The Beatitudes #7

Before I start the sermon, I just want to say just quickly by way of, by the way, this week we're going to be having some work done in our church parking lot. And so from Tuesday to Friday, our church parking lot is going to be closed, shut down, can't drive in it. That does not mean that you can't come to the building. All we'd ask, and we have permission for this, is just that you park in the next door neighbor's parking lot. That's where all the daycare workers will be parking. That's where Eric and I will be parking all week. Just park toward the back of the lot and then stay out of the, huh?

The other church next door. Yeah, right over here. And as you come into the building, just be aware of what construction is going on and don't get near the equipment. But I just want to let you guys know that that is going to be going on. They're going to be working on the asphalt Tuesday through Thursday. They're going to be working on concrete on Friday. And then by next Sunday when you come back to church, this side of the building, the back lot where most of us park, will be freshly seal-coated. It will not have any lines on it yet. So please park respectfully. But they'll come back early the week after and do those lines, and then they're going to schedule a time to come and do the west side of the building on the front lot. We have to do it in two phases because of having a daycare that needs to have access to the building at all times. So if you come here, just know that that's what's going on. Please don't pull in the lot if it's after Monday. Monday's fine. The rest of the week until Saturday, please don't drive on the brand new.

Seal coating unless you'd like to spray it all up on your car. Now, this morning we're going to be continuing our study of the Beatitudes found in the Sermon on the Mount. We're going to be studying particularly verse 8, where Jesus teaches about purity of heart. Our goal this morning, and my hope for us this morning, is that we would actually come away with an understanding of what purity of heart is and how it reveals God to us. My hope is that for us to understand what purity of heart is and to have God revealed to us, it means that we have to get to know ourselves better. And that the result of that would be that we would grow closer to God. Would you please stand now as you read the word of the Lord from Matthew chapter 5, verses 1 to 12. This is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true. When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on the mountain. And after he sat down, his disciples came to him. He opened his mouth and began to teach 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 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. And blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great. For in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. I've said before, as we've been studying the Beatitudes, I want to take a little bit of time now to sort of address it a little more fully. There's an order here in the Beatitudes. These are not simply just...

stand-alone statements that have been given to us, take it or leave it, as though they're not attached to the things that go before them or come after them. And so this blessing is in a strange place because the desire of all men throughout all time has been to see God. You would think that it would be at the beginning of this or at the end of this section, but we find it here right in the middle. And what he says of those who would see God is that they... are pure in heart. The Bible speaks of our hearts needing to be pure in many places. Even in our call to confession this morning, we were called by James to purify our hearts. And so I want to start by asking you, are you able to purify your heart? How does that go when you see some sort of sin in your life, some sort of struggle or some sort of temptation? How much strength do you have to resist it? I find in myself and with the people I work with that we don't have nearly the strength that we think we do or the strength that we would like to have.

Why do I do that? Why can't I stop that? I know I should. What's wrong with me? So what does it mean to be pure in heart? I want to start by saying what it's not. The purity of heart is not something that we can do. It's something that God has to do. What it does not mean is that Christians are free from all sin. When you think of purity, that's the most obvious connotation of it is that we are free from sin. Christians are supposed to be. Pure in heart, that must mean that we're supposed to be free of sin entirely. That is not what it means. The Apostle Paul in Philippians 3 says, speaking of his own righteousness, his own perfection, his own purity, he says, not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of...

that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet. And so here we have the apostle, the primary author of the New Testament, saying, I am not pure. I don't have it. I don't possess it in my hand. And in case you were inclined to think, well, maybe that's not what he meant here. Again, in Romans 7, he says it again. In other words, he says, for the good that I want, I do not do. But I practice the very evil. that I do not want. Now, some people might skirt this issue by saying, well, when he was saying that about himself, he was saying that about himself before he was a Christian. And I'd say that if that's what you believe, you don't know the first thing about what being a Christian actually is. The command here to be pure in heart is not something we can take hold of ourselves. It's not some low bar that we say, oh, I'm almost there. It is the standard of perfect purity.

