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

Cultivate patience. Patience is a heavenly gift, a gift from the Heavenly Father... With patience, and love for your fellow men, you become a victor in life's continual trials.

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

Love and self-control purify the soul.

The intellect becomes a stranger to the things of this world when its attachment to the senses has been completely sundered.

There is nothing more efficacious against the wiles of the devil, dearly beloved, than the kindness of forgiveness, and the bountifulness in charity, by means of which sin is either avoided or overcome.

Such tears should be preserved... because they have great power and action in destroying and uprooting sins and passions.

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

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.

And among all the works of God, before which the mind grows faint with awe, which so rejoices yet overwhelms the soul as the Passion of our Savior? For as often as we dwell, as best we can, upon His Omnipotence, which He shares with the Father in one and the same nature, more wondrous does His lowliness seem to us than His power; and with more difficulty do we grasp His emptying Himself of the divine Majesty, than His sublime uplifting of the form of a servant.

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

Spiritual reading and prayer purify the intellect, while love and self-control purify the soul's passionate aspect.

Accordingly, a man will neither be puffed up through pride, nor cast down by despair, if he uses the good things divinely bestowed on him, to the glory of the Giver; withholding his desires from the things which he knows will hurt him. And so he that would preserve himself from the wickedness of envy, from the corruption of sensuality, from the unrest of anger, from the desire of revenge, will be purified by the sanctifying power of true abstinence, and will taste the joy of imperishable delights, so that by making spiritual use of them, he will learn to change earthly possessions into heavenly, not by storing what he has received, but by multiplying more and more that which he has been given.

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

Struggle until death to fulfill the commandments: purified through them, you will enter into life.

When there is no patience, all goodness in the soul is quickly suppressed and sin grows

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

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

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

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440-526-5192 (Phone)