Have You Seen God?

Matthew chapter 5 and verse 8. Our Lord Jesus said, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Have you ever asked yourself the question, what is the highest joy possible in this life? Now, I suppose the answer that people would give to that question would somehow reveal their maturity or their immaturity. If you were to ask a little child what's the highest joy he could think of, I suppose it would be something like a new toy or the privilege of sitting up all night and watching television.

An adolescent might say, well, getting free from my parents, maybe having a car and be able to do what I please. A young adult would probably say, well, I'd like to achieve the goals that I have for my life, get my education and get busy doing something that the Lord wants me to do. I suppose some married couple would say, well, it would be a great joy to see our family grow up to glorify God.

And all these things are good. There's just nothing wrong with the joys of childhood or adolescence or young manhood and womanhood or family. But I really think when you get right down to it, the greatest joy possible in this life is to see God.

You say, well, Pastor, I thought we were going to see God in the next life. Jesus is not talking about that. The Sermon on the Mount is not dealing with the by and by.

It's dealing with the here and now. Now, there are some blessings in the Beatitudes that are reserved for heaven. Persecution, he says, will bring great reward in heaven.

But our Lord is saying here, blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God, not only in heaven, but right here and now. The highest joy possible, then, is to see God. That's why Jesus came.

He said to his disciples, have I been so long time with you, and yet you don't know me? He that has seen me has seen the Father. And that's why Jesus died. Peter says he died for us that he might bring us to God.

Initially, ultimately, our Lord Jesus Christ died. The veil of the temple was rent that you and I might have the privilege of seeing God. And if you read your Bible, you find this is the great desire of the saint.

Now, I may be wrong in this, and I trust no one thinks I'm critical, but I feel that the more we grow in our Christian life, the less we pray about things, and the more we pray about character. In our early Christian life, we're so concerned about getting this and getting that, and there's nothing wrong with praying about things. In the Lord's Prayer, give us this day our daily bread.

But I think we grow, and we get more concerned about character. And you find the saints of God in the Bible praying that they might see God. Moses up on the mountaintop said, oh, show me your way.

And God said, look, I'll go with you and show you the way. Then Moses prayed a little bit further and said, oh, show me your glory. And God said, now, Moses, I can't show you my faith, but I will show you some of my glory.

Moses prayed the right kind of a prayer. He said, I want to see God. The psalmist prayed this way.

Sometimes I turn the psalms into prayer. If you're not quite sure what to pray for yourself or somebody else, take one of the psalms. You find the psalmist praying like this, as the deer panteth after the water brook, so my heart panteth after thee, O God.

My heart yearns for God. My heart longs for God. When shall I stand and appear before God? The Lord Jesus Christ wants us to see God.

And this is what men prayed about, that they might be able to see God. Now, we don't seem to have this same desire today. I just wonder how many times you and I have, in our quiet prayer time, really prayed, O God, I want to see you.

I don't just want to know your word. I want to see you. I want, O God, to get to the place where this is the heart cry of my life, not to see success, not to see fame, not to see praise, not to see the accumulation of material things, but to see God.

I think sometimes we're so comfortable and so secure in our materialism, we don't pray like this. I think sometimes our faith is too much of an intellectual faith. I'm afraid sometimes we as Christians are so well taught in the Bible that we have a set of doctrines filed away up in our heads, but somehow our hearts just don't burn the way David Brainerd's heart used to burn.

Here he was racking, coughing with tuberculosis as he drove his horse through the woods of New England, spitting blood on the white snow, and he'd be praying for the glory of God to be seen. Spurgeon used to pray like this. Oh, how Spurgeon used to cry out for the revelation of God.

I suppose one of the greatest preachers ever to minister in the city of Chicago was Dr. A.W. Tozer. He was greatly misunderstood and greatly criticized by some people, but Dr. Tozer used to go down to the shores of Lake Michigan and fall on his face there in the sand and early in the morning just pray, Oh, God, show me your glory. We don't pray like this much today.

We're too concerned about external things, I guess, instead of eternal things. But most of all, we're afraid of getting mystical. We're afraid of getting impractical and mystical, and we really shouldn't be.

