Blessed are those who are pure in heart—they will see God.

You may think you have abided by this Commandment, walked the straight and narrow, but I tell you this: any man who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery in his heart.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Jesus: No one can serve two masters. If you try, you will wind up loving the first master and hating the second, or vice versa. People try to serve both God and money—but you can’t. You must choose one or the other.

Though they had only spoken in low whispers among themselves, Jesus knew their thoughts. Jesus: Why do you hold such hardness and wickedness in your hearts?

Jesus turned around and saw her. Jesus: Take heart, daughter. Your faith has healed you. And indeed, from that moment, the woman was healed.

Whenever crowds came to Him, He had compassion for them because they were so deeply distraught, malaised, and heart-broken. They seemed to Him like lost sheep without a shepherd.

Put My yoke upon your shoulders—it might appear heavy at first, but it is perfectly fitted to your curves. Learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble of heart. When you are yoked to Me, your weary souls will find rest.

You children of snakes, you who are evil—how could you possibly say anything good? For the mouth simply shapes the heart’s impulses into words.

The people’s hearts have turned to flab; their ears are clogged; their eyes are shut. They will try to see, but they will not see; they will try to hear, but they will not hear; they will try to understand, but they will not comprehend. If they, with their blindness and deafness, so choose, then I will heal them.

It is about the kingdom of heaven. When someone hears the story of the Kingdom and cannot understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away whatever goodness and holiness had been sown in the heart. This is like the seeds sown beside the road.

You know people who hear the word of God and receive it joyfully—but then, somehow, the word fails to take root in their hearts. It is temporary. As soon as there is trouble for those people, they trip: those people are the seeds strewn on the rocky soil.

That is what the end of time will be like. The heavenly messengers will separate the good from the bad, the righteous from the wicked, the repentant from the prideful, the faithful from the hard-hearted.

The bad, the wicked, the prideful, and the hard-hearted will be thrown into the fiery furnace where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.

People honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are nowhere near Me.

But the things that come out of your mouth—your curses, your fears, your denunciations—these come from your heart, and it is the stirrings of your heart that can make you unclean.

For your heart harbors evil thoughts—fantasies of murder, adultery, and whoring; fantasies of stealing, lying, and slandering.

Jesus (to His disciples): We must take pity on these people for they have touched My heart; they have been with Me for three days, and they don’t have any food. I don’t want to send them home this hungry—they might collapse on the way!

But the first slave cackled and was hard-hearted and refused to hear his friend’s plea. He found a magistrate and had his friend thrown into prison “where,” he said, “you will sit until you can pay me back.”

And that is what My Father in heaven will do to you, unless you forgive each of your brothers and each of your sisters from the very cockles of your heart.

Jesus: Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But divorce was an innovation, an accommodation to a fallen world. There was no divorce at creation.

Jesus (quoting Scripture): “Love the Eternal One your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.”

That messenger was John the Baptist, who appeared in the desert near the Jordan River preaching that people should be ritually cleansed through baptism with water as a sign of both their changed hearts and God’s forgiveness of their sins.

Jesus knew their hearts. He called to the man with the withered hand. Jesus: Come to Me.

Jesus was furious as He looked out over the crowd, and He was grieved by their hard hearts. Jesus (to the man with the withered hand): So be it. Stretch out your hand. The man stretched forth his hand; and as he did, it was completely healed.