Pure as God || Behind the Beatitudes || Week 6

Welcome back to another blog of our series, “Behind the Beatitudes.” This series takes a deeper look at Jesus’ teaching at the Sermon of the Mount. Let’s look at our Beatitude today! It’s Matthew 5:8, and it says this:

Matthew 5:8 – Great blessings belong to those whose thoughts are pure. They will be with God.

The term purity confuses me. When I think about purity, my mind immediately goes to sex, lust, attraction, etc. So it’s telling me that if my mind is free from the attraction of things that aren’t of God, I will be closer to God. That may or may not be accurate, but we need to look at other scripture to get the complete picture.  

Purity in Faith

Hebrews 12:4 – You are struggling against sin, but you have not had to give up your life for the cause. 

So again, we see a reference to purity and sin, which, to me, would refer to the struggle of dealing with lustful or impure thoughts. It can be a struggle to overcome this mindset when we become inundated with lustful imagery almost daily. The definition for “lust” is the “passionate desire for something.” Incorporating this definition of “lust” into our discussion can include jealousy, greed, desires, and other related words. We struggle with not feeling jealousy over what others have or how others are living their lives. God points out we’ll do that so much that it turned into one of his Ten Commandments. We’ll struggle with it often, but we haven’t lost the fight against it. We can still overcome this battle, and it involves learning to align our thoughts with God. God will provide what we need when we need it and give us the ability to fight off any temptation we deal with. God also doesn’t just give us what we need and lets us handle it. He’s there in it. In the struggle, fight, and temptation, God guides us how he needs to make sure we walk to the other side without any scratches, bumps, and bruises. 

Purity for the Future

1 John 3:2-3 – Dear friends, now we are children of God. We have not yet been shown what we will be in the future. But we know that when Christ comes again, we will be like him. We will see him just as he is. He is pure, and everyone who has this hope in him keeps themselves pure like Christ.

So, John calls his audience children of God. To be a child of God means you show genuine faith via your salvation, even though the heavenly life you have now won’t show until Jesus returns. In the meantime, we get the Holy Spirit working us into the image of Jesus himself. To be like Jesus shows yet another sign of a believer’s hope. When Jesus returns, we will become conformed to his image. A tension in verse 2 exists between the phrase “we are children of God” and “we shall be like him.” This tension is resolved in the hope of Jesus’ return because his return will transform us, believers, into the likeness of Jesus’. 

Then John focuses on the purity of Jesus. He talks about how living in the perspective that Christ will return changes the behavior of a Christian. Since we hope to be like Jesus, we should have this desire to grow throughout our Christian journey. We need to be actively doing this daily, in a Paulesque fashion.

We focused a lot on purity today—both the purity of the future and the purity of our faith. I find it interesting that these topics are the ones we discussed because they go hand-in-hand. You might have heard to have faith in a better future. I think incorporating a purity aspect into it changes the meaning of that phrase. Let’s define purity first, then incorporate what we’ve learned today so that we can walk away with a brand new meaning. The definition of purity is “freedom from contamination.” We want to become more like Jesus as we grow in our Christian journey, meaning we want to be less of the world. I wonder if the mindsets of the world are the contamination we need to be free from. Jesus never bent into how the world operated because he is free from sin. Jesus was pure in thought and in action because he operated with God guiding him and teaching him. We can do that as well. We can be pure in thought and actions by following and incorporating the teachings of Jesus. The Holy Spirit will work with us to make these changes. We won’t be perfect, and we will probably fall into temptation, but I’m so thankful that we have a God that forgives that and will still accept us as we are. God continues to this day to cleanse my mind. Remember, Jesus taught that “Great blessings belong to those whose thoughts are pure. They will be with God.” God continues to walk with us and cleanses our minds daily. We will always be with God. 

See you next week for Part 7 of “Behind the Beatitudes!” Stay blessed!