The Happiness Project: Pure in Heart

We're in a section of the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter five. So if you'll find that in your worship guide or up on the screen, we're going to read God's Word together. You ready?

Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain. And after he sat down, his disciples came to him, and 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 will be comforted. Blessed are the gentle, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. — Matthew 5:1-8

Amen. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Today we're focusing on this last one. Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. Now, next week, we will transition into the rest of the sermon on the mount and if you're paying attention, you'll know we didn't get through all these. My plan was to get through all these but COVID got in the way for me. I called an audible over Memorial weekend. We'll dip back in and catch up at some point later on this summer in some of these other, as we've said, the beatitudes, the pictures that Jesus gives us of the beautiful life.

The Mandela Effect

Here's my question to begin this morning. You ever heard of the Mandela effect? A Mandela effect describes when a whole group of people collectively remember something the wrong way. So here's the example from The Empire Strikes Back. Darth Vader is given the big reveal to Luke Skywalker, and everybody remembers this as "Luke, I am your father," but that's actually not what the script says. The real words are, "No, I am your father." And everybody remembers that incorrectly.

Now I think the Mandela effect is also at play when we read this beatitude of all these little pithy sayings of Jesus. This one is one we also hear the wrong way. Let me explain that to you. Because when you hear this thing about pure, this is what people immediately respond to. "Oh, I knew it. We were doing great there for a while, but this is the one. Here's where Jesus finally calls us all out, right? This is the one where Jesus shames us. I lost the purity thing long time ago. This is not for me." And I want to tell you that is the Mandela effect. That's not what we're hearing—we're hearing this wrong.

So let's think about the word pure or purity. Let's think about how we use that word. I guess we like purity in our water. I guess illegal drug users like purity in their drugs. But besides that, this is almost a hundred percent of the time a negative word for us. I mean, think about how history has looked back on the Puritans. We associate them with burning people at the stake, burning witches, right? Not all that was about them, but that's what we think of when we think of pure and Puritans—something negative.

We have baggage with purity also because many of you grew up in a time when the purity culture was a big movement in The United States. Now, if you don't know what the purity culture is, what I'm talking about this morning, I should maybe come up with another beatitude. Like, blessed are those who don't know what purity culture is, right?

Purity Culture

So, here's what purity culture was. It was a movement in the 1990s in the evangelical Bible believing churches in The United States in order to help our children abstain from sex outside of marriage. Now I did two tours of duty as youth pastor during the 90s. So I'm very familiar with purity culture. Some of you may be very familiar with purity culture. Kind of the figure of this was Josh Harris, who wrote a book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which instructed people on how not to date, but how to figure out with their families who they should marry. It also came to be the True Love Waits campaign, where especially with young girls, we asked them to take a purity pledge, they got a ring. And the pledge went like this:

Believing that true love waits, I made a commitment to God, myself, my family, those I date and my future made to be sexually pure until the day I enter marriage.

Now, did this work? Sort of. I mean, it sort of worked. The stats show that like from '95 to 2002, rates of sexual intercourse among teenagers did go down, but at a really high cost. There were a lot of unintended side effects of the purity movement including the Mandela effect you're hearing in the sermon this morning.

Why do you have to have a long sermon intro? Because the intentions of that movement were really good. Is waiting until marriage for sexuality good? Yes, that's how God intended that. Is protecting our children from the wounds that their parents carried around good? Yes, all that was good. But there was some collateral damage from that too.

And some of you know this very personally. In some ways, the rules were applied more to women than men. And women have borne in a lot of cases more of the damage from this. For example, some of the lies that came from purity culture: women are responsible for men's sexuality, men's sexual sin. Women's bodies are something to be ashamed of. Your virginity is the only thing that's worthwhile about you. And if you have sex before marriage, everything's over. Big disaster, your life is a disaster. You might have heard some of those before or felt some of those before, right?

But here's what's ironic. Purity culture missed what Jesus has in view here by a country mile. Purity is so far away from what we're going to read. Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. So different. That's why I have to do this long sermon intro.

I want to ask you to help me with the sermon this morning. Try to hear beyond the Mandela effect and ask questions like: What is the pure heart? How do I get one? And why is the pure heart a happy heart? That's my outline this morning.

What is Pure?

So what is Jesus talking about? Let's hear again what he's saying. He says, "blessed are the pure in heart." The pure in heart—which already tells you there's something wrong with the definition of purity culture.

