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[0:00] Our scripture reading, the first scripture for today's sermon is taken from Psalm chapter 15, verses 1 to 5.

[0:15] ! A Psalm of David. O Lord, who shall sojourn in your tent? Who shall dwell on your holy hill? He who walks blamelessly and does what is right, and speaks truth in his heart.

[0:31] Who does not slander with his tongue, and does no evil to his neighbor, nor takes up a reproach against his friend. In whose eyes a vile person is despised, but who honors those who fear the Lord.

[0:46] Who swears to his own hurt, and who does not change. Who does not put out his money at interest, and who does not take a bribe against the innocent.

[0:58] He who does these things shall never be moved. Matthew chapter 5, verse 8. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

[1:14] The word of the Lord. Well, this morning, after a several week break, we are returning to our sermon series in the Sermon on the Mount.

[1:28] We have come to the sixth beatitude. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. For those of you who have considered this beatitude, I believe you would probably agree with me, that on its face, it is perhaps the weightiest and scariest of all the beatitudes.

[1:53] And I say this for two reasons. First, I say it because I believe all of us present, with the exception of maybe some very young children, know the meaning of pure.

[2:09] We know that when we say something is pure, we mean that it is not contaminated. It is unmixed with anything else.

[2:21] And the second reason I say it is because we know our own hearts. And I don't think any of us can honestly stand this morning and say, my heart is pure and uncontaminated.

[2:38] And so we have a dilemma. Jesus says, only the pure in heart are blessed and only they will see God.

[2:53] And we all know that our hearts are not perfectly pure. We all know that our hearts are not free from sin.

[3:06] And so for anyone to hear these words of Jesus and to take these words of Jesus seriously, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

[3:19] And then stand and say, I am morally pure in my heart. It would be very obvious to the rest of us that that person's pride has blinded them to their sinful heart.

[3:31] Or they're just simply dishonest or a combination of both. And so it appears that in this sixth beatitude, we have a dilemma.

[3:47] Is Jesus saying that people who are morally impure in heart like us will never see God? Or is he perhaps saying something else?

[4:02] Before we consider exactly what Jesus is saying, let's take a moment to pray and ask for his help. Father, would you meet us by your Holy Spirit as we open your word this morning?

[4:18] We acknowledge, Lord, we need your help. Lord, I need your help. I need your help to faithfully bring your word to your people. Would you help me to stay within the four corners of the truth?

[4:34] Would you anoint me by your spirit? Grant me unction to speak your word to your people. And grant us all, Lord, ears to hear and hearts to obey what you would say to us.

[4:54] Would you superintend the preaching of your word and cause what we just sang about to be a reality for us? Move among us, Lord. And cause our lives to be changed.

[5:08] Give us a taste of heaven now. We pray all these things. In Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. It was my intent this morning to have the reading to start at verse 1 of Matthew chapter 5.

[5:35] And the reason for that is because although we have considered the first five Beatitudes already, I wanted us to hear them again. I want us to hear them again in conjunction with this one that we are considering this morning.

[5:51] And the reason is that I don't want us to forget that the Beatitudes are a connected body of teaching that Jesus gave.

[6:02] We don't have random, isolated sayings of Jesus. These are connected, and not only are they connected, there's a progression in them.

[6:13] And Jesus knows exactly what he's saying, and knows exactly where he starts and where he ends. And it's a glorious thing as we have been memorizing the Beatitudes, and we are preaching through it.

[6:25] And really, there was no intent to coordinate the two. It just happened in the problems of the Lord that we are doing that. And it's quite interesting that the Beatitudes begin with someone, a person who is mourning over sin.

[6:46] And then the Beatitudes end with those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. And they are rejoicing.

[6:57] And there's a progression from that first Beatitude to the last Beatitude. And we want to remember that as we work our way through the Beatitudes.

[7:11] And so one of the first things we should remember as we think about this sixth Beatitude is that Jesus is not speaking to a new group of people. He is not speaking about a new group of people. The same person who is poor in spirit.