You understand, you know, with gold, some of you who are maybe if you're older actually have gold wedding rings. I know all the young people have them made out of other stuff. But if you actually have a gold wedding ring and you take it off and you look at the inside, there'll be a little stamp on it. And that stamp is a purity rating, okay? What is pure gold? How do you designate pure gold? What's the rating? 24 karat gold. Does anyone have a 24 karat gold ring? No. Why? It's too soft. That's actually why we don't have them. But what does it mean to have an 18-karat gold ring, a 12-karat gold ring, or a 10-karat gold ring? What's true of a 10-karat gold ring? Well, it's harder for one, right? Why is it harder? Because it's mixed with other stuff. It is not pure gold. Now, we want our wedding rings to be hard so that they don't crush on our fingers or whatnot. But it is impurity that's in there. It is not pure gold that I'm wearing on my finger. You're not wearing pure gold on yours.

And so purity is not this thing where we measure it in terms of how pure is it. Is Jesus saying we're supposed to be a certain level of pure, not perfectly pure, but somehow less than that, but that's enough? No. When he says, blessed are the pure in heart, he's not saying, blessed are the 12 karat gold. Blessed is the 18 karat gold. He's saying, no, 24 karat gold, perfect, perfect purity. All of the impurities, all of the other stuff. It's taken out. And so you feel like that's not something I can be or do. That is not something I am. I remember one time when Vanessa and I were dating, when she was still in college or doing her master's, and I went to this music talk seminar thing with some really great musician. I don't remember who he was, but he was a big deal. And all the kids, all the string players came, and they were, and they...

wanted to hear what he had to say, and he was going to teach a quartet in front of all of them and show them. And all it was was this worship service for this man. Now, I'm not a musician. I might have got as far as squeaking out Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on my wife's violin just so she could laugh at me and I could laugh at me, you know. But I'm not a musician. So I'm sitting in the class, and it's obvious I'm not like the rest of the people there because I don't know what in the world we're all talking about. But the guy made a statement.

in the middle of it, he says, I have never made a mistake as a musician. And my face, I didn't even think about it. Martin says, yeah, right. And that was my look. I was like, you're a liar. You don't know it. You're wrong. You just came out good as you are. It's just a bold-faced lie. And it's meant to communicate something to the people around him. You should respect me. You should honor me. You should think high thoughts of me because I'm perfect. And the look on my face was like, you're a scumbag. You're a liar. You're a snake oil salesman. You're not doing these students any good. This is all about your pride. And he looked at me, and I'm scowling at him, and he's looking at me, and I'm like. And so the idea that you or I or anyone can be pure the way that that conductor claims to be pure is a farce. It's a lie. It's not true.

It's impossible. So does that mean that the blessedness that Jesus talks about here is just gone from us? We're supposed, blessed are the pure in heart. Well, I'm not pure in heart, so I'm not perfect. So I guess I'm not blessed. I guess I will never see God. That's not the case. My point in bringing all of this up to you at the beginning is to say, this is what it's not. Jesus is not commanding something of us. He's not promising something to us that is unavailable to us. Sometimes you might go shopping and you might say, oh, I really like that thing. And you click on it, it says out of stock. And you go.

There was a thing I liked that I can't have. That's not what's going on here. Jesus is not saying, here's this blessing you can't have. Here is God, but you will never see him because you can't be pure in heart. There are those who would downplay this, the levels of impurity in us and make the goal attainable, but they don't do us any good. As much as we don't like to think about our own sins and our own weaknesses and our own failures and our own offenses, As much as we want to have good thoughts about ourselves, the thing that will actually produce good fruit in us is not thinking high thoughts of ourselves all the time, but low thoughts of ourselves. You say, you want me to be depressed all the time? And I'm going, no, I don't want you to end at being depressed about yourself, but you will never have joy and you will never be a Christian if you don't know who you are. You're not pure. You're not close to being pure. I'm not close to being pure. And to lie to ourselves and say that we are,

