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We’re good at looking pure—saying the right things, following the right rules, putting on the kind of life that earns approving nods—and that’s precisely the trap Jesus names in Matthew 5:8 when he calls the pure in heart blessed, not the pure in appearance.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon contrasts “doing the things” with “being transformed.” Can you identify an area of your own life—maybe a church habit, a moral standard, or a way you present yourself—where you’re going through the motions without real heart change? What would it look like to invite God’s transformation there instead?
Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for tithing mint and cumin while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness. What are the modern equivalents—the precise religious performances we might prioritize while missing what God actually calls us to?
The sermon describes how church camp conversions can happen because of peer pressure rather than genuine encounter with Jesus. Have you experienced or witnessed the difference between choosing faith for others’ approval versus choosing it out of genuine desire to know God? What made the difference?
When you speak or act in ways that appear holy, what tends to drive you: pleasing God, gaining respect, avoiding judgment, or meeting others’ expectations?
The woman at the well didn’t clean up her life before encountering Jesus; she encountered him and then everything changed. How does that order matter? What keeps us trying to get our act together before we’ll fully turn to God?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, here we are, can you believe how far we are already? We’re on week six here at Little Hills. I’m just sort of stunned by that. I can’t quite believe that we’ve been gathering for six weeks, and yet here we are, smack dab in the middle of the Beatitudes, looking at what the kingdom looks like and how it functions. Tonight, we’re going to come to something that’s really important—that we can think that we’re doing and not be doing it. That is what we find in verse 9, or excuse me, verse 8, which is, “Blessed are the pure in heart.”
I don’t think I know anyone who says, “I want to have an impure heart.” We don’t think that, right? It’s not anyone’s goal. We might decide, “Well, I’m going to redefine what a pure heart looks like,” but we don’t think, “I want an impure heart.” We tend to associate impurity with something bad. You don’t go to the store and buy impure oil or impure milk. You might get it really cheap if you could, but they’d actually probably get sued for selling it. We avoid things that are impure. But Jesus says blessed are the pure in heart.
Well, Leo, can you take us back one slide? Thanks. And then hit the preaching blue light icon on the light screen, thanks.
You know, there’s lots of components to being the church. And there’s lots of components to almost anything we do. There’s lots of components to things that happen in life that I don’t usually think about. For example, a couple years ago here, when this was purely the meeting spot of Faith Tree and Lutheran Student Union before Little Hills, we noticed it started getting really hot in here. And it was middle of summer, and I have a little temperature sensor in my office so I could see how things were going up here when I wasn’t here. I pulled it up one morning: it’s 110 degrees in my office. We have those windows that face there, you know, the sun’s coming up and it is really, really intense, and the air conditioner just wasn’t keeping up any longer.
So I called the landlord, and they sent out a technician. The technician looked at it, and I had a feeling where this was going because the air conditioning unit here, the paper, the logos was yellowed and so on. It was an ancient air conditioner, probably original to the building. He looked at it and said there needs to be a new unit. Thankfully, since we’re leasing, we didn’t have to pay for the new unit, but he came in a few days later—it was baking in here—and installed a new HVAC system. So we’re all set, and the air comes on, it’s glorious; it’s cool again in here, it was great.
That was, I think, June, late June, early July—somewhere in there it was hot. So it cooled everything off nicely in August. September, it was still keeping things cool in those hot days, and on cooler days, it just seemed to naturally be fine. October was still naturally fine, but it was kind of starting to get a little nippy in here. November was still nippy, and I’d go in earlier and earlier and turn up the heater. No matter what I did, it was always around 60 degrees in here, sort of like a cave. I thought, well, this is strange. You know, it’s not blizzard conditions out here; why is it always 60 degrees? But it’s not as cold as it is outside, so it must be working.
It turned out it wasn’t working. We were receiving the ambient heat from below. In fact, as it turned out, the technician came back out and said, “Let me take a look at it.” He opened the panel to the heating portion of the unit, and there’s just a cavern in there—he forgot to install the heater! There was a box, but there wasn’t anything in it. The heart of the heater was missing. It looked like a unit; the fan was blowing as if there was a unit and it could do part of it right because they had the air conditioner, but it was missing part of its heart and couldn’t actually do what it was called to do.
That’s the challenge we face in life as well. A lot of times we become part of the church, maybe you start attending, and we can do some of the stuff that we’re supposed to be doing, and we can blow some refreshing cool air, but then it gets cold and we can’t offer any warmth. What we find is that we’re missing something under the surface, and that’s what Jesus is pointing to here. He’s invoking something that comes up time and again in the Old Testament, and that’s the call to have a pure heart. So we need to think about what that is.
