Jesus once said blessed are the pure in heart. We all know that pure water is one of the essential ingredients to healthy life. But what about a pure heart?  What exactly did Jesus mean?

At different times in our lives we all hunger for some sort of positive, spiritual experience, not ruled, not formalised religion, not ritual - but to taste for ourselves that God is good. To hear Him, to see Him, to gaze on Jesus with the eyes of our soul, to feast on Him.

The good news is that is exactly what God intended. That's why Jesus said:

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. (Matthew 5:8)

What a promise. But there's a pre-condition to that experience, to be pure in heart. What does that mean?

I recently had the opportunity to travel in India, and I was driving through one of the poorest, poorest villages in India. I have a photograph, it's sitting on my computer, of a bunch of bullocks and they were bathing in a stream. Now, this stream was pretty narrow — about 5 meters wide. And it was running through this village. And at the same time as the bullocks bathed in the stream, there were people washing their clothes in this stream. There were people swimming in the stream. And there were people drawing drinking water from that same stream. Well, it was a pretty amazing picture for me.

And, okay, people who live in those conditions to some extent build up a degree of immunity to the bugs that are floating around in the stream. But I recently looked up the life expectancy of a man and a woman in India. A man's life expectancy on average is 58 ½ years. And a woman's life expectancy in India on average is 59 ½ years. That is 20 years less than the average in developed western countries. That's a 33% lower life expectancy. And interestingly one of the people that was traveling with me said, "Have you seen any old people around?"

And the answer is: you almost never see old people in the rural areas. And those that look old turn out to be about 5 years or 6 years older than I am. I'm forty-five. And there was one pastor at a church. I could have sworn he was 70 years old. He was four years older than I was.

Now, there are probably a lot of contributing factors to this high mortality rate. But the purity of the drinking water would have to rate right up there. The bottom line is this: physically purity promotes life. Purity is good for us. Well, what about a pure heart?

When Jesus said, "Blessed are the pure in heart", He used the word cardia from which we get cardiac. And the heart is the center of our physical circulation system. It's the place where our blood gets pumped around. And all the blood flows out from there and all the blood flows back to there to be pumped around again.

And if that blood is contaminated, then we end up with sickness and death. And if the heart is contaminated it's going to stop pumping and we die. Just as physically the heart is the center of our life, in an emotional sense here Jesus is saying, "Look, the heart is the center of who we are. It's the center of our personalities, the center of our soul and of our spirit."

And if it's true of the water that we drink and if it's true of the life blood that pumps through our veins, Jesus is saying, "It is also true of our emotions, our motives, our personality, our thoughts, our hopes and our dreams." In fact, it's blindingly, glimpsingly obvious isn't it?

In our heart we dream dreams. In our heart we hatch ideas. In our heart we experience pain and we experience joy. Everything we do begins in our heart. It's the birthplace of action. And if our heart is diseased, our actions will be diseased.

Ten years ago I had open heart surgery. On the 15th of October 1995, on a sunny day under a gum tree outside a church in Wollongong in New South Wales, I accepted Jesus Christ into my heart. And over the last 10 years He has been scraping out the blocked arteries. He's been renewing the muscle in my heart. And day-by-day, little by little He has purified my heart.

Sometimes when our heart isn't working well we don't notice. We're short of breath. We're not feeling well. We're tired. There are symptoms. But we need a doctor to diagnose that there is a problem with our heart. If it's true physically, it's also true spiritually and emotionally.

We live in a society that says, "Anything goes." You can think anything you like. You can do anything you like. You can consume anything you like as long as you don't hurt anyone else. They're the basic rules.

The reason that paedophilia is wrong in our society (and rightly so) is that it hurts innocent people. And that's exactly how it should be. But so long as something doesn't hurt innocent people in an overt way, what you do in your bedroom, what you do in your house and what you shoot up with what you smoke and what you think, what you believe, that is entirely up to you according to the social morays of our time.

But if you have look at our society, it's not so much a society or a community anymore. It's seems to be more a bunch of people who happen to share the same space but with each one of us in it for number one — what I can get out of this.

I saw an advertisement recently. It said, "Spoil yourself; you deserve it." Well, there's a maxim for our society today, isn't there? Spoil yourself because you deserve it. But no matter how glossy a face our society will put on bad behavior, have you noticed it's not working?

Divorces are up. Alienation is up. Mental illness is up. Loneliness is up. People are hurting in our society because we believe that having a diseased heart doesn't matter. We believe that having diseased emotions, looking at wrong things, consuming things that are clearly bad for us, we believe that that's okay.

And yet clearly, if we went to the doctor the doctor would say, "Are you mad? Why are you drinking this stuff? Why are you eating — why are you consuming this rubbish?" Maybe you had heart disease. Maybe if your life just isn't working, if everything is going awry, if somehow you hear someone talking about God's plan (which is the best for each one of us) that's not happening in our lives. Maybe you have a heart disease.

Maybe the reason that we aren't living out the best of the best, maybe the reason is because we can't see God. We can't feast on Him. We can't know Him. I want to know God but I can't see him. Maybe the reason is that our hearts aren't pure.

Now, when I look at Jesus and when I listen to Him speaking, when I see what He did amongst the poor and the lepers and the sinners and the tax collectors, I look at this Jesus and I know that He is not talking about perfection here. He is not talking about being perfect before we can come into God's presence. What He is talking about is submitting our hearts, our emotions, our souls, our hopes, our dreams. He's talking about submitting those to Him and letting Him day-by-day, little by little purify our hearts.

Do you have heart disease? Are you doing things; are you believing things that are ruining your life? If you're a man, let me ask you a question. Are you addicted to pornography? Sixty percent of men in our society are. How's your marriage? My hunch is that an addiction to pornography (if that's what's happening in your life) is little by little undermining the relationship that you have with your wife. Doesn't matter what it is. You take impure things in, you consume them. You are what you eat.

And so many people have heart disease in our society. Listen. God's best for us is that we should be able to see Him, to touch Him, to hear Him, to communicate with Him.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

And the only way that we can have our hearts purified is to go to Him and ask Him.