is to hide away the gospel from us and say, we don't need it. It's not necessary. I want to step away from the idea of purity for a minute and say, where are we supposed to be pure? He says we're to be pure in heart. It's the heart that's pure. Notice that he didn't say it's our minds that are supposed to be pure. I think one of the things we do with our impurities in our behavior is that we retreat into our minds. And we think that there's purity to be found in the things we think. What else is behind, he didn't mean it. I did that thing, but I didn't mean to do it. What that's saying is, my actions were impure, but my intentions, they were pure. But Jesus doesn't call us to be pure in mind. He calls us to be pure in heart. It's also worth noting that he doesn't call us to be pure in action, in behavior.

And I think this, honestly, is where if we have some interest in purity or obedience or looking and living like a Christian, this is where we focus. We focus on what we do or how we're perceived. What do people think of me? That's what I'm concerned about. I want them to see me as pure, as obedient, as faithful. The problem is, that's the definition of a hypocrite. Hypocrites are concerned with their appearance, with the outside of the cup. whereas God is interested in your heart. You might think, well, I've come to church. I'm doing the right thing. People will think good thoughts about me. But here's what God says about those who draw near to him in worship, but whose hearts are far away. He warns in Isaiah 29, Then the Lord said, Because this people draw near to me with their words and honor me with their lip service, but they remove their hearts far from me, and their reverence for me consists of tradition learned by rote. And then he goes on and says, Because of that, I'm going to judge them.

They're doing all the right things. They're saying all the right things. They look right. But they have removed their hearts from me. They're going through the motions. And because of this, I'll judge them. And again, in Matthew 23, when Jesus is speaking of the Pharisees and the scribes, he says, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish so that the outside of it may become clean also. What were the Pharisees concerned with? What is Jesus warning about all through this section in Matthew 23, where he starts out each condemnation with, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. He says, you're all concerned with what people think of you. You're desperate for their encouragement. You're desperate for their approval. You're desperate for their affirmation and their acceptance. And what would you do to get it?

Well, many times, sadly, whatever is necessary. You've cleaned the outside of the cup, but the inside is full of robbery and self-indulgence. In another place just after this, he calls them whitewashed tombs. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. You're as whitewashed tombs. On the outside, you look nice, but inside, you're full of dead men's bones. In the analogy here, the thing that Jesus is getting at in both our passage in the Beatitudes and here in Matthew 23, is God is concerned with your heart. And if you'll hear it, he is more concerned with your heart than he is with your behavior. And if all you do is concern yourself with your behavior, you will never draw near to God. In Deuteronomy 30, verse 6, this is a warning, or well, this is a promise after a judgment that God gives to the Israelites. They've come into the land, they've become wealthy, they've lived a life of ease, and they've forgotten their God.

And as a result, they've been judged. And so here's a promise that God gives them that it will not always be this way, but that I'm going to return to you and I'm going to restore you. He says, Moreover, the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants. To what end? To love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul so that you may live. And so again and again, the testimony of Scripture is that we need pure hearts. We need pure hearts. And yet you and I can't make our hearts pure, even though Scripture tells us to seek after it. When James says, cleanse yourselves, cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded, he is telling us something we can't do ourselves. And yet it is necessary that it be done. And if our hearts are not pure, then nothing else we do or say or think will be pleasing to God. If you guys are familiar at all with...

