Resisting the Everyday Temptations
The sermon emphasizes the importance of yielding up our hearts to God's great grace of love and letting it fill our whole heart and life.
Mary Wilder Tileston, through the words of Francis Paget, emphasizes the importance of loving one another as a key aspect of our purpose on earth. By allowing God's love to fill our hearts and lives, we can overcome sin and selfishness, leading to a daily increase in His love within us. Through prayer, work, studying the Bible, and partaking in the Holy Eucharist, we can cultivate and strengthen this love, leading to growth in love, joy, and peace beyond our imagination. Ultimately, God's forgiveness and eternal love will bring us into the fullness of life in His perfect and unending love.
Text
Ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another.
--1 THESSALONIANS 4:9
If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us.
--1 JOHN 4:12
THIS is the great business and meaning of our life on earth: that we should more and more yield up our hearts to God's great grace of love; that we should let it enter ever more fully and more freely into us, so that it may even fill our whole heart and life. We must day after day be driving back, in His strength, the sin that doth so easily beset us, and the selfishness that sin has fastened in our hearts; and then His love will day by day increase in us. Prayer will win and keep it; work will strengthen and exercise it; the Bible will teach us how to know and prize it, how to praise God for it; the Holy Eucharist will ever renew and quicken its power in our hearts. And so (blessed be God!), love and joy and peace will grow in us, beyond all that we can ask or think; and He will for.give us, for love's sake, all the failures, all the faults in whatever work He has given us to do; and will bring us at last into the fulness of that life which even here He has suffered us to know; into that one Eternal Home, where Love is perfect, and unwearied, and un.ending; and where nothing ever can part us from one another or from Him.
--FRANCIS PAGET
Sermon Outline
- The Great Business of Our Life
- The Sin that Besets Us
- The Power of Love and Joy
- Growing beyond all we can ask or think
- Forgiveness and the fulness of life
Key Quotes
“THIS is the great business and meaning of our life on earth: that we should more and more yield up our hearts to God''s great grace of love;” — Mary Wilder Tileston
“And so (blessed be God!), love and joy and peace will grow in us, beyond all that we can ask or think;” — Mary Wilder Tileston
Application Points
- We must daily drive back sin and selfishness in our hearts through prayer and work.
- Love and joy and peace will grow in us as we yield up our hearts to God's love.
- God will forgive us our failures and bring us into the fulness of life in His eternal home.