“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
This is a distinctly Hebrew concept, though it is recognized in other cultures. In Hebrew intellectual traditions, the heart is the seat of the will, the seat of your commitments. It is not a metaphor for your emotions or feelings; that would be the bowels (“belly”) in Hebrew thinking. The heart is where you find your convictions. The first and biggest step toward inner peace is conscious recognition of what holds you; you hold your opinions, but your convictions hold you. The first step in adjusting your moral consciousness is recognizing where you are in the first place. Any degree of blindness will lead to misguided attempts to fix things that aren’t broken in your soul, never fixing the things that are.
Once you clarify your own true value system, you are in a position to correct any flaws. Without that clarity, nothing can possibly change. In the opening quote above, Jesus calls for people to spend some time bouncing things off their own commitments until they understand what’s in their hearts. What does it take to be consistent to your own true self?
Purity means purging conflicts. It means digging around in the roots of your soul until you know enough to throw aside false beliefs. This has nothing to do with what’s actually factual or true in some objective sense; that’s a chimera. This is all about what is really in you. Until you cast off the externally induced shame and cultural mythology, you can’t possibly understand what really drives you. The whole point is ripping pretense to shreds and letting it fall away, then embracing what you find as your true self.
Only then can you bring it to feet of Christ and begin communion with Him that brings about a change. The power to transform is not in changing the world; God alone does that. The power to transform is in changing you. That power remains hidden as mere potential so long as you are blind to your true nature. Only with clarity and conscious recognition can the power of truth come to life. I get so tired of people talking about the power of the Scripture, as if quoting the words in any particular language will change the universe. No; the change that you seek is in you. The words mean nothing until you are standing in purity of heart. You can’t build a religion that’s real, you can’t build a life free or neurosis, you can’t touch your world for His glory until you are transparent. The whole point is to move you into Heaven; the world around you cannot ever go there.
It’s a process which begins with some moment of truth. You look inside and realize there is a power to change, but only when you bring an undivided loyalty to the One who made you. You have to accept what He has done and embrace it. That’s the only way His revelation can have any meaning.
Scripture is just ink on paper, electrons on a screen or sound vibrations in the air, but it’s not the Word of God until it is incarnated in your true nature.
