to be pure in heart.

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Because again, this is the most important thing for us to understand here. If the pure in heart are the ones that Jesus calls blessed, well, buddy, that's what we're going after.

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So as usual, I think it's helpful when we're looking at what something is, it's also helpful to consider it from a negative perspective, as in what it is not.

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So we've already seen that sincerity does not automatically equal purity of heart.

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Integrity does not automatically equal purity of heart. And even other things that are almost universally seen as positive, like honesty, that even doesn't necessarily equate to purity of heart.

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I mean, think about it. You can be honest with people for the purpose of hurting them. But we also have to acknowledge that you can't assume by anyone's outward acts or by the words or deeds or anything else that any of that is coming from a pure heart.

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And that's exactly what we talked about a little bit ago with the Pharisees and the happy, friendly atheists.

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So what does it ultimately mean to have a pure heart? So Martin Lloyd -Jones, again, he provides us a helpful framework in suggesting that purity of heart comes down to two general ideas.

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And the first one is this, purity of heart is represented by an undivided love for and devotion to God.

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And this should probably be self -evident from just a basic reading of Scripture. For example, we'll look at Mark chapter 12.

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So starting in verse 28, it says, and when one of the scribes came and heard them arguing, he recognized that he had answered them well and asked him, asked

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Jesus, what commandment is the foremost of all? Jesus answered, the foremost is, hear

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O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

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The second is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, there is no other commandment greater than these.

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And the scribes said to him, right teacher, you have truly stated that he is one and there is no one else beside him and to love him with all heart and with all understanding and with all the strength and to love one's neighbor as himself is much more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.

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And when Jesus saw that he had answered thoughtfully, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God.

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After that, no one would dare to ask him any more questions. So we see these verses in Mark are also echoed in Matthew 22, 37.

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And both of those are coming from Deuteronomy chapter six, verses four through five.

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So that's where Jesus is pulling this in. But we read this, the most, the first and foremost commandment is to love your

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God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. And again, intellectually, in our brain, we can agree to that.

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But in practice, it's a lot harder because if we're being honest with ourselves, there are worldly cares.

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There are worldly desires that pull at us every day. They're constantly picking at you, pulling at you, tapping on your shoulder, burrowing their way into your brain.

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But that pull from those things is always away from God. And that's what

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James is referring to. You remember what he was referring to when I said that that verse from James had a really interesting concept in it.

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He said, double -minded. And again, because everything comes from our heart, everything flows from our heart, our thoughts flow from our heart, our actions flow from our heart, our beliefs flow from our heart.

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When he says double -minded, what he's essentially saying is that our heart is split between the things of God and the things of the world.

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And it's tempting to say, well, at least we're giving part of our life to God, right? Surely God is not concerned with every little teeny tiny thing that's going on in my life, that's going on in my mind, that's going on wherever it's going on, right?

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And obviously that's wrong. Not only is God concerned with every seemingly insignificant thing that's going on in your heart and your mind and your life, he's also concerned with the big things.

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But it's the big things that we're always trying to keep back. And I've said this before, and I'll say this many times in the future too, we say that Christ is

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Lord. And when we say that Christ is Lord, that means that Christ is Lord and Christ is sovereign over every single aspect of your life, every single aspect of your life.

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There's a well -known quote from a theologian whose name is Abraham Kuyper, and it says this, there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which

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Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry mine.

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It means you must submit every area of your life to God and to his will and to his will as revealed in scripture.

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I mean, that means all of it. Your thought life, your work life, your financial life, your family life, your sex life, all those areas and every other area of your life that I didn't mention, they all have to be conformed to God's will.

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And every one of those areas that I listed is addressed in scripture. And if you wanna know how, you can ask me.

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I'd rather you try to find it yourself first, but I'm happy to talk about it. Because when you're ruled by your feelings, you're gonna start to operate in all those areas that I just listed in a way that's contrary to the will of God.

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And it's because your heart is divided. It's because your heart is divided between the world and between God. And a lot of times, when you're acting out of those feelings, what you're really acting out of is fear, fear of something else, fear of losing something else.

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Fear of being vulnerable, fear of being taken advantage of. But it's because your heart is divided between what you want now and what you want to feel now and God's will or what you know is

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God's will. Now, we're probably all familiar with this verse. This is Luke 16, 13.

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Also shows up in Matthew 6, 24. No servant can serve two masters for either he will hate the one and love the other or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other.

