Tit. 1:15 ... "To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled."
On the afternoon of August 4, 1971 in Cairo, Egypt, I visited the fortress of Saladin, a Moslem conqueror who lived about eight hundred years ago. In the fortress, or citadel, there is a very large and ornate mosque built by Muhammad Ali, the governor of Egypt in the early nineteenth century. Within this building and suspended by a chain about forty feet long is a gigantic chandelier about thirty feet across containing hundreds of lamps. But what impressed me most was the windows, constructed of intricate patterns of stained glass. Since the mosque faced west, these windows were illuminated by the brilliant rays of the sun beaming across the Sahara Desert. The light coming in through the stained glass turned everything inside the building the same colors as the glass. All around there were patterns of red, yellow, orange, green, blue, purple, and gold. Even though a bench was brown in natural light, it took on instead the shades of the variegated colors of the windows.
It is impossible for me to picture in words the beautiful scene I witnessed that afternoon so long ago. You just had to be there and experience it in order to appreciate it. A thought occurred to me then that related what I saw to the words of Jesus in Mat. 6:22-23, "The lamp of the body is the eye; if therefore your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!" In this simple illustration Jesus compares our eyes to the windows in a building which admit light. The nature of the glass in the window determines the quality of light that radiates into the room. If the window is colored, the interior of the room will be colored with the same shades and hues as the glass. If the window is distorted, objects within the room will be distorted because of the tricks played by the multiple refractions of light upon it. If the window is obscured or dirty, then a great deal less light will be admitted, and the room will be dim or dark.
In Tit. 1:15 the writer is drawing from Jesus' imagery in Mat. 6:22-23. The mind and conscience is like a window between one's inner life and the external world. If a person is greedy, he interprets others likewise and feels himself in competition with them for desirable things. If someone is a thief, he thinks others are fair game with respect to their possessions, neither considering nor caring that they labored for what they have. The fornicator thinks of people as sexual objects with the same lascivious urge as himself. If a person is deceitful and suspicious, he considers others to be like himself -- untrustworthy and potentially harmful.
When people with a lust for power read the Bible, they are most attracted to the passages where men came to power and exercised it with a will. When carnal minded people open God's word, they are most fascinated with its statements and accounts about sexual activity. But when a person's mind has been purified and his conscience cleansed by submitting to the power of God's Spirit, he is enabled to see the beauty, goodness, and worth that are always present in others and in the situations of life. Even when the beauty, goodness, and apparent worth are minimal, the pure-minded person will nevertheless seek them out to the degree they exist and then be interested in how they can be increased to transform the individual.
When Jesus came into First Century society, He was sometimes accused of being a gluttonous man, winebibber, and friend of the hated publicans and sinners, (Mat. 11:19). It is revealing that they saw Him like this, for there is evidence that these very sins prevailed in their own lives. Jesus, however, though He saw the evil in their lives and exposed it, also saw the good and tried to stimulate its growth, (Mat. 13:15; 23:37).