A mystic is just simply a person who believes that there is an invisible spiritual world. That's all. A mystic is not a mistake.

A mystic is not necessarily a confused, ethereal kind of a weird person. No, a true mystic is one who says there's a real world out there that cannot be seen. Behind everything material is something spiritual, and I want to reach beyond the material, and I want to know the spiritual.

That's a great way to live. Paul was a mystic. Paul says the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal.

Now, we walk by faith and not by sight. Now, in this beatitude, the Lord Jesus Christ is inviting us to the highest joy possible, the joy of seeing God. And for us to understand this and apply it, we must be able to understand three definitions.

And so in this particular beatitude, let's take three words and define them. Heart, pure, and see. Let's take the first word, heart.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Now, what does he mean by the heart? This may startle some of you, but biblical psychology is not as precise as we'd like it to be. Jesus said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, with all thy strength.

Is he saying man has four parts to him? No. He's just saying there are various functions down inside, and all of these ought to be open to the love of God. Paul said, I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And Paul seems to be saying you and I are a trinity. Spirit, God consciousness. Soul, world consciousness and self-consciousness.

Body, consciousness of things around us in the world and in the material things. Now, when Jesus says here, Blessed are the pure in heart, he's talking about the inner man. Sometimes the word heart is used for the emotion.

Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. Sometimes the heart is used for thinking.

The word of God is the discerner of the thought and the intent of the heart. Jesus said to a group of critical people, Why do you reason in your heart? So sometimes the heart is used for the emotion, and sometimes the heart is used for the intellect. Sometimes the heart is used for the will.

Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself. Jesus said to his disciples, Settle it therefore in your heart. And so the heart means really the inner man, the master control.

Our Lord is saying here, If we are going to experience this highest possible joy, we're not going to get it on the basis of the physical or the material. It has to be on the basis of the spiritual, the inner man. And you know what that says to me? That says to me that all these religious people who are trying to get through to God by means of physical means are doomed to failure.

You can't do it through whipping. You can't do it through narcotics. We have a brand of religion today where they think that by using narcotics they can have great visions and see God.

To the best of my knowledge, the only physical discipline that can assist a person in seeing God is fasting. And fasting is connected with praying. So when our Lord talks about the heart, he's talking about the inner man.

He is saying there is a master control down inside. Let's call it the heart. This reminds me of Proverbs 4 and verse 23.

Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. That's very simple. Solomon says, look, if you can control your heart, you can control your life.

Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. Now, the heart is the source of all of our trouble. You say, no, my neighbors are the source of all of my trouble.

No, no. The heart is the source of all the trouble. Here in the Gospel of Matthew, just turn over a few pages to Matthew 12.

Matthew 12 and verse 33. Either make the tree good, says Jesus, and its fruit good, or else make the tree corrupt and its fruit corrupt. For the tree is known by its fruit.

O generation of vipers, how can ye being evil speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. And our Lord says, look, as a master controlled down inside, your heart controls your mouth. And someone said, oh, this past week I shot off my mouth.

Oh, I wish I could control my tongue. Well, the problem is not controlling our tongue, is it? The problem is controlling our heart because the tongue is controlled by the heart. Down in Matthew chapter 15, our Lord has something else to say about the heart.

Jesus did not teach his disciples to wash after the traditions of the Pharisees. Now, you know, the Pharisees, whenever they came home from shopping or wherever they were, lest they had been defiled, they would pull up their sleeves and put their hands a certain way in the water and lift it up and let the water drip off. They had this ceremonial washing.

Our Lord's disciples didn't do this. They were criticized for it. And Jesus says in verse 7 of Matthew 15, you hypocrites, speaking to the Pharisees, well did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, this people draweth near unto me with their mouths and honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. So he calls the multitude together in the next verses and says, don't be so confused. It's not what goes into a person that defiles him.

It is what comes out of a person that defiles him. Verse 19, for out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, blasphemy. These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands, meaning ceremonially unwashed, defiles not a man.

