[Note: This is a bilingual sermon. The pastor speaks in English and the content is then rendered in Chinese by a translator. Both languages are preserved as delivered. This is the second in a series on life quality, the first having been preached in Montreal.]
Has anyone ever heard a testimony that went like this: when I was a non-Christian I had a very happy life, full of joy every day, until I decided it was time to become miserable — so I became a Christian? Nobody has heard such a testimony. Yet when you meet certain Christians, it seems that this is in fact what happened. They may not have been particularly happy as non-Christians, but they are certainly not happy as Christians, and all their efforts to appear not too miserable are sometimes not very successful.
Why does a person want to come to Christ? Not because he wants to feel miserable. Even after a Christianity Today course, where the demands of the Christian life are made plain, some people still want to become Christians — which shows that there is something they are looking for that goes beyond mere comfort. Visiting Nepal last year, and watching the plane approach the Himalayas, the pastor noticed how everyone rushed to the same side of the aircraft to look, nearly tipping it over. Looking at the Himalayas from inside a pressurized plane is very pleasant and very safe. But some people are not satisfied with that — they actually come to Nepal to climb the mountains, in the cold and steep hardship, risking and sometimes losing their lives. Why?
Life quality for the mountaineer is not sitting in a reclining chair. For the mountaineer, life quality is to scale the height and survey the world from the top — through months and years of tough training, for that one glorious moment at the summit. Maybe these are the kind of people the Lord Jesus is looking for: those for whom life quality is not an armchair, but the readiness to conquer mountain peaks on the spiritual level. All the same, all life is about life quality, however you understand it.
Walking through a department store and looking at all the goods on display, one can ask: who buys all this? Clothes are a good example — for many people, buying clothes is a key expression of life quality, which is why they do it. Consider the television: in black and white, you get exactly the same news as in color. The color of the news announcer's dress does not improve the quality of the information. Yet black and white televisions have completely disappeared from the market. This is because color looks nicer, and that is a question of life quality — nothing else. Billions of dollars of research went into making color television possible, for no reason other than to improve the quality of what you see.
Medical research follows the same logic. Cancer is devastating because it destroys life quality through suffering and death, which is why enormous resources are poured into finding a cure. Walk into a pharmacy and look at the rows of painkillers — pain spoils life quality, which is why people buy them. Does this same logic not apply on the spiritual level? Or have we somehow adopted the notion that God is different, and that to be a good Christian is to be a miserable Christian, so that the more miserable you are, the more spiritual you are?
Consider the monk who wears coarse clothing, keeps strict silence, eats the crudest food, and never laughs. It might seem that he is looking for misery. But perhaps, like the mountaineer who cannot chew Kentucky Fried Chicken while climbing the Himalayas, he is simply setting aside normal comforts in the pursuit of a higher kind of joy. If the monk is truly seeking the joy that is in God, he knows what he is doing. If he thinks that being miserable in itself produces salvation, he has missed the point entirely.
The apostle Paul says in Philippians that God has given us all things richly to enjoy. Paul knew suffering and hardship as well as any soldier of Christ — yet the life quality of joy was visible in him. The fruit of the Spirit confirms this: love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, and the rest — each of these is a life quality matter. If the Spirit fills our lives, we will be living in this kind of life quality. And if we are miserable, this may itself be evidence that we are not as filled with the Spirit as we think.
The word "blessed" in the Beatitudes actually means happy. Although the Chinese tradition speaks of eight blessings, there are in fact nine — the word "blessed" occurs nine times, exactly corresponding to the ninefold fruit of the Spirit. The Lord Jesus begins his entire public ministry with nine statements about happiness, each built around a particular spiritual condition. One of these, in Matthew 5:8, is the focus of today's message: Happy is the man who is pure in heart, for he shall see God. God will give his happiness to the person who is clean in heart, and that happiness consists in seeing God himself.
