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"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
(Matthew 5:8)
I hope you had a blessed Christmas with your loved ones, and I pray that God blesses you with a wonderful New Year in 2026. Time seems to move at warp speed for me these days. As a child, it felt like Christmas came every 3-4 years, so very slowly. But as an adult, it is like Christmas is coming tomorrow! Someone wisely said about parents of young children: "The days are long, but the years are short."
Only God knows the amount of time we have on this earth. As surely as we were born, we will die and enter eternity. The older I get, the more I think of and even long for heaven. As my friend Fred Eppright wrote in his annual Christmas letter, "I find myself homesick for a place I have never been but long to be."
This week, I will be writing about those who are pure in heart. We will look closely at the 6th of 8 Beatitudes Jesus shared in His famous Sermon on the Mount, delivered to many people on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Recently, we studied all 8 of these in a sermon series we called "Kingdom Contrasts" at GHBC. Everyone knows that there are two diametrically opposed kingdoms operating in our world today. There is the kingdom of darkness that is led by the devil, and it is a kingdom dominated by killing, stealing, and destroying (John 10:10a). But praise God, there is another kingdom, and it is one of peace, love, and abundant life (John 10:10b).
Everyone lives by (or even promotes) the standards of one kingdom or the other. Those who do not know the Lord gravitate toward darkness and attempt to hide their thoughts and actions from others. Those who know Jesus are drawn toward the light. We are not perfect, but we pursue the things of God like humility and righteousness. In fact, Proverbs 21:21 states, "He who follows righteousness and mercy finds life, righteousness, and honor."
During our Christmas celebrations this year, many of us looked at the lives of a group in the Bible, the shepherds, who were pure in heart. They were open to God, and God revealed His Son to them first. They lived out this 6th Beatitude of Jesus in a profound way: they were pure in heart, and wow, did they ever see God!
Luke 2:20 says, "Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told them." I love these Christmas characters, the shepherds. Though their occupation was humble and lowly, they were chosen by God for this special occasion. God still operates in the same way. He chooses the humble, the pure in heart, and then He does what only He can do: He blesses mightily.
Will you humble yourself before the Lord today? Ask Him to give you a pure heart so that you can clearly see all God wants you to see.
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