Sermon Illustrations

“remember”

• this love on the cross

• this love that reached out to you when you were HOSTILE to God

• this love that reached out to you, though God had every right to be—and WAS—enemies of us

Remembering the cross can have a profound effect on us:

Why then, let your mind come to rest in Christ’s Passion, and find in his sacred wounds the home it longs for. Take refuge in those wounds, those precious scars, as a devout soul should, and you will feel in all your troubles, a deep sense of consolation. How little you will care for the contempt of your fellow men, how easily you will put up with their criticisms. (Thomas a Kempis, The Discipline of the Inner life, p. 133 in H.T. Kerr’s Readings in Christian thought)