Let's talk about the heart. In our culture, we think of the heart as that organ that pumps blood, or we think of it from Disney, right? "Follow your heart." Just trust your heart. It's all about your emotions. But the Bible uses this word heart everywhere, and particularly in the Gospel of Matthew. We find all kinds of things about how the heart is described.

The Bible describes the thoughts of the heart. You're never going to find that in a Disney movie. The thoughts of the heart, the meditations of the heart, the desires of the heart. The Bible calls the heart the wellspring of life. Jesus says the heart is what makes a person pure or impure—it's not about behavior, but about the heart. It's about what's deep inside of us. And you can hear this in multiple places in the book of Matthew.

It's not what goes into the mouth and into the stomach that makes a person unclean or impure. It's what comes up out of their heart. — Matthew 15

Out of the overflow of your heart your mouth speaks. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him. An evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. — Matthew 12

It's about the heart. Jesus tells us over and over that the heart is the deepest, deepest part of you. It's like Josh Harris never read the book of Matthew, right? You could tell this right away. The purity culture definition was always about behavior. It was never about the deep down insides. And Jesus says no, this is something really different.

Second, purity of heart cannot be partial. It can't be part of you—as in the sexual part of you only. Here's how the word purity is used in the New Testament times. This word in this beatitude describes a very specific process. It was borrowed from the process of purifying gold, purifying metals—separating ore from pure gold. And this is how they would do it.

They would take rock that had gold in it, break it down into little pebbles, and put it on a table and run water over the top of that. Because gold is heavy, all the sand and grit would wash off. Then they would take it and combine it with salt, lead, and bran, put it in a closed container, and heat it continuously for five days until they could separate the various elements out and pour off and skim off the top until they had pure gold.

Can you partially purify gold? Can you go, "I want to purify half of this batch but not the other half"? No, that doesn't make any sense. All of it goes in the container. All of it gets heated. And that again tells us there's something wrong with that purity culture definition of purity. It can't just be about your sexual part of you, but not the rest of you.

Finally, to be pure in heart means so much more than just choosing the right thing and not doing the wrong things. It's about being the same through and through. For Jesus, purity goes back to our word for a whole number: integer. You know, that's what we use in math class to talk about a whole number. An integer—whole number. Integrity: whole person. Jesus is describing a person who is whole. The same all the way through.

Several years ago, I taught through the book of Leviticus, and if you missed it, you weren't part of our church at that time—you missed some really exciting, weird stuff on skin diseases and dietary laws.

Really riveting preaching but one thing we learned as we walked through the book of Leviticus was that Israel had all of these purity laws related to their food. And one thing we saw in that is holiness with an H is closely related to wholeness with a W. Now, I just made you do spelling on Sunday morning—H, holiness, W, wholeness. Holiness with an H is closely related to wholeness with a W, and not just because they sound similar in English. That's just me making that sound right. The root words are so similar, so related to one another that it tells us something about your purpose in this world. God's purpose is for you and for me.

The ancient Hebrew people read their plates, and it told them something about God's design. So let me show you this. The purity laws about what they ate were not just arbitrary. We look at those now like, "Man, why didn't they eat bacon in the Old Testament? That seems like they were really missing out or shrimp. What's the deal?" Here's what we saw going through those purity laws: there was in the Hebrew mind a whole type and a mixed type. In every category of animal, there were whole animals and there were mixed ones. The whole ones you ate, the mixed ones you didn't.

For example, land animals. A land animal that was a whole type had a split hoof and it chewed the cud like cattle. A pig that does not have a split hoof and does not chew the cud, you don't eat. Because what is it? It's not the pure type, it's a mix.

Let's think about fish. A pure fish has skins, has fins and scales and swims through the water. So the ones that look like bugs, that don't swim with fins, that don't have scales like lobster, crab, shrimp—the ones that y'all can't wait to eat at the beach this summer—they didn't eat because that was a mixed type.

Oh, let's think about birds. The ideal bird was one that sat on twigs and chirped and ate bugs and seeds. The ones that ate dead things, no. The ones that also had hair—we call them bats. Don't eat those either. Those are mixed types.

So the plates, the very dinner plate of the Hebrew people, said something to them about God. It said, "For God, wholeness is related to holiness. Purity, cleanliness. These things are all connected for God." And it told them not just "Here's what you eat and here's what you don't," but "This is what God wants for you. This is what God wants for you. You to be a whole person. You to experience deep shalom, deep wholeness."

