This morning's scripture reading comes from Matthew chapter 5 and it's just going to be verse 8. So a very short scripture reading this morning. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Let's pray. Father, we do thank you for your word that you have spoken to us and more recently spoken to us through your Son. that we might come to know you. And Lord, we pray that our hearts would be fertile ground this morning through the work of your Holy Spirit, that this word would take root within us and it would put forth and bear fruit all for your glory and for your kingdom. In Jesus name. Amen. So what I want to do, I entitled this message Pathway to Purity, and I really want to look at what it means to be pure in heart and what that path looks like for the Christian. If you recall or have read John Bunyan's book, Pilgrim's Progress, Christian is the main character and he leaves the city of destruction. And this allegory that Bunyan writes transfers Christian's life onto paper. And it really represents the Christian faith in an allegory. But it touches on several doctrines as it goes through. So I'm looking at Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." From a doctrinal point of view and what that path looks like for us, what is actually happening, so to speak, behind the scenes. So that is what I'm going to attempt to do today. Well, on December 3rd of 1967, a 53-year-old man, Louis Waskowski, received the first human heart transplant in Cape Town, South Africa. He was a grocer. And he was dying from a chronic heart disease and needed a change in order to live. A young 25-year-old had been fatally injured in a car accident, and so Christian Bernard, the heart doctor in Cape Town, decided that he would put to the test a heart transplant. It had never been done before. some doctors had been working on something for almost a decade at Stanford University out in California. They were looking at heart transplants, but they were using animals, obviously, and they had done a successful one in 1958 with a dog. And so they continued to look at that procedure and see if it could be applied to humans. Well, the surgery was a success, but Wachowski's Survival was only 18 days. We put it that way. He lasted for 18 days. Because what they were able to do for a heart transplant, they weren't able to fight off resistance that comes from the immune system of the body with a heart transplant. They had to experiment with some drugs, and so they would continue to do that. And in the 70s, it became more of a common surgery, and Dr. Bernard was involved in many of those. And today, heart transplants are done with regularity. But it is something that doesn't last forever. The life expectancy of a transplantee is only five to 10 years. And so it is important for us to take care of our physical hearts It's how we exist, if you will, along with breathing. But it is much more important for our spiritual hearts. We need to care for them because it too is life or death. Only the life and death that it speaks of is eternal. It's not temporal. How many of you have experienced, if you're a husband and wife, going to the doctor when you're expecting? That period of time right around the 10 to 12 week mark. You've got a sonogram that's scheduled and you go in and they position the sonogram device and they move it around the mother's belly and there it is. You hear the heartbeat. It's a sound of joy. It's a sound of life. Well, what are those sounds of joy and what are those sounds of life then for the Christian? Last week I spoke about this sixth de-attitude and I asked two questions. What does it mean to see God and what does it mean to be pure in heart? And hopefully I answered those. Today I want to look at it a little bit differently. As I said, I want to look at it in terms of our pathway of purity, what it looks like from beginning to end. The doctrines in the scripture are called the doctrines of sovereign grace, those that deal with salvation. John Murray was a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and he wrote a definitive book on redemption. It's entitled Redemption Accomplished and Redemption Applied. And if you haven't read it, it's a short paperback. It's less than 200 pages, and I would highly recommend it. Redemption accomplishes the person and work of Christ, what He did in His life and on the cross, what He accomplished for us. Redemption applied is the work of the Holy Spirit that applies that to the believer in Jesus Christ. And so I want to look at this idea of purity from the point of view of the doctrines of sovereign grace. So I've got four points to talk about this morning. Impurity, definitive purity, progressive purity, and then perfect purity. If you're familiar with these doctrines, you would say, yeah, I know where you're going with this. In Romans chapter eight, there is The golden chain, it is referenced to verses 28 through 30. Paul puts forth this golden chain that says, and we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good. For those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew. Let me give you a little bit better interpretation of foreknowledge there. It means to love beforehand. So, for those whom he foreknew or foreloved, he also predestined to become conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined, he called. And those whom he called, he justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. So you begin to see some of these doctrines that take place. If you study and go to seminary and take classes, one of the things that you'll take is you'll take a biblical theology class and you'll take a systematic theology class. Biblical theology just means as you read Scripture, those doctrinal truths come up out of the text, given the narrative or the history or whatever is being spoken of by God. But