Within reach of most of us this morning is our smartphone, that miracle and tyrant of modern living. Cast your mind back to the day when you first took your device out of its box. It’s flawless, shiny, sleek, light; the screen is crystal clear.
On that first day, you’re careful – wiping it down, making sure your hands are clean, avoiding scratches. But over time, no matter how careful you are, smudges appear. Fingerprints, dust, and grime start to collect on the screen and around the camera lenses. One day, it’s in your pocket or bag along with the car keys, and a scratch appears.
No matter how much you wipe it, it’s nearly impossible to keep that screen perfectly clean, because the phone was made to be used. And in a world full of dust, dirt, and imperfect surfaces, contact is unavoidable. And accidents do happen.
Attaining moral purity is a lot like trying to keep that screen spotless. We live in a world where impurity is all around us – on our devices, in our conversations, in entertainment, in thoughts that come uninvited. Even when we’re careful, these influences leave their mark. Achieving complete moral purity on our own is impossible because of the world we live in, and because of our human nature.
But there’s hope: just as we have screen protectors and cleaning kits, God offers us protection and cleansing through his sanctifying word, his Holy Spirit, and his amazing grace. When we fail, God is faithful to forgive and purify us (1 Jn 1:9).
God does not leave us where we are. God does not leave us to fix all our own problems. He is the God of hope and help, of second chances, and new beginnings. And so Jesus teaches his apprentices in Matthew 5:8, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
Like the phrase “poor in spirit” in verse 3, this phrase, “pure in heart,” is used only here in the New Testament, but it echoes the thought and aspirations of the Hebrew Scriptures (e.g., Ps 24:3f; 51:10). In the Bible, “heart” in this sense refers to “the whole of our inner state, thought and will as well as emotions.”[1] To possess a “pure” heart is to be a person who is single-minded, undivided, undistracted, unalloyed and unadulterated by all that is impure within us and around us.
Those who are “pure in heart” are, literally, godly. They are loyal, dependable, inspirational, focused on God and God’s kingdom, clear in heart and mind and will about life’s priorities. The “pure in heart” are a lot like Jesus. Their character and way of being in the world remind us of the Jesus we read in the Gospels. They not only commend the Christian way to us; they make us want to be better people too. In our better moments, we desire what they possess.
The opposite of this way of being is described by Jesus in Matthew 15:19, “For from the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, slander.” The Bible makes it clear that rescue from all of these negative qualities and actions is possible, by God’s grace. It’s an ideal to which all of us may aspire.
Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus and others announce that blessing or goodwill comes to those who study the Torah, and who faithfully observe the practical teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the Sabbath command, and various good works and dietary laws. But biblical scholar Frederick Bruner observes that, here in the Beatitudes, the most succinct example of the teaching of Jesus,
It is difficult to put one’s finger on a specific activity that is blessed, on any concrete doing … In the Beatitudes, Jesus seems to bless people at center, where they are most themselves (poor in spirit, mourning, powerless, hungering for righteousness, and now pure in heart). The absence of concrete specificity in the Beatitudes is the more surprising when we see how concrete and specific Jesus is in his parables.[2]
In the Beatitudes, we learn that Jesus especially delights to bless people’s “core” (from the Latin for “heart”) – not what they do with their hands so much as who they are in themselves. In the Beatitudes, Jesus blesses those whose lives are centred on God and on God’s will for their lives. Jesus rewards purity of motive, not our capacity for doing good or the amount of good we do.
And the result? “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” The invisible will be made visible, the ineffable made comprehensible, the ideal realised. This is the Christian hope, the promise of salvation, and the ultimate goal of our union with Christ.
To “see God” also suggests, in the here and now, the delight of obtaining a clearer knowledge of Jesus and his priorities for me; the prospect of better understanding the purposes of Jesus in becoming human, and inaugurating the kingdom of God, and going to the cross and the grave to redeem me; and the possibility, every day, of a deeper experience of union with Christ through faithfully putting into practice the ordinary disciplines of the Christian life.
Make no mistake: purity is a struggle. The world, the flesh, and the devil stand ready to oppose purity in the life of the child of God. Left unrestrained, these three perennial tyrants seek to chain us, corrupt us, and direct us down wrong paths into failure and futility, and along hopeful and smooth roads that lead to ultimate ruin.
But God has not left us without resources for the fight for moral purity. There is a prayer in Paul’s first Letter to the Thessalonians, where he prays that God will “make your hearts blameless in holiness in the presence of our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints” (1 Th 3:13).
This is a prayer we may all pray, a prayer that God is able and willing to answer. At the point at which God, in his mercy, meets our need, we are far from blameless, far from holiness, yet it is God’s will that we experience a state of holiness, of complete wellbeing, in this life. When answered, this prayer reflects the wonderful reality and the still more wonderful promise presented in the sixth Beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Mt 5:8). Commenting on this prayer of Paul, theologian Derek Tidball writes:
There is no reason for discouragement in the battle for holiness and no room for giving in to the temptation to give up. Like any job of restoration, whether it is restoring an old building, repairing a damaged work of art, or renewing a worn out part of our bodies, we may often feel we’re making little progress. The rubble remains which we long to get rid of, the cleaning and repair of the picture seems a slow process, and the body is perhaps still in pain for some time after the operation, as it begins to heal.
But the process has started and will one day be completed. We’re called to persevere because God perseveres with us. Therefore we must keep our eye on the goal, the day when the final assessment deadline is reached, and not stop short. Until then the verdict is not in. But then, by God’s grace, we hope to be judged to be “blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father (1 Th 3:13).[3]
That Day will come. Until then, may each of us learn to be with Jesus, become more like him, and do as Jesus would do if he were me. I want to conclude my sermon today with a short poem by Elizabeth Rooney:
Now is the shining fabric of our day
Torn open, flung apart, rent wide by love.
Never again the tight, enclosing sky,
The blue bowl or the star-illumined tent.
We are laid open to infinity,
For Easter love has burst his tomb and ours.
Now nothing shelters us from God’s desire—
Not flesh, not sky, not stars, not even sin.
Now glory waits so he can enter in.
Now does the dance begin.[4]
Sermon 814 copyright © 2025 Rod Benson. Preached at North Rocks Community Church, Sydney, Australia, on Sunday 22 June 2025. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Christian Standard Bible (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020).
References
[1] Leon Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 100.
[2] Frederick Dale Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary. Volume 1: The Christbook: Matthew 1-12 (revised and expanded edition; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 175.
[3] Derek Tidball, The Message of Holiness (Nottingham: IVP, 2010), 296.
[4] Quoted in Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God (Downers Grove: IVP, 2012), 289. Poem by Elizabeth Rooney; original source unknown.
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