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

The martyrs will show their torments, the ascetics their good works; but what will I have to show but my apathy and my incessant indulgence?

A sign of deliverance from our falls is the continual reckoning of ourselves as debtors.

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

Self-accusation before God is something that is very necessary for us; and humility of heart is extremely advantageous in our lives, above all at the time of prayer. For prayer requires great attention and needs a proper awareness, otherwise it will turn out to be unacceptable and rejected, and `it will be turned back empty' to our bosom.

I wish I could persuade spiritual persons that the way of perfection does not consist in many devices, nor in much cogitation, but in denying themselves completely and yielding themselves to suffer everything for the love of Christ. And if there is failure in this exercise, all other methods of walking in the spiritual way are merely a beating about the bush, and profitless trifling, although a person should have very high contemplation and communication with God.

A prayer offered while one has any cause to reproach a fellow man is an impure prayer. There is only one whom the praying person may and must reproach, and that is himself. Without self-reproach, your prayer is as worthless as it is while you are reproaching someone else in your heart. Perhaps you ask: How can one learn this? The answer is: One learns it through prayer.

There is yet another reason that may cause our prayer to go unanswered: namely, that though we pray we yet continue in sin.

If you do not learn to deny yourself, you can make no progress in perfection.

He alone knows himself in the best way who thinks of himself as being nothing.

One who is capable of seeing himself is better than one who has been made worthy to see angels.

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

Humble yourself, reproach yourself, consider yourself the very last and the very worst of all, condemn no one - and you will receive God's mercy.

If a man accuses himself, he is protected on all sides.

Be despised and rejected in your own eyes, and you will see the glory of God within yourself. For where humility blossoms, there God’s glory bursts forth.

Unless a man keeps the commandments of God, he cannot progress, even in a single virtue.

The more a man struggles to do good, the more fear grows in him, until it shows him his slightest faults, those which he thought of as nothing while he was still in the darkness of ignorance.

Feeding the hungry is a greater work than raising the dead.

He who believes in Christ is not judged, for he judges himself, and sets his feet aright to follow the light that goes before him. As a man in deep darkness adapts his step to the candle in his hand, so also he who believes in Christ; that is, he who is set to follow after Christ as the light in the darkness of life.

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

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