Title: Sermon in our hearts
The diverse spiritual joy that rises above all labors, earthly suffering, death, in an external sense, and is applied to inner values like piety, virtue, wisdom, is the blessedness which is the result of a proper response to God and to one another, and is always in alignment with the kingdom, rather than to earthly goods and secular values.
Title: After he drove the man out
The one real pleasure in the garden of delight is the presence of the Lord God.
If anything else, the world has lost its expectation of the wonder of the sound of the footsteps of God, and yet man’s every endeavor, learning, physical prowess, is geared toward achieving the bliss of Paradise exclusive of the Creator in its reality.
Let us be reminded that there can be no lasting joy outside the economy of God. The best the world system can offer are the fleeting enjoyments afforded by the cursed environment out of the Garden God had planted in the east, in Eden.
Title: Love your neighbor
Love for God is not so personal so as not to include the people around us, people we relate to in everyday life.
Christianity is a faith of commitment and responsibility. We cannot fully relate with God if we are not of the mind to be responsible for the welfare of others.
A felt affection for God must overflow to our neighbor – with whom we often have friction and clash of character and interests – or it will have no meaning or reason because love had been purposed to be completed in someone else, other than ourselves; and love that returns to God must pass through the test of a sacrificial life lived for others, a love that is ready to give and to forgive, just as the Lord Jesus did not live for himself but for mankind, his neighbor during his tenure on earth.
Title: Tomorrow
No matter how many tomorrows with their assurance of good things and promise and success could be had for the easing of the anxious mind, nothing could give complete hope than the surety of eternal life with God.
The past, the future, time itself and the events that mark the way of life, no matter how fulfilling, sink into insignificance when the hope of the spirit, which we are, fall short of eternity for which we have been conceived by the wisdom and the Word of God.