A Dwelling Place of Spirits

Man is the strangest of all God’s creatures. He is flesh, a body of organs and systems, heart and brain, kidneys and lungs, all of them cooperating so that he may animate himself upon this physical plane; and yet that same body is capable of hosting immaterial substances, of becoming a residence for what can be neither seen nor touched. He walks past houses of brick and stone every day without suspecting that he is himself a house, and that within the walls of his own being there stands a city whose ownership is in dispute. God, who is Spirit, intends to dwell there. Satan, who has always coveted the throne of God, intends to dwell there too. The whole of the spiritual life turns on which of the two is enthroned.

My argument in this essay is that the human heart, the kardia of the New Testament, is the place where the destiny of a man is decided. It is the organ by which he may see God, the fountain from which every defilement issues, and the dwelling over which God and the powers of darkness contend. Because the vision of God, what the Fathers called theōria, is a function of purity, and because the impurities of the heart are not merely moral stains but the lodging places of unclean spirits, the purification of the heart cannot be a leisurely or ornamental work. It is warfare. The chief weapon of that warfare is the prayer of the heart, by which the soul is crushed, cleansed, and restored to what Christ declared it must be: a house of prayer.

I shall make this argument in stages. I begin with the mystery of man as a creature both physical and spiritual, and then turn to the sixth beatitude, where our Lord makes the vision of God conditional upon purity of heart. From there I follow His teaching in Matthew 15, where He locates the source of all defilement in the heart, and then return to the opening of Genesis, where the floods and the darkness that covered the earth give us an archetype of usurpation. Matthew 12 then shows us, in the Lord’s own words, that a man is a house and that unclean spirits call him theirs. The parable of the sower reveals how many enemies the word of God must overcome before it bears fruit in the heart, and the final sections set out the remedy: confession, struggle, and the violent prayer of the heart, until Christ enters His temple with the scourge and makes it His Father’s house again.

The stakes are high. A Christianity that tends only the surface of a man, that teaches him to sing and serve and attend while leaving the interior untouched, will produce people who confess Christ with their lips while their hearts remain occupied territory. Such people may see the stars, the sun, and the mountains with perfect clarity and yet remain blind to the One who made them. The question of who lives in the heart is therefore not a question for mystics alone. It is the question on which the vision of God, the fruitfulness of the word, and the very salvation of the soul depend.

The Mystery of the Creature Man

The creature man is a mystery because he belongs to two orders at once. Considered physically, he possesses a body: outward members and inward organs, the heart, the brain, the kidneys, the lungs, together with the energy systems by which all these parts cooperate and sustain his life in the material world. Yet there is an immaterial dimension to him which is no less real, and which is in fact more important for his development and for the relations he is meant to have with God, who by nature is Spirit and therefore immaterial. A man who knows himself only as a body knows the lesser half of himself.

Scripture is alert to this double nature. At times it sets physical organs alongside spiritual ones; at times it contrasts them; at times it lets the one stand as a figure for the other. There is a physical heart that pumps blood and a spiritual heart that loves, desires, and believes; there are physical eyes that see the world and inward eyes that are opened or shut to the things of God. Both orders are essential in their respective functions. I do not despise the body, for God made it and God will raise it. But the Bible repeatedly draws our attention away from the outward to the inward, insisting that the decisive work of God in a man is done in places no surgeon can reach.

This is why Scripture speaks so often of the cleansing of the inward parts. The purification of the interior man is presented as the means by which he is made fit, made ready, for the perceiving and beholding of his Maker. God does not merely forgive the outward act; He seeks truth in the inward parts, and He works there until the creature is capable of communion with Him. When God became man, when the Word was made flesh, He came not only to die for mankind but also to teach mankind about the Father and about how a man may attain righteousness before God and relationship with Him. The teaching of Christ is therefore not an appendix to His saving work. It is the map of the interior road along which His saving work is applied.

I have elsewhere drawn from the first chapter of Genesis an archetype for the warfare that exists within man, and I shall return to that archetype below. Before doing so, however, I want to set before the reader something of critical value for everyone who desires a relationship with God: the condition our Lord Himself attached to the vision of God, and the organ in which He located it.

