You know the story of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount.  He preaches to the crowds on a mountainside near Capernaum, beside the Sea of Galilee.

Jesus begins with nine compassionate proverbs – not the Proverbs of the Old Testament, but wisdom of His own.

Matthew 5:8  Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

Do you see God? (I don’t.)  What does that tell us?

Many feel-good sermons have encouraged our hearts in these beatitudes – our hearts which are not even close to pure.  We hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but we do not receive it in our hearts which are not pure.  The heart is deceitful, because it is not pure.

 

I once inadvertently poked myself in the eye.  I saw a great flash of light with intense distortion of my suddenly excruciating painful poke. I didn’t see God; but I couldn’t see anything else, either.

Sometimes it takes a sudden poke to get my heart refocused. It takes a pouring off of the dross from my cold hardened heart to purify my soul nearer to the pureness of God.

Jesus does NOT have fond and ‘happy’ memories of the crowds who sat on the Capernaum hillside.  The Son of God rebukes the “blessed” of Capernaum… those who did not accept his nice little Sermon on the Mount.

He later delivers these same ‘blessed’ an unexpected poke in the eye.

Matthew 11: ²³ “And you people of Capernaum, will you be honored in heaven?  No, you will go down to the place of the dead.^[a] For if the miracles I did for you had been done in wicked Sodom, it would still be here today. ²⁴ I tell you, even Sodom will be better off on judgment day than you.”

The nice people of Capernaum have not had ears to hear the nine nice proverbs of blessing by Jesus. Here He sounds more like the Prophets who warned of curse which would come on the land and God’s ‘blessed.’

Zechariah 13:9  And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried: they shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: and they shall say, The LORD is my God.

 “The choice is clear: BLESSING OR CURSE – Heaven OR Hell – Jesus OR a heart not quite pure enough for Heaven.

It seems we have two choices: the eternal fire of Hell

OR a refining fire of the Holy Spirit.

Look at the picture of God refining the heart:

Psalm 119:119 NKJV says:

You put away all the wicked of the earth like dross;
Therefore I love Your testimonies.

The wisdom of Proverbs 25:4 tells us:

Take away the dross from silver,
And it will go to the silversmith for jewelry.

“IF you want to see God, allow the Holy Spirit to take away the dross, the impurities of your heart and its cold deceptive hardness.

Jesus gave us the fire of the Spirit to refine our souls to see God.  By the blood of Jesus and the fire of the Holy Spirit we will be 100% pure.

John 14: ¹⁵ “If you love me, obey^[d] my commandments. ¹⁶ And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate,^[e] who will never leave you. ¹⁷ He is the Holy Spirit, who leads into all truth. The world cannot receive him, because it isn’t looking for him and doesn’t recognize him. But you know him, because he lives with you now and later will be in you.”

How pure is your heart?

Pray for the ‘blessed’ refining fire of the Spirit, before the ‘cursed’ punishing fire of Hell.