The Thing That May Keep You From Really Seeing God

That's a number one thing you have to do is to work on yourself.

What if nothing's holy and everything's allowed?

Because the truth is you are you now.

I now always go with the heart.

There has to be a better way.

Tell yourself true things about God, not about yourself.

God's word has to be your filter.

Your lens through what you see your emotional responses.

There is a better way.

And now your host up the better way.

This is Libby Glosset.

If I could just see God, I'd believe I'd obey.

Like a snowflake in a volcano you would.

Seeing God sounds lovely for about half a second before you turn into a crispy

critter. Also, that's not how this whole faith thing works.

When it comes to Christianity, when it comes to the God of the Bible,

seeing is not believing.

We walk by faith, not by sight.

And if you're a regular Bible reader, you know that Exodus says,

we can't look on God and live.

A desire to see God is pretty much a death wish.

So what is the deal with people making that demand?

Even if we all know, God's not going to answer it this side of glory.

Well, let's back the truck up for just a second.

I think we need to do a gut check on God himself.

Because if we really understand who God is,

the thought of looking him in the eye should not give us the warm and cozy's.

Throughout scripture, God's holiness is described as overwhelming,

consuming, and beyond human capacity.

God's not just a bigger, better version of us.

He's not a stronger, wiser human-like being somewhere in the universe.

God is utterly holy.

He's other.

He's completely pure.

He's radiant with glory in a way that our human language,

we can't even really describe him.

So if you're one of those people stomping your foot and demanding for God

to let you see him, we got a problem.

The Bible tells us that our current human condition

can't withstand the full weight of his glory.

One of the most fascinating moments in scripture that helps us understand this

comes from the life of Moses.

Moses had an incredibly close relationship with God.

In fact, the Bible describes their communication, God and Moses,

as being uniquely direct compared to others in Israel at the time.

Moses had already seen miraculous things.

He saw the burning bush that wasn't consumed.

He saw God devastate Egypt with plagues and leave the Israelites untouched.

He saw the red sea part and Israel walk through on dry ground.

But even after all of that, Moses had a deeper longing.

In Exodus 33, Moses asks God something really bold.

He says, please show me your glory.

And I love that request because it reveals something about Moses' heart

and about the human heart when it's truly seeking God.

Moses wasn't satisfied with second-hand knowledge of God.

He wanted to experience the fullness of who God is.

But God gives Moses a surprising response.

God tells him, you can't see my face.

For man shall not see me and live.

In other words, the unveiled presence of God is too overwhelming for a human being

in our present, fleshly state.

But then God does something so very gracious.

He tells Moses that he's going to place him in the cleft of a rock

and cover him with his hand as his glory passes by and after God passes.

Moses is allowed to see what the Bible describes as his back.

Not his face, not the fullness of his glory,

just the fading edge of his presence.

And even that small glimpse was powerful enough to leave Moses physically changed.

When he came down from the mountain, his face was shining so brightly

that the people couldn't even look at him.

That moment shows us something so important.

The glory of God is not something people can casually take a gander at.

It's overwhelming holiness.

So if that's true, if even Moses couldn't see God fully,

what does Jesus mean when he promises that the pure in heart will see God?

That's Matthew 5.8 if you're wondering.

The Beatitude that says, blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

So knowing what we know about the impact on the human being,

looking at God's glory, that it's pretty much a guarantee that you're going to be a burn

to end on the spot, what is Jesus talking about here?

Because clearly it's not simply physical sight.

Why would this be a good thing, this promise, if you will,

that follows the call to cultivate purity and heart as part of our Christian character?

Deep in the human soul is a desire to see God.

You can see it throughout the Bible.

David writes in the Psalms, one thing I've asked of the Lord,

that I may dwell in the house of the Lord and gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.

There's something inside of us that longs for God himself.

Humanity is wired for God.

We're created to know Him, to enjoy Him and to behold His glory.

But sin, sin clouds our vision.

It distorts our perception.

It darkens our hearts.

Seeing God in Scripture is often about perception and recognition.

It's not about visual, physical sight.

It's about having a heart that's able to recognize the presence and work of God.

And Jesus ties that ability directly to the condition of the heart.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

In biblical language and in God's economy,

the heart is not the fleshy, mussely, blood-pumping organ in your chest.