Blessed Are the Pure in Heart

In the Sermon on the Mount, among the beatitudes, the Lord Jesus Christ says something striking, something that deserves far more contemplation than it usually receives:

“Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).

The first thing this verse implies is that God is perceivable. He is not, in the end, hidden from the sight of man. The capacity to see God is carried within the creature, built into him by his Maker, so that the vision of God is not a fantasy but a promise. What a goal this sets before the Christian: not merely to believe in God, not merely to obey Him, but to see Him. Yet the Lord connects this possibility to a work that must be done within man before the possibility becomes a reality. Man can see God; but as long as the contingent condition is unaddressed and unfulfilled, God remains invisible to him.

I want the reader to dwell on the phrase “pure in heart”, and especially on the words “in heart”. The Lord does not say “pure in conduct” or “pure in reputation”, though both matter. He places the condition in the heart, which means that the only way to see God is for a man’s heart to be pure. The Greek word rendered “pure” is katharos. A pure heart is a heart void of the passions, a heart emptied of sin, a heart from which the disordered desires have been cleansed away. There is, then, a work that must be done within the heart: a purification which permits, which grants, the grace of theōria, the grace to perceive and to see God.

The verb our Lord uses for seeing is opsontai, “they shall see”. It is the language of perception, of beholding, of looking upon a thing with the eyes. This is what makes the beatitude so astonishing. God is immaterial; and yet there is an organ within man that can be configured to see Him. The eye of the heart, cleansed of what clouds it, becomes capable of a sight that the eyes of the body could never achieve.

The corollary follows with uncomfortable force. If purity of heart grants the vision of God, then an inability to perceive God means that the heart is impure. This brings us onto the terrain of warfare, for it explains why the heart is contested ground. The very place from which man can see God is the very domicile that Satan seeks to inhabit. That is where the veil is drawn, where the blindness is set, where the film of iniquity is laid over the inward eye. Through the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, Scripture is telling us something of extreme spiritual value: we are not pure. Had we been pure, we would see God, because theōria is a function of purity.

The same truth appears at the burning bush. When the Lord appeared to Moses, He stopped him before he came near:

“Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5).

The presence of God is holy, and that presence sanctifies the place it inhabits. One cannot therefore presume to host the presence of God without the scent of holiness. Here the word katharsis, cleansing, becomes the operative word for holiness, because cleansing is how the heart becomes holy. Without katharsis, holiness is impossible; and without holiness, the presence of God has no fitting place to rest. Our Lord brings this to our enlightenment in order to show us that our focus on the pilgrimage of life cannot be merely external. There is a work that must be done within, and primarily within the heart, because unless purification takes place there, theōria cannot.

The author of Hebrews says the same thing in different words:

“Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14).

Without holiness no man has any hope of seeing the Lord. The requirement, the condition, is holiness. If a man is not holy, he cannot see the Lord. This is precisely what the Lord Jesus Christ teaches in the beatitude: blessed are the katharoi, the pure in heart, for they shall see God their Creator, in whatever form He chooses to reveal Himself. And the vision, when it comes, is not a vague sensation. Theōria produces in the one who receives it the knowledge that he has seen God.

There is a further depth here. The Gospel of John declares:

“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18).

When the Son claims that He alone has seen the Father, He is, among other things, declaring His own holiness. The one who is perfectly pure is the one who perfectly sees. I draw from this a principle that governs everything that follows: the work of holiness is necessary not only for the perception of God but also for the habitation of God. Without purity God cannot be seen, and without purity He cannot take up His residence within.

What Goes In and What Comes Out

If the heart is the organ of vision, it is also, by the Lord’s own testimony, the fountain of defilement. This is the burden of His teaching in Matthew 15, where Peter asks Him to explain a saying about what does and does not defile a man:

“Then answered Peter and said unto him, Declare unto us this parable. And Jesus said, Are ye also yet without understanding? Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man” (Matthew 15:15–20).

The Two Paths Through the Mouth

Our Lord begins with physiology. He traces the path that food takes: it enters the mouth, goes into the belly, and is cast out into the draught. It does not turn aside and go somewhere else. The draught is the waste place, and the Greek word, aphedrōn, carries the sense of a place of sitting apart. Jesus is aware of the physiology of man, and He uses it deliberately. The body takes what it needs from the food and expels the rest, but the final destination of everything that enters through the mouth is the draught.

