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

Keep the commandments, and you will find peace; love God, and you will attain spiritual knowledge.

Love and self-control purify the soul.

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

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

Leave off all evasions, bend your neck to humility and obedience, and you will receive mercy. If you practice with humility and obedience what you hear from the fathers, God will grant you His blessed help not only in the work you are doing, but will make all your works successful, for He protects the path of those who fear Him and watches their progress.

The soul's health consists in dispassion and spiritual knowledge; no slave to sensual pleasure can attain it.

Acquire humility, which scorches the demons, obedience, which opens the door for the Son of God to enter a man, faith which saves a man, hope which makes him unashamed; and love which lets not a man fall away from God.

The greatest weapons of someone striving to lead a life of inward stillness are self-control, love, prayer, and spiritual reading.

What is self-justification? - Self-justification is when a man denies his sin, as we see in the case of Adam, Eve, Cain and others who have sinned but, wishing to justify themselves, denied their sin.

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.

All sin is due to sensual pleasure, all forgiveness to hardship and distress.

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.

If you wish to be delivered from shameful passions, do not behave with anyone familiarly, especially with those toward whom your heart is inclined by a lustful passion; through this you will be delivered also from vainglory. For in vainglory is involved the pleasing of men, in the pleasing of men is involved familiarity of behavior, and familiarity of behavior is the mother of all passions.

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

Silence of the lips is better and more wonderful than any edifying conversation. Our fathers embraced it with reverence and were glorified through it.

Spiritual freedom is release from the passions; without Christ’s mercy you cannot attain it.

Self-control and strenuous effort curb desire; stillness and intense longing for God wither it.

Concerning fasting, do not grieve, as I have said to you before: God does not demand of anyone labors beyond his strength. And indeed, what is fasting if not a punishment of the body in order to humble a healthy body and make it infirm for passions, according to the word of the Apostle: 'When I am weak, then am I strong' (II Corinthians 12:10).

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

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440-526-5192 (Phone)