[7:27] The same person who mourns over his sin. The same persons who are meek, who hunger and thirst after righteousness, who are merciful.

[7:39] Those are the same persons about whom Jesus is saying, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. They're the same people.

[7:49] So what does Jesus mean by this Beatitude? Again, is he saying that people whose hearts are morally impure like us will never see God?

[8:09] Or is he saying something else? In our remaining time, I want us to consider this Beatitude under two headings. The first is the meaning of purity of heart.

[8:26] Now, when the Scripture speaks about the heart of man, it's not speaking about this organ that's pumping in our chests. It speaks about, when the Scripture refers to the heart, it's speaking about the centrality of our being, the core of our existence.

[8:49] It's speaking about the place from which our lives are directed and ordered in terms of our affections, in terms of our emotions, in terms of our will, our intellect, and everything else.

[9:01] It's the center of who we are. And that's why we'll say things like the heart of a matter. I mean, that's the essence of it. And so that's what the Scripture refers to when there's this reference to the heart.

[9:19] Now, what does it mean to have a pure heart? I want to answer this question in a gradual way because I think it's important for us to see it. And I want to begin by looking at a few Scriptures that will give us some insight into what Jesus is saying.

[9:36] The first Scripture I want us to look at is Matthew 15, 19 to 20. You don't need to turn there. It's going to be projected for you. Jesus is addressing the Pharisees.

[9:48] He's addressing the Pharisees who were only concerned with externals. They were only concerned with the appearance of things and the appearance of righteousness. They were concerned about external cleanliness, but they were not concerned about their unclean hearts.

[10:03] And this is what Jesus says in Matthew 15, 19 to 20, with the Pharisees in view. He says, Notice the first defilement that Jesus references.

[10:37] The first defilement he lists. We don't need to go into the big ones. We can just start with this first one, evil thoughts. Now, let me ask, who among us has never had an evil thought?

[10:54] I don't expect any hands to be raised, because if you raise your hand, you just commit evil right there from a thought out of your heart to say that you don't have evil thoughts.

[11:14] The truth is that we all have had evil thoughts. The truth is that we have evil thoughts every day. including today, a day like the Lord's Day.

[11:30] Our thoughts, brothers and sisters, to different degrees and in various ways are all tainted by sin. And none of them is perfect before a holy God.

[11:44] This is true of every person who's walked the face of this earth except the Lord Jesus Christ. And so I think the reality of our fallen, sinful heart should make it very obvious to us that by the words pure in heart, Jesus does not mean perfect moral purity of heart.

[12:12] another scripture I want us to consider to help us to see this even more clearly is Isaiah chapter 6. And I want to look at the first five verses, verses 1 to 5.

[12:25] It's going to be projected again for you as well. This is an account of Isaiah's encounter when he saw the Lord. At a particular moment in his ministry, he had been serving as a prophet for years, ministering to the nation of Israel.

[12:43] And this pivotal moment came when King Uzziah died, when God gave him a vision. And here's what he wrote. In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple.

[13:02] Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings. With two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

[13:20] The whole earth is full of his glory. And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called. And the house was filled with smoke.

[13:33] And I said, Woe is me, for I am lost. For I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.

[13:54] Here in verse 5, we have the prophet Isaiah confessing his sinfulness, and yet he saw the Lord. And in fact, what Isaiah is really communicating to us is that it is the vision of the Lord that helped him to see his sinfulness.

[14:17] He'd been ministering to the nation of Israel as a prophet, but God gives him this vision. And Isaiah sees his sin in a way that he didn't see before.

[14:27] And he says, Woe is me, I'm lost. I'm a man of unclean lips, and yet I have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.

[14:40] One of the interesting things about growing in holiness and growing in sanctification is the more we grow in holiness, the more we see our sin. The more we see the Lord, the more aware we are of how sinful we are.

[14:57] And so clearly Jesus cannot be saying to us that only those who are morally pure in heart can see the Lord.

[15:17] Because that would exempt all of us. That would disqualify all of us. But we see Isaiah. It was the vision of the Lord that caused him to see how sinful he really was.

