Trinity Community Church
Trinity Community Church
The Blessed Life - Session 7
What if you could stop struggling to feel “spiritual enough” and start experiencing God through simple, honest connection? In this transformative session on Matthew 5:8—“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”—Brian Durfee unpacks Jesus’s radical redefinition of spiritual blessing and shows how purity of heart is rooted not in perfection, but in relationship.
When Jesus spoke the Beatitudes, He wasn’t addressing the religious elite. He was speaking to the common, overlooked people of Galilee—those who had been dismissed as spiritually unqualified. By calling them blessed, Jesus shattered conventional religious thinking. He revealed that God’s favor isn’t reserved for those with external success or spiritual credentials, but for those whose hearts are open and aligned with Him.
The key revelation in this teaching is liberating: purity is not something we achieve by religious effort, but something we receive through relational abiding. Drawing from Jesus’s words in John 15 about the vine and the branches, Brian reminds us that branches don’t struggle to produce fruit—they simply stay connected to the source. In the same way, “we become pure by staying close, not by trying harder.”
This insight changes how we view spiritual disciplines. Reading Scripture becomes less about fulfilling a checklist and more about encountering God in His Word. Prayer becomes less formal and more honest—an ongoing conversation with the One who already knows what’s in our hearts. Even small prayers like “God, give me the want to”—prayed in moments of dryness—can spark real transformation and renew our desire for His presence.
This session invites you to stop pretending with God and start being present with Him. It’s in those real, unguarded moments that we begin to see Him more clearly. As Brother Lawrence observed in Practicing the Presence of God, acknowledging Christ’s presence in the ordinary moments of life can reshape our entire spiritual experience.
Through this class, you’ll discover that a purified heart comes not from striving, but from abiding—and that the promise of “seeing God” is not only about eternity but about recognizing His nearness in the present. The door to experiencing Him is not locked by your past or your performance; it is opened through your presence with Him.
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Tonight we're talking on verse Matthew 5.8, that we've been in this series called Blessed. So we've been going through the Beatitudes, each one so Matthew 5.8 is blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. And over the past weeks we've been in this series called Blessed and so we've been hearing about being blessed. This kind of person is blessed and that kind of person is blessed, and so you know, it's really easy to get into our churchish, religious kind of thing doing. Well, this person is blessed and we get all religious about it. So I want to get very real and I want to ask you a very real question tonight have you ever felt like you just weren't spiritual enough to be blessed? I mean, if you just forget everybody else around you and just ask yourself do I really feel like I'm spiritual enough to be blessed? It's kind of like you're trying to have all the attitudes and the beatitudes and you just don't measure up. You know what I'm talking about. Am I the only one here that ever feels that way? Well, we're going to talk about that a little bit tonight from the perspective of one particular attitude, and that's in Matthew 5.8. And so let me kind of set the stage for this verse. The book of Matthew starts out with the genealogy of Jesus and then the birth, and then he just kind of leaves out a whole chunk of Jesus growing up, and the next time we hear about him in Matthew is he's being baptized by John the Baptist, and then he goes from there to the wilderness and he goes 40 days of fasting with temptation, and it's then that Jesus launches his ministry and he goes from down in the southern part of Israel up to the northern part, and the northern part was Galilee. And so Galilee was kind of like the other side of the tracks for Israel. It was this you know, that was where you found the poor, you found the working class, the people who were overlooked, the people who everybody else looked down on. You know, you might remember a verse where one of the Pharisees says does anything good ever come out of Nazareth? Well, nazareth was in Galilee. That's that kind of attitude. Nazareth Well, nazareth was in Galilee. That's that kind of attitude. So that's where Jesus begins. His ministry is in this area called Galilee, up in north Israel.
Brian Durfee:And the people who are hearing him, they're the common people, like I said, they're the working class, they're the disregard, they are not the religious elite, and Jesus has one central message that he's declaring to everybody, and you need to get this. This is Jesus' central message Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. But to elaborate on that just a little bit repent, change your mind, because the kingdom of heaven is at hand, it's here and now, it's not just in the future. Now, these people were not expecting to be included in anything that God was doing. These are the down and out. These are the one that everybody looks down on, and they know that they're not blessed. But Jesus turns to them and begins declaring who really is truly blessed. And so then he begins talking about the Beatitudes, and each Beatitude has three primary parts. So there's the declaration blessed are. There's the type of person the pure in heart. And then there's the promise or result, for they will see God. And so tonight we're focusing on blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Now, before we look at pure in heart or they will see God, we need to understand why Jesus' use of the word blessed probably shocked everybody.