This is God's design for people—that we would be clean, that we experience a deep inner integrity, the same no matter which way you slice us. We would be the same over and over. Our inner life would match our outer life. Do you get it? Integrity.

Be Whole as Your Heavenly Father Is Whole

Later in the same sermon, Jesus will say something that at first sounds really scary to us.

Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Now if you got the purity culture mindset, that's really scary, isn't it? But if you hear this through the lens of wholeness—God's design for you and me—this sounds very different. This sounds more like an invitation than a rebuke.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, wrote this. He paraphrased that passage this way:

Be whole as your heavenly Father is whole.

This is God's design for us. And here's my question for you this morning. Time out on the sermon. I just want to ask you this question: Would you like to be made whole?

I mean, aren't we people with all kinds of inner contradictions? Aren't we people who in this context were this way, with that group of friends were that way? We change our minds all the time. We find ourselves something we use this word broken a lot. Sometimes we mean sin with it. But a lot of times we mean there's something wrong with me. And don't you want to be made whole?

Okay, I guess I'm up here by myself this morning. You all can just observe the sermon from this point forward because I would. Aren't you tired of wearing a mask? Aren't you tired of just feeling like something's always not quite right with you?

See, Jesus says, "Blessed are the pure in heart." Don't you want a pure heart, a whole heart? How do we get one?

Of course, the Sunday school answer to this is: only Jesus has one, only Jesus can give us one. Now, that's really true. The word for holy in Hebrew means weight or substance, and in that sense, we could say Jesus was the only whole person who ever existed. He had gravitas. He had wholeness.

If you've ever read C.S. Lewis's book The Great Divorce, it's about somebody who goes on a bus tour of hell and everybody there is a ghost. They have no substance to them. Compared to that, the people who know Jesus appear as solid, and Jesus would be like super solid by comparison. Jesus was all substance. He was the same in every context. He was the same no matter how you sliced him. He was not filled with inner divisions like we are.

Only Jesus had a pure heart.

Only Jesus can give a pure heart. In the New Testament, we read all these stories about people interacting with Jesus, and there are two kinds of people that come to interact with Jesus. There are some who come to prove they're pure in heart and some who come to Jesus to get a pure heart. Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner. That's the right answer, right?

We have people like the rich young ruler. He comes to Jesus with something to prove: "Jesus, approve of me. See, I have a pure heart." Then you have Simon Peter. He's a fisherman out in the boats, and Jesus approaches him and says, "Come follow me." He's like, "Get away from me. I'm a sinner." And later on, at the last supper, Jesus is washing his disciples' feet and Peter's like, "Wash all of me, man. All of me needs to be clean." He's coming to get a pure heart.

You have Simon the Pharisee who invites Jesus over for dinner and quizzes him, tries to show him up, proving that he is the one with a pure heart. At the same dinner, a woman from the city comes in and begins to weep and wash his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair.

Here's the question for us: Are we people who are coming even to church this morning to prove that you have a pure heart or to get a pure heart? We're in the Bible belt. I don't know if you noticed, but Raleigh might as well be the buckle on the Bible belt. This is a super Jesus-y, churchy city, and we're surrounded by lots of people who call themselves Christians whose main motivation in coming to a place like this is, "I gotta prove to all the people that I'm one of the nice people. I'm one of the goodies." And that is not the gospel. The gospel is Jesus invites all of those who come to say, "I can't do this. What I need is a pure heart."

Ezekiel the prophet, hundreds of years before the coming of Jesus, said that when the Messiah comes, he will take away our heart of stone—our hearts that are hard to God, resistant to him—and give us a heart of flesh, one that beats in time with him. On this Pentecost Sunday, churches around the globe are celebrating the Holy Spirit and his role in our salvation. He's the one who makes dead people alive. That's called regeneration.

But when God gives you a new heart, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a pure heart yet. Remember my illustration with the gold. What happens with the gold? It's a process. It's probably kind of painful to the gold. It's being melted down and purified. That is a long process of God's work in us to purify us. Being made pure in your inner being, in your mind, in your desires, in your longings, in all of you—the only way for us to be made pure like that is for us to go to the blesser, to Jesus himself, and for him to purify us. Just like the gold doesn't purify itself, it calls for us to submit ourselves to him.

So how do we get in touch with our need for a pure heart? How do you who are Christians who've been given a new heart by God become whole again? And this is the thing I want to really major on, my last thing this morning: you embrace your inner divisions. You begin to embrace your inner divisions.

