Chasing Holiness

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."

— Matthew 5:8

A happy person will be a holy person, because Jesus said, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8). But who could ever be pure in heart? You can. I can. We must understand what this statement means. By pure in heart, Jesus is not saying that we can never have an impurity in our hearts and never be inconsistent. Otherwise, we all would be disqualified, because the Bible clearly teaches "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" (Jeremiahs 17:9).

So here is how it works: we come to God, poor in spirit. We see ourselves as we really are. We mourn over our condition. And like the psalmist, we pray, "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me" (Psalm 51:10).

In our culture, we often refer to the heart as the center of emotion, and we refer to the mind as the center of intellect. But in the Hebrew culture, the heart referred to everything. The heart was the very center of personality. It was the center of the emotions as well as the mind. And it included the thinking process. Proverbs 23:7 says, "As [a man] thinks in his heart, so is he."

The heart is the center of who you are. This means that with all of your being, you should be pure. But being pure does not mean being flawless. A good translation of the word "pure" would be "single" or "focused." So to be pure in heart means to have a single-minded devotion to Jesus.

To be pure in heart is to seek to live a holy life, because that is the secret to happiness. If you want to be happy, then seek to be holy. Don't chase after happiness. Chase after holiness.