We must always pray to the Lord for peace of soul that we may the more easily fulfill the Lord’s commandments; for the Lord loves those who strive to do His will, and thus they attain profound peace in God.
I shall speak first about control of the stomach, the opposite to gluttony, and about how to fast and what and how much to eat. I shall say nothing on my own account, but only what I have received from the Holy Fathers. They have not given us only a single rule for fasting or a single standard and measure for eating, because not everyone has the same strength; age, illness or delicacy of body create differences. But they have given us all a single goal: to avoid over-eating and the filling of our bellies... A clear rule for self-control handed down by the Fathers is this: stop eating while still hungry and do not continue until you are satisfied.
Unless the inner man meditates upon the law of God and is nourished thereby, unless he is strengthened by reading and by prayer, he is conquered by the outer man, and he serves his master.
Paissy the Great, having lost his temper, begged the Lord to deliver him from irritability. The Lord appeared to him and said, ‘Paissy, if thou dost not wish to get angry, desire nothing, neither criticize nor hate any man, and thou wilt have no anger.’
The Saints in Heaven through the Holy Spirit behold the glory of God and the beauty of the Lord's Countenance. But in this same Holy Spirit they see our lives too, and our deeds. They know our sorrows and hear our burning prayers. When they were living on earth they learned of the love of God from the Holy Spirit: and he who knows love on earth takes it with him into eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven, where love grows and becomes perfect. And if love makes one unable to forget a brother here, how much more must the Saints remember and pray for us!
Those who have truly decided to serve the Lord God should practice the remembrance of God and uninterrupted prayer to Jesus Christ, mentally saying: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
The full and complete definition of repentance is that we never again allow in ourselves the sins of which we repent, or whereby our conscience is stung. The mark of satisfaction and forgiveness is when we have driven out from our hearts all desire for them.
The good man thinks to himself in this wise: Every one who has strayed from the truth brings destruction on himself and is therefore to be pitied. But of course the man who has not learned the love of the Holy Spirit will not pray for his enemies. The man who has learned love from the Holy Spirit sorrows all his life over those who are not saved, and sheds abundant tears for the people, and the grace of God gives him strength to love his enemies.
Great is this mystery, and great is the mercy of God towards man. If all the people of the earth knew how deeply the Lord loves man their hearts would be filled with love of Christ and Christ’s humility, and they would seek to be like Him in all things. But man cannot do this by himself, for it is only in the Holy Spirit that he can become like unto Christ. Man that is fallen purifies himself through repentance, and is made new by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and in all things becomes like unto the Lord.
The soul that is given over to the will of God fears nothing: neither thunder nor thieves nor any such thing. Whatever may come, 'Such is God's pleasure,' she says. If she falls sick she thinks, 'This means that I need sickness, or God would not have sent it.'
That prayer may be poured forth with that fervor and singleness of heart that it ought to have, these rules must always be observed. In the first place, anxiety concerning the things of the flesh must be altogether be put away; then we must not allow to enter our minds any thought or even memory of worldly cares or business. We must cut off slanderings, vain words or many words, jestings and the like. We must root out the disturbances of anger especially, and despondency, and also tear up the
evil roots of carnal lust and avarice. And so with these and similar faults done entirely away with and cut off, - things which can also be discerned by human eyes - and with such a cleansing and purifying as we have mentioned first carried out in the sincerity of simplicity and innocence, we must lay the unshakable foundations of humility strong enough to sustain a tower which shall pierce the heavens.
And Jesus, when He was baptised, went up straightway out of the water; and lo, the heavens were opened unto Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon Him; and lo, a voice from heaven saying: 'This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.' The Spirit did not descend on Christ while He was down in the water, but when He came out of it. By this, the wisdom of God seeks to show us that the Spirit of God does not descend on the old man, who is alive to sin and dead to God, but only on the man spiritually re-born, who has died to sin and come alive to God.