James 1 and James 4 both say this: they describe us as people who are double minded.

Double minded means you think one thing and you think the opposite thing. This happens to us all the time. We are fractured and fragmented people. We say things like, "Part of me wants to go but part of me wants to stay home. Part of me is angry but part of me hates it when I get angry." A woman might say, "Part of me loves him, part of me hates him." A man might say, "Part of me wants to work for this promotion, another part of me is exhausted and wants to quit. A part of me wants to be holy. Part of me doesn't."

Do you identify with this? Where people are filled with inner contradiction. Paul, the apostle Paul, describes this really well:

I do the things I don't want to do. I don't do the things I do want to do. — Romans 7

Anybody else identify with that? I'm like, yes, preach it Paul. I know exactly what you're talking about. That inner division in us, that sense that we're of two minds.

I want you to picture this morning an orchestra. I'm going to borrow this analogy from Chuck DeGroat. My wife put me on to his take on this particular beatitude—really masterful. He says every person is not just of two minds. It's not just like, "I want to do this. I don't want to do this." We actually are not just two minds but like an internal orchestra. You have lots and lots of yous inside of you, like an orchestra has lots and lots of instruments that get up on the stage, and they all make different noises.

And some of them are really loud and some of them are really quiet. So you go to Meymandi Hall and you watch the North Carolina Orchestra, and out they come on stage and you've got the bassoon and the oboe and you've got the French horns and the kettle drums. You got all these instruments around and before the conductor comes out, it sounds crazy. They're all playing different things. It's really loud. Some of them are playing nothing. Some are playing, you know, calm down guy, right? Like that's what's happening on stage. And they're waiting. It sort of begs the question, where's the conductor? I mean, what is all this chaos? You're looking at yourself when you see that.

See, every person has an internal orchestra filled with all kinds of different instruments that are playing all kinds of different tunes. There are lots and lots of yous inside of you. You might have fearful you, you might have bragging you, you might have need to be funny you, you have Bible knowledge you, you have lustful you, you have faithful through hardship you. All kinds of yous inside of you and they're all singing different songs and they're not singing together.

And this is really helpful for us. If you think about you like everybody else has all these different persons inside of them, yous inside of you competing, it helps us not to be too impressed or too disparaging of one another. You come in a church like this and you look around and some people feel really good about themselves and some people feel really bad about themselves when you come to church. Some of you feel really bad about yourself because everybody else here seems to have their stuff together.

Well, the picture of an orchestra helps us because we might go like, oh, that guy, man, he knows his Bible. He should be an elder. Well, that's one part of him. That's Bible knowledge him. But you don't see the I'm starved to have enough money so I have security part of him. So it helps you to maybe not be so impressed. That's one instrument in his orchestra, Bible knowledge guy, right? But that's not all of who he is.

It also helps us not to disparage other people because we might see another person and look down and like, oh, anger issue. She's anger issue. Well, that's part of her, but you know what? Part of her hates the anger issue. She's got all these voices that are battling inside of her too, just like you do. And it helps us therefore to not only evaluate other people correctly and maybe second-guess ourselves, but it also helps us to look inside of us and know how to move toward Jesus.

Naming the Parts of You

I want you to think about this. What if this analogy helped you to begin naming the parts of you in your orchestra? I mean, imagine at Meymandi Hall, if the only word we had for all the different instruments was "instrument." If the conductor just called the trumpets "instrument" and the violins "instrument" and the drums "instrument," he's like "instrument play louder, instrument play softer." It wouldn't make any sense, right? But they all have specific names. So he can say, hey tubas, you're out of tune. Hey violas, play louder, we can't hear you, right?

Beginning to name the different parts of you help you to identify those parts of you that you have brought to Jesus and maybe those parts of you you haven't identified with and brought to Jesus yet, right? You can look at you and you say, I have a loud internal critic. I have a little young lost part of myself that just wants to play. I have a hyperachiever inside of me. I have a duty-bound part of me. I have an approval addict part of me. I've got a craving attention and connection part of me. I mean, don't we all have these parts?

Okay, again, just up here by myself this morning. It's okay. It's alright. Y'all can just watch me sweat up here, right? All of us have these voices inside of us and it's helpful if you can do this this afternoon. Pull out a piece of paper and begin writing out all the parts. These aren't your roles. This isn't mom, employee, aunt. This is, I always want people to think I'm funny. This is, I always gotta be right. These are all the various parts of you that you name and then you begin to listen. You ask this question: Hey, I need to know what song they're singing. I need to understand what song they're singing because some of those songs are probably legitimate in some ways. Some of them are actually probably legitimate.

