Helping Our Neighbor
We must be active and earnest in kindness, not just passive and inoffensive, to truly help our neighbors and please them for their good.
Mary Wilder Tileston preaches about the importance of considering and pleasing others for their good, emphasizing the need to lighten burdens, lessen cares, promote pleasures, and gratify wants and wishes of those around us. She highlights the significance of self-denial, kindness, and actively engaging in acts of love towards family, friends, and neighbors, rather than just avoiding unkindness. Tileston also reflects on the sacrificial nature of hospitality, where giving what one has is easy, but offering weariness and pain is a true sacrifice that adds value to our acts of service.
Text
Let every one of us please his neighbor for his good.
ROMANS 15:2
Let us consider one another.
HEBREWS 10:24
LOOK around you, first in your own family, then among your friends and neighbors, and see whether there be not some one whose little burden you can lighten, whose little cares you may lessen, whose little pleasures you can promote, whose little wants and wishes you can gratify. Giving up cheerfully our own occupations to attend to others, is one of the little kindnesses and self-denials. Doing little things that nobody likes to do, but which must be done by some one, is another. It may seem to many, that if they avoid little unkindnesses, they must necessarily be doing all that is right to their family and friends; but it is not enough to abstain from sharp words, sneering tones, petty contradiction, or daily little selfish cares; we must be active and earnest in kindness, not merely passive and inoffensive.
LITTLE THINGS, 1852
The labor of the baking was the hardest part of the sacrifice of her hospitality. To many it is easy to give what they have, but the offering of weariness and pain is never easy. They are indeed a true salt to salt sacrifices withal.
GEORGE MACDONALD
Sermon Outline
- The Importance of Helping Our Neighbor
- The Value of Little Acts of Kindness
- The True Cost of Hospitality
- The labor of sacrifice can be wearisome
- True hospitality requires more than just giving what we have
- Be active and earnest in kindness, not just passive and inoffensive
Key Quotes
“Let every one of us please his neighbor for his good.” — Mary Wilder Tileston
“Giving up cheerfully our own occupations to attend to others, is one of the little kindnesses and self-denials.” — Mary Wilder Tileston
“The labor of the baking was the hardest part of the sacrifice of her hospitality.” — Mary Wilder Tileston
Application Points
- Look for opportunities to lighten the burdens and lessen the cares of those around you.
- Be willing to give up your own time and do tasks that nobody likes to do to show kindness to others.
- Recognize the true cost of hospitality and be willing to make sacrifices to show love and care to others.