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

Ignorance of the scriptures is a precipice and a deep abyss.

Nothing is more unsettling than talkativeness and more pernicious than an unbridled tongue, disruptive as it is of the soul’s proper state. For the soul’s chatter destroys what we build each day and scatters what we have laboriously gathered together.

The more a man's tongue flees verbosity, the more his intellect is illumined so as to be able to discern deep thoughts; for the rational intellect is befuddled by verbosity.

Reading the Scriptures is a great means of security against sinning.

If Moses, who was a god to Pharaoh, was shut out from the Land of Promise because of one word, how much more will not the evil speech of our tongue, by which we offend and hurt both God and man, shut us out from heaven?

In general, loquacity opens the doors of the soul, and the devout warmth of the heart at once escapes. Empty talk does the same, but even more so… Empty talk is the door to criticism and slander, the spreader of false rumors and opinions, the sower of discord and strife. It stifles the taste for mental work and almost always serves as a cover for the absence of sound knowledge…

The Holy Fathers teach us how to become familiar with the Gospel, how to read it and how to understand it, what helps and what opposes its understanding. Therefore, at first you must devote more time to reading the Holy Fathers...

Reading the scriptures is a great safeguard against sin.

Trials are of two kinds. Either affliction will test our souls as gold is tried in a furnace, and make trial of us through patience, or the very prosperity of our lives will oftentimes, for many, be itself an occasion of trial and temptation. For it is equally difficult to keep the soul upright and undefeated in the midst of afflictions, as to keep oneself from insolence and pride in prosperity.

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

Rejoice when you perform the virtues, but do not become exalted, lest, arriving at the pier, you suffer a shipwreck.

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.

Virtues are connected with suffering.

The Scriptures were not given merely that we might have them in books, but that we might engrave them on our hearts.

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...

We must with unflagging zeal and care give ourselves to the pursuit of virtue, and constantly occupy ourselves in its practice, lest at any time progress may cease, and regress immediately take its place.... To cease to acquire means to lose, for the will which goes no longer forward will not be far from peril of falling back.

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

Virtue can only be attained by unremitting effort.

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5025 E. Mill Rd
Broadview Heights, Ohio 44147

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