"Happy are the Holy" Matthew 5:8 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Matthew 5, verse 8.

Matthew 5:8

One beatitude, one lonely beatitude for this morning.

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

Cathari, a cardiaa.

It's alliterated in Greek.

Holiness to the heart.

Purity to the heart.

In Greek, they start with the same letters, they have the same sounds.

There's a rhythm to it that's kind of lost with pure in heart, but it comes through in the Greek.

Cathari, purity.

Cardia.

English word is cardiac.

We get the from the Greek word, cardiac, heart.

There's this idea by even the way it sounds in Greek that holiness is at home in the heart.

And I'm trying to capture that with a sermon title you see on your screen, happier the holy.

That's my attempt at translating it.

The point of it is that your heart was made for holiness.

Now you've heard it said, I'm sure, there's a God-shaped hole in your heart.

And it's kind of quirky or pithy or hackneyed or however you want to say it.

But there's an element in which it's true.

When God made Adam and Eve, they were holy.

They were set apart from creation.

They were on the earth that God made, but they, in a sense, were not like everything else in the earth.

They weren't like the plants or the trees, they weren't like the fish or the birds.

They weren't like all the animals.

Remember, all the animals lined up before Adam, and he looked at all of them, and he was not like any of them.

So God gives him Eve, and Eve is like Adam, and together Adam and Eve are unlike the rest of creation.

They're in the image of God.

They have the capacity to magnify God and delight in God and subdue the earth and rule over it in a way that the animals, of course, could not.

They're the ones being subdued.

And at the heart of that is their own heart.

At the heart of that is the holiness, that they are set apart from creation.

Now, of course, God is holy.

God is set apart from creation.

God exists before creation, so God is the essence of holiness, or holiness is the essence of God.

Adam and Eve, they have that derived holiness.

They are set apart from creation as well, but they received that because they were made in the image of God.

Their holiness is not in and of themselves, it's derived, it's from God.

And yet that holiness, as perfect as Adam and Eve were, they were capable of change, and change they did.

When sin entered the world, their holiness was wrecked.

The image of God was marred.

Creation itself was afflicted.

Creation groans under the oppression of sin now because of the fall.

And Adam and Eve are separated from God.

There really is a hole in their heart.

It is a God-shaped hole because it's a hole of holiness in their heart.

People now are born in this world distant from God, separated from God, and that separation is seen in the area of holiness.

This is why Matthew 5, verse 7 is so jarring.

Matthew 5:7

Blessed are those who are pure in heart.

Jesus says that you will be happy if your heart is holy.

But that is exactly the problem, because the Bible says that your heart is, if it is anything, it is not holy.

Genesis 6, verse 5.

Genesis 6:5

This is Moses' verdict because it's God's verdict on the human heart.

The Lord looked at man's heart and saw that every inclination of man's heart was only evil continually.

Man, that makes us uncomfortable, doesn't it?

Think of all those like exclusive, piled-on words in that verse.

Every inclination, not just every thought of man's heart, but every inclination of the thought of his heart.

He's into the nitty-gritty here, in the weeds of your heart.

Every little sway in your heart, that's inclination.

Every little movement of your heart is generally or occasionally evil, sporadically evil.

Prone to good, prone to bad, give and take, yin and yang.

It's not what it says.

Every inclination of man's heart is only evil continually.

That's the human heart.

Jeremiah reiterates it, Jeremiah 17, verse 5.

Jeremiah 17:5

The heart is deceitful above all else.

It's wicked.

Who can understand it?

You might think your heart is prone to good, but reality, as the hymn come down fountain, says, your heart is prone to wander.

If God's goodness didn't tether it down, it would just run away.

That's where your heart is.

And so we find in verse 8 of Matthew 5 bad news.

When it says, happy are the holy in heart.

It's the one thing our heart is not.

Now I'm using holiness and purity as interchangeable because they are essentially the same concept.

Holiness is God's essence.

God is separate from us.

