Your Heart God's Home
Making your heart a place where God dwells requires heartfelt simplicity, love, and reverence, and becomes a beautiful and helpful part of your life.
Mary Wilder Tileston emphasizes the importance of continually conversing with God in heartfelt simplicity, reflecting on Him with love and reverence, and offering up our hearts and all that we are to Him sincerely. She encourages starting this practice again if we falter, promising that it will become like a heaven on earth with patience and courage. Tileston assures that this way of life is not hard but easy and pleasant to the spirit, leading to a deep connection with God and a heavenly experience.
Text
As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, 0 God.
PSALMS 42:1
Singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.
EPHESIANS 5:19
LORD, make my heart a place where angels sing!
For surely thoughts low--breathed by Thee
Are angels gliding near on noiseless wings;
And where a home they see
Swept clean, and garnished with adoring joy,
They enter in and dwell,
And teach that heart to swell
With heavenly melody, their own untired employ.
JOHN KEBLE
LET your heart and desires continually hold converse with God, in heartfelt simplicity. Reflect on Him with feelings of love and reverence, and often offer up your heart, with all that you have and are, to Him, in spirit and in truth, as cordially and sincerely as possible. if through weakness or unfaithfulness you forsake this exercise, which is so incredibly helpful and beautiful, all you have to do is, meekly and heartily to begin again; and do not be weary of it, although in the beginning you may not find any great advantage from it, or make any rapid progress in it. It is not true that such a mode of life is hard; it is easy and pleasant to the spirit, and becomes in due time like a heaven upon earth. A little patience and courage alone are needed.
GERHARD TERSTEEGEN
Sermon Outline
- The Heart as a Home for God
- A Place of Adoration
- A Place of Worship
- A Place of Heavenly Melody
Key Quotes
“For surely thoughts low--breathed by Thee / Are angels gliding near on noiseless wings;” — Mary Wilder Tileston
“LET your heart and desires continually hold converse with God, in heartfelt simplicity.” — Mary Wilder Tileston
“It is not true that such a mode of life is hard; it is easy and pleasant to the spirit, and becomes in due time like a heaven upon earth.” — Mary Wilder Tileston
Application Points
- Make time to converse with God in heartfelt simplicity, love, and reverence.
- Offer your heart to God in spirit and truth, and do not be weary if progress is slow.
- Remember that this mode of life is easy and pleasant to the spirit, becoming like a heaven upon earth with time and courage.