The second in a series of four talks on the Beatitudes given at community meetings in 1979. Here Paul DeCelles taught about purity of heart, emphasizing that if we are not holy (pure) we will not accomplish what God wants us to do as a people. He talked about how one person’s action can weaken our strength as a people of God and about the importance of guarding one’s eyes and ears.
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
[Tape begins after Paul has already begun speaking.]
PAUL: . . . talk about holy Scripture. And in particular, I’d like to talk about one of the Beatitudes. Once before, when I was talking about them, I tried to give something of an overview, and how—I also gave a recommendation for certain passages that everybody should be pairing up with each other when you are praying and studying these chapters five, six, and seven in St. Matthew’s gospel: that you could study ’em in a certain way and get more out of them, I think. I wanted to start today by—I’m going to talk about only one of the Beatitudes. I’ve picked—I’m only going to talk about that one today, I should say—and I’ve picked “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”
But before I do that, I’d like to just say, if I can, briefly—call to your attention the fact that God just does things a lot differently than we do them. And I was trying to think of some examples to illustrate the point. One of them that came to my mind was about what happened with the people in Israel, in a certain region where Ezekiel was—or was it Elijah? Elijah, I think. Who—when Elijah prayed that it wouldn’t rain, it stopped raining and didn’t rain for three years. And then when Elijah, for the reasons that he wanted to, began to pray that it would rain, then it rained. Now imagine yourself being a farmer in this country, and you have no idea what Elijah is up to, okay? As far as you know, it just hasn’t rained, and the whole area’s becoming part of the Sahara, or something like that, and you just can’t imagine what’s going on. For one thing, if I were there, I certainly—I know all of us would be praying to the Lord to give us the rain, and we would continually have been praying. But Elijah would’ve been over there holding out against us, also praying.
What I’m trying to say is that a lot of times the things that just don’t go at all the way that we think they ought to go—and we may make ardent prayers, you know, to achieve a certain kind of good result. We know it would be good for it to rain. But it doesn’t rain, because God has a different plan. And it really is in his plan that it’s not raining.
He does all kinds of strange things. He works a lot differently than we do. One example that came to my mind was how it was that, here, the Jews had a real [sic] good idea about going to capture a town one time—we’re all familiar with this story. And they had already had a great victory at Jericho. And then, of course, they went out to the—something like a suburb—it wasn’t really that far away—where there were just a few thousand people. They’d already knocked out this huge, you know, fortress—fortified city; [they’d] been very successful knocking down the walls, you know. All kinds of great things, with evidence that God just delivered the city into their hands. Well, and we all knew, everybody knew, that—I wasn’t there, actually, at that time [laughter]—but if you read Scripture long enough, you begin to feel like you were, though, so I’m getting there.
Anyway, they all knew that they could just sort of sweep over there and pick up this little goody on the side without any trouble. And they went out, and they fought the battle, and they failed. And you can imagine that everybody in the group felt very mystified by what had happened. Because, I mean, even if God weren’t on their side, they would’ve been able to knock off this little city. But God had demonstrated so thoroughly, time and time again, that he was on their side. And you know what had happened? Somebody—just one person, as a matter of fact . . . . . . that God couldn’t go out with them, and so they lost. All their strength went out—like, when Samson’s hair was cut off, Samson had no more strength, and neither did the Israelites when they went to attack Ai.
Okay, so again, what I’m trying to say is, you know, if you look at it, according to one sort of standards—set of standards, we ought to be able to do all kinds of things, you know. For example, just look over all the men, women, and children who are here, and realize who’s not here and everything else, who’s part [sic] of the community. Why, you know, with the kind of commitment we have to each other, there is practically nothing we couldn’t do. You can’t find a group of people like this anyplace—until you get to Ann Arbor. That’s the [laughter]—right? That’s the closest place. And then there are a few more places around. But it really is rare that you find people who have committed themselves to live their lives together, fully for the Lord, fully in his service, laying down their lives for each other, ready to go, you know?
Well, the Lord’s called us to battle. He wants us to go in to fight a war against Satan, stem the tide of evil, build our thing up, and everything else that he’s given us a commission to do. He wants us to be on mission. He wants us to do all these things. There’s no telling, you know—look at what we have; it’s tremendous. It really is tremendous. Just look at what’s happened in Belgium, you know, just with that outreach. It’s just tremendous. Just sending a few people there, and the Lord with those few people is able to reproduce a community, to build one from scratch, and take into account all the complications, and still work and make a great and holy body of people in Belgium.
