Have you ever considered the “impossibility” of successfully living out the commands of Christ in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) on a daily basis? In this sermon, beginning with the “blessed are’s,” he shifts the standard of judgment from behaviors to the heart and our thought life.  He says that instead of murder being the standard, if you even remain angry at your brother, you are in danger of judgment.  Instead of physical adultery being the standard, lusting after a woman in your heart is just as sinful.  He commands us to love our enemies and to pray for those who are intent on doing us harm.  He warns that we must not judge another or we will be judged with the same judgement.  Participating in gossip is a form of judgment.  Considering myself more righteous than another is judging.  Having a critical spirit and accusing others of not measuring up is judging. We could go on, but Jesus set a very high standard for holiness in the courts of heaven.

 How do we get through the day without violating these commands in some way?  Those commands define the standards and the goal.  Thankfully, grace makes up the difference.  But if we ever think we are doing well spiritually, we only need to read those three chapters in Matthew and hold them up to our own hearts objectively to see how much we need Jesus – every day.

One of the beatitudes (blessed are…) that always catches my eye is, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt.5:8).  In a season where the church is crying out for the presence of God in our worship and manifestations of God in our lives, I wonder how much a lack of purity hinders our ability to see God.  If you read the Psalms of David, there seems to be a real sense in which he had vivid visions of God in the temple.  Perhaps, they were occasional, but his songs reflect a true hunger to see God again, to take in his majesty, and to be overwhelmed with his glory.  I think we are crying out for those same things again, but I wonder if our standard of purity has become relative rather than biblical.  

We are surrounded daily by a tsunami of illicit sexuality, profane language, graphic violence, blatant and bold dishonesty, and perversion.  By cultural standards, Christians avoid the worst of those things, but by heavenly standards I suspect we carry much more impurity than we want to acknowledge. What we become calloused to in our culture, what we normalize, is still highly offensive to the Holy Spirit.  For instance, the apostle Paul commanded, “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people” (Eph.5:3). 

 All I have to do is look at Face Book pages of believers I know, to understand that our standards for modesty, environments we hang out in, and even language don’t come close to biblical standards.  And yet, we must think that God is good with our standards or we wouldn’t post some of those things all over the internet for others to admire.  We must remember that we’re are not graded on the Bell Curve against how others perform, but we are to be judged by the pure and holy standards of heaven that never change.  

In 1939, the famous movie Gone with the Wind was released.  This “classic” nearly did not make it past the movie censors because Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara that he didn’t “give a damn.”  That kind of language in a movie was shocking and outraged those who were concerned about America’s moral climate.  Think about what we now consider normal and acceptable in movies and television in terms of language, nudity, sexuality, adultery, and so forth.  Our standards have fallen so far, that we typically would push back against those censors as being archaic and prudish rather than questioning our own standards of morality and purity.  

I have to monitor these issues in my own life, so I know how subtly we can become calloused to the sin around us and lose our sense of shame and outrage when our culture not only offends God, but boasts about the sin and recruits others to join in.  We can’t control the world around us, but if we want to see God, as we claim we do, purity – by His standards – is something we must consider.  

We cannot lower the standards of God’s holiness but must ask him to give us his sensitivity to sin once again in our own lives and hearts so that we are constantly recognizing the compromises in our soul and pulling those weeds from the garden where we want to meet with God. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.