they're not in order. Systematic theology does that. It puts things in order from beginning to end. It helps us to understand what God is doing in our lives. And so because of that, we have a greater understanding in order that we will praise Him all the more. We will glorify God. So these ideas that I'm talking about today, impurity, definite purity, progressive purity, and perfect purity, line up with some of those doctrines. It's the path of purity, if you will. They're distinct. But in reality, sometimes they go together. They happen simultaneously. If you've ever experienced witnessing to someone, sometimes you think it lands on deaf ears, and you pray for that person, and you go back to that person, and you give the gospel again, and again, and again. Years may go by, and then they come to faith. At other times, you'll share the gospel with someone, and it seems like the conversion is so instantaneous, it happens right before your eyes. So sometimes they go together, they happen simultaneously, but each has a distinct function. As Christian and pilgrim's progress is leaving the city of destruction, you get this idea of the path. It will end with him crossing a river to the celestial city, heaven itself. But along the way, all these pieces of biblical theology come up and it's put in more of a systematic approach. So that's what I'm attempting to do today and apply these here. God is not the author of confusion. He's the author of order. So hopefully this will help you put this pathway to purity in some kind of order, give you greater understanding of that. Well, last week I did cover this passage, blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. What is implied there is there was a state before being blessed with a pure heart. So to be blessed is this idea of approval of God, a blissfulness, a restorative humanity. And so some people will refer to it as happiness, but it's not happiness as we would think, like an ice cream makes a young child happy. It's more of a fulfillment that takes place. But the opposite of that would be that of impurity. Not purity, but impurity. And instead of being blessed, it would be an approved of, it is one of disapproval. Jesus uses a word in the New Testament in the Gospels, woe. That actually means disapproval. Woe, scribes and Pharisees, or say woe to cities such as Tyre and Sion. If my miracles would have been done before you, you would have repented long ago. And so we have this dilemma. I wrote out an attempt of what might be true of those who are apart from Christ, a beatitude, if you will, of the impure. Woe are the impure in heart for they are spiritually blind. That's true of all of us. Last week I asked the question, what's wrong with the world? I'm gonna change that up a little bit this week and I'm gonna say, what's wrong with man? I did refer to that last week. The problem with man is the heart. But it's more than that. It's all of our being. Jesus, in Matthew 23, verse 37, was lamenting over Jerusalem, and He said, "'O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it, how often would I have gathered you, your children, together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and yet you were not willing.'" How do you explain that? They were not willing. This is a people that had the Old Testament put together for them. They saw the fall, the creation fall. They saw the election, if you will, or the choosing of Abraham to be the father of Israel, the promises that are given to him, followed by the kings, followed by the prophets and the Psalms. Everything spoke about the Messiah that was to come. They had the whole story put before them before the person of Jesus came. And He didn't come in passivity. It was undeniable who He was. He turned water to wine. He fed the 5,000. He gave sight to the blind. He made the mute speak, the deaf hear, and He raised people from the dead. Only God can do that. That's what Jesus did, so how do you explain that? How were they not willing to receive them? Think about history for a moment, all of history. We like to think that we are better than everyone that went before us, that we're more intelligent, that we're better off, we're smarter, we've got it all down now. you find advancements that we have right now. My great-grandmother came across the Oregon Trail. She was born in the 1880s. She died just before 2000. In her lifetime, she saw the motor car. She saw the telegraph. She saw telephones. She saw lights. She saw radio. She saw all this technology happening. It's the same kind of things that we see. We go, oh, we must be the greatest people ever to live. But do you know that the 20th century, more bloodshed was taken, more hatred displayed than any other century in history? How do you explain that? The explanation is what we call total depravity. When Adam and Eve ate of the fruit in the garden, and when Jesus said, if you eat of it, you shall surely die. Physically, not immediately, but spiritually, yes. And they ate of it. That fall was great, brothers and sisters. It wasn't a short fall. In 1947, Evelyn McHale leapt off the Empire State Building in New York, fell on the top of a car. A picture captured that moment in Life Magazine. It was called, A Most Beautiful Suicide. To see her was to see a beautiful woman. She was young. She was attractive. Her makeup was just so. She had the latest fashion on. Nothing about her looked off. It simply looked like she was laying on top of a car and sleeping. She was dead. She was definitely dead. That is true of us. Total depravity is what happens to us. It doesn't mean that we are as bad as we can possibly be. But it does mean that every part of our being is tainted with sin. Physically, mentally, emotionally, in our will. Every part of our being. That's what the problem is. Our Shorter Catechism talks about