You see, the Pharisees had the problem that as long as you kept the outside clean, you can live any way you want to on the inside. And our Lord said, oh no, it's just the opposite. You don't clean the inside by cleaning the outside.

You clean the outside by cleaning the inside. Over in Matthew 23 when our Lord just turned his guns on those Pharisees and let them have what all the ammunition he had, he said to them, you whitewashed sepulchers. On the outside you appear beautifully white, but on the inside you're full of dead men's bones.

He said, you wash the outside of the plate and of the saucer and of the cup, but you don't wash the inside. He said, you've completely reversed it. The Pharisees taught that if you're religious on the outside, that'll take care of you on the inside.

Our Lord says, oh no, you start with the heart. So the heart of all of our problems is the heart. If I speak in the wrong way, it's my heart.

If I live in the wrong way, it's my heart. You say, but pastor, I was born with the wrong kind of a heart. We all were.

David confessed for all of us, in sin did my mother conceive me. He didn't say conception was sin, he just said what was conceived was sin. A baby is born with a corrupt heart.

And you and I have a corrupt heart. And it's only when God comes and gives to us that new heart, when we trust Jesus Christ as our Savior, and God cleanses our hearts by faith and grants to us that beautiful new nature, then we can start living a different life. I've said the source of our trouble is the heart.

Now I'm going to say the source of our blessing is the heart. You say, you're contradicting yourself. Oh no.

When you receive that wonderful new nature down inside, then the heart can begin to generate not sin, but blessing. And if you read the Word of God, you find how true this is. Jeremiah said, I'm going to give them a new heart.

Ezekiel repeats this. Over in Ephesians, Paul says, doing the will of God from your heart. It's a beautiful way to live.

And so, my friends, the word heart means the inner man. And your inner man tonight is either producing sin or producing holiness. And the difference is Jesus Christ.

Parenthesis at this point, then we'll turn to our second definition. Focus on the inner man. Focus on the inner man.

For every function that you perform outwardly, there's one to be performed inwardly. You know this. The outward man has to be cleansed.

The inward man has to be cleansed. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. The outward man has to be fed.

The inward man has to be fed. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. The outward man has its outlook on life.

The inward man has its outlook on life. Focus on the inner man. My friend, if you and I will just cultivate the heart, everything else will take care of itself.

That's the beauty and the simplicity of the Christian life. We aren't called to perform all kinds of rites and rituals. We aren't asked to indulge in all kinds of directions and disciplines.

God just simply says, focus on the heart. Keep thy heart with all diligence. Out of it are the issues of life.

And yet most of us, most of us don't do this. We don't have time to cultivate the heart. We have time for all sorts of things.

We have time to cultivate the mind, and this is good. We have time to cultivate the body and exercise, and there's nothing wrong with this. We have time to learn new skills in tennis and golf.

Nothing wrong with that. But, oh, the priority ought to be given to the cultivation of the heart, the inner being. Now let's take the second definition, the word pure.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. What does he mean by pure? This word pure really is the foundation for a word we use every day, cathartic. Do you know what a cathartic is? Everybody knows what a cathartic is.

That's something a doctor gives you to clean you out. That's the word that's used here, the Greek word that means to be clean. The word has two sides to it, two aspects to it.

It means, first of all, to be cleansed, to be washed, like clean clothes. If a Greek person took a dirty garment and washed it and brought it up, then they would use this word, pure. It's now clean.

But it also had another meaning. It meant unadulterated, not divided. For example, milk that is not half milk, half water.

This is the word. It's pure. It's not adulterated.

Wine that's not half wine and half water, unadulterated. That's the word. It's used of seed with the shaft taken out.

Someone's going to sell you some grain that's half grain, half shaft. Can't use this word. When the shaft is taken away, then you've got it.

It's used to picture that which is not mixed. Now, keep that in mind because the word pure here means single, a single outlook of the heart. Now, Jesus explains and illustrates this over in Matthew 6. I want you to turn there.

Matthew 6 and verse 19. The word pure means single-hearted. Our Lord could just as well have said, Blessed are the single-hearted, for they shall see God.

