Beatitude #6- The Pure in Heart, Part 2 (TMF:408)

Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Peace to Live By: Beatitude #6- The Pure in Heart, Part 2 (TMF:408) - Daniel Litton
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       So God didn’t just want the gift, he wanted it to come from the ‘heart’ of people. And I think the same can be said for other things in the Christian life, whether it be service in helping others or spending time with God. God doesn’t want us to be compulsively, grudgingly helping others because we think it’s the right thing to do. For starters, it probably wont even help the person your trying to help that much. God wants us to act from the heart. We shouldn’t spend a certain amount of time with God everyday because we feel we ‘have to,’ but rather we should do it because we love him and want to. But someone might say, “Didn’t Jesus say to perfect as God is perfect?” Sure he did. But the idea here is that our hearts be right and we do the best we can, not that we legalistically follow a load of rules in order to try to be pleasing to God or to gain God’s acceptance. We have already been perfectly accepted by God by trusting in Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for us. We should not be like the Pharisees, of which Jesus spoke, “For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others” (Matthew 23:3-5, ESV).