Then He turns to what proceeds out of the mouth. The contrast is exact. The mouth is both entrance and exit, but only material substance can enter it, and what exits it, when a man speaks, is immaterial substance. Food and water go in; words come out. Their origins and destinations are entirely different. Food goes from the mouth to the belly; it will never travel to the brain. Words, however, do not go in at all. They proceed, which is to say they issue forth from a source. And the Lord names the source: they come forth from the heart.

The heart, then, is the origin, the factory, the well of immaterial substance. It is where words are produced, and before words, where thoughts are produced, since words are only the extension of thoughts. Our Lord says the same in the twelfth chapter of Matthew:

“O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh” (Matthew 12:34).

The mouth speaks from the heart. In both places Jesus is reiterating one theology: what a man says reveals what a man is, because his speech is drawn from the reservoir within.

The Heart as the Centre of Defilement

The Lord says that the things which come from the heart defile the man. The Greek verb is koinoō, which means to make profane, to make unclean, to pollute. So it is the things from the heart that pollute the man, and they pollute him in the very place from which, according to the beatitude, purification alone can permit him to see God. The heart is therefore the centre of defilement. Every defilement of man issues forth from the heart.

Here I want to press the logic one step further. If the heart is the place where man is defiled, it is also the place where man is to be deified. When the heart has been cleansed to the point where it no longer generates defilement and pollution and uncleanness, that is when a man is brought into theōsisTheōsisNot that we become God by nature, but that by grace we are drawn into His life: “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4)., the participation in the divine life which the Fathers called deification. The part of man that will be deified, changed, transfigured, is the heart, precisely because the heart is where man is defiled. The battlefield of corruption and the sanctuary of glory are the same ground.

Notice, too, that the Lord does not say the things which enter defile the man. It is the things which go out. Within the heart inventions are formed that go forth to destroy the man. The list He gives begins with evil thoughts: “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts”. Thoughts proceed from the heart, and so when a man finds himself thinking evil thoughts, something is happening to him: he is being defiled. He is being rendered incapable of theōria. The foundation of spirituality, or of its opposite, is in the heart.

After evil thoughts come murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, which is untrue testimony, and blasphemies. These, the Lord says, are what defile a man, whereas eating with unwashen hands does not. Jesus is giving us the location that requires our attention. The impediment to spiritual development, the obstacle to the spiritual progress of the saints, is fought and either overcome or surrendered in the heart. As long as the heart continues to manufacture these things, the man is held back.

Where the Passions Are, There the Demons Gather

Every item on the Lord’s list is a sin, and together they belong to what the spiritual tradition calls the passions: the disordered movements of the soul that enslave it. The presence of the passions defiles the man, corrupts the man; and their presence is found in the heart.

Here is a principle that must be stated plainly. Where holiness is, there God is. Where defilement is, where the passions and sin are found, there the demons are, because the demons hang around the passions. A man in whom the passions are alive becomes host to all manner of demons. His heart becomes a jungle, a zoo in which every kind of beast lives and abides. The presence of unholy thoughts is therefore more than a moral symptom. Evil thoughts are an indicator of the company a man is keeping within.

The Flood, the Darkness, and the Usurper

To understand why the heart is contested, we must understand the ambition of the one who contests it. Here I return to the archetype I have drawn from the opening of Genesis:

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2).

In this verse we observe the floods of chaos that came upon the earth and rendered it tohu wa bohu, formless and empty, and dark. But this is not how God created the earth. The earth became this way. We cannot see directly what happened, but we can draw inferences by looking at similar scenes elsewhere in Scripture.

Flood as Judgment

In Genesis 7 to 9, when God determined to destroy mankind from the face of the earth, He used a flood to accomplish it, saving only Noah and his family. The floods of destruction are the instrument God brings in as a means of judgment. When we turn to the very end of the biblical story, to the book of Revelation, where God makes all things new, John records what he saw:

“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea” (Revelation 21:1).

The new earth has no sea, no ocean, no great body of water, but only a river that flows from the throne:

“And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1).

