With All My Heart

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

We often speak of the heart as the center of our love. “I love you with all my heart”, is spoken to those that we cherish greatly. I recall the story of the mother that would pull each of her children aside and tell them “I love you the most. You are my favorite but don’t tell the others they will be upset.” She told each of her five children this and throughout their lives each child believed that they were her favorite and kept the secret faithfully. When the Mother passed away the children were making plans for her funeral service when the youngest told the others that she was her Mother’s favorite, each sibling then shared the many times that they had been told the exact same thing. What a shock! I am sure that in the Mother’s mind she did love every one of her children “with all her heart”. But deep down inside of this loving mother was the knowledge that she could not give all her heart to more than one child. Thus she had them all keep the secret.

We are like that with God. We love Him deeply and want to walk the path’s of this life hand in hand with our Heavenly Father. We want God to love us and abide with us. But there are others, those things that demand our time and become the object of our affection. We bring them into our lives and allow them to possess a part of our heart. When we come to Jesus we compartmentalize our lives placing each “love” into its own secret place. Life has a way of allowing us to accept what we know we shouldn’t and soon those secret places and loves seem normal, just a part of life. Like a man who has two wives, two families, two homes and orders his life so that each doesn’t know about the other. To the rest of us that seems burdensome and peculiar but he has lived with the secret for so long that it seems right. That is until the two families meet.

To have a pure heart, a single eye, requires to be honest about the secret places in our lives. We know that when our two loves meet only one can survive as the “one true love”. Perhaps the road to being pure in heart must start with an abundant dose of honesty. There is an old song that states, “Is your all on the altar of sacrifice laid. Your heart does the Spirit control…” The altar is a good place to start in our search for a pure heart but only if we are honest about the things we have kept in our secret place.