Pure Hope
1 John 3:3 He is pure, and everyone who has this hope in him keeps themselves pure like Christ.
“Purity” is a word that, by and large, we love. Pure gold, pure joy … but have you ever met a pure person – someone whose profoundly decent thoughts and motivations on the one hand are matched 100% by their words and actions on the other? They’re few and far between.
If you think about the sorts of movies and television shows you like to watch, the ones you likely gravitate towards are the ones with a hero who, against all odds, lives out a mighty goodness, a kindness, a love that goes way above and beyond to achieve greatness.
That’s the whole idea of purity – goodness in action against the odds. And yet as we live our lives, the grubbiness of this world has a habit of rubbing off on us. We’d like to be “pure” so to speak but life’s messy, it’s complicated. Often what’s required of us is to choose the least worst of all the options.
Into that messy, sometimes grubby, reality of life God has this to say:
1 John 3:3 He [that is, God Himself] is pure, and everyone who has this hope in him keeps themselves pure like Christ.
Sometimes I think we need to be reminded that there is a very good reason for us to stand back from the dirt being thrown to and fro in this world, to wash ourselves clean, and to be pure in thought, word and deed.
And that reason is this. God is pure. And if we’ve placed our hope in Jesus, His Son who brought us out of our slavery to our sin by paying the terrible price that we owed on that Cross, then we too should be pure.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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