[15:37] I believe also another scripture we can point to that helps us to begin to zero in on what Jesus means by the pure in heart is Psalm 24, verses 3 to 6.

[15:52] Again, these will be projected for you as well. This is the Psalmist David. The Psalmist David begins with two questions.

[16:07] Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart.

[16:18] Who does not lift up his soul to what is false? Does not swear deceitfully? He will receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

[16:34] Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob, Selah. The Psalmist David is written by David.

[16:44] And David is one of those characters in scripture where the smallest child knows about David. The smallest child whose grace is Sunday school knows about David.

[16:56] A man whose many sins are recorded in the pages of scripture. And notice in verse 4 that David describes the person who may come into God's presence.

[17:13] The person he describes is not one who is perfect, but one who is sincere. One who is not a hypocrite. His hands, her hands are clean.

[17:29] His or her heart is pure. In other words, there is consistency between who they are on the outside and who they are on the inside.

[17:40] Clean hands, pure heart. They're not showing clean hands on the outside and then having an impure heart on the inside and harboring malice and other sins like anger and jealousy and envy and ill will towards others.

[18:00] And they're not only refraining from worshiping idols outwardly, but they're also refraining from and guarding their soul against idolatry. They're truthful with others.

[18:13] They don't lie to them. They don't swear with an oath to make their lies seem true. Our first scripture reading this morning in Psalm 15 says the same thing.

[18:28] But it says it in a slightly different way. Again, the psalmist opens asking these two questions. Who shall sojourn in your tent? And who shall dwell on your holy hill?

[18:42] And then David answers in verses 2 to 5. He who walks blamelessly. And to be blameless is not to be perfect.

[18:58] Blamelessly speaks of someone that you just cannot charge with flagrant and just open sin.

[19:09] That you can throw things, but they just wouldn't stick in the sense that this is a person whose general way of life is godly towards God. This is the description of Zechariah.

[19:24] That he was blameless before the Lord. That he and Elizabeth, they were blameless. Not perfect, but they were blameless.

[19:37] Some of the blameless people that we think about in scripture be someone like Joseph, Daniel. They weren't perfect. Christ is the only perfect one. But we cannot think about or see any particular thing that we can throw at them and it sticks because it's true.

[19:55] So he says this one is blameless. He does what is right and he speaks truth in his heart. He doesn't slander with his tongue and doesn't do evil to his neighbor. He doesn't take up a reproach against his friend.

[20:10] In other words, he doesn't slander his friend. He doesn't speak behind his friend's back. He's not a duplicitous person. He is one who swears to his own hurt.

[20:22] He gives his word. He'll keep his word even if it hurts to keep his word. He says he doesn't put his money out at interest and doesn't take a bribe against the innocent.

[20:35] He who does all these things will never be moved. He's one who's compassionate. He's one who would help without adding hurt to the help, not giving his money to a needy person upon interest.

[20:50] He doesn't take a bribe against an innocent person. This is the one who is pure in heart before the Lord.

[21:09] Now, if you had doubts about what pure in heart means, I hope that by now you are agreeing with me that by purity of heart, Jesus is not referring to a heart that is perfectly morally pure, but he's speaking about a heart that is unmixed.

[21:31] A heart that is not mixed with duplicity, a heart that is not mixed with hypocrisy. It's a heart of sincerity and honesty before God and before people, not a heart of moral perfection.

[21:48] Again, if it's a heart of moral perfection, none of us has a hope of ever seeing God. But the heart of purity that Jesus is referring to is a heart that is unmixed, unmixed with hypocrisy.

[22:03] It is a heart of sincerity before God. And we see this thread running through the Beatitudes. We see this with the person who is coming before God and recognizing, I am bankrupt, I have nothing in and of myself that is of spiritual worth.

[22:22] It is the person who is mourning over their sin. They see their sin and it grieves them. This is a person who is sincere about who they are before God and towards others.

[22:39] really, when we think of the structure of the Beatitudes, the Beatitudes is structured in two parts. The first four and then the latter four.

