By the command of Thine only-begotten Son we communicate with the memory of Thy saints... by whose prayers and supplications have mercy upon us all, and deliver us for the sake of Thy holy name which is invoked upon us.
Condemn only yourself, and you will not be condemned at His second and awful coming. From your whole heart remit the sins of whoever sins before you, and your Father who is in heaven will remit your sins.
The joint prayer of husband and wife is a great force. That may be one of the reasons why the enemy is trying to get both of you to break this excellent habit. [This is] one more temptation which God permits so that you should learn to overcome it and come out of the testing stronger than before!
A prayer offered while one has any cause to reproach a fellow man is an impure prayer. There is only one whom the praying person may and must reproach, and that is himself. Without self-reproach, your prayer is as worthless as it is while you are reproaching someone else in your heart. Perhaps you ask: How can one learn this? The answer is: One learns it through prayer.
If the highest aim of virtue is that which aims at the advancement of most, gentleness is the most lovely of all, which does not hurt even those whom it condemns, and usually renders them whom it condemns worthy of absolution.
A lover of riches is never satisfied, no matter how many possessions he accumulates, but the more he acquires daily, the more his appetite increases; and a person forcibly pulled away from a stream of pure water before he has quenched his thirst feels even more thirsty. In a similar way, once one has experienced the taste of God, one can never be satisfied or have enough of it, but however much one is enriched by this wealth one still feels oneself to be poor. Christians do not set great store by
their own lives, but regard themselves rather as rightly set at nought by God and as everyone’s servants.
Take remarks without grumbling: be thankful when you are scorned, disregarded, ignored. But do not create humbling situations; they are provided in the course of the day as richly as you need. We notice the person who is for ever bowing and fussily servile, and perhaps say, How humble he is! But the truly humble person escapes notice: the world does not know him (I John 3:I); for the world he is mostly a 'zero.'
Let us then not be ashamed to confess our sins unto the Lord. Shame indeed there is when each makes known his sins, but that shame, as it were, ploughs his land, removes the ever-recurring brambles, prunes and thorns, and gives life to the fruits which he believed were dead. Follow him who, by diligently ploughing his field, sought for eternal fruit: 'Being reviled we bless, being persecuted we endure, being defamed we entreat, we are made as the offscouring of the world' (Luke 13:7). If you plough after this fashion you will sow spiritual seed. Plough that you may get rid of sin and gain fruit. He ploughed so as to destroy in himself the last tendency to persecution. What more could Christ give to lead us on to the pursuit of perfection, than to convert and then give us for a teacher one who was a persecutor?
A Church pure and untouched by the harshness of our times is not easily found and from now on rarely to be seen -- a Church that has preserved the apostolic doctrine unadulterated and inviolate! ... Beloved brethren, we are small and humble, but we have not accommodated our faith according to changing events.
Also in another place it shows that the angels are the ministers of the saints. For when Elijah was on the mountain and foreigners were rising up against him, his servant said, 'Many are coming against us and we are all alone.' Then Elijah answered, 'Do you not see the armies and multitudes of angels with us surrounding us to aid us?' (2 Kg. 6:15). You see how the Master and the multitude of angels are standing by the side of their servants.
Empty your mind of these two things: the belief that you are deserving of great things, or the thought that any man is beneath you. If you do this anger will never be permitted to rise up within you.
A life lived in the world can be as good, in the eyes of God, as one spent in a monastery. It is indeed only the keeping of God's commandments, love of all, and a true sense of humility that matter, wherever we are.
Whence is it that we are Christians? Through our faith, would be the universal answer. And in what way are we saved? Plainly because we were regenerate through the grace given in our baptism.
Habit forms from custom, and habit seems to accustom itself to nature. It is much worse and more difficult to change nature. However, with God it is possible. For nature does not set itself against God.
Many are the obstacles that stand in the way of pleasing God; for not merely poverty and obscurity but also riches and honor are trials for the soul. Indeed, to some extent even the solace and ease which grace bestows on the soul can easily become a temptation and a hindrance if the soul is not properly conscious of these effects of grace and does not enjoy them with great circumspection and understanding: for the spirit of evil tries to persuade the soul to relax now it possesses grace, and so contrives to implant in it sluggishness and apathy.