You see, purity does not mean sinless. If it means sinless, we're done for. There's not a person here tonight who is sinless.

If we say we have no sin, we lie and do not the truth. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his truth is not in us. Pure means undivided, single, unadulterated.

Look at Matthew 6 and verse 19. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moss and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moss nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Oh, ho, not only does my heart control my lips and not only does my heart control my body in committing sin or doing good, but my heart controls my values. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Somebody comes and says, you know, Pastor, my heart is really in Moody Church.

I can find out in five minutes whether your heart's in Moody Church if your treasure's there. My heart is really in missions. You can find out in a short time whether your heart's really in missions.

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Now, says the Lord, the lamp of the body is the eye. Authorized version says the light of the body.

But it's the lamp of the body. The lamp contains the light. The lamp of the body is the eye.

If therefore thine eye be healthy, single, not divided, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, unhealthy, divided, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that be in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.

Now, verse 24 wraps it up. No man can serve two masters. You can't have two outlooks.

With your right eye, you can't be serving this master and watching him. With the left eye, be doing this. Because James says a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.

No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

You know what he's talking about here? He's talking about a unity of outlook. That's what it means to be pure in heart. He says now your eyes let the light into your body.

But if your eye is looking at darkness, it brings darkness into your body. If your eye is healthy, they'll focus together. If your eyes are not healthy, they'll look in two different directions and you'll start stumbling all over the place.

Pure means not divided, not mixed. We use the word simple today in the wrong way. Here's somebody perhaps who was born a little bit deficient mentally.

And someone says, well, he's simple. I don't know what that word means at all. The word simple, simplex, is the good old Latin word.

Simplex, it means undivided, one. Simplex is the opposite of duplex. Duplex means two, duplicity.

You know what duplicity is. When someone is guilty of duplicity, he talks out of both sides of his mouth. His right hand does one thing, his left hand does something else.

He lies, he schemes, he plots. That's duplicity. But our Lord is saying I want your eye not to be double but to be single.

Pure in heart means the heart focuses on one thing. Now what is that one thing? God. Oh, you say, Pastor, please get practical.

I drive a bus eight hours a day, five days a week. I've got to keep my eye on the road. That's true.

I pound a typewriter all week long. I've got to keep my eye on the paper. That's right.

That's right. But you see, you can still see God. What he's saying is we get up in the morning, and instead of our hearts being divided, they are united in the will of God.

There's a great verse back in Psalm 86. I want you to look at it. You may want to mark it in your Bible.

Psalm 86 and verse 11. Teach me thy way, O Lord. I will walk in thy truth.

Unite my heart to fear thy name. That's what he's talking about. You see, if I go through my day, and one eye is upon God and one eye is upon material things, I'm not pure in heart.

If I go through my day and with one part of my heart I fear God, then I fear man, my heart's not united. To be pure in heart means to have your heart united. Now, the Pharisees didn't.

The Pharisees had a divided heart. And our Lord says, no, that's just not going to work. We have to have, may I just use a good old-fashioned word that's been getting back into our vocabulary ever since Watergate, the word integrity.

That's the word. The word integrity comes from a good old word, integer. An integer is a whole number, not a divided number, not a fraction.

And our Lord is saying, look, folks, have integrity. Be one person. Your heart is focused on one thing, God.

That means that we have one desire, to please God. Not please God and please ourselves, please God and please somebody else. One desire to please God.

One devotion to love God. That's what he's talking about. To be pure in heart means to have my heart united so that I have spiritual integrity.

Now that leads us to our third definition, see. What does it mean to see God? Jesus says, if the inner man is united, if you have spiritual integrity, if you're not living for God and mammon, if you're not living for God himself, you're just living for God. Then you'll see God.

What does it mean to see God? Now, if you study your Bible at all, you know that God in his essence cannot be seen. No man hath seen God at any time, says the Gospel of John chapter 1. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. That word declared is a good old Greek word from which we get our word exegesis.

You say, what in the world is exegesis? Exegesis is what I'm supposed to do every week. Exegesis means opening up the text, explaining the text, making real the text. No man hath seen God at any time.