But as we do that, let’s come before our God and ask the God who can give us a pure heart—the only one who can give us a pure heart—who would be with us tonight as we look at his Word. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for giving us a heart, restoring our heart. Lord, when we seek to accomplish even good works on our own, we find that we’re like that heater trying to blow hot air without an actual heating unit inside. But you offer something more. Father, would you help us to see the places where our hearts are not in conformity to you? Help us to trust, help us to receive the warmth that comes from your Spirit, the refreshing coolness that comes from your Spirit. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, we talked about it a moment ago. Let’s just look at this verse again so we can tuck it in our minds as we’re thinking about it. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” What does it mean to have a pure heart?
So, if I said you should have a pure heart, you’re not going to say, “Well, that sounds like a dumb idea. Why would I want a pure heart?” You’re not going to say that, and yet we have lots of false senses of what purity looks like. In the church, we’ve spent decades talking about—or actually more like millennia talking about—what does purity look like? And we’ll come up with these definitions: Here’s what you should wear, here’s how you should act, you should do these certain things. Oftentimes, they’re touching on God’s law, so they’re good things. And yet we define a box and say, “This is purity.” We think, well, it looks pretty good, right? If we do those things and you look at our lives, our lives often look like pretty good lives. Maybe holier-than-thou lives at times.
Someone might say, “Well, why do you have to be so legalistic, or why do you have to do this or do that?” But it can look pretty good. The challenge is, over time, we run into problems, and we see this over and over again in church history, where people will rebel against that or they’ll fail miserably, even though they seem to have this presentation of purity. Because what we’re dealing with is: how do we make it look like purity, rather than how do we actually have a pure heart?
Just like that heating unit back there, if I’d taken you back there and you’re not an HVAC person, you would’ve looked at it and said, “Hey, you have a nice new unit; all the paint’s nice and shiny, all the service contracts look up to date, everything looks good.” But underneath, it couldn’t actually do its job. That’s what we often run into.
It reminds me of, if you come over page 364 onto 94, and there’s a storage shed over there that’s been there for decades. It was there before PAGE was even built over onto this side of the river before the PAGE extension. It was just this short, single-story storage unit. It wasn’t one of the new, fancy, climate-controlled ones. It was just an average storage unit. But they’re building the off-ramps onto 94 from PAGE, and they were going to be kind of covered by all the mounds and the overpasses and everything.
So they started a building project, they put these giant beams up, then cross beams, and they started putting siding on. You can go look at it. If you look, though, if you drive behind it, they didn’t add a bunch more storage. They just added this giant facade on top so you can see it from the highway. You can see it, but it’s still this relatively tiny storage set of units. It’s not the impressive units that it looks like. And so, it’s easy to see, but that fanciness they added did nothing. It didn’t add more units. It didn’t make it easier to store things. It didn’t provide climate control. It just is visible.
Too often, in the people that Jesus was addressing, too often, they were building really nice, big walls and making everything look really nice, but they weren’t actually doing the work to be more of what God called them to be. We fall into the same trap. Fancy building that does nothing. We’re called to something different. We’re called to purity of heart, transformation that does more than just put up a facade.
Jesus, later on in his ministry in Matthew 23, addresses two different ways that the Pharisees, the teachers of the law, the people that had what looked like a really good presentation of purity, were actually falling short. We see that if we turn to Matthew 23, verse one. It says, “Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, ‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat. So do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works that they do. For they preach, but they do not practice.’”
You see, the Pharisees could put on this presentation of purity, and Jesus is saying, yes, yes, I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t have purity in your life, you shouldn’t be a people of purity, but what I’m saying is don’t actually do like they do, because they’re not actually pure. They had hundreds and hundreds of laws to follow to evoke a sense of purity, and yet in their hearts, the actual purity of heart was missing.
God wants us to know that an outward profession isn’t enough. Pharisees could say lots of things that sounded impressive. They could say they were seeking after God’s heart, but they weren’t actually. They were seeking what would look like it, what you could see from the highway and say, “Oh, wow, there’s a big storage facility,” rather than what was actually going to change their lives and change the lives of the people around them.
Notice what God says in Isaiah 29, verse 13: “Because as people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is in a commandment taught by men.”