Now, what I think might be a temptation is for us to feel that, well, here we are, we’ve got it together. At least we know how to get it together increasingly. But I guarantee you that if we are not holy, if we’re not pure, we can go fight any war we want to, and we will lose any one. There’s no way that we’re going to do any work for God unless we’re holy people. There are lots of ways in which we can be unholy, unrighteous. That’s why I wanna talk about purity of heart today: because that is our strength.
If we are holy and the Lord is with us, then the Lord will accomplish all the things that he has intended to do from the very beginning. But if we are unholy—and it may be even that if one person here were unholy—we would be unable to accomplish what God wants us to do as a people. I don’t mean that I have that from the Lord—but if we were Israelites going to attack Ai, that would exactly be the case. And here we are trying to fight battles also, to overcome the spiritually evil forces in this city. We wanna wager a war against that. But if we countenance sin in our lives, even individually, it may well be—I’m not trying to load anybody up with guilt. I, at least, would stand there right along with everybody else, bearing responsibility for failures.
But what I’m trying to say is that we do need to strive, in fact, to be holy persons individually, and being holy and pure individually has a body effect. Now, the children who are here could say, “Well, this is all [a] grown-up affair anyway; it doesn’t make any difference what I do at school.” But I tell you that if you cheat at school, you’re causing problems for everybody here. You say, “Well, this little thing—nobody notices, you know—my girlfriend and I are doing this. What difference does that make?” I tell you that what difference it makes is that it may be crippling the whole body. It’s extremely important that every one of us be holy, in mind and in spirit and body. So I would urge everybody to take seriously what I’m talking about. Because we all, whether we believe it or not, have an effect on what’s going on.
Now, when you look at this in Matthew 5 . . . [words missing on tape] . . . Beatitude. And the passage that I had called to your attention before it, connected with it, is Matthew 5, beginning with verse 8. It says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Now, what I’d like to ask you to do again, is to look at verse 27, because that’s where it picks up with a little commentary on this Beatitude.
You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
That is really powerful. First thing to point out about it is, you notice the blessed are the pure in heart. It doesn’t only say, “Blessed are the pure, blessed are those who are un—who are clean,” as opposed to unclean. It says, “pure in heart.” It’s a little bit like the very first one, which says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” It doesn’t say simply, “poor,” but it says, “poor in spirit.” And you see already, even as the Beatitude is written down here before us, that it implies a kind of interiorization. It’s supposed to have something to do with your heart. It has to do with what’s going on inside you. It’s not just a question of whether you are ritually pure and clean, so that you can go into the temple to offer sacrifice. I’ll come back to some of those things in a little bit, though.
So the first point I wanna make is that it is interior. It’s not a lot of legalism. It’s not a lot of rules and obligations, which, you know—and acts external to yourself, that are important. But it’s—what’s important is what’s going on inside you. What is really going on? And in this case, right off the bat in verse 27, the Lord says, “If you wanna be pure. . . .”, you know. “Well,” some people say, “well, you can’t be committing adultery or fornicating or involved with other kinds of pornography and things of that sort.” What the Lord says is, “No, listen. If it’s even in your heart, if you already have lust in your eye, you’ve already committed adultery.” The Lord, in fact, you can see, strengthens the Beatitudes and strengthens the teaching of the Old Testament. He doesn’t, in fact, weaken it at all. He doesn’t say, “That’s okay. I understand what really counts is the way you feel about each other. Go ahead and commit adultery.” He doesn’t do that at all. What he says is—I mean, he tightens it up! He says, “It’s in your heart that I’m really concerned about this.” I mean, as well as—of course, it goes without saying, “I don’t want you to be committing adultery,” but it goes beyond that.
