Church of England -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 19th century
And to those who long to do that, God's Spirit
will come to fill them with love; and where the Spirit of God is,
there is also the Father, and there is also the Son; for God's
substance cannot be divided, as the Athanasian creed tells us (and
blessed and cheering words they are); and he who hath the Holy
Spirit of Love with him hath both the Father and the Son; as it is
written: 'If a man love Me, my Father will love him, and we will
come unto him, and make our abode with him.'
And then, if we have God abiding with us, and filling us with His
Eternal Life, what more do we need for life, or death, or eternity,
or eternities of eternities? For we shall live in and with and by
God, who can never die or change, an everlasting life of love,
whereof St. Paul says, that though prophecies shall fail, and
tongues shall cease, and knowledge shall vanish away, because all
that we know now is but in part, and all that we see now is through
a glass darkly, yet Love shall never fail, but abide for ever and
ever.
SERMON XVI. GOD'S OFFSPRING
Galatians iv. 7. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son;
and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.
I say, writes St. Paul, in the epistle which you heard read just
now, 'that the heir, as long as he is a child, differs nothing from
a servant, though he be lord of all; but is under tutors and
governors, until the time appointed by his father. Even so,' he
says, we, 'when we were children, were in bondage under the elements
of the world: but when the fulness of time was come, God sent forth
His Son made of a woman, made under a law, to redeem them that were
under a law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.'
When we were children. He is not speaking of the Jews only; for
these Galatians to whom he was writing were not Jews at all, any
more than we are. He was speaking to men simply as men. He was
speaking to the Galatians as we have a right to speak to all men.
Nor does he mean merely when we were children in age. The Greek
word which he uses, means infants, people not come to years of
discretion. Indeed, the word which he uses means very often a
simpleton, an ignorant or foolish person; one who does not know who
and what he is, what is his duty, or how to do it.
Now this, he says, was the state of men before Christ came; this is
the state of all men by nature still; the state of all poor
heathens, whether in England or in foreign countries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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