A pure heart is the first order of business

Book 2, Chapter 1

-Part 8 Continued-

As a pure heart is the soul’s first order of business, it must be said that, while its pursuit may involve a number of reliable means, the pure heart is made so by the Holy Spirit.

Scripture says “purify your hearts,” or “keep your way pure,” with the understanding that we are to offer our hearts unto God so that He may cleanse us in the way that only He can perfectly accomplish. (See James 4:8 and Psalm 119:9.) God advances to His people a holiness that is His alone. There is no holiness apart from Him. Nothing created can stand alone in its own innate purity. There is no purity unless God has put it in place. If anything or anyone is indeed holy, it is so because God has made it so and maintains it as such.

Through God’s glory and goodness we have been made partakers of His divine nature (see Second Peter 1:4). The origin and application of the holiness we possess is from God. I can do certain things to open my mouth, but it is God’s work alone to fill it. (See Psalm 81:10.)

For believers to be able to say that God has purified their hearts, they must have entrusted to God the possession and care of their inner life. He finds the wrecked condition of the inner man and restores it in such a way that it can bear upon its reworked strands the weight of His glory, the substance of His holiness and the fullness of His life.

A close, loving, enriching relationship with God is the means by which one’s heart is purified. This route is supported by “obedience to the truth” (First Peter 1:22), “keeping the word of God” (Psalm 119:9), seeking God in prayer for cleansing and renewal of spirit (Psalm 51:1-10), and “treasuring our hope in Christ” (First John 3:3).

In the Gospels, the disciples of Jesus go through a gradual change in their relationship with Christ. John the Baptist is heard pointing to Jesus as the Messiah. Having heard, the disciples then seek out Jesus, after which they become followers. As they follow, their belief deepens. As believing followers, they continue to learn from Him, and they walk further as obedient servants of His. And then, as believing, obedient followers, they become disciples who love Jesus.

Even at this point, their love for Jesus is to become something still more enriching – it will yield union with God. His disciples, from this brief overview, are loving, obedient followers united in the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. At the close of His priestly prayer, Jesus prays to the Father, “I have made your name known to [My disciples], and will continue to make it known so that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and so that I may be in them” (John 17:26).

Jesus is setting up an inner-life economy by which obedience is honored as a high place indeed, but obedience out of love for God is higher still, and loving union with him is the utmost peak for the believer.

I included the above description of a disciple’s progressive walk with God not as a prescription – although it is pretty good medicine – but to point out the movement, the development, the blossoming that naturally occurs when a disciple encounters and abides with God. This is the widening and deepening of faith that God works in us through His Spirit. One’s soul may always anticipate vast improvement as love for God develops.

An Eleventh-Century monk articulated the emergent soul in this way:  “To have pure faith in [Christ], and carefully meditating on that same faith, always to seek, and understanding what we seek, to find, and ardently to love what we find, to imitate as much as we can what we love, and in imitating Christ, to cling to Him steadfastly, and clinging to Him, to be made one with Him for all eternity.” (Guigo II, Twelve Meditations, Meditation 10)

In whatever way we put it to words, we know the purified heart will deepen into union as we come to love our God.

As Father Caussade puts it:

“Let us love, dear souls . . . Love gives us holiness with all its accompaniments, with both hands, so that it may flow from both sides into hearts open to these divine effusions.” ~Caussade (Page 54.)

Not just any type of love will give us holiness or open us to a divine inflow of God’s goodness and presence. This is a love for God from God. It is the love with which the Father loves the Son and the Son the Father. We are beckoned to share in this love of this divine quality, so we must be done with the idea that mere good feelings about God will pass. Only the transformed can access and live in this love. When they do, it is always at their fingertips, and they at the Lord’s.

“By Your love, I have access to Your house” (Psalm 5:7).