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You cannot serve God and wealth. And while that verse is about money specifically, it actually has a much greater application.

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It applies to a lot of other areas as well. Exodus 23 says, you shall have no other gods before me.

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And this verse actually is one that I came across that I hadn't really thought about in this context, but it became really interesting.

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And this is Romans 6, 16. It says, do you not know that when you go on presenting yourself to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness.

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And what that means is you're either a slave to your feelings and your emotions and what you think is going on in any given situation based on your sinful heart, or you can be a slave to the will of God, which is perfectly pure, perfectly righteous, perfectly for your good.

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So a pure heart, to sum all that up, a pure heart is one that is not divided.

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Now, the second concept here is a pure heart is a heart that is cleansed and without defilement.

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Revelation 21, 27, and speaking of the kingdom of heaven says, and nothing defiled and no one who practices abomination and lying shall ever come into it, but only those whose names are written in the

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Lamb's book of life. So when we consider defilement or we consider what is a clean heart or what is a pure heart, what standard do we use for this?

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We use God's standard. If we don't use God's standard, we really risk going off in a completely wrong direction.

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So regarding the undefiled purity of our hearts, who is to be our model? Well, obviously it's

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Jesus. I'm not trying to surprise anybody here with something crazy out of left field. Hebrews 7, 26 says of Jesus that he was holy, innocent, undefiled, and separated from sinners.

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And of course, that doesn't mean physically separated from sinners. It means spiritually. Separated from the sins of those people that he clearly walked with on a regular basis when he was alive.

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And in Matthew 5, 48, Jesus himself says, therefore, you are to be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.

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So that's the standard. And we have to be careful of compromising that standard because we love to compromise that standard.

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And the most common way that we start to compromise that standard and to degrade the idea of purity of heart is by comparison with other people.

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So instead of taking our life and our shortcomings and the things that we do and comparing them to Jesus, we would rather take them and compare them to somebody else who's worse.

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We'll say, I did this kind of sin, but at least I'm not that guy.

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You know, he's really sinful. So by doing that, we can temporarily make ourselves feel better without actually doing anything that purifies our heart, without actually being pure in heart.

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But I just said doing things that purify our heart because this puts us in a little bit of a difficult position, doesn't it?

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Because the truth is we can't purify our own heart. Only the Holy Spirit can grant us a pure heart, a new heart.

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And it doesn't matter what you do. All your labor, all your good deeds, all that stuff is basically washing the outside of the dish.

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It's whitewashing the tomb. Christianity is actually the only religion that tells you you don't have to do a bunch of things to earn your salvation.

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Christianity is the only system of faith that doesn't require specific acts from you to earn the favor of your

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God. Every other religion has some form of works as a prerequisite.

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But this is good news for us. I was thinking about this recently. And I realized that just about every week,

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I get up here and I tell you, this is the requirement. This is God's requirement.

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But guess what? You can't do it. And it's really easy to be discouraged by that, right?

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If you don't think deeply enough about it, it's easy to say, well, he told me

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I gotta do this, but he told me I can't. So what am I supposed to do? But it's good news for us because what you're supposed to do is have faith in what was already done for you.

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You don't have to do it. It's already done. And it's done for you. It's done for all of you.

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So when I tell you, you have to have a pure heart, but you can't purify your own heart.

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Don't despair. That's your feelings getting in the way again. Rejoice in the fact that it was done for you.

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So again, you can attempt to cleanse your heart as much as you want and in every way you can think of, but all these efforts are ultimately gonna fail.

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So what can you do? The first thing is this. Realize, like I just told you, realize that purity of heart is impossible without God.

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Proverbs 29, 20 verse nine says, who can say I have kept my heart pure?

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I am clean from my sin. The answer, of course, is no one. And so where does that leave us?

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At the risk of belaboring this point, I would say that leaves us at Matthew chapter five, verse three.

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It drops us right off at the beginning of the Beatitudes. Poverty of spirit, mourning over sin, meekness, hungering and thirsting for righteousness.

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Because again, that's where that ultimately gets you is hungering and thirsting for righteousness. So what's the second thing that you can do?

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You can stay in God's word. How can you understand

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God's will if you don't keep yourself focused on Scripture? You can't. Yet God has graciously given us everything that we need to know on a conceptual level to stay in His will because our hearts are divided.

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And if your heart is divided to the point where you're convinced that you don't need to read your

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Bible, or if you're convinced that you don't have time to read your Bible, you should ask yourself why that is.