The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. He hath revealed him. Paul wrote to Timothy and said that God dwells in light which no man can comprehend or see.

So God in his essence cannot be seen today by any man. In fact, throughout all eternity, the very essence of God will be revealed by Jesus Christ. God said to Moses, no, you can't see me in my essence, but I will reveal a part of my glory, the backside of my glory I'll reveal to you.

How then do we see God? To see God means that in every area of life, God is there and we recognize him. That's what it means. Illustration, weak but it may help us.

A loved one passes away. And there's a funeral service and friends pay their respects and they pray and they show love. And maybe two weeks later you stop to visit the widow or the widower and you say, well, how are things going? And she says, you know, every place I look I see my husband.

That's what he's talking about. You say, well, he's not there. No, of course he's not there.

He's home with the Lord. But every place I look I see my husband. I remember when my brothers left for the Marine Corps and they were sent over to China.

And a week or so later their clothes came back. I can still remember my mother going down to the basement with those clothes. I'm sure she spent an hour down there weeping over them before she did anything with them.

But she kept saying, every place I look I see the kids. And parents are this way. Even when you ship the kids off to camp, just two weeks, every place you look you see the kids.

That's what he's talking about. To see God means that the whole world changes. Oh, it's the same as far as the external is concerned.

But behind that external you see God and it's the most wonderful experience. You see God, for example, in the creation that he made. Jesus did.

Jesus said, look at that flower down there. When I look at that flower I think of my father. Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed like that flower.

My father did that. You see that bird falling down there, dying? My father knows all about that. Jesus couldn't look at a flower or a bird without seeing God.

I like to read the Psalms, especially when they talk about God in nature. Oh, it's magnificent. The psalmist describes a storm coming.

He said, you shook the mountains and your lightnings lightened up the world. It wasn't electricity up there and air changing its pressure. No, no.

Oh, he didn't know the scientific explanation for lightning and thunder. It didn't make any difference if he didn't know it. It was God who was doing it.

That's a beautiful thing to see God in creation. I think, too, we see God in circumstances. Too often, and I'm guilty of this, when things aren't going the way they ought to go, we complain.

And yet Paul said, you know, folks, all things are working together for good. When Paul got into a storm, God was there. He saw God in circumstances.

When Paul was thrown into jail, they put chains on him. Oh, these weren't the chains of Caesar. Paul, a prisoner of Jesus Christ.

Whenever Paul went through some difficulty, it wasn't Paul being abandoned. It was God being there. We see God in circumstances.

But you see, if you have a double mind and a double heart, you won't see God in circumstances. It's something like this. God puts a window in front of us.

And if all we think about is ourselves, that window becomes a mirror and all we see is ourselves. And if all you see is yourself, you'll be miserable. But if we want God to be first in our lives, then that window opens up and through that window we see God.

We see God in creation. We see God in circumstances. We see God in the Word.

My friend, if you can read the Word of God and not see God, there's something wrong. In the parable of the sower, Jesus said one of the things that robs the seed of its growth, the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches. And so if part of my heart is fixed on material things and part of my heart is fixed on spiritual things, the material robs the spiritual.

We see God in the Word. We see God in Jesus Christ. And, of course, we see Christ through the Word.

In other words, life is not a terrifying thing. We don't see an enemy behind every bush. We see God.

And be it something to rejoice in, we rejoice in the Lord. If it's something to pray about, we pray to the Lord. If it's a burden to carry, we ask the Lord for strength.

In other words, God is the circumference and the center of our lives. We see God in His people. God's been teaching me this lately.

Oh, how He has revealed Himself to me through His people. There are some great people of God in the city of Chicago. And oh, how they've taught me about the Lord.

There have been people I've gone to visit to try to encourage them, and they've encouraged me. In other words, if our hearts are integrated, if our hearts are united, then no matter what happens, we see God. It boils down to this.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. It boils down to this. Take it home with you.

Whatever you love, you see. It's not true in everyday life. Without apology, I tell you I love books.

