![]() The story is told of a newly-promoted officer being given command of a military base. And the first thing he’s looking for is people who bring our real self before him, not a mask. Outward is what’s valued in this world: Instagram influencers, outward signs of success and power. “People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”” – 1 Samuel 16:7 Very similar to Jeremiah, 1 Samuel 16:7 declares: Here’s the first: Purity of heart means I bring my real self to God, not a mask. So what does it mean to be pure in heart? At least two things. Who can fully understand it, Jeremiah wonders aloud? Our personal command and control centers all appear to have some kind of bug. What your car’s internal computers are to driving, your heart is to living. The Bible uses heart as shorthand for your inner command and control center. The impurity of the human heart is the easiest doctrine of the Christian faith to prove. Created in God’s image with astounding potential for good, we are all also…a mess of motives and attitudes and actions. Here is his letter in its entirety: “Dear Sir: Regarding your article ‘What’s Wrong with the World?’ I am. Chesterton sent a short letter to the editor. What we may manage to hide from others is out in the open before God.Ī hundred years ago, a series of newspaper articles titled “What’s Wrong with the World?” caught the attention of British writer G. Our hearts are not pure, he points out, and God sees that. “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things,Īccording to what their actions deserve.” The prophet Jeremiah pulls back the facades and bluntly declares: No one is consistently good and loving, patient and kind, humble and hopeful, steering clear of boasting, self-seeking, envy and arrogance. In our more honest moments, every one of us recognizes that our hearts are impure, a mixture of good and evil. You hear this, and it immediately raises questions like what does it mean to be pure in heart? How do the pure in heart see God? And how can we become pure in heart? Those are the crucial questions we dive into this week. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” – Matthew 5:8 Here it is, from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he promises… This promise is the most challenging yet, and yet it is arguably also the single most rewarding. The promise of Jesus we come to this week, as we continue our series on 8 keys to a blessed life, to a happier life, this promise is all about the full renovation that Jesus came to start in you and me and anyone who will welcome him. Then he handed our crew the blueprints, and following his plan, we turned a time-worn house into a whole new home, ready to give a whole new life to another family. So Rosalie called in her favorite architect, who drew up blueprints. The whole house needed a full, robust renovation not just paint and carpet, but a foundation-on-up re-do. ![]() The appliances were that lime green from maybe late 1960s or early 70s. Rosalie found a little Cape Cod where an elderly couple had lived and had never updated anything. One of our jobs, for example, was a little Cape Cod in a town that had 3-acre zoning, meaning you can only build one house on each 3-acre or larger plot. And what Rosalie loved to do more than anything was take an old, time-worn home and completely renovate it, tip to tail. That in turn gave Rosalie money to play with. And somehow, somewhere along the line, he got the opportunity to bid on doing the plumbing for-ready for this?-a missile silo! He won the contract, did a good job, and that kicked the door open for him for other lucrative federal contracts. Rosalie’s husband had his own plumbing company. ![]() Between college and grad school I worked for a high-end builder, and one of our repeat customers was Rosalie Feldman.
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