The heart is the center of our desires, motivations, affections.

The Bible uses the word heart kind of interchangeably with mind,

spirit, small S of a person.

It's what we love, what we long for, what ultimately drives our lives.

It's who we are, really, when no one else is looking.

And purity of heart means something more than outward morality.

It means a heart that's undivided, that's sincere and cleansed.

And this is where Jesus is teaching becomes remarkably countercultural,

not only because of the, hey, you're going to get to see God part.

But because our culture is not oriented towards purity of heart,

in fact, the messages we receive every day often push us in the opposite direction.

I don't think it's a secret that our culture celebrates indulgence and impurity.

It tells us to follow every desire, tells us to explore every impulse we had and pursue

whatever feels good in the moment.

We live in a world that literally drives everyone in the opposite direction from purity,

touting impurity as freedom.

Entertainment glorifies and normalizes lust.

Greed gets reframed as a worthy life ambition.

Pride and envy and self-actualization are fueled by the comparison culture that

dominates not only social media, but even our conversations.

The human heart is constantly being pulled towards things that dull our spiritual vision.

And this is why Jesus ties purity of heart to seeing God.

Impurity doesn't just break the rules.

It blinds us.

Sin clouds our ability to recognize God's presence.

It distracts our attention.

It fills our lives with noise and desires that pull us away from him.

Imagine trying to look through a window that's completely smeared with mud.

The outside world, it's still there, but you can't see it clearly.

That's what sin and impurity do to the human heart.

Our lives get filled with so many competing desires that we lose our awareness of God's presence.

And the more our lives are dominated by impurity, whether it's lust or greed or pride or

bitterness or selfishness, the less we perceive God.

This doesn't mean God isn't present.

It means our vision is distorted.

And that's why purity matters.

Purity grabs the index in the paper towels and cleans that glass.

It removes distortion and re-orients the heart toward God.

But even then, we still face the earlier problem that we were talking about.

If humans can't see God and live, how can Jesus promise that we will see Him?

Well, the answer is found in Jesus Himself.

So it makes sense that Jesus is the one who gives us this beautiful promise.

The pure and heart will see God because their hearts are oriented toward Him.

But the most incredible part of the story is how God ultimately makes that possible.

Because the greatest way we see God is through Christ.

The New Testament says something extraordinary about Jesus.

It tells us that Jesus is the image of the invisible God.

In Jesus, the glory of God becomes accessible.

Revealed in a way, human beings can actually encounter.

In the Gospel of John, we read that no one has ever seen God,

but the Son has made Him known.

And later, when one of Jesus' disciples asks him to show them the Father,

Jesus responds with a statement.

Pretty clear, he says,

whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

In other words, Jesus is the visible expression of what God is like.

When we look at Jesus, we see the heart of God because Jesus is God.

When Jesus touches the leper that everyone else avoided,

we see God's compassion on display.

When Jesus forgives the woman, caught in sin, we see God's mercy in action.

When Jesus calms the storm with a word, we see God's authority over creation.

And when Jesus goes to the cross, we see the depth of God's love for humanity

acted out in real time.

The cross is the clearest revelation of God's character in history.

And here's the amazing thing.

The very thing that prevented us from seeing God,

our sin, is the thing Jesus came to remove.

Through his death and resurrection, Christ cleanses the heart.

He makes purity possible, not through human effort alone,

but through transformation.

Christ makes the invisible God visible.

Through Him, we begin to see what Moses long to see.

Because of Jesus, those of us who have come to real saving faith

who are true followers of Christ, work in spiritual sight now.

The pure in heart see God's work, his hand, his beauty.

A Christian who visits the Grand Canyon doesn't stand on the edge

and marvel at the work of Mother Nature.

This is God's work.

And we rejoice at the obvious evidence of Him in creation.

We have eyes to see His provenance in suffering.

Instead of focusing on get me out of here when the hard stuff comes,

we run to our Father and we're grateful

as He provides sustains and leads us through suffering.

Our spiritual sight lets us see His presence

in scripture, in our lives, in the conviction and our consciences.

It gives us spiritual sight.

Well, I was trying to get a couple more points of sight in before the break,

but I didn't quite make it.