The new earth is watered by the river, not by the sea. If the new earth is the restoration and redemption of the first earth, then the sea cannot have belonged to God’s original creation in the way it now stands. Its presence tells us that something entered into God’s original creation, and it stands as a symbol of judgment in the earth.

Notice what God does in Genesis 1. Even after dividing the waters from the waters, even after bringing forth the dry land and gathering the sea into one place, He does not remove the sea. He bounds it. The book of Job tells us where the sea comes from and how God restrains it:

“Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it, And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors, And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?” (Job 38:8–11).

The sea issued from the womb, and God shut its doors, setting bars so that it could not traverse the land. By nature, then, the waters are held back. When we see the sea cross over the land, when tsunamis and floods sweep across the earth, we are looking at something unnatural, something that has the character of judgment.

The Presence of the Adversary

The submersion of the earth beneath the floods in Genesis 1:2 is indicative of a presence that was never intended to be there, and Scripture identifies that presence as none other than Lucifer himself. His grand vision has always been the replacement of God in the universe. He wants to be God. And so in every place, every dwelling, which God intends to inhabit, Satan wants to establish his replacement, to set up his throne, to make it the place from which he takes up his abode.

When there was no place found for him and his angels in the heavens, they were cast to the earth:

“And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him” (Revelation 12:8–9).

The earth is the last stop before hell, for there is nothing outside heaven and earth except the abyss of darkness, the place of which Jesus says: “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:12). Satan was expelled from heaven into the earth, and the cosmic change in the earth that we see in Genesis 1:2 is the consequence of that expulsion. His presence is represented there by darkness: a deep darkness covering the face of the earth beneath a layer of deep floods.

Scripture repeatedly associates this enemy with floods. In Revelation 12, when the dragon cannot seize the child because the child is caught up to God, he turns on the woman:

“And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood” (Revelation 12:15).

The woman is given “two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place” (Revelation 12:14), where she is fed “a thousand two hundred and threescore days” (Revelation 12:6). And when the dragon finds that she has been delivered, he “went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ” (Revelation 12:17). What comes out of the dragon’s mouth is a flood. Isaiah sees the same pattern and the same divine answer:

“When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall lift up a standard against him” (Isaiah 59:19).

The enemy comes like a flood; he spews a flood from his mouth to destroy the woman and all who worship God. But beneath every flood lies the same desire: to displace God. And here the archetype reaches the heart of man. If man was a creature designed by God to be inhabited by God, then Satan will seek to replace God within that domicile. The darkness upon the deep in Genesis 1:2 is the cosmic image of what the adversary seeks in every human heart: to submerge the place God made for Himself and to sit enthroned upon the waters of chaos.

“I Will Return into My House”

With this preface in place, I turn to the passage that makes the argument explicit in the words of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself:

“When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation” (Matthew 12:43–45).

A Spirit That Calls a Man Its House

Our Lord speaks of “the unclean spirit”. The adjective matters. That which proceeds from the heart is that which defiles, pollutes, and makes a man unclean, and here is a spirit whose very name is uncleanness. It goes out “of a man”. The Lord is not speaking of mankind in general but of a particular person. From this we can deduce the first truth: man can host spirits, and not only the Spirit of God but unclean spirits.

The passage speaks of the spirit having “gone out”. It does not say how, but we know from the same chapter how such spirits come out of a man:

“Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house” (Matthew 12:29).

The only way a spirit can come out of a man is if one with greater authority than the spirit binds it. Unless that happens, a spirit may remain in a man for years.

Once outside, the unclean spirit “walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none”. This spirit is restless outside the body. For it to be at rest, it must reside in a man. Spirits of this kind are profoundly attached to human beings; they are made restless by being removed from their abode.

Then comes the most chilling phrase in the passage: “I will return into my house”. The spirit calls the man its house. When did it take ownership? Scripture does not say, but the claim is unmistakable. The unclean spirit speaks of the man as its possession. Men are houses. Though a man carries a physical body, that body is a carrier, a house, a home, a habitation for spirits. The spirit says it will return to the house from which it came out, and we already know where it came out from: a man.

Seven Spirits More Wicked

When it returns, the spirit finds the house “empty, swept, and garnished”. It then “taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself”. More than one spirit can live within one man. This is infestation: the occupation of a single human being by a multitude. “And they enter in and dwell there”. Man is a dwelling. “And the last state of that man is worse than the first.”