[22:51] The first four really speak to our relationship to God. So the first four in verses three to six, they are about our relationship to God.

[23:04] We recognize that we are poor in spirit, meaning we are bankrupt. We have nothing of spiritual value to offer to God. We mourn over our sin.

[23:17] In our relationship with God, we are meek because we are trusting Him to make a way for us rather than taking matters into our own hands. In our relationship with God, we hunger and thirst after righteousness.

[23:31] That's the first half of the Beatitudes. In the latter half of the Beatitudes, the other four, verses three to six, we see in them a connection between our relationship with others.

[23:46] All of them, they relate to how we relate to others. So we move now from looking Godward to looking manward, as it were. And so the first one is blessed are the merciful.

[24:00] We don't give God mercy. We who have received mercy from God, we give mercy to other people. And now we come to this one, blessed are the pure in heart.

[24:15] This is pure in our dealings with others, with an unmixed heart, with a heart that is not mixed with hypocrisy.

[24:27] And then the other one would be blessed are the peacemakers. We make peace with people who are at war with us, who are disagreeing with us. And then finally, blessed are those who are persecuted.

[24:40] We are persecuted by sinful people, by those who oppose us. And so these latter four, they relate to how we deal with others. So when you think about the structure of the Beatitudes, it should make it clear that what's the blessed are the pure in heart relates to our relationship with others as opposed to some moral purity before God.

[25:06] Now I'm not saying that we're not to be striving and seeking to be morally pure and to walk in holiness before the Lord. We must do that.

[25:17] But that's not what is in view right here. And I'll talk a bit more about that towards the end of the sermon. Listen how John Stott, a deceased pastor and theologian, put it in his commentary on this Beatitude.

[25:36] He writes about the pure in heart. Their whole life, public and private, is transparent before God and man.

[25:49] Their very heart, including their thoughts and motives, is pure and unmixed with anything devious, ulterior, or base. Hypocrisy and deceit are abhorrent to them.

[26:03] They are without guile. That's what Jesus said about Nathaniel in John 1, 47. He said, here's an Israel, here's an Israelite with whom, in whom there is no deceit.

[26:19] There's no guile in him. And so to be pure in heart is to not lead a double life. It is to be sincere.

[26:32] It is not to be hypocritical. So this sixth beatitude addresses the issue of hypocrisy of heart. Jesus is saying that hypocrites will not see God no matter how much they pretend to see him, no matter how much they pretend to hear from him.

[26:54] and this is because people who have come to see their spiritual bankruptcy, who have mourned over their sin, who are meek, who hunger and thirst after righteousness, who've experienced God's mercy, don't need to pretend to be who they are not.

[27:18] They can be like the tax collector in the temple who would beat his chest and say, God, be merciful to me, a sinner, while there's a Pharisee who's boasting about how good he is to the other side.

[27:39] Those are the ones who will see God. They know all too well who they are in and of themselves.

[27:53] And they know who they are in Christ. And they know that they're loved by the Father. They know that they've been forgiven of their many sins.

[28:04] And they know that they are eternally adopted into God's family. And so they can honestly deal with who they are without pretense.

[28:17] without any kind of a mask, without any kind of hypocrisy. This acceptance before God, this honesty before God, encourages them, encourages them, and enables them to live sincerely before God and before others.

[28:40] to live in the world. So now that we have teased out and we better understand what Jesus means by blessed are the pure in heart, let me ask you some questions that I encourage you to reflect upon.

[29:00] how do you assess yourself in light of this beatitude, in light of this sixth beatitude? Are you living two lives, one publicly and one privately, that contradict each other?

[29:18] How does your life at church compare with the life you live at home, the life you live at work, or the life you live at school?

[29:30] How different is our usage of the computer when we know others can see us or are watching us versus when we are all alone?

[29:51] What movies would we watch? What music would we listen to privately that we would not dare watch or listen to publicly?

[30:06] But to put it in a broader way, if a videotape of your life, my life, our private life, was displayed and compared to our public life, would you, would I be described as hypocritical?