how we were created. We were created good. in the image of God. We were created with knowledge. We were created with righteousness and holiness. God gave dominion over everything in his realm to Adam and Eve. But the fall took that away and drove them into a state of sin and misery. And we can understand sin and misery. Look at the world around us. We see the curse. We see thorns and thistles. We see famine, we see plight, we see disease, we see death, all of that. The fall was great. Like Waszkowski, we need to be reborn, renewed, have a new heart, put it within us. It's not that we don't know about God. Mankind does know. Paul talks about that in Romans 1. He speaks of this in verse 19 through 21. He says, For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world. Dropping down. But they, the people of the world, did not honor Him. did not give thanks to him. They became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened." That's that idea of spiritual death, impurity of the heart. And that state is one in which we are bound, we are enslaved in it, captured. You can't break away on your own. You are in it, shackled to it. Paul speaks about that in Ephesians chapter 2. He talks about us being dead in our trespasses and our sins, that we walk according to the prince of the power of the air, Satan himself. We carry out the desires of our body, our mind. By nature, we are children of wrath. What's to be done? There's nothing that we can do good. There's nothing that can get us out of this predicament of impurity. Here's truth of the impure person. An impure heart, those who have it, do not see God in nature. An impure heart does not see God in scripture. An impure heart does not see God in the church and doesn't see God in their own lives. They live separate from him. They want no part of him. Or they may play the part and just say, well, that might be true for you. It's not true for me. I'm okay. Thomas Watson hit the nail on the head when he said this about those who are impure of heart. He described the sinner as a devil in the shape of a man. Okay, you're just molded to look that way. We need to be changed. Well, that's the bad news, the impurity of the heart. and of the person, total depravity. Now the good news. What man cannot do, God does. The enslavement that we have, He emancipates. He and He alone sets us free. And He does it through a process on this pathway. So we've had the impurity of heart, and we're gonna get to the definitive purity that takes place, but there is a transition between those two, one that is not seen so much by the naked eye. We see the results of it, but we don't necessarily see it with the naked eye. It is, in doctrinal terms, we call it effectual calling and we call it regeneration. The calling is what goes forth. When Isaiah says in chapter 55 that my word will go forth and will not come back void, He is speaking about the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. It goes forth with the Spirit and does the work. And the one who hears it and responds to it is affectionately called. God is drawing him to himself. As Christian in Pilgrim's Progress is reading the book, he runs into Evangelist. And Evangelist tells him the gospel and points him to the narrow gate. And he said, just on the other side is the cross. Christian hears those words and he responds, and he sets out on a path to go to the narrow gate. That's what we're to do, and when we hear God's calling, we respond. But we don't respond on our own. Our own catechism, again, talks about this idea of calling is the work of God the Spirit. whereby he convinces us of the state that we're in, that sin and misery, that need that we have spiritually and desperately need to get out of, and then enlightens our minds with the knowledge of who Christ is, and we respond. We respond to the free offering of the gospel. But there's another work that takes place in there, a work that is absolutely necessary. We hear about this idea of regeneration in John's gospel, chapter three. You know that story, the story of Nicodemus. He's a priest within the Sanhedrin. He comes to Jesus by night, as if cloaked in the darkness, probably ashamed of who he is. He's interested in Jesus, and he goes to Jesus. I believe personally he's being affectionately called at that point. And he questions Jesus, talks about him being a good teacher. Jesus knows right where he is. Jesus always knew the condition of the heart. He knew what was in the hearts of men. And so he hits Nicodemus right between the eyes. He cuts to the chase, he says, truly, truly, I say to you, unless You are born again. You cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus is befuddled. Jesus is talking in spiritual terms here about being reborn. The Old Testament spoke about it. Nicodemus should have known. Later in chapter three, Jesus will tell him, you're a teacher of Israel. How do you not know this? But Nicodemus is befuddled. He's focused on a mother giving birth to a child, physical birth. Jesus is talking about spiritual birth. In fact, he does it again. He talks later in verse 5. He says, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. So you cannot see it and you cannot enter it unless you are born again. Nicodemus should have known this. He should have known that in the Old Testament it spoke about this. And I talked about these passages last week. Jeremiah 31, Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. Dropping down, I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts And I will be their God, and they shall be my people." This idea of writing the Word of God on their hearts. And then in Ezekiel 36, this idea is, I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanliness. And from all your idols, I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove your heart of