It is the Lord Jesus Christ who articulates all of this, and He tells us four things. First, man is a dwelling place. Second, unclean spirits inhabit men. Third, more than one unclean spirit can make its house within a single man. Fourth, such spirits are restless once they come out of a man, because they have been removed from their abode.

Unclean Spirit and Holy Spirit

The contrast is stark: the unclean spirit, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit makes a man holy, and that is how His presence can be recognised as active and operational within a man. The unclean spirit makes a man unclean. The Lord does not say “an unclean spirit” but “the unclean spirit”, as though naming a particular power, and I believe this is the strongest of the spirits that facilitate the lusts behind human behaviour. Its work is to make a man as unclean as it can, because the more unclean he becomes, the more of its nature he takes on.

Notice also what the returning spirit finds: a house swept and garnished, clean, with no occupant. This tells us what had been making the house unclean in the first place. It was the presence of the spirit itself. When it left, the house was clean, but it was empty, and emptiness is an invitation. A heart that has been delivered but not filled, cleaned but not inhabited by God, stands open to a worse occupation than before.

The Disputed City

So within man is an entire arena, a city. The only question that matters is whose city it is. Is it the city of God or the city of Satan? Is there a dwelling for God within, or a dwelling for demons? Both of these seek a domicile in man, and the Lord has shown us that the unclean spirit, having once lived there, speaks of the place as its own.

Here lies a deep dimension of mystery in the life of man. Most of us live on the surface of our lives, but beneath that surface there is a zoo, a jungle, and all sorts of beasts are fed from it. In the heart the desires of men are twisted. A man will not pray. He will not seek God, will not pursue spiritual goals, will not seek the pleasure of God; yet he will pursue with energy the things that are contrary to the will of God. The heart is regulated by the passions and manipulated by unseen, immaterial forces.

The Lord therefore sets before us two possibilities for the life of a man. The first is the beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God”. The heart must be purified if a man is to see and perceive God; otherwise he is rendered useless for the work of God. And the Lord tells His disciples how that purification is wrought: “Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you” (John 15:3). The heart is a dwelling meant for God and for His word. The second possibility is what we have just seen: in the absence of God and His word, entities other than God lay claim to the heart, take possession of men, and call them their houses.

We must therefore ask by what means spirits claim ownership of their dwellings, and how they may be dislodged. We walk past houses all our lives without realising that within those physical houses there are other houses, other dwelling places. The work of purification is consequently a work of warfare. It is not a work of leisure or luxury, and Satan, who has made his abode and built his empire within, will not lightly or easily forfeit it. There will be war.

The Heart as a Field: The Word and Its Enemies

The parable of the sower in Matthew 13 shows how many impediments stand in the way of the word of God bearing fruit in a man. Jesus explains that the ground is the heart and the word is the seed:

“When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the way side” (Matthew 13:19).

There is the wayside where the birds snatch the seed away; the stony ground where the plant springs up but has no root; the thorns which choke the growing word:

“He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22).

Only one of the four soils yields fruit, and even there the yield differs:

“But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty” (Matthew 13:23).

Only a quarter of those whom the word reached actually bore fruit, and the quality and degree of that fruit varied. Satan has set many obstacles in the heart to prevent the word from yielding real fruit: stony ground, shallow roots, thorns. The Lord is showing us that there is an interior life which must be cultivated. Within man is an Eden, but that Eden has been infested and trampled upon. We must till the ground of our hearts and cultivate its soil until it is fit, so that the tree of the life of God may grow and blossom, so that every virtue and fruit of God may flourish, and so that the word God seeks to plant within us may find a habitation.

Consider the long road the word must travel. When it is sown, when it is spoken, it must contend with the hard ground; it must contend with the birds; it must contend with rootlessness; it must contend with the thorns and briars, the cares of life within a man; and only then can the heart become good ground that yields fruit. No man can come into the glories of Christ without entering into the sufferings of Christ. No man can make his house fit for the habitation of God until he has subdued and destroyed the enemies within his own heart.