[30:36] Or would there be consistency between who we are privately and who we are publicly? or would we be branded as a duplicitous person, as a hypocrite?

[30:55] Again, brothers and sisters, one of the best examples we can find in Scripture of a man who is pure in heart, setting aside the Lord Jesus Christ, is King David.

[31:10] God said about him, he is a man after my own heart. God said that David lusted after another man's wife, committed adultery with another man's wife, killed that man, defamed the office of the king, shamed his family and all those associated with him.

[31:30] But when the prophet Nathan confronted him, instead of trying to cover it up, David said, I've sinned against the Lord.

[31:43] David was powerful enough, he could have killed Nathan the same way he killed Uriah, but no, he said, I have sinned against the Lord. And David repented publicly, didn't have to do it publicly, could have done it privately, he repented,!

[32:01] and his cry was not, don't take the kingdom from me, it was, don't take your spirit from me. Brothers and sisters, the sixth reality is not about goodness and badness.

[32:17] The sixth reality is about sincerity of heart. It is about a heart that is unmixed with hypocrisy in our dealings with others and before the Lord.

[32:29] And this is why Jesus said to the Pharisees, he said, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom ahead of you. You see, because tax collectors and prostitutes, they are aware of their sin, they are aware of their need for God.

[32:53] And they don't pretend to be who they are not like Pharisees do. I heard an interesting story about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the Sherlock Holmes character.

[33:09] One day he decided to play a prank on the 12 most respectable people he knew to see how they would respond. And he sent a message to each of them, and the message simply said, flee, all is revealed.

[33:26] And within 24 hours, six of those respectable persons had left the country. And it's a reminder that all people, even the most respectable people, have secrets that they would be horrified if others knew.

[33:47] And brothers and sisters, we're no different. And some of our deepest secrets are not the things we have done. our deepest secrets are the motives and the thoughts of our hearts that are buried deep within our souls that people never see.

[34:13] And it is in this area of our lives that Jesus directs this beatitude in our hearts, to the core of our being, that which is not seen by others, but is seen and known by him.

[34:33] See, we could stand in the presence of someone and we can be duplicitous and hypocritical in our hearts, they would never know, but God knows.

[34:45] And so he says, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are those who are unmixed, blessed are those who are honest, they will see God.

[34:58] Isn't that a marvelous thing? That seeing God will be a matter of grace.

[35:12] Not a matter of saying, oh, I have done this and I've cleaned up myself and I'm all that I need to be and therefore I will be rewarded with saying God.

[35:25] No, it's a matter of the sheer grace of God. And so that's what it means to be pure in heart. It means to be sincere, it means being unhypocritical in heart.

[35:43] So now that we know, hopefully, the meaning of purity of heart, let's now consider the blessing of purity, the blessing of purity of heart.

[35:59] And this is my second and final point. The blessing that Jesus promises to the pure in heart is that they will see God. God. This is what theologians call the beatific vision, the hope and the joy of the promise that one day we will see God.

[36:28] God. But there's a difficulty in this promise. The difficulty in this promise is that Scripture says that God is invisible.

[36:40] For example, the Apostle Paul in that wonderful doxology in 1 Timothy 1.17 writes, to the King of Ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.

[37:04] Amen. But brothers and sisters, God can still be seen by his people and is seen by his people even though not in a physical sense.

[37:21] For example, speaking about Moses, the writer to the Hebrews in Hebrews 11.27 says, by faith he left Egypt not being afraid of the anger of the king for he endured as seeing him who is invisible.

[37:45] Moses was moved to suffer with the people of God. Moses was moved to live his life in the way that he lived his life because he saw him who was invisible.

[38:01] Moses saw him who was invisible with the eyes of faith, which is the same for all the people of God. And how do we see him?

[38:16] I like the way John Stott put it in his comments on this beatitude. Here's what he writes. Only the pure in heart will see God.

[38:30] See him now with the eye of faith and see him in glory and the hereafter. For only the utterly sincere can bear the dazzling vision in whose light the darkness of deceit must vanish and by whose fire all shams are burned up.