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What are you avoiding? Or what are you stubbornly refusing to give up?

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I've been stubbornly refusing to give up my time in the past before.

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My heart was divided between different things. It happens, but it was nothing more than my own selfishness.

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John 15, three says, you were already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. But you have to read that word.

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You have to get into that word to understand the will of God. Number three is to be controlled by the

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Holy Spirit. Because the power of the Holy Spirit is that power which enables you to walk in God's will.

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This is the power also that enables you to understand what you're reading in Scripture. That is the other thing that people will say.

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It's not that I don't have time, or I don't think I need to. They'll say, I don't understand. And I get it.

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Some of it's complicated. We have these conversations a lot. You know that stuff I talked about with polygamy and weird stuff in the

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Old Testament? It's hard to understand. We gotta have a way to put it into context. And one way to do that is just to pray for enlightenment.

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But again, back to the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the only way, the only way that you will be able to walk in God's will.

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You can't do it under your own power. Galatians 5 .16 says, but I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.

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Now, I jumped ahead just a little bit when I talked about praying. But number four ways you can purify your heart is to stay in prayer.

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Stay consistent in prayer. Stay persistent in prayer. Stay constant in prayer. 1 Thessalonians 5 .17

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says to pray without ceasing. Ephesians 6 .18 says to pray at all times with all prayer and petition to the

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Spirit. And this is God's method. This is the tool. This is the gift that God has given you to communicate with Him.

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And there are promises that are associated with that as well. One thing that we hear a lot of times is that I prayed and it didn't work.

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I prayed for that for two weeks and it didn't happen. Well, I mean, there's a lot of answers to that.

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And there's a lot of questions that go along with that. Like, what were you praying for? But again, as I said, there are promises that are associated with prayer in Scripture.

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And when God makes a promise, it will be kept. 1

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John 5 .14 gives us one of those promises. It says, and this is the confidence which we have before Him, that if we ask anything according to His will,

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He hears us. And rest assured, it's

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His will that your heart is pure. Pray for a pure heart. Pray for salvation.

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These are the prayers that will be answered. I won't say to you that there are prayers that won't be answered, because I don't know and I'm not in control of that.

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But I can assure, you know, if you pray for a new house or you pray for a new car or you pray for a better job, that might be answered, it might not.

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Is it God's will? I don't know, but I can tell you that it is His will for your heart to be pure. And if you pray for that and continue to pray for that, that's something that will be answered.

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So as we wrap up here and we consider the idea of a pure heart,

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I just wanna reiterate the fact that we can't divide our heart between God and the world.

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And we can't live our life dictated by our feelings and by our emotions, because those come and go.

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They're temporary. Somebody makes you feel bad. Well, yes, that feeling is real.

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That feeling exists. That feeling is valid. But do you want that feeling to be what guides your entire life?

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I don't think that any of you do. Do you want a bad feeling?

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Do you wanna choose to feel bad about things that have happened to you, things that you've done, things that have been done to you when

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God has told you that you can be forgiven, you just need to repent of the things you've done, you need to be meek and forgive other people and purify your own heart.

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So that's my encouragement to you. Focus on the things of God.

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Stay in his word. Be controlled by the Holy Spirit. Stay steadfast, stay consistent in prayer.

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Recognize that God is always there and God is always doing stuff, even when you don't exactly see how it works.

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Because what we think and what our heart thinks and what our feelings and our emotions tell us are not always what

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God's will is for the world and for our lives. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see

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God. Please pray with me. Heavenly Father, thank you once again for your word.

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We come before you admittedly broken. We come before you knowing that there are a number of ways that our hearts are not pure and a number of ways that they're divided and that we are chasing after that other part that is not you.

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God, we pray to the Holy Spirit to create in us a clean heart the same way that David prayed.

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We pray that the Holy Spirit would give us that new heart that's promised so often in scripture.

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God, help us to have faith in the work of Jesus. Help us to have faith in what he's done for us and help us to understand that we don't have to earn it.

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We don't have to do it. He's already done it for us. God, thank you for each and every person here.

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Lord, I pray for the hearts and souls of our congregation and we pray for the hearts and souls of every person in our community, every person in our world, every person who's lacking the knowledge of the gospel of who you are and of what you've done.

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Lord, help us to be part of the hands and feet that bring that to them. But before we do that, help us to understand it and to truly internalize it in our own heart.