He is holy.

That's what holiness means.

Separate, it's the sum of God's attributes.

But you recognize that God's attributes can't be summed up, that God is not composed of parts.

It's not like God is a cake.

You don't add righteousness and holiness and kindness and grace and mercy and omniscience and omnipotence and all those things, and you stir them up and out comes God.

God is one being.

The Bible says that God is one.

Behold, Israel, Yahweh your God, is one.

Shma Israel, Adna, El Chenu, Adna, Ichad.

God is Ichad, one.

He's singular.

He's not composed of different things.

He is one essence, one being, and the essence of God is holy, different than us.

Now there's a moral component to holiness.

That ihad, that moral, or that oneness of God, that is a moral component, the essence of that, and that moral component is purity.

God is holy, he is morally pure, there's nothing unrighteous about him.

God in his infinite majesty is pure.

There's no shifting shadows in him, James says.

Purity is not easy to understand because it's related to the essence of who God is.

You can have all eternity to study God's purity and never exhaust it, never fully understand or comprehend it, which is okay because guess what?

You're gonna have all of eternity to study God's purity and holiness.

And you'll never get tired of it.

You can understand it and look at it and examine it from different perspectives and always find new facets of it, new angles of it, new beauties in it, new new wonders of God's holiness are displayed every which way you look at it.

So I just want to grab on to two this morning.

Let me give you an outline.

Purity is two perspectives.

And again, when I use an outline like this, don't hear me as saying there's actual parts to purity.

No, purity is unified because God is unified.

God is like light.

The Bible says.

You remember a physics class in high school when your physics professor says, you know, light is the one thing you can't define.

It's everything.

It's a wave and it's a particle.

Whoa.

It violates all the rules because it's light.

You know, God is like that.

Not in the sense that he is a wave and a particle, but you can't understand him.

You can't grasp him.

You can not make rules that regulate him.

He's incomprehensible.

He is bright, he is illuminating, he reveals all things.

And so we wrestle to appreciate what he illuminates, what he lights up.

Now, every all the attributes of God, there's a positive side and a negative side, and we'll use that outline this morning, a negative and a positive.

Because when you're dealing with something incomprehensible like God, it's often easier simply to describe what he is not.

You know, God is holy, which means he's not sinful.

God is righteous, which means he's not bitter.

You know, God is benevolent, which means he's not greedy.

You can always define things and they're negatives, and that's usually the easiest way it is to approach God.

The process theologians refer to is the process of negation.

You describe God by eliminating all the things that aren't God, and you're left with God.

Purity, in that sense, simply means undefiled.

Purity means undefiled.

Holiness means without corruption.

Light means without darkness.

Again, how do you define light?

You're just left with what it's not.

Light is not darkness.

The absence of darkness is going to be light.

So here, holiness is understood by negation.

Let me give you the negative side of holiness.

Holiness pushes us away from sin.

Holiness is the absence of sin.

Purity is having sin removed or purged from us.

That's what purity is, is not.

It's not sin.

Purity is the absence of impurity.

You even hear it in the word impurity, the negation.

Purity, impurity, eliminates purity.

Purity is the absence of impurity.

That sounds like just circular talk there.

It sounds like gibberish, but that is the way the Bible describes purity.

Purity is often linked to its absence.

For example, James 4, verse 8, cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

James 4:8

The fact that we are sinful and we harbor sin in our heart is what's behind the biblical mandate for you to pursue purity.

You're supposed to purify your heart because you have impure thoughts, impure motives.

Your best thoughts, your highest thoughts, your highest prayers, your most complex thoughts and reasoning about God are marred by impure motives and impure actions, impure desires, selfish motives and selfish desires.

And so the Bible commands you to pursue purity by excising, getting out of your heart and in your mind and your imagination impure thoughts.

So how do you grow in purity?

Well, you grow in purity, you push away sin by being drawn from darkness to light.

Jesus says the light shines in the darkness.