Reformation history. In time of history, when God brought Reformation to his church, and the result of it was there was a divide between the Catholic church and what became the Protestant church, those who protested against the things that were being taught by the church at that time. Martin Luther, a German priest, was overwhelmed. Here's a two or three minute life of Luther, okay? German monk. very concerned with serving God, overwhelmed perpetually by the weight of his sin. Always, always, always overwhelmed by the weight of his sin, which is another way of saying realize he is not pure and was forever going to his priest and confessing his sins and coming back and confessing his sins again to the point at which the priest was like, enough, enough. Martin, you've got to stop. Because Martin Luther studies.

the scripture, he discovers that all of his sorrow and all of his grief and all of his guilt that he's feeling, he can't resolve it. And it's an unbearable weight for him. And then he comes to realize that the Bible promises that God would save sinners like him. He discovers the doctrine of justification or rediscovers this doctrine. And so he begins to write and he begins to preach and he begins to work. proclaiming this good news, this gospel that had been hidden for so long. So he meets with resistance from the church. The church excommunicates him. The church wants to kill him. There's all kinds of pressures that Martin Luther is under. And at one point he comes to a city called Worms. In German it would be said some other way. How would they say it in German? Okay, German, say it loudly. Yeah, I like that. And he comes to the thing called the Diet at Worms.

And this is to be the place where all of the weight of the church is going to bear down on Martin Luther, and he's going to crack. That's the whole point. He's going to recant the things he said. He's going to take them back and say, I was wrong, and the church was right. And this is when Martin Luther famously said that he could not sin. I'm paraphrasing here. Unless you can convince me by Scripture or clear reason from the Word of God that the things I've said are wrong, I can't recant. I won't recant. For me to do so would be unwise and dangerous. Here I stand. I can do no other. Lord, help me. All of that, all of Luther's life and all of the fruit that his work that God raised him up to, all that came downstream of that was downstream of a man who realized he wasn't pure and went searching in the scriptures to find a solution to his problem. So did Luther have a pure heart?

Was he pure in heart? We could recount Luther's sins, which are many, as we could with any other of us. But I would say to you that Luther's ability to say, here I stand, I can do no other, is the fruit of his purity of heart. You say, well, how can he be pure of heart while still a sinner? That really is the question. And I think it's a scary question. Because the idea of removing purity from our actions as being the primary place that we process it, and we make it into a heart issue, if you will, there's dangers that run alongside of this. To some, that's a really scary proposition. If I take away the pressure, if we say, I think Christianity is a list of rules that I'm supposed to follow, and living as a Christian is just a rinse and repeat cycle of me realizing I didn't do it right, and then trying harder again. If that's what Christianity is to you, and I say, no, okay, that's not what it is. We're taking away the rules.

The rules aren't going to save you. The rules aren't the gospel. The rules are not. Your ability to follow the rules doesn't make you pure. To some people, that's very scary because they like rules. They like knowing where the standard is. They like having something to work on, like having something to do. They worry that if they can't live under the pressure of their eternal destination hanging in the balance of their actions, they're afraid of what sort of sin they'd get into because they feel like that's the only anchor they've got to to keep them back, to govern their actions. And what I would ask you is, is that the way that a pure heart would reason? I have to have rules and standards. Otherwise, what would I do? What kind of sin would I fall into? No, this is not how a pure heart reasons. To reason this way is to discredit entirely, entirely the work of the Holy Spirit. I remember when, a while, a long time ago,

There was discussion going on amongst our friends, Vanessa and my friends, about whether or not, you know, what the rules of dating should be for young people. And one person was saying, well, they should never be alone in a car together because if they're ever alone, they're just going to end up fornicating. There's just no other choice, no other option. So we should set up this whole labyrinth of rules to keep them from falling into sin. And so they shouldn't be alone together, and they should have curfews, and there should be very strict rules about touch, and there should be very strict rules about everything. So then the question of, well, can they go on a day trip up to see family where they're going to be alone in the car without anybody else for like three hours? And some people said no. And other people were like, yes. Now, to the people who said no, what was going on?

