I've got this buddy, lifelong friend, well, lifelong, we met in high school, and he had been a bachelor well into his 20s, and along comes this girl who's the perfect fit. And he's in the early phase where they clearly both like each other, but they haven't turned over their cards yet, and it's kind of awkward and also cute and fun. And everybody's conspiring to help make this thing work out, kind of like what happened for you know my relationship when I met the girl who would become my wife. And so, anyway, he wants to take her and me and Camilla, my wife, out to his family cabin in the mountains of Colorado. And this is a beautiful cabin. Uh, just amazing. It's got the big stone fireplace in the middle, but it takes a while for the stone fireplace to warm up, and it's very important to the effect of the whole cabin. And he wants to woo this girl. So he tells me, all right, look, let's do this in two shifts. You and I will drive out from Nebraska to the mountains of Colorado, and we'll get the fire going, and then the girls can show up the next day, and everything will just be perfect. Now, he's not totally telling me it's because he wants to impress her, but I totally see what he's doing. And dude, from the minute I said yes, and from the minute we got in the car to go light the fire so the rocks would be hot. This guy got tunnel vision. The weather starts turning bad. There's blowing snow on the interstate as we get into Colorado. The conditions are horrible. We're doing like 10 miles an hour, limping across the high plains of Colorado, heading west to try to get to the mountains. And my parents live on the way near Fort Collins, Colorado. And we got there hours behind schedule at like three in the morning. I didn't even ask him. I was like, We're done here. We're gonna go in and we're gonna crash at my parents' place, and then obviously we'll go up to your place in the morning and get going. And he was like, No, we're gonna drive all the way through the night. Why, dude? Why we have to warm up the cabin. I don't I don't want it to be cold. We're going to die. Like, we're gonna be like the Donner party, and one of us is gonna eat the other one as we're stranded in some mountain snowbank. No, dude. And he was mad, and we got into like a pretty legit one of our biggest fights ever as lifelong friends because he had tunnel vision. And for me, I'm like, dude, she likes you. This is gonna be fine. The hot rocks are not gonna be the difference. But for him, that was like the thing that makes it magical, and he wanted it to be magical. Ultimately, we did not go up to the cabin. She got there eventually. The rocks were only lukewarm. They still fell in love, they got married, they had babies, everything worked out beautifully. But that singleness of mind was something that annoyed me in the moment. But now looking back, I'm like, you know what? I get that way. And I kind of like it when I get that way. Yeah, there might be some collateral damage as some things fall to the wayside, but it's kind of an invigorating thing to get that singular purpose direction drivenness that occasionally happens when you're on a quest. Likewise, there was. When you get to the Gospel of Matthew, you figure out pretty quickly that one of the things Jesus is driving at is this singleness of heart that we've talked about before, this purity of heart, this will one thing, this thing that goes beyond cold external religion, where you do certain things and don't do other things, and where you're very pure and tidy and you wear white and you're angelic and you don't do scandalous, naughty, dirty things. That's great, and that concept is in there of just basic obedience to God, but that is a subset of this bigger thing that Jesus is driving at, which is purity of heart. Remember the Beatitude in Matthew 5 8, where Jesus says, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. And you'll recall that when we looked at that, we talked about the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his notion of singleness or purity of heart is to will or to want one thing. And I said, like, this is all going to come into focus more when we are done with the Sermon on the Mount and we're looking back on this. And now I think it is coming more into focus that again, that purity concept is not just one of good behavior and moral decency, it's a concept of singleness, of being driven and focused on one precise thing, on having your heart vested in the kingdom and the king. It's a loyalty thing, it's an understanding that this is the truest, realist thing, and it's the only thing that's really worth your brain and your energy and your time, or at least that is what the text holds it out as being. There's a passing comment in the Old Testament prophetic book of Ezekiel that deals with some of the same concept of singleness of heart. And Ezekiel is a guy who was in the southern kingdom, so this is the one that fell second. The northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians, the southern kingdom falls to the Babylonians in the sixth century, and the first wave of exiles, that is, people who got hauled off into captivity, included the last king of the south, is that Jehoiachin, I think, and Ezekiel, who was a young man, a married man. And somewhere around age 30, he becomes a prophet, and his whole book, his whole collection of prophecies, is about the judgment of the southern kingdom of Judah and God's eventual promise of return and restoration for those people, their re-establishment as a people, if you will. So there are a lot of themes that look kind of like Isaiah, where we've been spending a bunch of time. But one of the accusations in Ezekiel against the people who sort of knew God and kind of were doing a kingdom thing, but didn't really get it, is that they didn't have singleness of heart. They liked a lot of things. They liked a lot of other, to use Ezekiel's language, images and idols that they also really loved. And so God was interesting to them and convenient to them, but part of the judgment and condemnation through the prophet Ezekiel that God says they were getting wrong is this not singleness of heart. So in verse 19 of chapter 11 of Ezekiel, there's this passing phrase that indicates that it would be a blessing for God to return to them a spirit of singleness of heart. And I'm going to start in verse 18. It goes like this They'll return to it and remove all its vile images and detestable idols, and I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them. I'll remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. They'll follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They'll be my people, and I'll be their God. Now, understanding and adjusting for the reality that some of this is very Old Testament sounding language about laws and rules, and it's framed a little bit differently in the New Testament, you can still see the carryover. The God of the Old Testament, just like the God of the New Testament, is held out in the Bible as believing that he is worthy of the singular attention and love and loyalty and affection and energies of the people who he is in a relationship with. So effectively, the beatitude that is explicitly stated in Matthew chapter 5 and verse 8, blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God, is a restatement of what happens here in Ezekiel chapter 11. Then you've got the blessed are the pure in heart, I will give them an undivided heart, and then you've got the for they will see God, then they will follow my decrees, they will be my people, and I will be their God. So this is not a new concept from Jesus. This isn't some fresh thing that he's doing where it's like, guess what? Now God wants you to really, really like him and be excited about things. No, this has been the idea all along. So then when we get to the passage we were looking at yesterday in Matthew chapter 8 about people getting really excited after Peter's mother-in-law gets healed and they all start gathering around and there's a whole bunch of miracles going on, more than people can count. And all of a sudden, more people are wanting to sign up to be in the inner circle of followers of Jesus. And you have a teacher of the law who comes up. You remember this from yesterday, verse 19 of Matthew 8. Then a teacher of the law came to him and said, Teacher, I'll follow you wherever you go. But then Jesus, again in the spirit of disclosure we talked about yesterday, says, Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. And then we get no answer as to whether or not the guy actually went ahead and followed him. Another disciple, so somebody who's already kind of in, said, Lord, let me go first and bury my father. But Jesus told him, Follow me and let the dead bury their own dead. And here again we see the same theme playing out. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they're gonna see God. I'll give them an undivided heart, I'll be their God, they'll be my people. Here again, Jesus is saying, absolute singleness of heart, don't be distracted by discomfort or even really understandable social expectations. This is gonna be hard, but it's true and it's real, and it matters, and this is the thing that is actually worth your full attention and your singleness of heart. What's the parable in Matthew 13? I know it's kingdom parable. I know it's toward the end. Uh yeah, they're they're matching parables in Matthew 13, 44 and 45. I'm gonna read them both to you right now. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy he went and sold all he had and bought that field. Now we're gonna break that down when we get to Matthew chapter 13. But the idea here is dude completely sold out. He found something that was of maximum value, and everything else went by the wayside, singleness of mind, purity of heart. Uh then verse 45, the matching parable. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it. Dude was Antana out for something of maximum value, and when he found it, he cashed out everything else for this one thing that mattered the most of all the things. So as much as this passage that we were looking at yesterday in Matthew chapter eight seems almost like a transition thing or like a an incomplete story, or some people want to follow Jesus, and he just kind of comes off as mean and dismissive. I don't think it is that. I think it's yet further follow-up on this theme that we gotta keep our antenna out for as we go through Matthew of singleness of heart, of purity of heart. And if we play along with Jesus and we're like, okay, well, it seems like maybe you can deliver on the things you say, and you say, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God, well that's kind of the thing I want the most. Even in my most skeptical times in life, that is the thing that I want the most. I mean, I don't just picture like the guy with the beard and the sky with the white robe and all of that stuff. God is more than that. God is truth. God is essence, God is the one thing that is real and unchanging and not subject to advertising and laws and violence and force and all of the forces that are at work in shaping and reshaping reality as we understand it over time, God transcends all of that. He is the foremost expression of real and true and genuine, and I want to see that. I want to experience it. I want to get out of the opinion fest and the bickering around in the mud. I want to see real truth in its truest form. So if if Jesus is to be believed and purity of heart is somehow a pathway to experiencing that, okay, uh you've got my attention. All religion, all politics, all the silly debates aside, that is pretty much the end game of life. If you see that thing that is that true and is that real, well then I guess in some other expressions of religion that would be called enlightenment. In the one that I believe is the truest, realist expression of religion, that would be called relationship with God, rightness with God, made possible by the work of God. So I'm in a place where I'm in, I'm interested, I'm really intrigued by this concept, and I think we cheapen it if we're like, oh well, you know, purity of heart means behave well and be nice. I think it is something so much bigger than that, and I think the reward on the other side, or maybe it's not even reward, just the the natural consequential outcome on the other side of actually seeing this truest, realist thing for ourselves is the greatest outcome that could possibly be imagined. And therefore, I think it's impossible to overpay attention to this theme of singleness of heart when it comes up. There's a ton more that I could say on this, but at that point I think it starts to get into the real sermony, me tell you what to do thing. And uh we have an agreement that um we think about it together, and I'm not your boss, it's the internet, and I don't tell you what to do. So we will come back to this theme quite a bit, no doubt, but now I am ready to roll on to the next passage, so we will do that tomorrow. I'm Matt, this is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.