So please meet me back here in a couple minutes

because you do not want to miss this.

And we'll be back with more from Libby and Justin Momen

who's teaching today about purity of heart.

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what that means is you help fun voices just like Libby's voices

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Now, let's get back to Libby Gloss.

And this is The Better Way.

Welcome back to The Better Way.

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and get back to The Better Way with Libby Gloss.

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It's kind of nice to have that peace of mind, right?

So purity of heart, leading to seeing God.

What exactly was Jesus talking about in Matthew 5.8?

Well, we said before the break

that we get spiritual sight now because of Jesus.

We can see God in creation in His providential work

in our lives in His faithful provision

and so much more.

There's also a future dimension of Jesus' promise.

Right now, we see God dimly.

Do you all remember back in August?

I think it was of 2017.

There was a total solar eclipse

in a large part of the continental US.

I live in the South and we were right in the path

of that eclipse.

And everybody was running around trying to find

those paper glasses that you have to have

to be able to see the eclipse

because without the paper glasses,

if you look right at it, you'd at the very least

get really severe eye damage.

And at the worst, you'd end up blind.

So armed with our paper glasses,

my family standing on top of a really remote mountain

on the Georgia North Carolina border,

we got to see that two minute and 38 second eclipse.

It was the weirdest darkness ever.

But we couldn't look directly at the eclipse

with our bare eyeballs.

And that's what we're talking about here.

God gives us a partial peak at His glory.

We see Him through Christ.

We see Him through Scripture.

We see glimpses of His glory and creation.

We see evidence of His work in transformed lives.

But the Bible promises something greater is coming.

One day, we're gonna get to take off the paper glasses.

And as believers, we're gonna see God

in a way that we've never experienced before.

Scripture tells us there is a day coming

when that promise will be fulfilled

in a way we can't even imagine.

In the book of Revelation,

we're told that the renewed creation,

the new heaven and the new earth,

that is when God's people will see His face.

Revelation 22-3 through 4 says no longer,

will there be anything accursed?

They will see His face and His name will be on their foreheads.

This is the culmination of the promise of Matthew 5-8.

We're gonna get to see His face in the Old Testament

to see God's face that was totally unthinkable.

Moses couldn't see God's full glory and live,

but in the new creation, the redeemed will see Him.

This is intimacy.

This is access to God.

This is unbroken communion.

And notice what Revelation says.

It says nothing accursed.

There's not gonna be any impurity or corruption.

Our hearts won't be divided.

The promise of seeing God is inseparable from purification.

The trajectory of the Christian life is moving

toward that moment when our purity is gonna be complete

and our vision will be totally clear.

The story that began with Moses hiding in the cleft of the rock

is gonna end with all of God's redeemed believers,

his chosen ones standing in His presence without fear.

No more risk of being crispy critters.

The pure and heart will see God fully.

And the reason that we can stand in that glory

is because Christ has purified us.

Matthew 5-8 isn't just a call to cultivate

an aspect of our Christian character

that God would really like us to have to be pure and heart.

It's a promise.

It's a command to orient our hearts

toward the one who made us to step away

from the constant pull of a culture

that celebrates impurity and to pursue something deeper.

Where our desires become more aligned with God

and we begin to recognize His presence

in ways we couldn't before.

Period is not about perfectionism.

It's about devotion and surrender

and dying to self and living for Christ.

It's about a heart that says,

God, I want you more than anything else.

And the promise Jesus gives really is extraordinary.

Blessed are the pure and heart for they shall see God.

Not just someday out there in eternity,

but now as we encounter Him through Christ

and through His Word and through the transforming work

of the Spirit, the more our hearts are purified,

the clearer that vision becomes.

All right, so if you're picking up what I'm laying down,

you should be asking yourself something right about now.

How in the world am I supposed to have a pure heart?

I mean, I might look cleaned up on the outside,

but if you could see what goes on in my mind,

if you knew what my heart desires,

yipers.

And just what does Jesus think I'm capable of over here?

Matthew 5 should leave us with another question too.

And I know I'm getting a little personal,

but let me ask you, do you actually want to see God

because if you do, it means pursuing purity of heart.

It means turning away from the things that cloud our vision

and allowing Christ to reshape our desires.