Well, what was going on was they were convinced that the Holy Spirit was impotent to work in the lives of a Christian, that there was no possibility that the Holy Spirit could. There was any other way to restrain sin other than to build a structure for them. Well, what happens when there's a crack in the structure, when people aren't around? What happens is there's no ability to avoid sin then because you've been taught there is no other way to avoid sin other than to set up your life in such a way that You're never tempted. The wise man in that situation said, listen, if they want to fornicate, they're going to fornicate. And no rules that you set up are going to keep them from doing it. And the failure, if they fornicate, is not that there was a lack of rules, but a lack of purity. Does that mean there should be, you know, so then the pendulum swings and we say, well, then there shouldn't be any rules. And the boyfriend can stay at the girlfriend's house overnight as long as they're not in the same bedroom or whatever.

There's these pendulum swings that go on in our minds, but none of it is concerned with the work of the Holy Spirit and his ability to make us able to be pure, to make us pure. So maybe you're scared and you say, if I don't have the rules to guide me toward purity, I'll fall into all kinds of sin. And I say, you will fall into sin whether you have the rules or not, for one. And two, you ought to... Turn and ask God to help you and to give you his Holy Spirit to protect you from falling into sin. The goal is not purity of action first, but purity of heart. Purity of action flows out of purity of heart. Where there is no way to set up a perfect set of rules for every circumstance that someone might find themselves in, the Holy Spirit is able to indwell the believer in such a way that in whatever circumstance they find themselves, he can guide them and keep them from sin.

Some of you might think, well, I'm not worried about what sin I'll fall into. There's a part of me that's excited about what sin I could get into if you remove the pressure or the weight of the rules, the external conformity. And to that, Scripture says, are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be. How shall we who died to sin still live in it? What you and I need, what we need, what God's people need is purity of heart. We need God to make our hearts pure. We can't make our hearts pure, and we can't trade out our hearts for our actions and think that we're on the right path. Toward the beginning of these Beatitudes, I said to us, these are spiritual things. These are not natural things. This is not a list of things you can go do. I'm going to go do these things this week. These are the three things I'm going to go do, and I'm going to be obeying what God said. Every one of these things is something we need God to do in us and for us.

If we're to have pure hearts, we need God to give us pure hearts. If we're afraid of removing the boundaries, we need to ask God to give us faith to trust him and to take him at his word and to not set up these structures that we put our hope in. If we're excited at what we could get away with if the pressure of obedience, outward conformity is removed, we need to ask God to make of us pure hearts, to purify our desires. So that we won't want to do what's wicked. What does an impure heart look like? In Hebrews 10, he talks about our hearts being cleaned. It says, And so at least part of what the Bible tells us about having an impure heart is that we would have an evil conscience. What is an evil conscience? It's not the same thing as a bad conscience or a seared conscience.

What's an evil conscience? What is your conscience supposed to do? Our consciences are the place where the Holy Spirit works and convicts us of what's right and what's wrong, what the truth is and what the lies are. Maybe you've had a time in your life where you thought, I know I shouldn't do this. I know that it's wrong. Maybe you've gotten sick to your stomach over what you did when you didn't listen. And while you may say to other people, I didn't know it was going to turn out this way, the truth is, You had a suspicion that it wasn't going to go well if you did it. This is your conscience at work. And so Hebrews tells us that we need our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience. An evil conscience, our consciences are a place where not only God works, Satan also works. Have you ever been convicted of sin only to have someone, or you did something wrong only to have the scripture or somebody tell you, that wasn't sin, what you did. You shouldn't feel bad about that.

Satan is at work in our consciences as well, accusing us, bringing up the past, afflicting us, tormenting us. To what end? Why does Satan do that? Well, he does it to muddy up our hearts. If our hearts were a room, Satan comes in and his goal is to make it a dirty place. Some of you who have little kids, you might feel from time to time that that's your kid's goal, to come into your house and make it a dirty place, to bring disorder to the order. Well, that's how Satan works in our consciences. This is a hard concept for me to get to because I feel like I say something and then I turn around and say the exact opposite. And I say something and I say the exact opposite. This is the tension, though, that we live in as Christians. To have a pure heart or a clear conscience is something that you have to work out with God. If you try to work it out, if you try to judge whether you're doing the right thing or whether you're obeying God through what everyone else thinks of you,