[38:52] And so brothers and sisters, the more we value and pursue purity of heart, the more we will see the Lord through the eye of faith in multifaceted ways.

[39:10] We see him in creation in ways that others cannot. We see him as he governs life, as he governs our lives, as he governs our lives in his sovereignty and in his providence.

[39:27] We see him. We see him at work. The promise to the pure in heart is that we will see God.

[39:39] We'll see him in his beauty and his splendor. We will see him in increasing ways now and in an ultimate way in heaven. The pure in heart see God at work in ways others do not, indeed cannot.

[40:03] Again, when we consider that the pure in heart does not mean the perfect in heart, it is a testimony to God's grace that he allows sinful people like us, like Isaiah, to see him.

[40:26] It is an act of grace that he allows us to see him in any way or degree. It is an act of grace that we're able to see him with the eye of faith, the way Moses was able to see him.

[40:42] Scripture teaches us that the righteousness that believers have comes from Christ. It is an imputed righteousness, not an imparted righteousness.

[40:54] The great reformer Martin Luther called it an alien righteousness, a righteousness that is foreign to us, it doesn't belong to us. It is not our own righteousness, it is Christ's righteousness.

[41:07] God puts it in our bank account as it were. and it remains Christ's righteousness, it never becomes our righteousness. It is always Christ's righteousness that we have the benefit of, that the Father sees us with.

[41:25] It's the righteous garment that he gives to us that is Christ's righteous garment, not our own. Will we grow in righteousness? Will we grow in holiness over time? Yes. But never to the degree that we can stand before God in our own righteousness and have him accept us.

[41:41] The only righteousness that accepts us before a holy God is the righteousness of Jesus Christ. And the righteousness of Jesus Christ is our portion even when our hearts are not perfectly moral before the Lord.

[42:01] And that is amazing grace. grace. That's amazing grace, brothers and sisters.

[42:18] It is amazing grace that we should never take for granted. We see God now with the eyes of faith.

[42:30] And we will see him in glory in the hereafter only because of his mercy and grace that has come to us through the Lord Jesus Christ through his substitutionary death on the cross for sinners like you and me.

[42:48] Now because of this purity of heart in the sixth beatitude that it does not mean moral perfection, please hear me this morning, that does not mean that we have any kind of license or liberty or freedom to live slack and carelessly and slothfully as it relates to sin.

[43:13] Anyone thinking that way is thinking in a way that is not consistent with the revelation of God's word. It doesn't mean that we make no effort to grow in holiness.

[43:27] It doesn't mean that we make no effort to grow in Christ-likeness. In truth, since purity of heart is sincerity of heart, true believers genuinely want to grow in holiness.

[43:44] They want to grow in godliness. They want to grow in Christ-likeness. It is a contradiction to say I am sincere in heart before God and others and then not really wanting to pursue holiness and Christ-likeness in our lives.

[44:07] And so how can we grow in holiness and growing in Christ-likeness? I want to just close by offering three suggestions.

[44:20] Number one, we need to acknowledge that only God can make our hearts pure. James 4, 8 says, draw near to God and he will draw near to you.

[44:33] Cleanse your hands, your hearts. Sorry, cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Notice that the issue that James is addressing, again, is the issue of sincerity.

[44:49] He says, cleanse your hands, purify your heart, and draw near to God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

[44:59] because even after we have resisted sin, even after we have cleansed our hands, even after we have purified our hearts, in the practical ways that Scripture calls us to do, they are only truly cleansed and purified in the sight of God through Jesus Christ, whose hands and heart alone are perfect.

[45:24] I like the way Kent Hughes, a retired pastor and theologian, he put it. Here's what he writes. The biblical balance is, I must do everything I can and still realize it's not enough.

[45:40] Only God can make my heart pure. Second, let's commit to filling our hearts with God's Word, reading and meditating upon it daily, memorizing Scripture, valuing the benefit of sitting under the preaching of God's Word, valuing the benefit of studying God's Word.