Brian Durfee:In the Jewish culture, blessing was tied to outward, visible signs, things like material wealth, good health, power and status, public righteousness, religious role, like Pharisees, sadducees, scribes, those type of people. If somebody looked successful or they looked very religiously successful, you know they were doing it right. The people assumed that God was clearly with them. God wasn't with anybody else. Those were the people who were blessed. Jesus was redefining what blessing was. Now the Greek word for blessing and I'm sure you've heard this in every other teaching to put it simply means happy. But you know you can have some nuances, some additional understanding to the word. So the reason that it's happy is because you're deeply favored by God, you're spiritually flourishing, you're possessing joy and peace, regardless of circumstances. Those are the kinds of things that are inherent in that word blessed, happy.
Brian Durfee:And so Jesus is just flipping the script. He's saying blessing isn't based on what you have or how good you look externally. It's about who you're in relationship with and what's happening internally. Now, jesus wasn't just being kind. He wasn't just like okay, guys, you don't feel. I know you think bad about you. Let me just encourage you a little bit more. He wasn't just being kind. He was actually announcing the true values of the kingdom. In fact, that's what the whole Sermon on the Mount is about. What does it mean to be a citizen in the kingdom of God. That's the entire Sermon on the Mount, and this is just one little piece of it.
Brian Durfee:And so the people who are hearing this, they're the ones who are down and out, spiritually overlooked. And Jesus is confronting that idea that blessing is earned or proven by success and instead the kingdom, in his kingdom, the poor in spirit are blessed, those who mourn are blessed, the pure in heart are blessed. Jesus was saying you think you're far from God, but you're the very ones that he calls blessed. And so that's the first part of the verse Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Jesus is describing the pure in heart as the people who are blessed. So what is this blessing that the pure in heart are going to get, that they're going to receive? Well, it says they will see God.
Brian Durfee:Now there's a lot of different words in Greek that can be translated as see, and the most literal definition for it is to see with the eyes, the physical act of seeing. But there's also a figurative definition to perceive and to understand. It's kind of like what we do in English. You know, I can explain something and I say do you see I'm not talking about. Can you see the words that have no form in front of you? It's not about do you understand and it's no different in Greek and there's even a spiritual connotation to it to recognize relationally, as in knowing, or experientially to experience. So in the context of this verse for they will see, god is not about literally, physically seeing, it's about understanding, knowing and experiencing. So that kind of changes that part around too. It's about understanding, knowing and experiencing it in the here and now.
Brian Durfee:Remember Jesus' central message repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. It's here and now, for the kingdom of God is at hand, it's here and now. So Jesus is talking about a relational, spiritual and experientially knowing God, something that begins now and continues on forever. You know, in Revelation 22.4, it says we're going to see him face to face. But what does it mean for the here and now? Well, we get to experience his presence. We get to experience his guidance through situations sometimes and that can happen in a lot of different ways. We get to experience his conviction to keep us morally on the right path. We receive comfort from him and honestly, we can know him in prayer and in the word and in worship and obedience. There's so many different ways we get to encounter God and he's basically saying that we walk in intimate relationship with him.
Brian Durfee:So this whole thing, they shall see God. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. The pure in heart get to know and experience God and have God as your companion and as your guide and as your God and as your servant. And because these are all characteristics, when you start looking through the Bible and you look at all the names of God that come out of his character, he was humble. He humbled himself even to the point of the cross. That's in Philippians. Jehovah Jireh, our provider, jehovah Rapha, our healer, all of these different names of God that we see through the Bible. They are descriptions of who we get to walk with.
Brian Durfee:So now here's the key question. This is where I go from teaching to meddling a little bit. Do you really feel like you're experiencing God this way? Maybe you're thinking like I've done for or did for a long time. I keep being obedient, but I'm just not feeling it. I must not be blessed, I'm not doing something right. You know, there's some kind of standard that I'm not meeting because I'm not really sensing God in my life, so blessed are the pure in heart. What does that really mean? If pure in heart means I get to know and experience God in my everyday life in a very real way, then what does it mean to be pure in heart? Well, heart in this verse I mean, we know heart is the thing that pumps our blood, but in this context, the heart is talking about the center of our being. It's who we are, at our core, how we think, how we feel about things. It's our moral center, the place that we make our decisions from. It's how we decide whether we're going to choose right or choose wrong. You could say it's our mind, our will and our emotions all rolled up. That's the heart.