But one of the parts of this that I want you to do is begin to invite all those instruments, all those yous, to the conductor. To begin to introduce them all to the conductor and that's gonna do two things. First, like at the beginning when the orchestra plays, there's tuning time, right? The conductor comes out, everybody claps, and then there's this quiet moment where the oboe plays a note—plays the A above middle C, 440 megahertz—and everybody tunes their instruments to that. Now why do they do that?

Because every instrument that's tuned to that is tuned at the same time to one another. In our church, we sing this song: "Come Thou Fount of every blessing. Tune my heart to sing Thy praise." Right? Like I need tuning and there are parts of me that need to be changed and adjusted by You, Jesus.

The second thing that needs to happen is that we begin to say, conductor, you get to call out what happens in my life with all these different parts of me. When the conductor stands up, you watch them and think, oh, they're just going to keep time up there. No, no, they're doing this stuff. What are they doing? Oh, I need to draw out that voice. I need to quiet that one. And you allow the conductor to not only interact with those parts of you that maybe you haven't brought to him before, including the sexual part of you. You allow him to not only tune them, but to draw out those different parts of you.

Eugene Peterson paraphrases this beatitude in the Message. He says this:

You're blessed when you get your inside world put right like the conductor with the orchestra. Then you can see God in your outside world.

So here's my homework for you today. Pull out the paper, write out your orchestra. What's inside of you? Have you introduced all the instruments to Jesus? Are you allowing Him to be the conductor of all those parts of you in your life? My guess is that we've done that with parts of ourselves. There are parts that we allow Jesus to touch and know and see, and there are parts that we keep hidden. We don't want Him to see and know. It's too painful. It's too embarrassing. But Jesus knows. He knows all of who you are and He sees you unblinking.

Why the Pure in Heart Are Happy

Last thing here: why is the pure in heart the happy heart? I use that on purpose because I know when I said that earlier, some of you giggled. You're like, that sounds so silly. But Jesus doesn't think it's silly. All these beatitudes are about our happiness. Aren't we people who in every area of life seek happiness? We want to be happy. So this is not a foolish thing to say.

How is the pure in heart a happy heart? Because it says here, the pure in heart will see God. Now, Hebrews 12 tells us:

Without holiness, no one will see the Lord.

And if you're hearing this from purity culture ears, you're going to be like, oh, I hate that verse. Why is that gotta be in our Bible? But if you understand that God is in the process of purifying those He loves, you'd be like, there's a promise in there. Did you know that God wants you to see him?

One thing that little kids ask all the time of their parents—I remember our boys, one of them very young. We were talking about Jesus, and Susan tells a story about how we're talking about Jesus and he's like, well, where is Jesus? You're talking about him like he's right here, right? And kids always ask this question: why can't I see God? Here's the answer. God doesn't want you to see with these because he wants you to learn to see with this. He doesn't want you to just see him with this. He wants you to learn to see him with this.

When we begin to offer up our heart in all its parts to God, our hearts can develop new eyes to identify Jesus and his work in our lives. We're like, oh my word, that verse this morning was for me. That song we sang in church, the Holy Spirit threw that one in this morning for me. I wanna see him, and you know what? God wants you to see him. He's not playing hide and seek from you. He's not purposely hiding from you. He wants you to learn to see Him from here.

And the promise is that one day we will see Him. You know, in First Corinthians 13, it says this:

Now we see as in through a mirror dimly, then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, then I will know fully even as I am fully known.

The Lord of the universe knows you fully, and one day you will fully know him. In all of who you are, all the divisions and fracture, all the contradictions and mess—all that will be resolved. Can you wait? I can't.

Let's go to the Lord in prayer together. Lord, we thank you for your word. There is nothing like your word. Lord, we pray today for hope. I pray for every person under the sound of my voice that you would give them hope today. That they might be purified and known by you—the deep parts of us that are deeply contradictory and frustrating to us, in the ways that we're not the same. Lord, You invite us to bring all of ourselves to You. Lord, we pray this morning as we sing, as we come to Your table, that You would do Your work in us to transform us, transform our desires. We pray that we would be the pure in heart and that we would see God. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.