I had a case—situation one time, a long time ago, when a very good friend of mine and I were talking outside a factory where I was working. And while we were talking, the—he was a little bit older than I was, and I admired him tremendously, and he really was a good man. There were many things about him which were quite admirable. And as I watched him, we were—as we were carrying on this conversation—there were just the two of us, and I—standing next to this very large factory that stretched on and on and on for about a whole city block. Okay, so it was like a wall. And, like, when you stood there and you looked, all you’d see is a sidewalk and a bare wall, all the way down to the end of—about a block away. Well, while we were standing there, a pretty girl walked by. And this guy carried on a conversation with me without dropping a comma; he didn’t lose track of anything that was being said. He said everything he wanted to say. But all the time that we were walk—talking, he just—he watched her, and he—you could see written all over him the lust of the eye. He walk—he watched her all the way down to the end. I mean, it took her, you know, maybe five minutes to get down there, and he didn’t miss one single step that she took.
Now that really shocked me. It was the first time that I’d really—I mean, I think God let that happen so that I would be very careful to guard my eyes. In fact, I’ve really made some effort to do that ever since then. And I think it’s been very helpful.
There are all kinds of pleasing things for us to look at. There is a problem, though. You cannot look at everything; not everything belongs to you. In fact, you can commit adultery, you can sin in your heart, by looking at the wrong things, by just sort of dwelling on them, focusing on them and fantasizing about them, and letting them kind of seep into your whole being that way.
I think that we can do that very easily today, let’s see, by watching television and movies. What can happen now—let’s see. A lot of times—it used to be the case, anyway, that if you watched something that you weren’t supposed to be watching, you’d get your face slapped, or somebody would do something to you. You know, you’d be in some kind of trouble. It just—you know, it was at least rude, you know, very much out of place. But nowadays, you know, who can do anything to you while you’re sitting in your family room watching TV? And you see something really filthy and rotten and immoral going on and lascivious, and you sit there and you watch the thing—okay, are you with me? You’re just sitting there ogling this situation or this person who may be undecent—indecently dressed or undressed in front of you on TV.
I believe that you have to understand that that is—can be sin, and that that’s the sort of thing that our Lord wanted us to be very careful about. He wanted us to, in fact, interiorize this commandment that we should be pure. So I would urge everybody to be very careful of what they watch. Also, I’d like to urge everybody, well, let me. . . . TV was one, movies is [sic] another, and of course, all kinds of . . . books or magazines and pamphlets are around, which a person can take and just sort of study at great length and [in the] privacy of their room, looking over that, poring over that. And that is really wrong. That’s immoral. We can’t do that. If we do that, we’re going to ruin our relationship among our brothers and sisters. It’s going to take away the strength, which the Lord wants us to have as a people of God.
Okay. Let me go on to some of the other ones here. I won’t spend as much time on the rest of it—the rest of the passages. It says, “But I. . . .”
If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.
Now, that’s a . . . Hell is the place where God ain’t, okay? Essentially, that’s the best definition of it. Because any place where God can’t be is surely no place I want to be.
Now, this passage can mean a couple of things at least, probably a lot more. One thing it can mean, in fact, is that if one of the members of the body does this, you should cast—you should throw him out, cast him out, okay? If somebody is in an immoral situation, as it says in 1 Corinthians 5, if somebody who says that he’s a brother or a sister is behaving like this, you’ve got to get them out, okay? Now that’s something which I think is included in this passage.
But it also means that, in fact, we—I mean, this is a pi- —a more pious interpretation of that passage. It does mean that if, in fact, it requires us to go to considerable length to avoid committing sins of this sort, we should do it, or we will be very, very sorry. So I just urge everybody to do it, so that we won’t, in fact, be sorry—any of us.
It is [sic—“was” in RSV] also said, whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce. But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, makes her [an] adulteress; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
Now, this—at least, it has an obvious meaning. I want also to say something about something that’s very—maybe not quite as obvious. Adultery, and—or rather, divorce and remarriage, if it is—infidelity is what I wanna talk about. Infidelity is something which is associated with rebelliousness and paganism in Scripture. It is—when there’s a breakdown in the marriage, it’s similar to people of God rebuking God and leaving him. It’s God’s intention through—I won’t go into this in much detail; I just wanna point out that that connection’s there. And that one of the things that we should be concerned about in connection with that passage is whether or not we’re gonna be pagans, or whether we’re gonna follow God. It doesn’t have only to do with whether or not you can marry a divorced woman, and things like that, without committing adultery. I just wanted to point that out because I’m—I’ll come back to it in a minute.
Again you have heard that it was said [inaudible] to the men of old, “You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.” But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is the footstool of—it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black, no matter how hard you try. Let what you say be simply “yes” or “no”; anything more than that—more than this comes from evil.