[45:59] Making every effort to do it. And that's because God's Word has a cleansing, sanctifying effect upon us.

[46:13] God's Word has a sanctifying and cleansing effect upon us. And if we are growing and filling our hearts with God's Word, we will be growing and living sincere, open, and honest lives before the Lord, and our progression and sanctification will be evident to those around us.

[46:34] Because that is the effectiveness of the Word of God that He has put into His own Word. And third and finally, let's leverage thinking now about what we will be in eternity.

[46:52] in 1 John 3, verses 2 to 3, the Apostle John writes, Beloved, Lord, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is, and everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself even as He is pure.

[47:26] Brothers and sisters, note carefully verse 3. Everyone, everyone without exception, everyone who has this hope of seeing the Lord is motivated to prepare by purifying Himself.

[47:38] And how do we purify ourselves? Paul tells us in Titus 2, verses 11 to 14, For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession who are zealous for good works.

[48:24] God is the only one who can ultimately make our hearts pure. He calls us to grace- motivated labor.

[48:39] He calls us to grace- motivated labor to renounce ungodliness, to renounce worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age while we patiently wait for the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

[49:11] As the Word of God in the Bible is concluding, in the last book of the Bible, in the last chapter of the last book of the Bible, we read these words, Revelation 22, verses 1-5.

[49:29] Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. Through the middle of the street of the city, also on each side of the river, the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month.

[49:52] The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.

[50:05] They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads, and night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun.

[50:19] for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. And no doubt some of you are saying in your mind, but I thought you said we cannot see God.

[50:36] I thought you said we cannot see God with our eyes. And if you're asking that question, you are tracking well with the sermon this morning. God is invisible. What the Bible teaches is that while God is invisible, he has made himself visible in Jesus Christ.

[50:58] Christ. Speaking of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul in Colossians 1.15 says this, he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

[51:18] And in 2 Corinthians 4.6 we read, for God who said, let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

[51:38] Revelation 23, 22, verses 3 to 4 says, no longer will there be anything accursed for the throne of God, another lamb will be in it and his servants will worship him and they will see his face and his name will be on their foreheads.

[52:01] Whose face is it that we see in verse 4? Whose face is it that we promised that we will see in verse 4?

[52:13] Is it God the Father or is it God the Son, the Lamb? I believe the face that we will see is the face of the Lord Jesus Christ who is the image of the invisible God.

[52:30] But you know what? It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. We have this promise from the God who cannot lie that we're going to see God.

[52:42] How and all the ins and outs of how he's going to fulfill that promise to make it true for us, he will do. And we don't have those details as clearly as we would like, but we have what we need.

[52:59] We have what we need. We have this promise of this beatific vision that we will one day see the Lord as he is.

[53:15] and I pray that this promise will linger in all of our hearts. Blessed are the merciful.

[53:28] Sorry. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are people like you and me, whose hearts in and of ourselves are not morally perfect, will never be morally perfect, that one day, by the grace of God, through the Lord Jesus Christ, whose perfect righteousness has been given to us, we will see God.

[54:02] And I pray that the grace of God that has come to us in Jesus Christ would be the motivation for us to be honest before God and honest before our brothers and sisters as we live the Christian life, acknowledging our sin, confessing our sin, and pursuing the Lord, pursuing godliness, pursuing holiness, and looking forward to the day when we behold his face, however and whenever he chooses to reveal himself.

[54:37] Let's pray. O dear Lord, we thank you that sinners like us, those who are aware of our sin can still hold on to the beatific vision.

[55:05] the hope that one day we will see the Lord. We'll see the Lord as he is.

[55:19] And when we see him, Lord, it will not be with hearts that are morally impure, but it will be hearts that have been perfected and glorified all because of the Lord Jesus Christ.

[55:39] Would you help us, O Lord, to look for that day and long for that day more and more every day. And may we hold on to the promise and the blessing in the promise.

[55:55]  Blessed are the pure in heart that they shall seek God. We ask all these things in Jesus' name. Amen. That's the time for those who who