You will never, ever get off of that rat wheel. When we were moving last week, I have a book that Nolan recommended to me by Charles Spurgeon. And it's just these short little things that he wrote under the pen name John Plowman. And one of the stories that I had the men read was about man-pleasing. It was about a guy, he and his son, carrying his donkey, trying to figure out how to get it to market. And everyone thinks they're doing it the wrong way. And at the end of it, In disgust, the father takes the donkey with his son and they throw the donkey bound into the river and go home. Because they're so angry because it can't please anybody. And what Spurgeon says at the end of it is that he who would please man before he goes to sleep will spend a great many nights before he can close his eyes. If the goal is pleasing the people around you, you're never going to do it. For one reason, people don't all agree.

about what purity is. And even if you're dealing with the same person, their opinions will change over time. They'll think at one point, well, this is what you should do. And a few months later, they'll think, well, this is what you should do. And you're going to be like a rat on a wheel trying to figure out how to please them and everybody else at the same time. And so what Spurgeon was getting at and what I'm trying to get at to you is that you actually have to deal with God directly in light of what his word says, okay? I'll take myself as an example as your pastor. If I had to stand up here every Sunday and worry about what they thought and they thought and they thought and they thought because there's old people and young people and single people and married people and kids and boys and girls and people with money and people who are poor and all these different, and I got to figure out how to make everybody happy, I won't have much to say because you all want different things. And sometimes it's a good thing you want.

But if you're honest, oftentimes a lot of what you want isn't good. You can't say that. And so my work as a pastor, using me as an example, is to stand up here and to not take my cues from you about what I'm supposed to say, which makes my job hard. Because sometimes you guys don't look happily at me while I'm preaching. Sometimes you walk out in the middle of the service and I think, did they just leave the church because of what I just said? No, they just were taking kids to the bathroom. I don't know what's going on. So how do I judge whether what I say is right, good, bad, or otherwise? What'd you say? God's word and what? Yeah, God's bar. That's what Dan's saying. At some sense, I have to deal directly with God about whether or not what I'm saying is true and right and necessary or not. And sometimes God uses you guys to tell me that. There have been times where I've had to come back the next Sunday and say, I was wrong when I said whatever I said. And please forgive me. But if you're to have a pure heart,

and a clean conscience, it is something that you have to work out with God, and you will have voices around you saying, you're doing the wrong thing. And it is the Christian's work to discern the spirits and to ask God to help them do what is right and believe what is right and to be pure and desire it. We could multiply the examples. How should you educate your children? Pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure. What does authority in the home and submission of the wife look like? Pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure. How many kids did you have? Pressure, pressure, pressure. And it could go on and keep multiplying the list of where you're going to have all these voices talking to you, telling you this, that, and the other thing, and they don't agree, and you've got to figure out who you're going to please and who you're not. And what you ought to do is seek to please God, which means that, you know, we say, well, of course that's what I should do. And I say, then from time to time, that's going to mean you don't please the people around you. They will not be pleased with you. Have you never had your children displeased with you because you said no to something?

Have you never had your wife displeased with you because you said no to something? Have you ever had your husband displeased with you because you said yes or no to something? We displease one another. And so the best we can say with regard to our actions is, I did the best I could, what I believed to be right at the time, and I may well have been wrong when I did it. I may have been a flat-out fool. Good intentions and all the rest, I was wrong. This is how you avoid this. Going through this process is how you avoid and fight against Satan accusing you in your conscience and saying, you're wrong and you're bad and you didn't do the right thing. That's all true. You don't need him to tell you that. It's true. You sin. All the time today, you sinned. This morning, in numerous ways, many of which you're probably not even aware of, and if you are aware of it, you're not grieved by it the way you should be. This is us, okay? This is us.