stone, and I will give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes. and be careful to obey my rules. That is a new creation. Paul will say in 2 Corinthians 5, therefore, if anyone be in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away, behold, all things have become new. It is this newness that is needed. It is a putting away of the old and a putting on of the new. Regeneration changes our constitution, if you will. It puts us in a position to not only hear the gospel, but to receive it and appropriate the faith that is actually given to us by grace as well. But one who is regenerated, born again, that constitution that changes, John refers to it as first epistle. He does talk about the changed life. This is what I mean, you can't always see it. But the effects of it, you'll see. The relationship to one who has sin. The first John, written by the Apostle John, is a testament, if you will, for the believer to know whether they are saved or not saved. It is a series of if-then arguments. If this, then that. If you confess your sins, He is faithful just to forgive your sins. But if you remain in sin, that's not the case. So as you walk through these, you can see and measure and examine your own life to see if you're a part of who Christ is or not. The things that are spoken of about being born again is the relationship of the believer to sin, the relationship of the believer to loving others, and the relationship of overcoming. Statements such as this, everyone who practices righteousness has been born of God. No one born of God practices sin. So there's a difference between the two. Let us love one another, for love is from God. Whoever loves has been born of God. The constitution of the person has changed. Everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world, our faith. So regeneration, the new birth, being born again, prepares us for that definitive purification. This is justification. This is when we repent and believe. It is a transaction that takes place. If you're familiar with accounting, there's debits and credits. You have a debit card. You use that to spend, or you may use cash. Every transaction that you spend is a debit. It's on one side of the ledger. You need to have income, though, on the other side of the ledger to be able to cover the debit card that you're using. When we sin, we can sin one small sin, and you've just expired everything and then some that you would have on your debit card. spiritually speaking, because you have sinned against an infinite God. It's an infinite offense. It requires an infinite payment. It's the beauty of Christ, the beauty of redemption accomplished. He puts his person and work to your account. covers all that has happened, wipes the slate clean, if you will, so that we can have standing with God. Justification, this definitive action that takes place, changes your status. It moves you from that impurity of heart to a pure heart. Righteous before God, not because of the righteousness that you have, Not like Roman Catholics would say, an infused righteousness. No, it's the righteousness of Christ. Zechariah chapter 3 has a beautiful picture of what's happening here. You see Joshua. He is a priest. He is clothed in dirty garments. It looks like a courtroom setting. The angel of the Lord, the pre-incarnate Christ, is there. Satan accuses Joshua of being filthy, therefore he should be condemned. The angel of the Lord, Jesus, says, take off the dirty clothes and put on these pure linen robes. Yet his clothes are changed. He now wears the righteousness of Christ. That's what God sees when He looks at us. He doesn't see us, He sees Christ. He covers us. His righteousness on our account. We need that for standing before Him. It is a declarative state. If you're before a judge in a courtroom, He looks at the evidence and He makes a declaration. God does that on our behalf. He declares us righteous, again, not for our own righteousness, but for the righteousness of Christ. This is what excited Martin Luther. He thought that it was up to him to be righteous, up to him to be perfected, and he tried everything And it was when he read Paul's epistle to the Romans that he learned that the righteous will live by faith. He learned about justification, the clarion call of the Reformation. It's like this. If I put these two together, if I talk about regeneration or being born again and justification, think of regeneration this way. It's like a surgeon that does an act of surgery on us and takes something away on the inside of us. And then the outward is a judge that casts a verdict on our behalf and declares us to be righteous. So the two are bookends to one another. So Jesus does the work for us. This pathway starts in one of impurity, like for Christian, the city of destruction. It moves through this wicked gate because of a calling that he receives in hearing the Word of God. When he meets up with the cross, his burden falls off. He is justified. From that point on, the journey for Christian in Pilgrim's Progress is one of progressive purity. We call it pursuit of holiness or sanctification. It's not a work, again, that we do in and of ourselves, but we are a participant in it. The Holy Spirit plays that part with us. Again, our Shorter Catechism says that this idea of sanctification, making us holy, conforming us to the image of the Son, is a work of God's free grace. Where the whole man being renewed after the image of God are enabled to do more and more of this, dying to sin and living to righteousness. putting away with the old and embracing the new. Sanctification is concerned with sin. John Owen wrote his famous treatise, if you will, Death of Sin or the Mortification of Sin. Sin is a contradiction to holiness. It's a contradiction. The believer in Jesus Christ has sin that remains, but sin does not