Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Two soldiers were on a transport going overseas.

Standing on the deck they gazed out across the vast expanse of water.

One who had never been near the ocean said, "That's the most water I've ever seen in all my life.

Did you ever see so much water?"

His companion responded, "You haven't seen anything yet-that's just the top of it!"

Even the surface of the sea is impressive, but the depths take away your breath in awesome wonder.

The beatitudes we have looked at so far are far from being shallow surface saying of Christ.

They are deep and challenging, but they are at least within the range of what seems possible to us.

But in this sixth beatitude, Jesus plunges to such depths in the ocean of holiness that we feel it is impossible to follow Him deeper, and that up to now we have only seen the top of it.

We feel we are just not built for this kind of depth.

The pressure we feel would crush us.

Both the condition of purity of heart, and the promise of the vision of God seems so far beyond our capacity that the whole thing appears impractical.

It is like asking a man with a snorkel and swim fins to follow an atomic powered submarine.

No one claims to be adequate for the task of even explaining this beatitude.

Preachers apologize for their audacity in even presuming to try and preach on this text.

It is agreed, however, that Jesus is not mocking us here, but offers the hope of attaining an apparently impossible ideal.

It is agreed that Jesus gets to the very heart of happiness in this beatitude.

All else stands or falls on the basis of what we do with this one.

Matthew Henry in his commentary writes, "This is the most comprehensive of all the beatitudes; holiness and happiness fully described and put together.

Here is the most comprehensive character of the blessed; they are the pure in heart.

Here is the most comprehensive comfort of the blessed; they shall see God."

Hastings in the Great Texts Of The Bible writes, "If in blessedness there be a crown of blessedness it is here."

A. R. Clippinger says, "In the bright constellation of the beatitudes this star of promise shines the farthest and is the most beautiful."

The great hope of God's people has always been to see God and behold His presence.

Moses cried out, "I beseech Thy, show me Thy glory."

(Ex.

33:18).

In Psa.

17:15 the Psalmist describes his greatest bliss: "As for me, I will behold Thy face in righteousness."

In Psa.

41:12 he expects his integrity to be rewarded by being set before God's face forever.

In Psa.

63:2 he says, "So I have looked upon Thee in the sanctuary, beholding Thy power and glory."

Isaiah saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and many are the texts in the Old Testament that refer to seeing God, or the great hope of seeing God.

This is true in the New Testament also.

Jesus said, "He who has seen me has seen the Father."

Paul holds forth the hope of seeing Christ face to face, and no longer through a glass darkly.

In Rev. 22:4 it says of the servants of God, "They shall see His face and His name shall be in their foreheads."

In both the Old and New Testaments the condition for seeing God is a pure heart.

In Psa.

24:3-4 we read, "Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?

And who shall stand in His holy place?

He who has clean hands and a pure heart."

In I John 3:2-3 we read, "We know that when He appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is, and everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself as He is pure."

The longing of every Christian should be for a pure heart.

Walter C. Smith expressed it in poetry:

If clearer vision Thou impart,

Grateful and glad my soul shall be,

But yet to have a pure heart

Is more to me.

Yea, only as the heart is clean

May larger visions yet be mine,

For mirrored in its depths are seen

The things divine.

The clearer the heart the greater the vision.

The heart is the telescope whereby the believer sees into the heaven of heavens, and the cleaner the lens the further he sees.

As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.

A man is what his heart is.

The heart is the telescope by which we see beyond the heavens which declare the glory of God into the heaven of the very presence of God.

A man with a telescope can see what others do not, even though it is present to all.

He can point at a star and say it is two stars, but you look and see one, and you do not believe it until you look through the telescope.

So the man with a clean and pure heart can see God at work where others see nothing, or only men working.

Jesus is not just talking about the vision of God when time is over, and we see Him face to face.

The seeing begins now in the life of the pure.

1.

When you point to the big dipper and look up and say, "I see it," that is physical sight.

2. When you tell me how to find the big dipper by looking to the Northwest, and I say, "I see," that is mental sight.

3.

But when I look up at the dipper and feel the wonder of God's creation, that is heart sight.

You are seeing God on a level that the physical and mental cannot penetrate.

You are going beyond the body and mind into the realm of the spirit where you have the ability to enter the presence of God and praise Him for His creation.

Men only see what they are prepared for seeing.

The man who loves and studies nature sees the beauty of animals and plants that most men never see.

A sightseer once stopped to watch Turner the great artist at work.

"Why Mr. Turner," he said, "I never saw any such light and color in nature as you put on your canvas."

Turner merely replied, "Don't you wish you could?

As for me, I never can hope to match with pigments the glory I see in the sky."

Wesley had this same experience in the spiritual realm and wrote:

Lo! to faith's enlightened sight,

All the mountain flames with light.

Hell is nigh, but God is nigher,

Circling us with hosts of fire.

Keith Miller in his book The Second Touch tells of two men who were traveling at night in the brush land of the Southwest.

The driver lived on a ranch in the area, but the passenger was from the East.

As they approached a cut in a hill the Easterner saw in the headlights a boulder rolling down into the road ahead of them.

He yelled and leaped into the back seat in fear.

The driver, however, drove on undisturbed, for he knew it was a tumbleweed.

Both saw the same object, but what they saw was determined by their experience in that environment.

So it is with all of life, and so it is in the spiritual life.

We see what we are fit to see, and prepared to see, and only the pure in heart are prepared to see God.

This includes both the literal vision of the future as well as the spiritual vision of the present.

Alexander Maclaren, one of the most famous preachers of all time, summed up all that is meant by the present vision of God that is helpful to our understanding.

He wrote, "Whether you call it the vision of God, or whether you call it communion with God in Jesus Christ, or whether you fall back upon the other metaphor of God dwelling in us and we dwelling in God, it all comes to the same thing.

The consciousness of His presence, the realization of His character, the blessed assurance of loving relations with him, and the communion in mind, heart, will, and conduct, with God who has come near to us all in Jesus Christ."

In other words, purity of heart is the condition of experiencing all that the New Testament says about having fellowship with God.

The impure lose the sense of the presence of God.

The Christian with sin in his life is out of fellowship with God.

The lens of his telescope is out of focus and smeared.

The paradox is, many feel God has faded from their life, and is no longer a vital factor, when in reality, it is they who have lost focus, and their impure heart has clouded their vision.

This beatitude keeps a balance on the former one of being merciful.

Some may interpret mercy for the sinner to mean toleration of his sin, and even participating in his sin.

Jesus clearly destroys that idea, and make it plain for all to see that mercy that sinks to the level of fellowship with the sinner in his sin cuts one off from fellowship with God.