The Pure Heart

The following is from Norman Grubb's book The Liberating Secret:

"One outcome, the Bible tells us, of this life of union with Christ is purity of heart. Peter made this comment when he told the church at Jerusalem about the Holy Ghost falling on Cornelius and his household. He said that His coming 'put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith'. In other words, the first Pentecost had given heart purity, and the second the same.

"Again in his letters, Peter writes, 'Seeing ye have purified your souls . . . see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently'. And again, 'I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance'. Paul says, 'The end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart . . . ." And the Saviour, 'Blessed are the pure in heart.' We should therefore be bold in affirming the same by faith.

"The physical term 'heart' is used symbolically in the Bible. Just as the physical heart is the centre of the bodily functions, so we have an inner spiritual centre where we make our final choices, and are controlled by our true affections. It is there we are real, whatever we may put on outside. Thus it says that 'the word of God . . . is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart', and 'keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.'

"Heart and spirit are linked in the Lord's word by Ezekiel: 'A new heart will I also give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.' Again by David in his cry of penitence, 'Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me'. We may say that the heart is the inner sanctuary of the human spirit, and thus of the whole man.

"For this reason the integrity of this central citadel of our being is fiercely assaulted by the enemy, and many of God's people are deceived into a false surrender. All too quickly do we accept a lie from Satan that our hearts are in the condition described by Jeremiah, 'The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?' Very evidently the purified heart and such a desperately wicked heart cannot be in the same person at the same time!

"Let us get the situation clear. A thing that is pure is unmixed, such as water with no dirt in it. Therefore, a heart that is pure has no rival affection in it. Now sit down a moment and examine the well-springs of your own heart, if you are joined to the Lord, one spirit. There are two great commandments: to love God with all our hearts and our neighbour as ourselves. Has God done such a work of grace in your heart that you can say these are true of you? I believe we can honestly say yes to both. Down in our hearts we love Him supremely with no rivals, and we are ready to lay down our lives for the brethren, as God shows us how. Many a time we temporarily fall short of these standards, but we always come back to them, for they are the single intent of our hearts. That is the pure heart.

"An interpretation of the pure in heart given recently in a secular daily paper is interesting. 'The pure in heart do not see things through the distorting medium of self, and therefore they are the only persons who see things with perfect clarity. When your vision is distorted by self, you can see nothing as it really is--least of all the absolute and ultimate reality.' Not knowing the wonderful secrets of grace, the writer added, 'That, I think, is what Christ meant by the phrase, and if you ever had the courage, you would realize how extraordinarily difficult it is to be pure in heart.'

"But Satan's aim is to get us into false condemnation and thus cut the lifeline of faith. 'If our hearts condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.' But, 'if our hearts condemn us'--and the trouble is we so often let them. The comment John then makes is, 'God is greater than our heart and knoweth all things'. By this he means that God knows the inner intent of the heart to be pure, and that we have no business to accept this living condemnation so disturbing to our union and communion with Him.

"The way Satan does it is simple. He diverts my attention by some temptation, and perhaps gets me to respond and thus to sin. My way back is plain enough through confession and the cleansing blood; but he has other purposes in thus tripping me up. He wants to invade the inner sanctuary of my heart where spirit is joined to Spirit, and disturb or destroy that union. So he points his lying finger as me and asks, 'How can you claim a pure heart, when you do a thing like that?' And often he gets me to agree with him. But it is a lie, and he is pilfering from me my central position in Christ, where the pure Spirit lives in the purified heart. He has not only tripped me up, but seeks to wipe his dirty boots on me. So I learn not to take that lie. I don't allow him into that holy place. All he has done is to divert me temporarily, just as when my attention is drawn from looking in front of me when out for a walk. I don't walk looking sideways. I walk looking straight in front. If I do glance to the right or left, I soon return to eyes front. And the devil is a liar when, having caused me to look this way or that, he tries to tell me I always walk with a squint. I don't! The side-glance is only temporary. The single eye, the pure heart, is the norm of the new life."