Most people that are exposed to the light of God don't like the light.

They don't want to come to the light because they like darkness.

They don't want their evil deeds exposed.

So they hide from God and hide from the light.

And yet the Christian attitude is to let the light shine into your heart because you want your evil deeds exposed.

You want the word of God to expose to you what's wrong in your thought and in your thinking and in your imagination and in your heart and in your affections.

You want the word of God to show you the things that you love that are bad.

You want that.

That's the Christian response.

The Christian wants purity, wants light to expose the impurity and the darkness in our minds and in our affections.

The heart that is pure is a heart that says no to temptation, no to sin.

The heart that says no to temptation and no to sin is a heart that is drawn towards Jesus and away from sin.

But sometimes we need help with that gaze, don't we?

Sometimes we're not eager to gaze at the Lord because we do like the idols in our life.

We do like the darkness in our life, and our hearts are like that.

As Calvin who said, our hearts are like idol factories.

We produce idols in our life.

We like dagons on the shelf.

We like our life the way it is.

And so sometimes we need help to wreck those idols.

We need somebody to push dagon over and watch it break into pieces.

We need those trials that expose us.

And so that's why the Bible often connects purity to judgment or to fire.

That's this negative side of purity.

That there is a judgment or fire that produces purity in your life.

Because you have those idols in your heart, you have those things you love in your life, you have those things you don't want God to touch, that you like living this way, you idolize them.

You're not going to get rid of those idols on your own.

And so God comes in and topples them over, pushes them down, breaks them, and exposes you for the things that you love.

Our God is the consuming fire.

And it's the blazing intensity of his holiness that purifies our thoughts and our affections.

Think of Israel in the wilderness wanderings.

They were impure.

They were impure.

And so God purifies the camp through opening pits and swallowing them up, through purging them with fire, with serpents, with all manner of things.

He purifies his camp.

But the best example of this is probably Nadab and Nabihu, where the tabernacle is built.

The tabernacle was the temple before the temple.

The tabernacle was where God dwelled in that sense in the wilderness wanderings.

It was built according to the commands in the book of Exodus, exactly like it was supposed to be.

It is inaugurated, it is open for worship, so to speak, and Nadab and Abihu go to the tabernacle and they present unauthorized fire.

They present their own light, their own fire.

Well, that fire was revealing Nadab and Abihu.

It wasn't revealing God.

That fire couldn't purify anyone.

It didn't point to God and his holiness.

It pointed to Nadab and Nabihu, and it was presented to God as a form of worship.

And that's a sobering reminder to us that some people worship God on the outside just fine, but on the inside, they're doing it for themselves.

It's unauthorized fire.

Well, when Nadab and Nabihu walked in with their unauthorized fire, God struck them dead.

He had his own fire.

Aaron, their dad, was astonished.

Appeals to Moses and says, What is this?

And Moses says, God burned them, so that you will know that those who draw near to the Lord will be holy.

The God will be holy among his worshipers.

That's the spiritual fire that purifies us.

1 Peter 1 brings that truth into the New Testament.

We have an inheritance, and notice the negation words here.

We have an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.

You know, you can't undescribe heaven for what it is, so you often describe heaven with what it's not, right?

John does the same thing.

Heaven is the place without the sea, heaven is the place without the darkness, without, you know, all the all the knots, no tears, no divisions.

Peter does the same thing.

You have an inheritance that is undefiled, it's not defiled, it's unfading, it will never diminish.

It's imperishable, it won't ever run out.

Then Peter goes on to say, so that the genuineness of your faith may be seen, may be proved, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire.

So there's the gold, you burn the gold, and the impurities burn off, and what you're left with is purity.

That's what's happening to your own heart in this world.

You go through trials in this world, and it's the fire of judgment that burns away the impurities in your own life.

So what is left is fit for heaven.

When you go through trials in this life, it's God's fire that is purifying you.

That's the concept of purifying.

He burns you, and what's left is pure.

