Week of March 3rd, 2014

“Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience” (Heb 10:22, ESV)

If in everyday speech we refer to pure hearts, we are likely only to be identifying some people as not inclined, as others are, to sexual shenanigans or to the underhand exploitations of others for personal gain or to cruel abuse of them for some perverted gratification. Kierkegaard put his finger on the deep truth of the matter when he titled one of his books Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. Jesus spelled out that truth when He said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Mt 22:37 emphasis mine). The triad usage of heart, soul, and mind here are words of overlapping meaning, almost synonyms; Jesus is saying that we are to love our God with everything we’ve got. And He is effectively defining for us the purity of heart of which He had said in “The Beatitudes,”  “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). Purity of heart is indeed a matter of willing one thing, namely to live every day of one’s life loving God.

It is a matter of saying and meaning what the psalmist declared: “There is nothing on earth that I desire besides you” (Ps 73:25)—making it a matter of knowing and loving and pleasing and praising my life task, and of seeking to lead others as well into the same God-glorifying life pattern.

May we will this one thing as we seek to live this glorified life unto Jesus that the whole world may see of His beauty.

In His service,

Keith L. Bagwell