Or “from the evil one.”
Just—let me just say something about the passage so you can understand something that I think that it means. When you swear by something, to a certain degree what you’re doing is, you’re putting that—holding that up as collateral. Does everybody know what collateral is? It says that “If I don’t do this, the thing that I have sworn by becomes yours.” Okay? So that’s what—something like what “swearing by” means. So, what the Lord is saying is, “Don’t do that, because you don’t own those things. You can’t swear by God! Did somebody tell you that you could own God? You can’t swear by the Temple, or any of those things. They don’t belong to you! You can’t hold those up as collateral. You can’t hold—use those in a bargaining position to win somebody’s confidence, either.” And so the Lord says we can’t do that. Because, in fact, we don’t control God. He is our Lord and our Savior, our Master.
Okay. Now let me go on to something else, along the same lines.
Now, in the Old Testament—I’ll do this very quickly, but I will give you some references, and you can look them up and pray about them and continue to work on this. Yet—by now, you may have caught on that I really do mean that we should study this. Okay? That is to say, we should come ready and prepared to learn something about how—you know, how the Scripture is working together, and spend a lot of time praying about it. I also believe that it’s gonna be very helpful for everybody in their prayer life, as we go through these things. It will really change the way we pray.
In the Old Testament, purity was something that made it possible for people to participate in worship or in cultic practices—in the cult, in the worship, let’s say. But it also—like—do you know what I mean? It is to say, if you were ritually unclean or impure, you would not be permitted to go—like, the chief priest would not be able to go into the Holy of Holies and offer the sacrifice. Priests in general were not able to offer sacrifice if, in fact, they had violated some of the ritual purity laws. There are lots of other kinds of things that were also prohibited.
The second thing, though, is that you also—the Israelites, if they were unclean, were unable to participate in all kinds of aspects of ordinary daily community life. Now, this was usually something that they would have to impose on themselves, because they were the ones who knew what had happened. But if they were in that situation, they would have to make some sort of sacrifice, or they would have to go through some kind of ritual purification, in order to be in position to even take part in the daily contact within the holy community.
We need to do that, too. We need to really be making every effort to purify ourselves in the right kind of way. I’ll come to that in a minute. And also that we—in fact, we will be able to have the right kind of connections with each other in the community as we live our lives out.
I just want to call your attention to Leviticus, chapters 11 through 16. You can look at that, and you’ll get a real good feeling for the kinds of things that the Jews were—in fact, that’s most of them right there. There are some others mentioned, in some other books, but that’s a lot of ’em. And you’d say, “Boy, I’m glad I wasn’t an Israelite then.” Because, you know, every detail of their life, it seemed, was being dealt with according to some sort of law.
[Inaudible.]. . . and now, there were three things, I’d say, that you can get out of this when you study these things. One is that bodily cleanliness was one issue. There were certain things—like, they couldn’t touch lepers, they couldn’t touch excrement, they couldn’t touch dead bodies. . . . Which, by the way, has a lot to do with why the priests, for example, passed by the Sam—the fellow who had fallen by the side of the road where he got beaten up by robbers, in the Good Samaritan story. But at any rate, there’s bodily cleanliness.
Another one has to do with a protection against paganism. And that’s what I think our Lord was talking about when he mentioned, among other things—when he mentioned that about divorce and remarriage. That is to say, we also have to protect ourselves against paganism, against falling away from God, against becoming rebellious against God. We want to be faithful to the Lord.
And the third point that you see when you read these passages is that everything—virtually everything in their lives—was covered by some sort of regulation. In fact, there was a way to make everything that they did sacred, holy, set apart for the purpose of the Lord.
Are you still there? Is everybody okay? Go on for a little bit more, huh? I’ll have to talk some more another time about the rest of this.
Let me just find my place here and see where we can skip . . . to. Okay, well, let me say this: that you could—another way to summarize all these things is that we should not eat, touch, or regenerate indiscriminately. In fact, the laws that these—that the Israelites had, that you can see written down there, and the way they lived their lives, was [sic] such that it had two really outstandingly good effects. One was that it did preserve the faith against paganism. Now, you understand, the Israelites lived in a pagan situation, very much like Christians today live in a very pagan situation. But because there were all kinds of things that they had to do by virtue—in order to be a part of that believing community, they were able to be protected against the inroads of paganism in their lives.
