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

Do not seek to find the cause of temptations or whence they come; only pray to suffer them with gratitude.

If you lay down rules for yourself, do not disobey yourself; for he who cheats himself is self-deluded.

The Panagia is the salvation of the whole world, she is the only mother for all Christians… She has much love for the human race, especially for sinners.

The study of divine principles teaches knowledge of God to the person who lives in truth, longing and reverence.

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

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

You were commanded to keep the body as a servant, not to be unnaturally enslaved to its pleasures.

Just as desire and rage multiply our sins, so self-control and humility erase them.

He who fears God will pay careful attention to his soul and will free himself from communion with evil.

Go and have pity on all, for through pity, one finds freedom of speech before God.

Ascetic exertion, at the personal, family, and parish level, particularly of prayer and fasting, is the characteristic of Orthodoxy.

In Christianity truth is not a philosophical concept nor is it a theory, a teaching, or a system, but rather, it is the living theanthropic hypostasis - the historical Jesus Christ (John 14:6). Before Christ men could only conjecture about the Truth since they did not possess it. With Christ as the incarnate divine Logos the eternally complete divine Truth enters into the world. For this reason the Gospel says: 'Truth came by Jesus Christ' (John 1:17).

Love and self-control purify the soul.

Keep your mind from malicious thoughts of your neighbors, knowing that such thoughts are hurled by diabolical power, to keep your mind from your own sins and from seeking.

Prayer is the mind's dialogue with God, in which words of petition are uttered with the intellect riveted wholly on God. For when the mind unceasingly repeats the name of the Lord and the intellect gives its full attention to the invocation of the divine name, the light of the knowledge of God overshadows the entire soul like a luminous cloud.

The Church is the personhood of the God-human Christ, a God-human organism and not a human organization. The Church is indivisible, as is the person of the God-human, as is the body of the God-human. For this reason it is a fundamental error to have the God-human organism of the Church divided into little national organizations. In the course of their procession down through history many local Churches have limited themselves to nationalism, to national methods and aspirations, ours being among them. The Church has adapted herself to the people when it should properly be just the reverse: the people adapting themselves to the Church. This mistake has many a time been made by our Church here. But we very well know that these were the 'tares' of our Church life, tares which the Lord will not uproot, leaving them rather to grow with the wheat until the time of harvest (Matth. 13, 29-30). We also well know (the Lord so taught us) that these tares have their origin in our primeval enemy and enemy of Christ: the devil (Matth. 13, 25-28). But we wield this knowledge in vain if it is not transformed into prayer, the prayer that in time to come Christ will safeguard us from becoming the sowers and cultivators of such tares ourselves.

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

The mission of the Church is to bring about in her members the conviction that the proper state of human personhood is composed of immortality and eternity and not of the realm of time and mortality... and the conviction that man is a wayfarer who is wending his way in the sway of time and mortality towards immortality and all eternity.

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

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[email protected]
440-526-5192 (Phone)