Brian Durfee:So the word for pure, kotharos that's the Greek word. I'm probably mispronouncing it, but that's what it looks like to me. Kotharos means clean, unmixed or innocent. Blessed are the clean in heart which we would expect. It's translated pure, right. Pure means there's nothing, there's no bad stuff mixed in it, it's all expect. It's translated pure, right. Pure means there's no bad stuff mixed in it, it's all clean, it's all pure.
Brian Durfee:And that's what the word pure, so clean in our very soul, clean down to the core of our being, and that is kind of a hard standard to measure up to and our temptation is to say, well, I get to experience as much of God as that bit. The level of pureness that I have is the level of how much I get to experience God. And one of the things that people that I am guilty of and people that I know are guilty of is we is, even though we give really good lip service to, oh, jesus has made me righteous, his blood has made me clean. I'm sinless In real, practical, down-to-earth life. We live this life thinking, oh, I've got to be better. I've got to be better because I want to experience God and man. I'm just not experiencing God, so I must not be measuring up. I got to do more. And it's this works mentality that holds us in this bondage of trying to always measure up and we lose our freedom in Christ to it. So I want to talk a little more about what pure means. It's not about reaching a standard, and there's some really good verses over in the book of John that help us to understand.
Brian Durfee:In John 15, verse 3, I'll give you a little more about this. In John 15, jesus is talking to the disciples right before he goes to the cross, and the whole first half of John 15 is about abiding in Christ. He says Abide in me and I in you, for without me you can't do anything. And so the whole thing is about abiding in Christ. John 15, 3, he tells the disciples Now you are clean through the word that I've spoken to you, that word clean, katharos it's that same word that's used over pure in heart. So now you're clean, now you're pure through the word that I've spoken to you. Well, what word is he talking about? What is this magic word that makes them clean? It wasn't a snap, remember this is right before Jesus goes to the cross. That means there's three years prior that the disciples have been living with Jesus. They had been eating with Jesus, they had been talking with Jesus, they had heard Jesus teaching them personally, teaching the crowds, and Jesus was demonstrating the teaching. He was showing how to live it out. That's the word that he had been.
Brian Durfee:And where did Jesus' teachings come from? Neil, you talk about this. Where did Jesus' teachings come from the Father? Via the Old Testament. Right, that was the scriptures that he always referred to, and even the structure of the Beatitudes is shown forth in the Psalms, that whole structure. And when you start looking at it it's pretty amazing, and I don't have time to chase that rabbit. Jesus is teaching out of the Old Testament, but he's not just teaching law out of the Old Testament. He's showing what life in the kingdom means.
Brian Durfee:And in his teaching the disciples are being cleaned up. That's the word. So now, how does this apply to us? How did it do its cleaning?
Brian Durfee:Well, john 15, 1 and 2 says I'm the true vine and my father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit. Guess what the word for prunes is Kothros. It's the verb form of the same word for pure or clean. Basically, you say every branch that does bear fruit, he cleans it up, he cuts it back, he does what's necessary to make it even more fruitful, to increase the life in and through that branch. That's pure. It's not about whether the branch measures up to whether it can connect to the vine or not. No, it's connected to the vine and it just in being connected, then he is part of the vine that the Father takes care of and tends to. All the branch has to do is be connected and all the life from the vine flows into that branch. All the life that flows into the branch bears the fruit. It's not work, it's life.
Brian Durfee:Do you hear the difference? Purity is not achieved through effort, it's achieved through abiding in Christ. We become pure by staying close, not by trying harder. So the real question is how do we abide in Christ? Well, we spend time in the Word, but you know what I was told from.
Brian Durfee:I grew up on the cradle roll, if you have ever heard that term. From the time that I was born, as soon as I was old enough to be in church, I was in church Every Sunday morning, sunday night, wednesday night, all the time. You know my life, you know I was in the church youth group and I was told all through that time got to read your Bible every day, got to read your Bible every day, got to read your Bible and I would read my Bible and nothing. Okay, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. There is a type of duty that we seem to think that we have to do to read the Bible. We need to read the Bible. That's very true. But we're not reading the Bible to fulfill and check a box, saying, okay, I did this, so now I measured up.
