A collection of scriptural meditations from Saints and Fathers of the Church.

Silence of lips is better and more wonderful than any edifying conversation. Strive to acquire humility and submissiveness. Never insist that anything should be according to your will, for this gives birth to anger. Do not judge or humiliate anyone, for this gives birth to anger. Do not judge or humiliate anyone, for this exhausts the heart and blinds the mind, and thereon leads to negligence and makes the heart unfeeling.

Patient endurance is the soul's struggle for virtue; where there is struggle for virtue, self-indulgence is banished.

My brother, the passions are afflictions; and so the Lord does not excommunicate us because of them, but He says: 'Call upon me in the time of affliction; and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me'. Therefore, when beset by any kind of passion, there is nothing more useful than to call upon the Name of God. All we can do, weak as we are, is to flee for refuge to the Name of Jesus. For the passions, being demons, retreat if this Name is invoked.

A wise man is one who pays attention to himself and is quick to separate himself from all defilement.

Strive to love every man equally, and you will simultaneously expel all the passions.

He who smells the smell of one's own foul odor doesn't smell the foul odor of anyone else.

When you intend to do something and see that your thought is perturbed, and if after invoking God's Name it remains perturbed even by a hair's breadth, know from this that the action you mean to commit is from the evil one and refrain from commiting it. For nothing done with perturbation is pleasing to God.

We are sons of God or of Satan according to whether we conform to goodness or to evil.

Self-love -- that is, friendship for the body -- is the source of evil in the soul.

Reading the scriptures is a great safeguard against sin.

According to the degree to which the intellect is stripped of the passions, the Holy Spirit initiates the intellect into the mysteries of the age to be.

Blessed stillness gives birth to blessed children: self-control, love and pure prayer.

If you abandon God and are a slave to the passions, you cannot reap God's mercy.

If you are not willing to repent through freely choosing to suffer, unsought sufferings will providentially be imposed on you.

Control your stomach, sleep, anger, and tongue, and you will not 'dash your foot against a stone.'

During a time of disturbance and warfare of thoughts, one should lessen a little even the ordinary quantity of food and drink.

You have no peace from thoughts, which impel you to trouble others, and in turn to be troubled by others. But know, my brother, that if we offend by word or deed, we are thereby ourselves offended a hundredfold. Be longsuffering in all things and refrain from letting your own will enter into anything. Carefully examine your thoughts lest they infect your heart with deadly poison (ill temper) and make you take a gnat for a camel, a pebble for a cliff, and lest you become like a man who has a beam in his own eye but beholds the mote in the eye of another.

Break the bonds of your friendship for the body and give it only what is absolutely necessary.

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Archangel Michael Orthodox Church
5025 E. Mill Rd
Broadview Heights, Ohio 44147

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440-526-5192 (Phone)