And so you don't need Satan to come tell you that the sky is blue. What you need is to deal with God and to work out these things according to his word. If Satan tells you you're a sinner, you say, yes and amen. But that's not the end of the story. All Satan has done is reminded you that you're not pure. So you go to God and you ask him, make me pure. Change my desires and my hearts. Keep me from giving in to... to my sinful lusts and desires. You think, my life will fall apart and people in my home will be angry with me if I do that. People will be upset with me at work. I won't have any friends at school. What are your fears? I'll lose the relationships and the people who are closest to me if I try to honor God. Conventional wisdom would tell us, then therefore don't do it, but God's word would tell you. There's no one who's given up father or mother or brothers or sisters or parents or wives or husbands for me who will not receive back from me ten times as many in this life.

fathers and brothers and mothers and sisters, and in life to come, eternal life. Which is to say, you may well, in your pursuit of purity and asking God to change you and actually make you pure, you may well lose things that are very important to you right now. I would be lying to you if I was to tell you that you're going to go from being impure to being pure without going through pain. You will go through pain. It will be hard. When I became a Christian, what, 20 years ago, My whole life changed. I lost all my friends. I lost all of them. Everything I used to do changed. It was all gone now. And for the better for me. And so you can't use the pain or the difficulty or the relational tensions that will come on you if you seek a pure heart as an excuse for inaction. It's not a reason to carry on.

And so we have to deal with God in asking him to give us a pure heart and to give us faith to seek it and to pursue it. You do realize if God changes our heart, we will be changed. Our lives will be changed. Our relationships will be changed. Our priorities will be changed. When David confessed his sin, King David calls out in Psalm 51, confessing his sin of adultery and murder. In the midst of this, he cries out to God and he says, purify me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Now, why do I bring that verse up? Well, I bring that verse up to tell you that David's not asking. David is declaring. He's not saying, will you please make me clean? He's saying, when you purify me, I will be pure. When you wash me, I will be clean. And so God promises to his people, that he will cleanse them. In Ezekiel, he says that he'll take out our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh. And so the real question that you and I have to answer each day is whether or not we want purity or whether we're disinterested in it. Purity is costly. Jesus said, if your eye makes you stumble, pluck it out. You're right. You're right. You're right as far as you've gone. The question is, will you stop there? Or will you go on further?

David exclaims to God, purify me and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Is that what you want? That's what it means to be a Christian. Is that what you want for your life? And do you realize that wanting it means changing, sacrificing, saying no where you've said yes. To those who want it and to those who pursue it and to those that are being purified, they will be the ones who see God. This is the path towards seeking God. What I find is that when people don't want to repent of their sins, don't want to be confronted with their sins, there's often a corresponding sense of abandonment. They feel as though God's abandoned them and left them. Where's God? He's not near to me. I don't see him. I don't feel his presence. He's not around. I feel alone. And I think that that's often because they don't want to change.

What they want is God near them without having to change. Now you remember in our scripture lesson this morning, over 50,000 men from Beth Shemesh all died. Why'd they die? Because their unholy selves got close to a holy God and he struck them down. So what's the lesson in there for us? The lesson is we're unholy like those men were, and God is holy like that ark was, and if we bring our sinful self up to him and say, he should just have no problem with me, We should expect judgment and not mercy. If we come thinking there's no problems with me, God will have to accept me the way I am. There's nothing in Scripture that says God will accept you the way you are. There's nowhere from beginning to end where it says God will take you just as you are. If God will take you and have you, he must change you. Or he has to kill you. Because you're a sinner and he's holy.