Brian Durfee:No, the Bible is one of the ways that we encounter Jesus. That's why it's part of abiding. In fact, it's one of the foundational ways that we abide in Christ. But it's not about checking off a box. It's about when we read the scripture. You know, oh God, let me encounter you today. In fact, I'll challenge you Every time you sit down to read your Bible. Don't try to make it happen, don't put any work into this at all, just pray this prayer God. Let me encounter you today, jesus, let me encounter you and don't elaborate. Make it simple and then don't try to do it. Let God do it. Okay. And prayer you know I grew up hearing. You got to pray. You need to pray If you're going to be close to Jesus. You got to pray. But prayer is not about checking off a box and measuring up. Prayer is about conversation with God. You know we don't.
Brian Durfee:I grew up in, you know, and my grandparents were Christians too, and my grandfather, you know. In time we had a family get-together. He had a way of praying and it had these and thous in it and that's okay, and he was very real. That was just the language that he used. That's what he grew up with. It's not about how you say it, it's about what's in your heart. So many of us are so scared that God's going to strike us down if we actually admit what's in our heart, in our heart. When's the last time that you felt mad at God and you actually had a knockdown, drag out, fight, screaming at him, you know, hopefully away from everybody else, so they don't think you're crazy. But I mean, you really got real with God. You know, back in it's been about eight or nine years ago now.
Brian Durfee:You know I was leading the men's ministry. I was doing things here at Trinity. I had for years and I finally got real with God. I said you know God, I'm doing all these things. I'm doing everything I want to do, everything I need to do, but I really don't feel like seeking after you. I enjoy all the stuff that's happening at church and my life, but I just don't feel like anything. And so I'm going to pray this. God, give me the want to. I stopped reading my Bible, I stopped praying otherwise, but I purposed in my heart every day. I was going to pray that one prayer God give me the want to. That was it. I was going to pray that one prayer God give me the want to. That was it. And somewhere along the line, not too much later, things started changing and I didn't even see it, and within a I don't know, it was a year and a half, two years. All of a sudden, it's like, wow, I got this want to. I had just been praying a simple prayer. I got real with God.
Brian Durfee:We really have to stop pretending and get real with God. He already knows what's in our heart. The only thing that's stopping things between us and God is us, because we won't be real with Him. And so it's the same thing with prayer and with reading the Scripture. God, let me encounter you. Show me your glory, show me your healing, show me your provision. Lord, show me who you are, show me your character. Lord, just take this verse and just show me what this verse means. It's that simple, like be real.
Brian Durfee:You know, another part of abiding is obeying. You can't If I say that I'm Tyler's friend but I don't ever do anything that he wants to do, am I really his friend? You know what I'm saying. It's the same thing with Jesus. He gives us what to do, he tells us, actually, what's going to be best for us. It's just a matter of obedience. That's part of abiding. All of these things are an attitude of staying in close relationship.
Brian Durfee:You know, there's a monk I think it was a monk, brother Andrew who wrote a book called Practicing the Presence of God. Because as a monk, you think about this. A monk is a guy who goes off in a monastery for the purpose of knowing God and learning about God and all. And here's this monk and he says I don't think I really experienced the presence of God very much. And so he wrote this book about this, called Practicing the Presence of God. And here's what he did. He began reminding himself that God is with him every moment of the day. So when he'd sit down and he'd work in the garden, then he'd remind himself I'm picking carrots with Jesus, and if he's washing dishes, I'm washing dishes with Jesus. And as he went through his day, he just reminded himself I'm doing this with Jesus. It's not I will be with Jesus or I will know Jesus. I am with Jesus now, here. And it wasn't too long that he began to experience God in new ways.
Brian Durfee:That's what abiding is. It's seeking relationship with jesus. And all the things we do is not because we're checking off boxes, it's not because we're measuring up, it's because we're seeking to know him. And if you want your life transformed, that's how it happens, because in the process of doing that, you know you. Oh, I struggle with this sin, oh, I can't overcome this. Oh, man, I screwed up again In the process. If you are seeking Jesus, then the Father will clean those things up. The Father will take care of that. He's the vine dresser. Literally, from that verse, he's the farmer, but we're talking about vines, so he's the vine dresser. Literally from that verse, he's the farmer, but we're talking about vines, so he's the vine dresser. He's the one who'll take care of the pruning and everything that's needed there.
Brian Durfee:The more we walk with Jesus, the more our hearts are purified and our vision and our experience of knowing God becomes clearer. So now, how do we put all this together and how do we sum it up in a quick and easy way to remember this? So the verse was Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. But we can paraphrase that and say Blessed are those who are abiding in Christ, for they will know and experience God both now, in His kingdom and also forever in eternity. Say it again, for they will know and experience God both now and in His kingdom, and forever and eternity. The kingdom of God is now.
