Sermon quotes on
purity of heart
Augustine of Hippo
The so-called innocence of children is more a matter of weakness of limb, than purity of heart.
Augustine of Hippo
God bestows more consideration on the purity of the intention with which our actions are performed than on the actions themselves.
James A. Baldwin
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
Henry Drummond
Become pure in heart. The pure in heart shall see God. Here, then, is one opening for soul-culture–the avenue through purity of heart to the spiritual seeing of God.
The Essential Works of Henry Drummond: Natural Law in the Spiritual World
John Hagee
A pure heart won’t get us out of conflict and controversy. It may well be the very thing that gets us into it.
Søren Kierkegaard
Purity of heart is to will one thing.
Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession
Thomas a Kempis
He who loves with purity considers not the gift of the lover, but the love of the giver.
Thomas a Kempis
Purity and simplicity are the two wings with which man soars above the earth and all temporary nature.
Mother Teresa
To be pure, to remain pure, can only come at a price, the price of knowing God and loving him enough to do his will. He will always give us the strength we need to keep purity as something as beautiful for him.
John Henry Newman
Purity prepares the soul for love, and love confirms the soul in purity.
Quoted in Dawn Eden, Remembering God’s Mercy: Redeem the Past and Free Yourself from Painful Memories.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
the only way to have a pure heart is to realize you have an impure heart.
Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960), 92.
Martin Luther
Christ … wants to have the heart pure, though outwardly the person may be a drudge in the kitchen, black, sooty, and grimy, doing all sorts of dirty work. Though a common labourer, a shoemaker or a blacksmith may be dirty and sooty or may smell because he is covered with dirt and pitch, … and though he stinks outwardly, inwardly he is pure incense before God’ because he ponders the word of God in his heart and obeys it.
The Sermon on the Mount, trans. Jaroslav Pelikan: in vol. 21 of Luther’s works, Concordia, 1956.
R.V.G. Tasker
[The pure in heart are] the single-minded, who are free from the tyranny of a divided self.
The Gospel according to St Matthew, (Tyndale New Testament Commentary; InterVarsity Press, 1961.
John R.W. Stott
Nevertheless, it is plain from the rest of Jesus’ teaching that the kingdom of God is a present reality which we can ‘receive’, ‘inherit’ or ‘enter’ now. Similarly, we can obtain mercy and comfort now, can become God’s children now, and in this life can have our hunger satisfied and our thirst quenched. Jesus promised all these blessings to his followers in the here and now. The promise that we ‘shall see God’ may sound like a reference to the final ‘beatific vision’, and no doubt includes it. But we already begin to see God in this life both in the person of his Christ and with spiritual vision. We even begin to ‘inherit the earth’ in this life since if we are Christ’s all things are already ours, ‘whether … the world or life or death or the present or the future’.
Taken from The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7: Christian Counter-Culture) by John R.W. Stott Copyright (c) 1985 by John R.W. Stott. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
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