reign. Our job is daily putting to death sin and living for the Lord. It is what we're called to do. The presence of sin creates a conflict within us. We have to deal with it. We can't turn away from it. You know how that is in personal relationships in your life. If there's a conflict, you have to resolve it. You can't leave it. It'll fester. It'll grow to greater proportion. Then it becomes a bigger problem. We need to deal with conflict. And sin is a conflict within us. As I said, sin remains in us, but it does not reign over us. That's the beauty that we have by being redeemed. It's one thing to say we have sin living within us. It's another thing to live in sin. We don't want that. We need to remember that sin does not have dominion over us. It doesn't have the power over us. We need to understand that the Holy Spirit dwells within us. Therefore, as Paul says, we're dead to sin and alive to Christ. And we have that agent, the Holy Spirit, working within us. When Paul, in Philippians chapter two, speaks about working out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it's God who is at work in you, both to will and to work, he's speaking about that work of the Holy Spirit. Many of us will say this. We'll say, well, you know, God prompted me. or God spoke to me. Now, we're not meaning that God literally spoke an audible voice, but the prompting of the Spirit comes, and it's according to the Word of God. That's why it's so important to be in the Word of God. But we're prompted to do that work. We're prompted to have our devotional time. We're prompted to pray. We're prompted, but we need to do our part in those things. And so we look to the means of sanctification. Again, one of my favorite passages from the Acts series, Acts 2.42. You know that passage that talks about the new believers in Christ. And they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Although those have the definite article, they speak of different things within the church. This is a gathering of the body of Christ. So we do hear in the preaching of God's word, the apostolic teaching, the word of God proclaimed. We do fellowship with one another within the word. We encourage one another. We do it in this setting as well. Our presence here is an encouragement to the brother and sister to our right and left and front and back. We also break bread, take the sacrament, and we pray corporately together. We are to do this, though, as a work of sanctification, as a work of pursuing holiness. And we're doing it for a purpose. promises that we will be conformed to the image of the Son of God. You can't do that passively. You can't come to Christ and then sit back and go, okay, I'm ready, do your work. Think about your wedding day for those who are married. Even young people, if you think about getting married, you might have images of what a wedding looks like for both a groom and for a bride. I know that day for me and for my wife. I remember it well. Seemed like that whole day was getting ready for that seven o'clock ceremony that was gonna take place. Getting up and bathing and getting ready and making sure I'm groomed properly, every hair in place, the hair I used to have. Putting on the tuxedo, everything. I wanted to look my best for my bride. and she, in turn, wanted to look her best for me. We were preparing for that ceremony. We know that Jesus is coming again. Our groom is coming for us, his bride. He has spiritually sanctified us, made us blameless in the Father's sight, But still, we want to do our part to show the fruits of the Spirit, to show humility, to show a reflection of who He is. So it's a work that we do, and it's a work that we invest in, and we will be blessed in that moment because we will enter into perfect purity, or what is called glorification. The glorification has two parts, if you will. You're not glorified when you die to be absent from the body, to be present from the Lord. It's not at that part. We call that an intermediate state, and that's for another sermon some other time. But there is the fact that you will be present with the Lord, so you will enter into this idea of blissfulness, and yet you're still separated from the body. Brothers and sisters, we are glorified every believer in Christ at the same time, at the resurrection, when all of us are renewed to that spiritual new body. Simultaneously, in the blink of an eye, we will all be together. Every soul of believers at their death are made perfect and holiest, but we still wait to be united with Christ, body and soul, through the resurrection. That last enemy is death. It will be conquered. And we look forward to that day. Along with creation, we groan for him to come again. So that at that day, we will be, as said in Revelation 19, six through eight. Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude. Like the roar of many waters and like the sound of peals of thunder, crying out hallelujah for the Lord our God, the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exalt and give him glory for the marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready. It was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure. That's the path you're on. a path that was destruction and impurity, that went through a path of renewal, to a path of right standing, to a path pursuing to be like Jesus. And we look forward to the day when we will see him face to face with fine linen on, bright and pure. Let us pray. Father, we do thank you for your word, for what it means to us Lord, we do look forward to your coming again when our purity is complete and is perfected. But we do pray in the meantime that you will prompt us by your spirit to do the work to become more and more like you. It is a work that is not burdensome, and it is a work of value. Let us prepare ourselves for you, Lord Jesus. Amen.