I’m stopping in the middle of the phrase there for a moment. Let’s just stop and dwell on that for a moment. Their fear is in a commandment taught by men. They honor God, the Lord says, they honor him with their lips. They say nice things, but their fear isn’t in the Lord. Their fear isn’t, “How can I please God?” Their desire isn’t, “Can I be of the kingdom of God?” Their desire is, “Can I do these things that the world says are important?”
What does that passage go on to say? If we were to go on and read through it, it says that God is going to bring a new work, which is to bring down that people. This is coming before the exile, before he takes his people out of the land of Babylon. He says, you can say a lot of nice things, but if you’re not actually having purity of heart, if you’re not actually being transformed in the heart, if it’s merely about what you can say with your lips, what commands of men you can follow, that’s not actually honoring.
Jesus actually goes back to this passage as he speaks to the Pharisees. We look at Mark chapter seven, verse eight. He says, “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”
That’s really easy to criticize and really hard to deal with in our own lives. Here’s the thing: we like the traditions of men if they’re our traditions. We look at other people’s traditions and we say, those foolish people that are clinging to tradition rather than following what God wants them to do. Until you actually touch on something that means something to you, and then you say, “But this is the way it’s always been, and God wants this because it’s good.”
I’ve done it. How often that happens. How often it happens that I want to cling to the things that I think I’ve imbued with meaning, but it’s really about what? About my comfort? About how it makes me feel? It’s not about actually clinging to God.
Now, that’s not to say all tradition is bad. We have tradition incorporated into our service here at Little Hills. I challenge you to find a church that doesn’t because you can’t. We bring tradition, that’s what human beings do. We are tradition factors; we create tradition. And that can be a good thing. It’s good to actually take the word of God, take it and apply it into our situation and have it in a way that’s meaningful and we can cling to it and remember it.
We’re going to have communion in a little bit. What do we do? We remember what Jesus has done for us. God calls us to do things that enable us to remember. So tradition isn’t bad as long as it’s pointing us to God’s command. But we need to make sure that it’s actually pointing to God’s command.
That’s the difference between purity of heart and evoking a picture of purity because oftentimes that tradition paints a picture that looks very pure and it can be very dead. Are we clinging to the tradition or are we clinging to God? Are we clinging to what makes us comfortable or are we clinging to God? Are we clinging to what makes us feel important or are we clinging to God?
I wish I could say I always just cling to God. But then something that really means something to me, now you’re meddling. Don’t mess with that. No, no, no, no, no.
Again, nothing wrong with tradition. And you look at it. Just a word on that because we can say, “Okay, I want to be pure of heart, so I’m going to cast out any of the traditions of men so I can just cling to God.” And so we say, “Okay, I’m going to strip all the tradition from the church. We’re going to get rid of the altar. We’re going to get rid of the hymns and then we’re going to get rid of the contemporary songs because those are a new tradition. We’re going to get rid of the order of service because our service here, part of it sort of follows a non-denominational contemporary order, and part of it sort of is following the ancient order of liturgy. We have a little bit of both in here, if you’ve noticed.”
Well, they’re both traditions. We’re going to strip that away. You know what starts to happen? Well, there isn’t anything left. The key thing here is that we’re actually thinking in terms of why am I doing it? What’s driving me?
You see, that heater’s problem wasn’t that it wanted to heat the room. The heater’s problem was it didn’t have a heart. It didn’t have the heater element inside of it to actually heat up the air. What’s driving us? What is heating us and cooling us? What’s causing us to do the things that we do? Is it being after God and his heart? Is it having, as one commentator said about this passage, as an alternative to “pure in heart,” singularness of mind? Where whatever we do, we’re doing it for God’s glory. Is that what defines us?
Here’s an example, and it’s going to be one that I don’t want to criticize too much because it’s a good thing that churches do, but it also shows, I think, some of the problems. That’s church camp.
How many of you have been to church camp? Okay, so we have a lot of church campers here. Did you have—I’m not going to ask you if you had a good experience or not. Maybe it was mixed. But there’s some essential elements of church camp, right? You’re going to have to have a campfire at some point. You’re probably going to be in some rickety buildings. Good sanctification, right? You’re going to sing some camp songs, right? And you’re probably going to hear some testimonies of longtime believers who are camp counselors and their experiences and so on.
Where’s this all driving to? Well, to get those campers to profess faith in Jesus, right? Good thing. That’s a good thing, right? We want more people to know Jesus, and we certainly want those who go to church camp as they’re growing up to know Jesus. It’s a good thing.