Often trials work in our life like that.

Health trials in particular expose the kind of idols we have.

I'm not saying you go through a health trial.

It's not that you have sin X in your life, and so God gives you this health trial to make you realize that you have sin X.

So it's not like your sin is what one-to-one correspondence with your health trial.

No, it's more like you have sin A through Z in your life, and God puts you through a health trial, and it exposes some of those sins.

Some of the idols of comfort, some of the idols of self-sufficiency, some of the idols of the way you think your life should be.

They get they get exposed.

But it's not that you're being punished, it's that you're being sanctified.

It's not just health trials, it's any kind of trial, any kind of tribulation, it's refining.

You know, in the Old Testament, Leviticus says that you're supposed to purify the olive oil.

It's used in worship.

The word for purify there, it's the ESV renders it's the word beating.

It's this pressing.

You know, put the olives down and they roll a stone over the top of them.

That purifies the olive oil.

It presses the oil down, and you pass some of that, the stone over several times.

I I mean DSV, as I mentioned, translates that word beating.

That's a fine translation, I guess.

I don't know what better word you could use, but I want you to get the picture of what it's brought into English as.

It's something being crushed by a stone that is repeatedly rolled over it.

That's how you purify olive oil.

That's what's happening in our life through trials.

We're being purified.

We're being brought low.

And that's why the pathway or the highway to holiness, you don't just start.

This is not the first beatitude.

If Jesus started with happier the holy, the beatitudes would be very lame.

That's not a good place to start.

Happier the holy.

Yikes, I'm out.

See you next Sunday.

There's an on-ramp to this, and the on-ramp starts with poverty.

He says, Happy are the poor in spirit.

So you recognize that you don't have the purity that's required.

That's what you're absent.

You don't have the moral requirements to be pleasing before God.

You don't have them.

That's where we start.

That's a great place to start, right?

Because then you're all back in.

I am spiritually poor and bankrupt.

I don't have my spiritual wallet.

I am spiritually without capital.

Then you mourn over that.

You weep over your lack of spiritual standing before God.

Remember, not everybody who knows they're a sinner is saved.

The world's filled with people who know they're not good enough to be saved.

That doesn't mean they are saved.

The world's filled with sinners that don't love Jesus.

They excuse their sin, right?

They say, everybody's as bad as me, or I try hard, or blah, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, I may not be a good person, but you know, they come with excuses.

Followed by happier than mourning.

You know, you recognize that you're a sinner and then you mourn over your sin.

But again, not everybody who's mourning is a Christian.

You know, Judas wept over his sin doesn't mean he was saved.

Again, people might be sad about their sin, but they make excuses.

I heard somebody recently say, Yeah, I know I'm a sinner, but uh I can't believe the gospel because you know Christians have the worst e the worst immigration policy in the world.

That was a legitimate reason she was giving for why she wasn't gonna follow Jesus because of Christians' immigration.

She recognized she's a sinner, but Christians have this immigration policy, you know?

That's not mourning over sin.

You recognize your own lack of spiritual standing, that brings you to the point of mourning.

That brings you to the point of surrender.

Again, it's brought into English as the word meek, the third beatitude, meek, but it's the word for surrender.

You're brought down low, you surrender to the Lord.

You're broken by your own sin.

This is the conversion.

This is where conversion takes place in the beatitudes.

You surrender to the Lord.

Now that you've surrendered to the Lord, that's saved.

All those who surrender to the Lord are saved.

Now your eyes are cast up and you're hungering for righteousness.

You don't have it, but now you want it.

That leads to mercy, where you're treating others with mercy because we're all beggars.

We're all in this together, you know?

I'm not going to keep a record of wrongs.

We're all, you know, we're all homeless in this world.

And that leads to purity.

Now, with all of that broken, all that stripped away, now you're able, all that purification happening, now you're able to see purity.

So that's like, like I said, the highway to holiness here has an on-ramp.