Prayer as Excavation: The Warfare of the Heart

Occupied ground is reclaimed by prayer. Prayer is the instrument by which we go in and uproot. It is the work of excavation, the digging out of the passions: the uprooting of the lies, the adulteries, the fornications, the evil thoughts. This is why prayerlessness is such a benefit to the entities that dwell in the heart. When the heart prays, the devil burns; the passions burn. Because they want to remain, they will fight every activity of the Spirit and every pursuit of virtue, since it is precisely these that will dislodge them.

I have read accounts of monks who lived in the mountains of Greece and dedicated their whole lives to prayer, and who found that whenever they sought to pray in their hearts, every kind of devil rose up against them to prevent their ascent, to keep them from prayer. Their testimony matches what our Lord has taught: it is the passions that defile us, and the passions do not leave without a fight. Every time we are angry, every time we are bitter, we are being defiled, made unclean, polluted.

Confession and the Cleansing Blood

The remedy begins with confession:

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

And again: “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). The blood cleanses. As a man says, “Father, I am sorry; I have sinned against You; I have spoken ill; I have lied; forgive me,” the Spirit of God begins His cleansing agency in that very place. This is necessary because the passions create wounds and open doors. Each sin indulged is not only a stain but an entry point.

Consider, then, the warfare we face and the workload we have on our hands. And then we come to church and are told simply to sing, to say “Praise the Lord”, and that is the end of it. It is not. The greater work of man must be done in the unseen place of the heart. If a man treasures the word of God, he will make room for it, whether that means the destruction of the passions, fighting the flesh, or fighting the demons, the things that defile and corrupt and make a man unclean.

The Poverty of a Faith Without Warfare

Here I must speak against a certain strand of Western theology. It says, in effect, that a man is saved by grace through faith alone, and that after he is saved it is all faith. Then how is he cleansed? Simply by attending church services and performing Christian service. Then how is the heart dealt with, and by what means? That question is left unanswered. Paul answers it:

“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)” (2 Corinthians 10:3–4).

Paul says we war. He says only that we do not war after the flesh. If there were no warfare, God would provide no weapons; if there were no warfare, God would provide no armour; and if the believer had no duty to do something with the weapons and resources God provides, there would be no need for them at all. It would simply be faith, faith, faith.

But faith itself must be properly understood:

“But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him” (Hebrews 11:6).

Faith is that without which no man can please God; faith is pleasing God. And a man pleases God when he stands in the place of struggle and fights: fighting that lust, fighting that anger, fighting that bitterness, fighting all the malice and all of what John calls “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16). He fights and resists, and Christ is close to him, because that resistance is crushing him. The demon pushes him toward sin and he says no. It pushes him again, and he says no. That is how we become recipients of the grace of God: “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20). Grace abounds in the presence of struggle.

Paul knew this from experience:

“For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:8–9).

He cried to the Lord three times, and the answer was not removal but grace. As we struggle, the grace of God comes. This is what happens when we struggle in prayer, when we agonise in prayer, when the heart itself prays and cries out, “Deliver me from evil,” while every kind of force works and conspires for our ruin. Satan wants to make a jest of us. He wants to use us to sneer at God. The warfare of the heart is the refusal to let him.

The Prayer That Crushes

Scripture tells us what kind of offering God receives:

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Psalm 51:17).

This is the sacrifice of God: a broken and contrite spirit, a crushed heart, which He will not deny or cast away. The prayer that heals the heart is the prayer that crushes it. Because the heart is the seat of man’s defilement, it is also the seat of his deification; and when that heart is deified, the glory of God is made manifest. We know that a man has been inwardly sanctified, inwardly made a saint, when he has fought the war for the eradication of the passions, the things that defile us, weaken us, and blind us.

A man whose heart is unclean is blind to God. Imagine it: with his eyes he can see everything else. He sees the stars, the sun, the trees, the mountains; he sees all of creation, except its Creator, because his heart is unclean.

A holy monk once said that if a man truly knew the state of his heart, he would never rise from his knees, but would cry to God until God delivered him and made him pure. When a man realises the true state of himself, he will not leave his knees; if need be, he will die on his knees until God has cleansed him of every filth and every hindrance that keeps him from God. It follows that a man who does not spend time on his knees does not truly know the state of his heart. Had he known it, he would cry out with a cry that can only be healed and soothed by God Almighty taking away the sin of his life. Isaiah is the pattern. When he saw the Lord, he wanted to hide; he thought he would die:

“Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5).

