Daily Devotional

The Beatitudes are full of ageless wisdom handled down from Jesus at the very beginning of His ministry. This represents His first recorded teaching after gathering his 12 Disciples. The Beatitudes serve basically as a preface to the three chapters in Matthew making up the Sermon on the Mount.  Each of the individual Beatitudes discloses some deep spiritual truth for us.

 

While they work together as a collective whole, I do not have the space here to attempt a complete overview. So instead, I will pluck out one jewel from the crown of wisdom that are the Beatitudes:

 

Matthew 5:8 – "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (NIV)

 

What does it mean to be pure in heart? This is the Beatitude which more than any other requires a deep inner examination of oneself. The meaning is to have unmixed motives in all we think, do, and say. The same word is used for pure here as is used for refining gold or silver. The idea is to remove anything that creates any imperfection in what is finally produced.

 

Here, as used by Jesus, it means to remove all impure thoughts, actions, and motives from our daily lives. It is here that you need to clean out that back closet in your life that you fool yourself into thinking you have hidden from Christ. Here is a truth: It is easier for me to look righteous on the outside than to be righteous on the inside.

 

So, what is the promise connected to striving after a pure heart? We “shall see God.” This truth is something worth striving after.  What does it mean to see God? Why can only those with a pure heart see Him? Do the following verses shed some light on this issue?

 

1 John 1:5-7 – "This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin." (NIV)

John 8:12 – "When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, 'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.'" (NIV)

 

The world is a spiritually dark place. The pure in heart can walk in God's light; in darkness you can see nothing.  Those who do not have the Savior cannot perceive anything spiritual around them.  While they may not stub their toes on the edge of the coffee table, they are constantly stubbing their toes on all the spiritual reality around them. 

Seeing God also involves the issue of awareness. The pure in heart can look and see God's work all around them. They are spiritually attuned. The hard-hearted don't see God's work anywhere. Do you see God as active around you, or does He seem murky and far off?

If you were to put the world's greatest botanist in a beautiful meadow, they would see things that I could not even begin to see. I mean that literally; they would see things that my eyes would miss completely.  Being a spiritually attuned Christian with a pure heart is very much like being that trained botanist. 

If you wonder why you don't see God more clearly in your life maybe it is a pureness of heart problem. God is there; we just have a perception problem. For the pure in heart faith is easier because they see God as real and active.  Hopefully, more and more we able to see how these Beatitudes are a step-by-step growth process building spiritual maturity in us.