When Jesus talks about purity of heart in Matthew 5.8,

he's not talking about ceremonial handwashing

or cleaning yourself up or moral perfectionism.

He's not talking about being nice.

The word pure, it carries the idea of being unmixed

or undivided or clean from corruption.

And I already filled you in on what the Bible means

when it talks about the heart.

It isn't just emotions.

It's the control center of the person.

Our thoughts, desires, affections, intentions, our will.

So smush those two terms together and what do you get?

Purity of heart means that we have an undivided allegiance

to God.

Our desires have been cleansed.

We have sincere motives.

There's integrity between our inner life and our outer life.

You're a confessional and functional theology.

This isn't a singles mixer here, ladies.

Not, well, I'll give that part to God,

but I'm keeping this part for me.

And I'll bang the behavior modification drum again

because it's one of my favorites as you all know.

We aren't talking about outward obedience

with zero heart change.

If you look pure on the outside,

but you're still harboring desires

and thoughts that are not pleasing to God,

there's still more work to be done.

On the other hand, because I know y'all,

because I talk to you on a regular basis,

Purity of heart is also not sinless perfection,

or scrupulosity that leaves you in a pool of anxiety

where you can't even hardly function,

or legalistic rule keeping,

or some kind of self-generated moral effort, okay?

So lay all that down and rest in the finished work

of your savior.

Purity of heart is the result of grace.

It begins with justification.

It's where you're declared righteous through Christ

and it continues throughout your life

through sanctification as you are progressively cleansed

by the Spirit.

If you don't know what to pray,

you can shoplift David's words if you want.

Psalm 5110, he begs God,

create in me a clean heart, oh God.

And that's a prayer for God to do what only God can do

because we can't purify ourselves.

The gospel tells us that through Jesus' blood,

our hearts are cleansed from guilt

and through the Spirit, our desires are transformed.

Purity's not about looking good.

It's about loving God supremely.

So what does this mean for you?

Well, you have to guard your inputs.

What you consume shapes your heart.

Be honest when you pick up a book or your phone

or your iPad to stream a show.

Are you feeding impurity?

Are you dulling your conscience?

Does this content help you pursue holiness

and purity of heart or not?

Because you're also responsible for examining your motives.

Are you seeking God's glory?

Are you looking to validate yourself or escape from reality?

Are you more concerned with your image

or making his name known?

Purity really is often about the why,

more than it is, the what.

Now something I try to practice on the regular

is confessing quickly.

If you recognize an impurity in your life

or a place where you aren't pursuing holiness,

don't delay, drag it out into the light.

That's where the cleansing happens.

First, John 1.9 promises cleansing when we confess.

And then, as James says,

James calls the double-minded unstable.

So be single-minded.

A pure heart says, Lord, I am yours.

My husband and I used to tell our sons

when they were younger that if they made

the big decisions in advance,

they wouldn't have to even think about the small ones.

I've already determined to glorify God with my life.

So I don't even have to think about,

am I gonna go meet that guy

or am I gonna watch that show

or am I gonna buy that thing, reminder,

that doesn't mean perfect obedience.

It means that you are settled

on walking in a manner worthy of the gospel.

And all along the way,

because this is challenging, remember the promise,

the pure and heart, get to see God.

Listen, holiness is hard, purity costs

because you gotta give stuff up,

but the reward is staggering.

You will see God, not a substitute,

not a shadow, God himself.

So when the culture or if we're being honest,

our own sinful hearts say, indulge your desires,

you answer back, not gonna do it

because Jesus says, I'm supposed to purify my heart.

God never tells us to follow our hearts.

He says, I will transform your heart.

And here's the best part, purity is not restrictive.

It's liberating because a pure heart

is not anxious about being exposed

or exhausted from hiding.

It doesn't live a double life.

It's whole and it can see clearly.

Blessed are the pure and heart for they shall see God.

These four words describe the reality

for every soul that chooses purity.

This is not mystical escapeism.

It's a vision of relationship.

As the Puritan Stephen Charnock wrote,

a pure heart makes heaven begin below.

And now that you know the better way

to think about purity of heart

and what it really means to see God,

put it into practice for your good and God's glory.

This has been The Better Way with Libby Glossin,

a production of Fortis Institute.

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And until tomorrow, go serve your king.