The on-ramp is you're broken over your sin, you're mourning over your sin, you're surrendered to the Lord, you hunger for righteousness that's not yours, and the Lord gives it to you.

The Lord gives it to you through faith in Christ, which leads to the second perspective on holiness is the positive.

The negative perspective of unholiness is the absence of sin, which comes through fire and judgment.

The positive perspective of unholiness is being made like God, who is the Holy One.

The positive perspective on purity is that God Himself is pure.

He's the pure one.

So the judgment and fire burns your unrighteousness away, it sanctifies you.

What's left resembles God.

It's like calls to like here.

And there's little hints in this in the Beatitudes that maybe you picked up on as we've been going through it so slowly over the past few weeks.

I hope you have picked up on this little detail here.

Most of the other Beatitudes, the reward is the opposite.

Like, blessed are the poor, they get the earth.

Blessed are those who mourn because they're comforted.

See how they're opposites?

Mourning, comfort, opposites.

Blessed are the hungry, for they'll be filled.

Opposites.

But here, this beatitude is not an opposite.

Here it's blessed are the pure because they will see God.

That's the same.

God is pure.

So when your heart is pure, you will see God.

It's like calls to like.

It's the same.

It's not opposite, it's the like thing.

Because God is pure, you're drawn to him in purity.

In this world, you're not like him, but you want to be like him.

The Holy Spirit convicts you of sin, you're putting off sin, you're fighting sin, and the more you fight sin, the more you grow in the image of Christ, never complete in this life, of course.

Then when you die, you see him face to face.

And John says, when you see him face to face, you'll be like Him because you love him.

That's who you want to be like.

Then you see him as he is, and you will be like him.

You'll be holy at that point.

So that's the kind of the crescendo of purity in your life is when you see the Lord, you're made like him because he's the one whom you love.

That's purity.

God's purity does not come from being sanctified.

God doesn't have to go through trials to be pure.

He doesn't have to have the dross burned away.

He just is pure in and of himself.

So back in Leviticus 24, the olive oil was purified, and then you know what you did with it?

You burned it in the lamp in the temple, in the tabernacle.

So notice the two kinds of purity.

The first kind of purity is the olive oil.

It's got the dross and the contaminant stripped away.

The second kind of purity is the light.

That light just is pure.

The light doesn't have to be sanctified.

There's no impurities in light.

It just is pure.

You think, well, who cares how pure the oil is for burning a lamp?

You know, in the in the Roman world where Jesus lived, it was the worst oil that burned the lamps.

You know, the best oil, the most pure oil you ate.

In the second category of oil you might use for things you feed animals and such, there's the lowest oil, like the worst oil.

That's what you burn in your candles, because who cares?

But in the tabernacle, you needed the most pure oil because the light is undefiled, because it's the light of the Lord.

It's undefiled.

That's the beauty of purity, that God, in his radiance and his exalted nature, is completely undefiled, holy and pure.

And so you're drawn towards holiness and purity by looking at the Lord.

And when you look at the Lord, you desire, if you're a Christian, you love him and you want to be like him, more sin is exposed, and you're, you know, it's this pulling towards him.

It's this pulling towards him.

And it's notice that it's purity in heart, not purity in the hands.

In other words, it's about the heart, not what you do.

It's purity that starts from the inside and goes out, not from the outside in.

Sometimes we think of moral purity as just, you know, abstinence, things you don't do.

But that's not real purity.

You can refrain from sin for all kinds of wicked reasons.

The Pharisees did that.

You know, the Pharisees refrained from all the bad sins.

All the bad sins, make the list of the bad sins, they didn't do them.

That their little Pharisee robes nicely pressed, their hair nicely curled, everything was just so.

On the outside, they looked legit, but the inside they were they were dead.

You cannot reverse engineer this kind of purity.

It doesn't start with, hey, stop doing bad things and that will make your heart pure.

No, it starts with knowledge about God, love for God, that affects how you live.

