p. 1 | PURITY OF HEART by N. W. Vincent

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 28, 1877

PURITY OF HEART.

By N. W. Vincent

“Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.” Matt. 5:8. The standard of moral purity is the law of God. Its transgression is sin. Sin is everywhere represented in the Bible as vile and loathsome. As God’s law expresses his will and is a perfect embodiment of his pleasure, its transgression, or sin, is directly contrary to his pleasure, and must have his abhorrence. Not only is the violation of the letter of God’s law hateful rebellion against God, but a purpose or a wish thus to violate it is sin, and must be purged from the heart before it can be accounted pure in the sight of Heaven. God requires truth in the inward parts. These are His words who magnified his Father’s law and made it honorable: “Whosoever looketh upon a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Says John, “Whosoever hateth his brother, is a murderer.” How true that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. We have all sinned; by nature we are the children of wrath.

How can we be cleansed from sin, and thus flee from the wrath to come? God has loved the sinner. Although he could not make void that law which expresses his divine nature, although he can but forever abhor its transgression even to punishing it by death, he could, he did, permit his holy and well-beloved Son to die in the sinner’s stead. Christ died for our sins. They may be forgiven and blotted out. But what are the conditions of such a gracious, blessed gospel? Such faith in God’s word as will lead us heartily to accept of Christ as our divine Saviour; to repent of all our past transgressions of God’s holy law; and to yield it in the future our willing obedience. Three words express this: repentance, faith, obedience. In this way we are reconciled to God by the death of his Son; our consciences are purged from dead works, or sins, by the blood of Christ; we die to sin; we put off the old man, the carnal mind (not subject to the law of God), the body of death with its unholy members, and utterly loathe all that we know to be sin, or transgression of God’s law. We feel that our sins deserve death, but confide in the blessed truth that Christ died for us. The Father reveals to us the worthiness, the power, the preciousness of Christ; we are born of the Spirit; we know that we have passed from death unto life. We love God with all the heart, we delight in his law, we live unto righteousness. Thus our hearts are purified by faith, and we become new creatures in Christ Jesus.

Without this purity of heart, none of our race can ever see God. Rebels against Jehovah, those who knowingly persist in trampling upon any of his commandments, those who prefer a sinful world to a holy Heaven, those who lust after evil things rather than hunger and thirst after righteousness, all those who love the pleasures of sin, will be punished, with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power. 2 Thess. 1:9. But “blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.”

N. W. VINCENT.