Doves On Distant Oaks

Being Single-minded

It's not often I turn to the secular world for insight, but every now and then I find justification for God's will in the writing of mankind. In terms of purity of heart, something that's always on my mind, one of the finest discussions was written by Søren Kierkegaard in Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession. What he suggested was that the heart cannot be divided—that a pure heart was one that set its will on only one thing. According to him, that which we should set our will on was goodness.

While I disagree at some level with Kierkegaard's conclusion, it essentially describes what a pure heart means. Which is, to set one's eyes on only one thing. In my opinion, that's God. It's not simple goodness, because goodness is an outcome, but God is the source of goodness. So, it makes sense to set our will entirely on God. We cannot be divided in our own members. Every part of us must be set on God.

To have a pure heart means to have our heart, mind, and body unified around the principle that God gives our lives meaning and purpose. If we are divided in this guiding principle, then we are unable to be at peace within ourself. As a result, there is always inner strife, dissatisfaction, and confusion. We cannot hope to have a fulfilling relationship with God if we are pulled in different directions.

It's that relationship with God that we desire. And so, we strive to have purity of heart so that our eyes are always on God. Is it possible to do so? Absolutely, but only under one condition, that being our eyes are set first on Christ. It is Christ, our kinsman redeemer (a Judaic convention), that reconciles us to God through His substitution for our sins.

One of Kierkegaard's statements that I appreciate is: “What shall it profit the sick man to imagine himself, as all men do, to be well, if the physician says he is sick!” The physician, in our case, is Jesus Christ. That is why we need Christ—first to show us we are sick (in sin), and then to redeem us from that sickness.

When Christ spoke, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" to his disciples that had gathered on a mountainside, he was not talking about purity in the sense of a clean spirit. Because we all have sinned and will continue to do so, albeit prayerfully less and less. He was talking about the purity of unity within our own hearts—the desire to always be one-dimensional.

That has a negative connotation in today's world. The world asks us to be well-rounded and accepting of every philosophy. To be one-dimensional means to be inflexible … closed-minded … intolerant. However, being one-dimensional is exactly what God asks us to be; it's to be constantly in a prayerful relationship with Him and only Him, all the time. Christ has given us the chance to do that. It's up to us to decide if we want to.

We must see God in everything that happens around us and to us. We must have a pure heart—a unified, single-minded purpose to worship God—so much so that we will, indeed, be blessed.

Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart, having been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever,

– 1 Peter 1:22-23

Keywords: Purity

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