And yet here’s the problem that happens because we create a fear of not living up to the group rather than a fear of God. And so there are so many, and certainly there are people who genuinely come to faith at church camp, but there are so many who the reason they profess faith in Jesus is they don’t want the people around them, their peers, to say, “Why are you the one who hasn’t given a testimony?”
The pressure by the counselors and the organization and the peers all together create an awful lot of people who have church camp conversions but then go home and nothing happens. Some of you have had that experience. Came back home, nothing happened. Why? Because it was, “I need to say these words because I’m fearful what other people are going to think,” not actually, “I want to know the heart of God.” I want to profess because I want to hold on to the heart of God.
That’s a challenging thing for us in the church because we need to think: how do we encourage the one and not the other? And I’m not going to give the ultimate perfect answer for church camp here because it’s a challenging thing. It’s a nuanced thing. But one thing we can say is we need to be very careful that what we’re looking for and what we count as success isn’t how many people say a prayer or how many people can check the box that they’ve received Jesus, but how many people actually have received Jesus, how many people actually are in his kingdom.
And that’s a process that takes time because oftentimes we’ll present such opportunities and people don’t even have any idea what it means. It takes time to bring people to actually understand what the heart of God is. Some people have very quick conversions, and praise God for that.
What we should be doing is encouraging people to have a fear of God, a desire to know his heart, and not a fear of people in the church. Not enough to sound holy. Those campers—you hear them, you probably had this experience too, right? After camp, you have testimonies at church. They come back and talk about how they realize that in their 10 or 15 years of life, that they were a sinner.
Great, theologically excellent, right? We realize that. We all need to realize that. They go on and talk about how their lives have changed, but their life is two days since they got back from camp. And I don’t mean to mock that if it’s genuine, and I don’t mean to mock it at all. But the problem is we put up, “Okay, now we’re going to do this thing and you’re going to tell all these people,” and we’ve created this sense of purity. Then there’s the pressure, “Okay, now you said you’re a Christian, you better live like a Christian.” We start to expect people, “Start producing fruit of the Spirit, start doing what you should do in the church, start acting like a Christian.” Many of the people that have said that haven’t actually experienced having the Holy Spirit in their lives yet. They don’t actually know Jesus yet. So what we’re doing is teaching them a very fine facade of moralism, a very good sense of legalism, that this is what you’re expected to do, and this is how you will be judged if you don’t do it.
We’re not actually giving them the means to accomplish it in a lifelong sustaining passion because they don’t actually know Jesus yet. That’s just one example. We do it all the time. Are we encouraging people to go through the motions of church, or are we encouraging them to be transformed by Jesus? That’s the challenge, and that’s what Jesus is challenging us here.
Are we seeing people who are pure in heart, single-minded towards God? Are we seeing people who, like the Pharisees, could say all kinds of impressive things that everyone around them would say, “Wow, now they’re holy people”?
Because you know, here’s another problem with what was happening with the Pharisees there, and this is why Jesus is criticizing them in Matthew 23. They could put on this really good show of piety, but because it wasn’t actually life-changing transformation, it was what they were displaying to the people. They could do it, but the people who actually sincerely listened to them and tried to do it were just being deadened. That’s what Paul says in Romans. The law was bringing death to them because they were trying to follow these moral standards, these statutes before them, living statues of these Pharisees. The Pharisees aren’t actually directing them to the only way they could do it.
Not enough to sound holy. So what we should ask is, when I say things that might sound holy, and I’m trying to profess as a Christian, as we should, what is the aim of my words? Is my aim to get other people’s respect? Is my aim to impress other people? Is my aim to make people happy? Is my aim to avoid judgment of other people? Or am I saying the things because I know that they’re pleasing to God? If they’re pleasing to God, then we should go for it and do it. But if it’s so that other people will look on us as the moral exemplars of the church, let’s run from that.
Just as the empty words are displeasing to God, Jesus goes on to criticize the Pharisees for their veneer of pious actions. Matthew 23, once again, verse 4, Jesus says, “They tie up heavy burdens hard to bear and lay them on the people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do their deeds to be seen by others, but they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honor and the feasts and best seats in the synagogues and greeting in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others.”
Jesus says, they wear all the clothing of the day that symbolizes that they’re righteous, pious people. So he’s referring to there with the fringes and the phylacteries. They’re wearing the right stuff. Everyone looks at them and says, “There’s a holy man, there’s a holy woman.” You can see it because of how they dress. They put themselves in places where people can honor them and say, “Wow, look at these honorable rabbis, these teachers. I should look up to them.” They love being called rabbis. Why? Because what’s driving them? Well, it’s not a singularness of mind towards God. It’s the desire to be respected by people. And so they love it when they’re receiving that respect, and it’s just being poured down upon them because, “Wow, now people are looking up to me. I want more of that.”
