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  • Divine Liturgy: Sundays 9:30AM
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Quotes

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

Keep your conscience keen and bright, and refrain from hankering after, or expecting, consolation. Leave that to God. He knows when, where, and how to give it to you.

Temptations are sent for improvement when God delivers his righteous ones to various temptations, humiliating them for some slight and unimportant offense, or to increase their purity, in order that every uncleanliness of thought, or... dross which He sees they have harbored in secret, may be burnt away in this present life, and that so He may bring them, as it were pure gold, to the future judgment...

When beset by temptations pray for courage and strength to remain firm. Remember: there is an eternity!

Grace always precedes temptation, as if to notify you saying, 'Prepare yourself and lock your doors.'

There is nothing more burdensome and grievous then when conscience accuses us in anything, and there is nothing dearer then calmness and approval of the conscience.

When you pray fervently, watch, for there will be temptations. This happens to everyone.

It is up to us now to either bury our conscience under the ground, or to have it shine forth and illuminate us if we obey it. When our conscience says to us, 'Do this,' and we treat it with contempt, or it says it again and we refuse, then we are trampling it down, burying it under ground. Thus, it cannot speak to us clearly because of the weight upon it.

Whenever in your path you find unchanging peace, beware: you are very far from the divine paths trodden by the weary feet of the saints. For as long as you are journeying in the way to the city of the Kingdom and are drawing near the city of God, this will be a sign for you: the strength of the temptations that you encounter. And the nearer you draw close and progress, the more temptations will multiply against you.

Temptations are permitted so that we may learn what is in our heart.

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.

Remember that a good action is always either preceded or followed by temptations. God permits this so that the virtue, exercised in that particular action, may be confirmed, consolidated, steeled.

The way to attain compunction is an attentive life. ‘The beginning of repentance comes from the fear of God and attention,’ as the holy martyr Boniface says.

When God, using our conscience, calls us to righteousness and yet our self-will opposes Him, He respects our freedom and lets our own will be done; but then, alas, our minds grow dull, our will slack, and we commit iniquities without number. On the other hand, the fruits of the spirit are soon granted to them who follow the commandments of Christ our Lord.

If a man tries to overcome temptations without prayer and patient endurance, he will become more entangled in them instead of driving them away.

Christ allows temptations so that we may be purified of our predispositions.

The principle characteristic of this present, temporal life is temptation.

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

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The Fathers used to say, “If temptation befall thee in the place thou dost inhabit, desert not the place in the time of temptation: for if thou dost, wheresoever thou goest, thou shalt find what thou fliest before thee.”

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

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440-526-5192 (Phone)