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

You will pay glorious homage to God if, through virtues, you imprint His likeness on your soul.

A Christian has great difficulty in attaining three things: grief (over sins), tears, and the continual memory of death. Yet these contain all of the other virtues.

Repentance is real when afterwards you keep trying strenuously to live now as you ought; but without this it is not very effectual, if you repent just to say your sins & to keep on living as before.

Do not be surprised that when you draw near to virtue, grievous and intense tribulations come to you on all sides: for virtue is not considered virtue, if it does not involve hard work.

Woe is he who knowingly chooses to sin with the intention to repent when morning comes, for he knows not what the coming day or the night that precedes it will bring.

Virtue does not have a bell that rings to rouse your curiosity, to make you turn and see him. It is an immaterial gift of God.

Blessed is he who preaches virtue by means of his deeds. But if you say something that pertains to virtue, but do the opposite, this will not save you.

Even if all spiritual fathers, patriarchs, hierarchs, and all the people forgive you, you are unforgiven if you don't repent in action.

He who has repented travels towards the Lord.

If the main goal of the repentant sinner should be total, light-bearing and blessed communion with God, then the main hindrance to this is the existence of the passions still active and working in him - the virtues being as yet unsealed in him - and the unrighteousness of his powers. Therefore his main work upon conversion and repentance should be the uprooting of the passions and sealing the virtues - in a word, correcting himself.

The devout soul, even if it practices all the virtues, ascribes everything to God and nothing to itself.

Just as one cannot buy education or artistic skills for any price without working at it, so one cannot attain the habit of exercising the virtues without zeal and diligence.

When a person truly repents, grace approaches at once, and it increases with zeal.

Do not neglect the practice of the virtues; if you do, your spiritual knowledge will decrease, and when famine occurs you will go down into Egypt (Genesis 41:57, 46:6).

He who is deprived of repentance is deprived of the delight to come. He who is close to all things is far from repentance.

Repentance is the door of mercy, opened to those who seek it.

True virtue consists in victory over one’s own self, not to do what our corrupt nature wills, but what the holy will of God desires.

The Lord commands all men to repent (Matt. 4:17), so that even the spiritual and those making progress should not neglect this injunction and fail to give attention to the smallest and most subtle errors.

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

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440-526-5192 (Phone)