Hebrews tells us in another place that we're to draw near to God, to the throne of grace, to receive help. And many times it's our evil conscience that keeps us far off. We think, I see those guys who all got struck down for looking at the ark. I remember the guys who reached out and touched the ark and got struck down. I think, oh, God's holy and I'm not, so we use that as an excuse to stay far off. And we try to clean ourselves up. Maybe when you've come to church or maybe before you've gone to... bible study or maybe before you've gone into school or something you've had occasion to try to clean yourself up you've been crying or you've been upset or you've been something's bad and wrong and you're wiping and patting and trying to you know clean yourself up hoping that no one will see we do that same thing with god we try to clean ourselves up he's holy and i'm not so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go clean myself up and then i'll come then i'll come to god you will never come to god if that's if those are the terms in which you come

In Isaiah, it says, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. And you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Come buy wine and milk without money and without cost. And to which you think, well, who wouldn't do that? And then he asks, why do you spend money for what is not bread and your wages for what does not satisfy? And it's a real question. Why is it? Why is it that the people of God spend their energy and spend their time trying to get what they need? When God offers it freely to them. Why do we do that? It's because we don't want to come into his presence a mess. I think that's the whole reason. Isaiah tells us here, I have food. I have drink. I have what you need, says the Lord. I have it. Why don't you come get it? Because you want to clean yourself up. Because we think that it's our job to make ourselves pure and not God's. And so what we do is use it as a justification for staying on the outskirts and wandering around.

I can't tell you how many of you all think that you're a terrible person and that everyone else has it better than you. They have better marriage. They have more money. They have better kids. Everyone else has everything better that you have the absolute worst, for whatever reason. But I'll tell you, as your pastor, getting the opportunity to talk to more than one of you and getting some honesty, you all feel that way. You all think that you're the worst and that everyone else has it better than you. Everyone else's marriage is happier. Everyone else's kids are better. Everyone else has less financial stress. Everyone else has an easier time of it. Everyone else is more pure. Everyone else is closer to God. Everyone else cleaned themselves up better than you did or better than you can. What I want to tell you is none of that matters. It's a stupid way to think. It's a stupid way to think. I'm not like those people. You're a sinner, aren't you? So am I.

So is every other person in this room. Just because you don't see it intimately and have a detailed knowledge of it doesn't mean it's not true. Every one of us needs to be made pure in heart. Every one of us wants to see God, and we need him to purify us and to change us and to grow us so that we will see him. Where we think, I can't get close to him because of my sins, he calls out to us and says, come to me. Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and you will find rest. So he calls to you and he calls to me and says, I know you're a sinner. I know you're not pure. Come to me. You say, well, if I come, there's going to be this cost and there are these sins and they're going to have to be dealt with. And I say, that is right. That is right. And yet he calls to us and says, come to me and you'll find rest for your souls. And in that coming, you will see God. In that coming, you'll see what kind of person you are and what you've done and what you deserve. And you'll see the mercy of God.

to people just like you. That's our greatest need, is to be known by God and to have him be merciful toward us. So don't spend your money, don't spend your time trying to clean yourself up. The church has been described in the past as a hospital for sinners. It's a place where people come for healing, for strengthening, for mending. They come with pain, they come with things that need to be cleaned out and fixed up, and it hurts. Just like when you go to the doctor and you say, I have to have a procedure. And the one thing you know, you don't even know if the procedure will work, but the one thing you know is that when the procedure is over, it's going to hurt. There's going to be pain. And you hope that the pain was worth it because you got better. They fixed what was wrong. That's what the church is. It's a place for sinners. It's a place for purification. It's a place for being made holy. It's a place for confessing your sins and asking God to have mercy on you and to serve him better.

And so my call to you is, come to him. If you see that you're not pure, come to Jesus Christ. And you say, well, I'm a Christian. And I say, you're still a sinner and you still need to come to Jesus. Again for cleansing and again for healing and again for instruction and again for correction. And again for discipline and again for reproof. Come to him. Ask him to purify you. The way David did. Purify me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Ask him to purify you and you will be pure. This is not a one-time thing that we ask and then it's done. This is the life of a Christian. Lord, make me pure. Wash off the stains of sin. Scrub them out of me. Take them away. And make me like you. This is the basic simple prayer of every Christian throughout all time.

Make me pure and I will be pure. Let's pray.