So it's purity in heart.

There's always a tendency in our life to think that it's purity in the outside.

And some of that is just the word purity, I guess.

The Latin word for it is castis, which comes into English as chastity.

So you think it's chastity being morally chaste or morally pure in that sense, sexually pure, that must be purity.

You think of all those abstinence pledges that work their way through evangelical Christianity in like the 90s, everybody took these abstinence pledges.

There, I'm morally pure, I sign this form kind of thing.

But you cannot reverse engineer moral purity.

It doesn't start on the outside, it comes to you through knowledge of God, affecting your love for God.

And so if the negative side of holiness was seen in judgment and fire, the positive side of purity is seen in joy and love.

Your heart is filled with the joy in the Lord and love for the Lord, and that is what works itself out.

You start from the inside and you work yourself out.

Listen, it is possible to follow Jesus and to lead an externally holy life for all the wrong reasons.

It's possible to follow Jesus in the wilderness for three years and not be holy and not be pure.

Think of Judas.

He wandered around Jesus, he left his family, he followed Jesus for three years, he wasn't morally pure.

It's possible to follow Jesus in the wilderness to pack up a lunch from Capernaum and go and wander with Jesus for weeks, even, but not because you love his teaching, but because you liked the bread that he made.

I mean, that's really what people did.

That's not moral purity.

Moral purity starts with a love for the Lord in the heart.

This is Job's defense from all his friends.

Job's friends piled up accusations against him, and Job couldn't respond to those accusations.

Job 27, verse 10, he says, Listen, the truly righteous delight themselves in the Lord.

Job 27:10

That's all I can say.

That was Job's defense.

I just delight myself in the Lord.

Jeremiah 15, verse 16, which is, by the way, in the context of Jeremiah saying, I hereby vow never to talk about the Lord again.

Jeremiah 15:16

There.

But then he says, I found your word, I ate it, and it was sweet to me.

It became a delight for my heart because I'm called by your name, O Yahweh.

That's what happened to Jeremiah.

He says, I tried, I tried this whole, I'm not going to preach anymore.

Didn't work.

Because inside of my heart I loved the Lord and it kept coming out of me.

Paul in Romans 7, he's working through this.

In Romans 7, Paul's fighting sin in his life, and he recognizes the paradox of holiness that the holier you are, the more bothered you are by your sin.

You know, the immature believer is like, you know, I want one hour without cussing.

I'm doing great for Jesus.

But the mature believer is like super vexed about sins that the immature believer might not even notice.

The more mature you grow in godliness, the more vexed you are by your sin because of how much you love the Lord.

And so that's Paul's argument in Romans 7.

Paul's fighting through this in his heart in Romans 7, like I want to love the Lord, I want to serve him more, but I see the sin in my life more, and he goes going back and forth and how much he's growing in godliness.

And you remember where he finally stops in Romans 7.

He could talk himself in a circle.

You know, he could still be riding Romans 7 and never conclude.

He finally ends it by saying, Listen, at the end of the day, I delight in the law of God in my inner being.

That's where he's finally got to park the car.

In my heart, I love the law.

I love the Lord.

That's where it all ends.

I love the Lord.

That's moral purity.

That's holiness.

God's purity is intrinsic to God, so your purity, when it is right before the Lord, is in you.

It's derivative, of course, is given to you from the Lord.

You didn't manufacture it yourself.

It comes through his Holy Spirit.

It's his moral purity, but it's given to you by God, and God gives it to you through your joy and your love of him.

The morally pure life is a life of love of God.

That wants the light to expose the darkness.

A heart that radiates purity is a heart that is filled with the joy of the Lord.

It's a heart that recognizes everything God says is righteous and just, like Paul did.

Everything God thinks is pure.

So I want my thoughts to be like God's thoughts.

This is why Paul writes, to the pure, all things are pure.

It's not naivete.

He's not saying you just don't know the evil in the world.

No, it's to the pure, really, all things are pure.