# Life Quality (2): Purity of Heart (Part B) — The Orange Juice Test, Grace Under Pressure, and Searching the Heart Before God
[Note: This is a bilingual sermon. The pastor speaks in English and the content is then rendered in Chinese by a translator. Both languages are preserved as delivered. This is Part B of the second sermon in a series on life quality, continuing directly from Part A.]
Are you happy? If not, then the Lord's ministry has not yet fully reached you. What is the secret of happiness in Matthew 5:8? The word translated "pure" literally means clean. If there is any uncleanness in your heart, you will not have joy — and this is not a matter of theory but of simple practice. If you carry bitterness in your heart, or jealousy towards someone, can you still be happy? You cannot. That sin, that uncleanness, is polluting your whole inner being. Take greed: as long as greed is in your heart, you are never satisfied with what you have, and the moment you see someone else with a nicer car than yours, envy rises and joy disappears. You can test this in your own life as surely as anything can be tested in a laboratory.
We are called to be the light of the world, but we often cannot even light ourselves, never mind anyone else. Consider the simple example of the orange: when you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out. Now, some Christians are like an orange that gives a tolerable result when squeezed gently — what comes out still looks something like orange juice, still appears somewhat like a disciple of Christ. But when a sudden hard pressure comes — a car crash, a crisis, a sudden collision — what comes out may be something very different and much worse.
Suppose you arrive at work tomorrow morning and a colleague accidentally splashes coffee all over you. You jump up and grab them and react with the ferocity of a lion. The person looks at you and thinks: this one goes to the Disciples' Church. When the sudden pressure came, what was really inside came out. But if a person is genuinely pure in heart — with no impurity whatever — whether you squeeze hard or gently, what comes out is the same. When the Lord Jesus was reviled, he did not revile again. When the spear went into his side, blood and water came out — symbols of grace and truth. Whatever is really inside a person will come out under pressure.
John 1:14 tells us that the Lord Jesus was full of grace and truth — not merely that he had grace and truth, but that he was full of it. When you squeeze something that is full, whatever is inside will come out in full measure. On the cross, reviled, nailed, abandoned, his response was still: Father, forgive them. He was full of it. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians, when we are crushed, the fragrance that comes out should be the fragrance of the Lord Jesus — a fragrance of life to life. The smell that comes out when we are crushed should be the sweetness of the Lord, not a nasty reaction.
Watch yourself sometimes when you are sitting quietly — notice the tension in your hands, clenched without your realizing it. People go to all kinds of classes learning to relax because tension prevents joy and happiness. Why is there so much tension? Consider the act of sharing with a group: you feel very tense. Why? If you loved every person present with an intense and genuine love, you would not be concerned about their reaction to you. The tension comes from fear of man — fear that they will criticize you afterwards, fear of their eyes and their opinions. Fear of man produces anxiety, and anxiety produces tension. It is ultimately the lack of love that causes so much of our tension.
Every person has different spots in their life that need to be cleansed. Suppose a bottle is 99% full of clean water, but one percent is polluted — would you say that bottle is clean? The one percent poisons the whole. You wash a white bed sheet perfectly clean, hang it up, and then someone splashes one button-sized piece of mud on it. Would you still call it clean? No — that spot must be washed before it is clean. The Lord Jesus says: happy is the person who is pure in heart, and that heart must be pure — no spot in it.
That is why David prayed: Search me, O God, and try my heart — see if there is even the slightest wicked way in me. Why was David so concerned? Because even a little bit of uncleanness, if left there, will take away your joy. God wants us to enjoy everything richly, but he cannot share that joy with a heart that is divided or stained. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:28 that a person should examine himself — and he goes on to say that some are sick and some have even died because uncleanness was allowed to remain, poisoning the whole system physically and spiritually.
This evening when you go home, let the Lord search your heart, and you search with him: is there anything — some hatred, some bitterness, something you have perhaps even forgotten — that is still there? The Lord will search it out. If there are old wounds you have been carrying, ask the Lord to heal them. And if you do this honestly before him tonight, you will experience the Lord's peace — and you will sleep very well.