Truly God is good to Israel, to those whose hearts are pure.
—Psalm 73:1
Have
you ever noticed that we care deeply about the purity of the things we value?
When a man asks a woman to marry him, he gives her a genuine diamond, not one
with cubic zirconium mixed in. If you purchase a drink of water on a hot summer
day, you expect it to be pure, not tainted with bacteria or harmful chemicals.
When you are getting your prescription at the pharmacy, you trust that it’s
precisely the medication you need—undiluted, without foreign substances
sprinkled into the capsules. The more important the object is to us, the more
we care about its purity.
So
when it comes to purity in our hearts, minds, and actions, why is it that we
try to cut corners? We may think we can get away with something or that it’s
not that big of a deal. But at a core level, our casual attitude about our
purity says something about how little we value ourselves. God has clearly
placed great value on us as human beings made in his image (see Genesis 1:26-27).
If we truly see ourselves the way God sees us, with inherent dignity and worth,
then we will care deeply about our purity—in what we think, say, and do.
God’s
call for us to live pure lives is not an attempt to restrict us or prevent us
from having fun; rather, it is proof of how valuable we are in his eyes. As the psalmist says in Psalm 73:1, God’s
command for purity is actually tied to his goodness to us: “Truly God is good to Israel, to
those whose hearts are pure.”
Augustine, a bishop in the early
Christian church, had a great deal to say about purity and living according to
God’s commands. Today he is considered one of
the most influential church fathers in history, and his writings were significant
in the development of the early Christian church. But he wasn’t always known
for choosing the way of godliness.
In his book Confessions, which is considered by many scholars
to be among the first autobiographies ever written, he talked about the choices
he made in his youth and his eventual conversion to Christianity. He is famous
for saying, “Lord, give me chastity, but do not give
it yet.” In his younger days, Augustine had the misguided notion that many of
us hold ourselves: that God’s call to purity makes him a killjoy.
As Augustine lived by the ways of the
world, however, he started to realize that while immorality promises freedom,
it eventually ends up strangling us. “Lust indulged became habit,” he said, “and
habit unresisted became necessity.” After his conversion, he grew to regret his sins and the immoral choices
he’d made in his younger days. He also realized that there is a
special blessing offered to those who pursue purity, as Jesus spoke about in
the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). Augustine
said that purity “holds a glorious and distinguished place among the
virtues, because she, alone, enables man to see God; hence Truth itself.”
In light of God’s goodness, perhaps we could
change Augustine’s pre-conversion prayer to something like this instead: “Lord,
give me purity, and give it now.”
What
do you need to embrace to live a life of purity? What do you need to get rid of
to remove impurity from your life?
—Stephanie Rische
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