The thing that’s empowering them, the thing that’s enabling them to do the things they’re doing isn’t pleasing God, isn’t God’s Spirit working in them; it’s trying to achieve that status and maintain that status in society. “Wow, isn’t this an amazing person? So pious.”
Paul talks about that in Galatians 5, verse 3. He says, “I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he’s obligated to keep the whole law.” What’s that have to do with what we were talking about? Well, Paul’s talking to people who have become Christian but are still clinging not to what God has declared them but to fulfillment of the ceremonial law as defining them as whether they’re righteous before God or not. Paul says those people, if they do that, what’s going to come to them? Well, if they’re trusting in circumcision, if they’re trusting in this or that law that they can cling to as what’s going to define them as righteous and a part of God’s kingdom and a follower of Jesus, that’s what they see as what puts them in that place.
They better do every single law. You see, that’s what Jesus refers to as he says to do what the Pharisees do. That sounds like an odd thing, doesn’t it? We know that Jesus criticizes the Pharisees. Why does he say, “Do as they say, don’t do as they do”? Why does he say that? He’s trying to get across the point: if you want to earn things the way the Pharisees say that you earn them, then do exactly what they say, but don’t think that you should follow them because if you follow them, they’re not measuring up to their own standard and you’re going exactly where they’re going. You don’t want to go there.
He goes on to say in Matthew 23 that those who follow the Pharisees and the Pharisees as they go to make more disciples—what happens? He says, “You go all over to draw people to your sense of how to look pious, but as you do, you make them twice the son of hell that you are.” Because it’s dead; there’s nothing there, nothing that will bring life.
And in that, because they’re trying to impress people, they focus on the wrong things. Matthew 23:23, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others.”
Jesus says, you’re doing all kinds of things that will impress people about your piety. You’re taking out your garden herbs that you’re growing in your garden—thyme, cumin, mint—and taking those little leaves and you’re peeling off 10% of them and giving them so everyone can see that you are a faithful giver who always tithes. “Be impressed by me.”
You’re not actually loving your neighbor. You’re not actually loving God. It’s not about God; it’s about impressing people. And so you’re ignoring what God has actually said is most important so that you can impress people with your precision on things that aren’t as important.
He doesn’t say don’t care about tithing. Don’t care about tithing the little blessings that God’s given you. He’s not saying it doesn’t matter. What he’s saying is don’t get so focused on the precision that you’ve defined in your tradition that you miss doing what God’s actually called you to do as a baseline, which is love Him, love your neighbor.
You met my cat, Frost. One thing you learn very quickly is Frost exemplifies the scaredy cat. When he’s around people, he is such a brave cat, and he loves to harass me. But if there’s someone new around, he is frightened. Even when just his family is around, he can be really thrown off if something unexpected happens, like he’s accidentally stepped on a piece of crumpled paper or someone sneezes and he goes running.
He goes running because, wait, what’s this? And then you go and say, “Frost, it’s okay.” His tail’s all fluffed up and his coat’s all fluffed up, and he’s ready for the killer piece of paper. Thankfully, it’s not actually a killer piece of paper. He’s okay. But imagine if that piece of paper were a killer piece of paper, or as I like to tease him, a cat-eating monster ready to get him. Imagine if it were. A lumpy tail wouldn’t make a difference. An arched back wouldn’t make a difference. It wouldn’t somehow protect him. The tail doesn’t do anything.
And that’s exactly what our moral facades, when they’re just put up without anything behind them, are just like that. When we fluff up our moral tail and say, “Okay, I am pure now,” it doesn’t do any good. Now, to the extent that Frost has sharp teeth and sharp claws, he might be able to defend himself against some things, right? If you’ve been around a cat, they do have the ability to scratch and bite pretty substantially. But that fluffy tail isn’t doing any good. It’s not doing anything.
Our fluffy tails of presenting ourselves don’t do anything. That doesn’t mean we can’t do anything with the power of God. He gives us the claws and the teeth because he’s the only one that can do it. But the key thing is that we turn to him.