As your heart is pure, what settles in your heart is pure.

That's the fight we fight.

That's why God judges sin, as he burns away things that aren't pure, but that's not all of purity.

It's not just seen in judgment, remember, because God is pure and holy without judgment.

But God burns away sin in your life to make you pure pure, but he also draws you, magnetizes you to himself with his own essence, his own character, his own being, draws you to himself.

And if you love him, you want to be like him.

You're drawn in.

Sin is a lack of conformity to who God is.

That's why God judges it.

Holiness and joy and purity, it's a love for God and who he is.

And it brings you to him.

So how do you gaze upon the Lord?

Of course, through his word, but there's even a more crystallized element of that.

The Lord Jesus was the purest person who ever lived.

He was holy, sinless, undefiled, never failed to do what he was supposed to do, never harbored any ill motives.

He's the one person of whom Genesis 6.5 isn't true.

Every inclination of his heart, every inclination of the thoughts of his heart, were only righteous and always righteous.

His is the only heart that Jeremiah 17 is not accurate about.

His heart was not deceitful.

His heart was truthful and revelatory.

His heart is a window into God.

You want to know what God is like, you can look at Christ.

Because Christ is the essence, the holiness, the moral purity of God, robed in human nature, joined to human nature, in a human body.

The holiest person who ever lived.

But you also see the judgment, the other side of purity in Christ, as he's lifted up on the cross.

Even though he's the holiest person ever lived, you see the infinite wrath and judgment of God poured out on him on the cross.

Not for his sin, of course, but for the sins of all who would believe are given to Christ.

And so the wrath of God is poured out, the fire of God is poured out to Jesus on the cross.

So on the cross is where you have the positive side of holiness from the inside of Jesus, and the negative side of holiness from the wrath of God, they meet on the cross.

So the internal beauty and love and joy and holiness of Christ comes face to face with the wrath and justice and mercy and consuming fire of God that is burning out sin.

I say mercy there because it's a mercy towards us.

Through the cross, through justice and holiness meeting on the cross, God displays mercy to all who would believe because we look at him, and there we see God's wrath and love joins.

The holiness from the inside of Christ and the holiness from the outside of Christ, the fire from heaven against sin, and the love for God from within meet in Jesus Christ from the cross.

So as you look at him, you see holiness on display.

Purity on display.

As you hear him say, Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing, you see the mercy of God displayed through holiness, through purity.

You see the love for being reunited with this Father displayed, as he tells the thief, Today you'll be with me in paradise.

The longing to see the Father face to face, even as Jesus did on the cross there.

You see all that on display on the cross.

The reward, reward for the life well lived is seeing God.

That's what the Beatitude says.

Happy are the holy, for they will see God.

That's Jesus on the cross today in paradise.

You can see him now in this life as you gaze your eyes on the cross.

You'll see him in the next life when you see them face to face.

You'll close your eyes in death and open them and see the holy Lamb of God slain in the mind of God from before the foundation of the earth, slain in Jerusalem on the cross that day, exalted from the grave on the third day, raised into heaven, ascended on the high where he dwells now.

You'll open your eyes after you die, and you'll behold him through faith, the purest person who ever lived.

That's why we celebrate communion.

Because we see him in this life as we contemplate his death, his body broken for us, his blood shed for us.

Lord, we're thankful for the cross because it displays your purity.

The wrath of God and the joy of God mingled perfectly.

It displays your justice and your mercy.

It displays purity from the outside and from the inside.

We recognize on our own we're not, we are bankrupt, but we recognize through the riches of your treasury you share your purity with us.

You declare us to be righteous through our faith.

And you give us that righteousness.

And so in that sense, we, in a judicial sense, are pure before you.

But Lord, we pray that we would grow in a practical sense of purity, that we would grow more and more pure, that the fires of this life would continue to purge us and refine us.

And the joy and love of heaven would continue to draw us.

We long to be like Christ, to see him face to face.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.