Jerry’s Grill - A Pure Heart
Purity is a word greatly prized in the New Testament. Unfortunately, in our day, its meaning has all but been lost. It sounds quaint, Victorian, prudish, bloodless. It sounds as if a person isn’t fully human when actually God’s call for us to be pure is precisely His call for us to be purely human.
Question: How can one stay pure these days?
Answer: Regard a life of undivided loyalties.
Søren Kierkegaard in his book Purity Of heart Is To Will One Thing saw double mindedness as the essential disease of the human spirit. This disease:
- Is the failure to achieve simplicity
- To have a life that is integrated
- A life that is focused to one thing
- A failure to make an ultimate commitment to what Jesus spoke of as ‘seeking first the Kingdom of God ”.
The opposite to a life of simplicity is multiplicity or duplicity. Multiplicity is a life marked by ambivalence – pulled and pushed. To this regard, Paul said in Col 3:16-17 (NIV)
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
The purpose of knowing Scriptures is not to help us get a 100% score in Heaven’s Entrance Exam. It is to help us become equipped for good works.
Or, to put it in another way, it is for us to be transformed into the kind of people from whom goodness flows like an unceasing stream of water.
We need to develop the practice on meditating on the Scriptures. The purpose of meditation is to have our minds “washed by the word”.
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