Let me just give you one small example. If, for example, they had conquered a nation, they would not be able—the—they would not be able to marry the people who—whom they conquered. They also would not accept any of the local customs. They also frequently would not use any of the goods that they had gotten. They wouldn’t even—they would—you know, like, they would take over the city, but they wouldn’t use the gold. They would put it aside. Sometimes they’d put it aside for a period of time, like two or three years. But the point is that they did not simply get into their pagan situation and say, “Well, this is good gold. You know, gold’s good. Nobody can care about that. I’ll take that.” But in fact, they had some kind of a preservative built in, where their hearts did not lust after what the pagans had. And we need that also.
We need not to see—we need to see that the—even the good things that pagans have and use, for example, like a great deal of music or a great deal of dancing, are things which, in fact, we need to be fairly careful about. We have to have some kind of an approach to them, which is going to give us some caution. We should not, in fact, pick up every modern dance as it comes along.
That is to say, it might be wrong for us. It might cause us a lot of trouble. We also should not pick up every dirty word we hear; it might be wrong for us. Every new way of talking could be wrong for us. Where did it come from? And why is it being used? Why are people talking like that? It may be that we shouldn’t read certain kinds of books. I mean, at least—we oughta at least consider whether that’s gonna be helpful for us, and whether or not it’s gonna make us holy people, or keep us holy people.
Well, those are the main things I wanted to say. And I think I mostly just got to the Old Testament. I could give you some psalms. Why don’t you write these down? Psalm—this has to do with moral conduct and cleanliness: Psalm 73, verse 1. Psalm 24, verse 4. Eighteen, verses 21 to 25—that’s a beaut. Okay, I’ll do them again: 73:1; 24:4; 18, from 21 to 25. And in fact, if you—when you look at these, you’ll see that a few verses before and a few after also frequently apply. I just got the center of it.
Now, let me just conclude by telling you—reminding you what our Lord has said. He said that— in Matth—Mark 7, verses 14 to 23, Jesus said,
Nothing which enters from outside into a man can render him impure. For it is from within (inside, from the heart of man) that proceeds—that you get evil designs proceeding.
It is, in fact, the interior thing. It’s the condition of your heart and your intentions which the Lord wants to be kept holy and pure for his purposes. The way we need to be pure—to keep pure is to rely on the living presence of God. The Spirit of God, abiding within us, will make us holy. If we are unholy, the Spirit of God will not abide in our hearts in the same kind of way. Being in the Spirit is the key to being holy. Praying in the Spirit, I believe, helps tremendously in continuing to be holy. And when you are doing anything—whether you’re cooking in the kitchen, watching TV, going to a movie, being entertained one way or the other, or working at whatever your job may be, or relating to brothers and sisters, or, in fact, even in your bedrooms, for the married folks—everybody should understand that God is with you! He is with you because you’re holy. If you’re not holy, he won’t be there the same way, not in the same kind of way. But we really do want to invite the Lord into the privacy of all of our lives. Bring him in, so that, in fact, we can remain holy, and always call upon his name to make us holy.
There is no way that we will lose this. Nobody can take it away from us, because our holiness has been won by the blood of Jesus. When it was poured out for us on the cross, he became the victim that satisfied all the requirements—however you wanna put it. He’s vindicated us, and we can be holy, because he’s poured out his Spirit upon us. So let us not get weighed down by all these considerations. But, in fact, let’s not be fools either, and realize that all kinds of pagan things are around us that are, in fact, making big inroads on us, if we’re not careful.
I’d like to summarize the prophecy which Adrian gave as a very first prophecy today, in which he urged us to be careful about sexual temptations because the Lord wants us to be holy. He wants us to have a new righteousness. He wants the men to guard their eyes, avoid the lust of the eyes, avoid the lust of the minds and the lusts of the heart. And [inaudible] women should adorn—you should adorn yourselves in the way of the Lord. And the children should be careful about the ways of the world, because they are death: to rely on your parents and guard your ears. I’m adding to this. Guard your ears, guard your dance, guard your TV, guard your reading, guard your eyes. Rather, love one another; increase our affection and care for one another; and renounce the worldly ways, the—of the world in which we live, South Bend and Michiana.
Glory to God.
Copyright © 2022 People of Praise, Inc.