I don't love them in an idolatrous sense. I love them because of what they mean to me as a person. And you can't have me in a city very long before I've found a bookstore.

Whatever you love, you see. A little child can always find a Dairy Queen. A hungry teenager can always find a McDonald's.

Whatever you love, you see. That's true. If a person loves money, he sees ways to make money.

If he loves lust, he sees ways to gratify lust. If he loves laziness, he sees ways to get out of work. Whatever you love, you see.

Jesus said if you love God, you'll see God. He'll unite your heart. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

Now, I want to leave you with a warning and a story. First, a warning. Nothing robs you of spiritual vision like sin.

Nothing. Samson. The name Samson means sunny.

S-U-N-N-Y. Did you know that? He brought such joy and light into their lives. They said, let's call him Sunny Samson.

And he began in the light, but he ended up a blind man in the darkness. He ended up with his eyes gouged out and with his hands tied, and he was going, pushing a wheel, grinding, grinding, grinding. But he didn't start out like that.

You know why Samson became blind physically? It's an illustration of what happens to you and me. His heart began to love the wrong thing, and Samson began to do rather devious things at night. It got darker and darker and darker until finally he became blind.

Same thing happened to Saul. Saul would not follow the light God gave him. King Saul.

He ends up in a cave, delving into the occult. Nothing can ruin your vision like sin. And when a person is allowing some little sin to grow in his life, it ruins his vision.

He can't see. But nothing can make our vision better like prayer and the Word of God and worship and meditation and cultivating your heart. Now, nobody knows about this.

Nobody sees it. I've told you many times, the most important part of our life is the part only God sees. If you and I take time to cultivate, take time to be holy, our eyes will start to get clearer.

Now, physically, as we get older, our eyes need help. Our glasses need changing. We have to move into bifocals and then trifocals.

We feel it. Physically, there is a degeneration, a deterioration. But spiritually, that should not be so.

Spiritually, our eyes should get clearer and brighter and be able to see more and see farther if we're growing in the things of the Lord. Now, for the story. This story has been told about Whistler, the great painter.

It's been told about a half a dozen different painters. The one I think it really happened to was Turner. And he had an exhibition of his paintings, and he had a beautiful way of expressing sunset.

And a lady was standing looking at his painting, and she said, Mr. Turner, I've never seen a sunset like that. And his reply was, Don't you wish you could? Some carnal, worldly-minded Christian says, Well, I never thought... Don't you wish you could see? Did you ever notice that when Jesus looked at people, he didn't see what other people saw? Pharisees looked at somebody, a publican, a sinner. Jesus said, Oh, no, he's a lost sheep.

He's a lost coin. He's a runaway son. Don't be so hard on him.

He just needs to come home. He needs to be found. When Jesus looked at people, he didn't see what other people saw.

What do you see when you look at people? Blessed are the pure in heart, they shall see God. What do you see when you look at circumstances, problems? Blessed are the pure in heart, they shall see God. In other words, they just go through life all day long seeing God.

And you know, when you see God, it just does something in your heart. Oh, we don't see him in his essence, but we see him in his truth and in his glory. And life is not dull and uninteresting.

You never know where God's going to show up. It's a beautiful experience. Keep thy heart with all diligence.

Out of it are the issues of life. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Father, forgive us for divided hearts.

Forgive us for not cultivating the inner man. Cleanse our hearts. Search us, O God.

Know our hearts. Try us. Know our thoughts.

See if there be some wicked way in us and lead us in the way everlasting. We would, O God, unite our hearts to hear your name. Grant to us that spiritual integrity.

O, deliver us from duplicity, from being double-minded and double-tongued. May our motives be one and our goals be one. May our vision be one.

May we live, O God, for your glory. I pray for any here without Jesus Christ. It's so wonderful to see God here and now. How much more wonderful it will be when we come to see Jesus Christ in all of his glory and share that glory. O God, how terrible it's going to be for sinners to go out into darkness where they'll never see God. Lord, speak to hearts tonight, and may there be those who will trust the Savior. May there be those Christians who will get back to the cultivating of the inner man. For Jesus' sake we pray.