“Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God” Matthew 5:8
According to the Bible, the problem of the human being is sin and sin is born in the heart. Jesus said in Matthew 15:19 “For evil thoughts proceed from the heart, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.” Jesus placed the problem of the human being in his heart.
They asked Elvis Presley’s manager why he, being so famous, rich, young, successful, talented and apparently enjoying life, got into drugs and this ended up killing him before his time. He replied that Elvis did not seek drugs or get into them for the drug itself; he said the singer turned to drugs because of his fear of not being famous. What he feared the most in life was losing his fame. That is to say, drugs were only a way to escape from the possibility of losing what his heart yearned for most.
What our heart longs for is what will determine, consciously or unconsciously, what we will do. Everything we do denotes what we seek. When a person gets into drugs, they are rebellious, they get into gangs, they become violent, they are not stable emotionally or sentimentally (they constantly change partners) and what they are doing is looking to fill a lack, something that occupies that emptiness that prevents you from being happy. This world lives like this. All it offers is entertainment and nonsense. It’s like a postmodern house.
A postmodern house was a house that had stairs that led nowhere, corridors that ended in nothing, doors that, once opened, met a wall; in short, it was a totally dysfunctional and illogical house; it was called a postmodern house because it represented the modern philosophy of materialism, “unlimited fun and nonsense”, relativism.
Nothing that this world offers you can take you somewhere, you will always find the absurd, the empty.
God took his people out of Egypt to take them to the Promised Land and that journey, which was to last only a few weeks, lasted forty years. Why God took his people the long way was for his purpose to “test his heart” (Deuteronomy 8:2-3). He was going to expose them to a time of trials so that they would see the evil in their own hearts, so that they would know themselves and know who they are. He took them the long way so that they would understand that “man would not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of his mouth.” He did it so that they know that, despite the difficulties, God never abandoned them; he did it to learn to depend on Him.
God wanted to teach them HUMILITY and let them know how sinful they were, how fallible they were. HE wanted to teach him SPIRITUALITY and that the human being does not live only from the material, but from “every word that comes out of the mouth of his Creator”. God wanted to teach them FAITH and that many times we cannot be in control of our lives and that we really depend on Him.
Any person or nation that wants to be great should have these three principles: SPIRITUALITY, HUMILITY and FAITH. These three principles are missing today in the West.
Some will say that what a nation needs to grow is justice, honesty, education, security, etc., and it is true. But it is also true that these only flow naturally from a people with true faith, true humility and true spirituality.
Every Christian should naturally reflect these characteristics and infect others in that faith.