Notice what it says in Psalm 24: “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? Who shall stand in his holy place?” We heard this at the beginning. “He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false, does not swear deceitfully.” The Pharisees were holding on to this stuff, puffing up their tails, ready to pounce. Yet when it turned out, had they actually had to face anything of substance—in this case, ultimately, if they faced God’s judgment—they couldn’t pull out their theological claws and be okay. They were declawed. Nothing was going to happen because they were counting on the wrong thing.
The Psalmist declares that those who have a pure heart will see God, and yet they weren’t going to see God. God was standing in front of them and they couldn’t even see him. Right smack dab in front of them, right in front of their nose. He was right there talking to them, and they couldn’t see him.
But who did? Who did in scripture? Well, one of those people—pun not intended—was the woman at the well. What happens when she encounters Jesus? She’s talking to him, and they’re going back and forth, and Jesus has heard her say that they’re waiting for the Messiah and a great prophet. Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” Just then, the disciples came back, and they marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or “Why are you talking with her?”
So the woman left her water jar and went away into the town and said to the people, “Come see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” They went out of the town and were coming to him. Here’s a woman, and we’re told in the story that leads up to this exchange, she’s a woman that’s very imperfect. She has a background that doesn’t look pure at all. It doesn’t look like what you want to model your life after. I wouldn’t encourage you to do otherwise. You shouldn’t try to follow her life up to that point. She would tell you, you shouldn’t follow her life up to that point. Everyone in the town knew that you shouldn’t follow her life. She had lived a life that wasn’t pleasing to God.
But as the Pharisees talked with Jesus, and they heard what God’s kingdom looked like, they kept saying, “But we tied all our mint. We tied all our cumin. We went through our spice rack and we took all the spices and we shook some of them out and we tied them.” All that’s there. “What are you talking about, Jesus? We’re moral.”
Here’s the difference with this woman. She looked at Jesus and he told her what she had done, as she says. Told her about her life. She realized that she couldn’t have a pure heart, but she was talking to one who could give her a pure heart. So what did she do? She went and told everyone. She saw God, while the Pharisees didn’t.
That’s the promise that we receive as well. As we respond to the gospel, we can see God. Not because we get everything right, but because we turn to the God who has. And then as he transforms us, we don’t go and say, “Okay, now I’m going to hang on to what I’ve gotten right. Now I’m going to be the one who has everything right in my own power.” We say, “It’s still all his power.”
If we trust in him, what is that? It’s being pure of heart because we’re saying, “I can’t do it on my own. I mess it up. I have stains and splotches all over me. But inside, I realize that there’s a big hole there.” Instead of trying to heat the room myself, I’ve called the only one who can fix it and had him put in something new, the Spirit.
When we do that, we see him in that moment, like that woman at the well did. She didn’t have time to go and wipe her life clean in that moment, not yet. I’d like to think that her life was changed, and it was because she knew Jesus, but then it probably flowed out as our calling is to let it flow out and for people to see us following God’s word. But the pure heart came in the moment that she recognized that she had encountered the living God. She trusted in him. May that be for all of us.
If you never trust in Jesus, may tonight be the night that you set down all the beautiful facades that you may have constructed to impress people and make them think that your life is all together. You set those down and you realize that you need someone to come in and actually put in a power source. You can’t do it, but you want to focus on Jesus. You don’t have to do something huge and magnificent and somehow impress God before he’ll do that. All you have to do is come before him and confess your sins and he’ll hear your prayer.
That’s my prayer for you tonight if you haven’t ever experienced that. If you’re here in person, I know a whole bunch of us would love to pray with you tonight and walk you through that process. And if you’re online and you’re thinking, “I have tuned into this, and I’ve always thought that being a Christian meant being a good enough person, and I’ve realized that doesn’t work,” you can see an email address on screen. You can send an email there, and one of us would love to pray with you. Not because we have some kind of special power to give you. It’s because God does.
May tonight all of us seek singularly after him. And for those of you who have done that, who have trusted in Jesus, let me just say, all of us are going to go running back and try to do it on our own, so we do. What we’re reminded of here is, may we be more like the woman at the well, who realizes that she’s receiving that living water, and less like the Pharisees. May we flee from thinking we can impress people enough to get our way into heaven. I recognize that the only thing that matters is that we have a heart for our Lord.
Would you pray with me, please?
Father, so often we come before you and we say these things, but then we start to pile on them again and add all the ways that we’re going to impress people, the ways that we’re going to accomplish your will. May our hearts be singularly focused. May we not be distracted by all the different things we keep piling on to somehow get to where we think we ought to be. May we recognize where we ought to be is in your presence. We trust in you this day and every day. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
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