Pure In Heart

I’ve had a little fascination with the matters of the heart for a while now, perhaps since reawakening my own heart while reading Sacred Romance back in April. The heart is quite an interesting phenomenon. It contains hopes and dreams, love and joy, passions and pursuits. It also can contain, however, deceit and hatred, bitterness and disgust, idolatry and resentment, and all sorts of wickedness.

In our society, the heart is often neglected in favor of the mind and the body. We tend to our physical needs rather diligently and educate ourselves in order to condition our minds. We perpetuate a cycle of “heartless” living by feeling like we need to always be busy doing sensible things. For example, as a college age person, one might go to school and pick a degree that will one day make them a good living because they feel that they must, when really it’s the last thing they want to do in their heart. We squish our hearts because we’ve been taught that they are foolish and unrealistic. We don’t pursue our passions as careers because that’s just not what you do. Then again, maybe it’s just because I’m an artist.

I’m not saying that nobody pursues a passion as a career or that nobody listens to their deepest desires when making big decisions, but I think that everybody at some point or another will refuse their heart its requests in order to settle for what’s “safe” and “sensible.” Take relationships, for example. This is one I’ve been hearing a lot about lately. Call me foolish, but I have a lot of faith in the cliché phrase “Love conquers all.” I think that too many couples decide to end or postpone relationships because the circumstances aren’t “ideal.” They decide to wait until they’re finished with school to date, or that a long-distance relationship would just be too hard, or that they simply have too many “issues” to work out first. True, in some cases those decisions are wisest and are God’s will for them. Often, however, I think it’s a cop-out. “Anything worth loving is worth fighting for,” a wise friend once told me. Then again, maybe it’s just because I’m a romantic idealist.

Back to my point. This neglecting of our hearts can bring up quite a few problems. Besides constantly feeling a general dissatisfaction with life, we can also be fooled into thinking that we’re not so bad. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” Jesus told us in Matthew 5:8. Speaking as a Christian to Christians, I think it’s fairly easy to look at oneself and draw the conclusion that you have a pure heart. You go through the checklist: I don’t smoke, get drunk, party, do drugs, have sex, break laws, cuss, lie to people, hate people, idolize stuff… yeah, I’m pretty good. I think I’ve got it together. And then something happens, perhaps, to really piss you off. Suddenly, a ton of resentment and overall un-loving feelings towards someone come out of you. Uh-oh. Not so pure in heart now, eh? Yes, I am speaking from experience. I have been fooled by myself into thinking I have a pretty pure heart, but something always sneaks up on me and shows me the sin lurking deep within me. It’s so deep that I don’t even know it’s there. It’s those times of realization that I think about my favorite psalm, 139, where it says , “You understand my thought afar off… For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, You know it altogether” (vs. 2b, 4). There are some people that I know very well. I know when something they have done is out of character for them and that I should talk to them to understand it instead of simply writing them off. I know what they are going to say about something at times and I understand how they tick. But God knows us even better than that. The first time I read Psalm 139 I was blown away. God hand-picked it for me that day and has been using it to speak to me ever since. There are times I feel I have nothing I can say to Him and I simply rest in the fact that He not only knows everything going on in me but He understands it all too. He knows the thoughts that are beyond my reach. So when I start thinking that my heart is pretty pure and that I don’t really have any major sins that I’m struggling with, God knows better. Lucky for me, too, because the fact that He can see it means that He’s going to use people and events around me to show me and transform me more into the image of Christ. Yay, God! But seriously.

Everything has been coming down to prayer lately, and I mean everything. Farah and I talked about a lot of different things on Saturday and with each issue we came back to prayer. It’s been proven more incredibly powerful than I ever imagined this year and the more God demonstrates His faithfulness in it, the more I want to pray. The good news in all this heart talk, besides the fact that God knows and understands everything we are, is that we can pray . We can pray that God would reveal to us the impurities in our hearts and that He would gently weed them out so that we can be better imitators of Christ. A pure heart is possible through Him. Yes, as long as we are living in this life we will all struggle with sin, but this lifelong process should always be leading us closer to our goal, and one day we will reap the rewards when we spend eternity with Him.

Oh yeah, plus you get to see God (Matt. 5:8). That’s some pretty sweet motivation.