If the Christian life is a life of attaining to the glories of Christ, and if Christ died to deliver us from sin, then by that same power we must labour and fight. Yes, at times we will fall. No man can resist a spirit without the grace of God and without holding fast to the word of God. But as we cry to the Lord, and as He grants us His grace and strengthens us, the passions that stood as obstacles and walls between us and our Father, the passions that stood in the way of the indwelling and fruitfulness of the word within us, begin to weaken and begin to die.

My House Shall Be Called a House of Prayer

The final image is the one our Lord enacted with His own hands. When He came into the temple and found it full of trade, He did not negotiate:

“And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables” (John 2:15).

He said, “make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise” (John 2:16); and on another occasion, “It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves” (Matthew 21:13).

This is the state of our hearts. Our hearts have been made dens of thieves, places of merchandise where spirits trade among themselves and trade with us, with our lives, with our emotions. As we lash the passions with the name of Jesus, as we drive them out the way He drove out those who made merchandise in the temple of God, we take up His own zeal for His Father’s house. Let the word of Christ enter in with that scourge, and let Him give that command. By prayer we will evict every passion and everything that defiles within, until the heart is what He said it must be: a house of prayer.

Of the thief, Jesus says:

“The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy” (John 10:10).

When Jesus came into a temple that thieves had occupied, He did not knock politely. How then should we expect Him to enter hearts that have become dens of so many thieves, if not with the scourge, and with the ferocity and holy anger by which He drove out those who defiled His Father’s house? Many of us need exactly that: a spring cleaning of the heart, until our house becomes a dwelling place of God and of God alone, until every foreign entity and spirit that has come to make its home in us has been evicted.

May Jesus enter our hearts and drive out every thief, until our house becomes His house: a house of prayer, the place of communion between man and his Creator, the place where the created may have fellowship with the Uncreated.

Conclusion: That We May See God

The argument of this essay can be gathered into a single movement. Man is a creature of two orders, flesh and spirit, and the inward order is decisive. At the centre of that inward order stands the heart, which our Lord names as both the organ of vision and the fountain of defilement. Purity of heart grants theōria, the vision of God; impurity blinds, and the evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, and blasphemies that issue from the heart are not only sins but signs of who has taken up residence there. The adversary, whose ambition from the beginning has been to displace God, seeks to submerge the heart as once the deep was submerged in darkness, and the Lord Himself tells us that unclean spirits go so far as to call a man their house. The word of God must fight its way through hard ground, shallow soil, and thorns to bear fruit. And the only adequate response is warfare: confession, struggle, resistance, and above all the prayer of the heart, which crushes the soul before God and dislodges what has made its home there.

The practical implications are as demanding as they are clear. The Christian cannot be content with an outward religion of songs and services while the interior remains unexamined. He must learn to pray with the heart, to confess specifically and promptly, to resist the passions even when he is crushed by the resistance, and to treat every evil thought as an intrusion to be expelled rather than a guest to be entertained. Pastorally, this means that those who struggle are not failures; the struggle itself is where grace abounds, and the one who falls must rise and cry again to the Lord. Eschatologically, it means that the vision of God promised to the pure in heart is not a distant reward unrelated to present labour. The cleansing of the heart now is the preparation of the eye that will one day behold Him.

This is why the Church prays as Paul prayed for the saints at Ephesus:

“That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God” (Ephesians 3:16–19).

This is the will of the Father: that we be strengthened in the inner man by His Spirit, that change upon change and transformation upon transformation may conform us to the image of His Son (Romans 8:29), that we may be “renewed in the spirit of your mind” and put on “the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Ephesians 4:23–24). And this is the hope of every heart that has given itself to the war: that it should be with us as it was at Ephesus, where men who practised curious arts brought their books together and burned them before all men (Acts 19:19), because “so mightily grew the word of God and prevailed” (Acts 19:20).

The heart is a city, and it will not stand empty. Either the unclean spirit returns with seven worse than himself, or the King enters with the scourge and takes His throne. Blessed are the pure in heart, for when the thieves are gone and the house is His alone, they shall see God.