SACRAMENTAL LIVING

"We live in an age where self- promotion, competition, wealth, and fame are considered good. For some, these things constitute the very goal of life." (Archimandrite Vassilios Papavassiliou) “In the modern world, a man is thought to be successful in terms of his objective accomplishments. If he has acquired wealth, fame, power, or privilege, he is considered accomplished and worthy of emulation…But in the Gospel of Christ, we are reminded that God’s judgments are quite differ

“The world’s present mood is not conducive to prayer and meditation. Mechanism and speed dominate all departments of our present day civilization. We race through life and we hardly have time to read the signposts and to learn whether or not we are on the right road of life. No wonder that so many lives end in ruin and misery. Even in our leisure we are dominated by action and controlled by schedule and thus can hardly experience total relaxation of body and complete serenity

“Redemption has a technical meaning relative to the freeing of slaves. Here, the bondage is to sins; the act of releasing is forgiveness; the price of redemption is blood—the human life of Christ given over to death for the sake of new life. This beginning of life in Christ is not merely legal, nor instantaneous, but living and dynamic.” (Orthodox Study Bible, Ephesians 1:7-8) “Forgiveness of sins follows redemption, for there would be no forgiveness of sin for anyone before

“When our Lord reads Isaiah (Isaiah 61:1-2), He declares its prophecy fulfilled: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, / Because He has anointed Me” (vs. 18). In other words, salvation has arrived, the year of the Lord’s favor (vs. 19). This fulfillment includes the preaching of good news to the destitute. This “good news” defines the nature of the salvation Christ brings to the world: a deliverance achieved in and through His Person and extended to the entire world through the

“We must avoid at all costs competitive comparisons of each other's deeds…To be judgmental is to point out something that is wrong in someone else’s life, making the person feel put down, excluded, and marginalized...Being judgmental is fueled by self-righteousness, the misguided inner motivation to make our own life look better by comparing it to the lives of others.” (Orthodox Study Bible, Galatians 5:13-15, David Kinnaman & Gabe Lyons) “Pride gets no pleasure out of having

“God is the source of faith…God has revealed Himself to us, most especially in the revelation of Jesus Christ, whom we know as the Son of God. This Revelation of God, His love, and His purpose, is constantly made manifest and contemporary in the life of the Church by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Rev. Fr. Thomas Fitzgerald) “To believe in Christ involves faith working through love (Galatians 5:6).” (Orthodox Study Bible, Galatians 5:16-12) “Because we have conceived faith i

“Let us consider our heart for a moment as a parcel of land we are seeking to cultivate. Concerning hardness of heart, Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos says: “At first the ground may be soft and relatively easy to plow. But as we continue digging, we reach a level full of pebbles. Further down we reach solid rock. It is like sowing on granite. Nothing can penetrate it . . . because of three things: over preoccupation with worldly affairs, focus on physical pleasure, and obsess

“Christianity is based on the willingness of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to live with us and die for us. This is unique to the Christian faith—no other faith teaches that God would do this amazing thing for His creatures, out of completely self-emptying love for them…The exaltation of Jesus as a man depended entirely on His self-emptying humility. True greatness, divine greatness, is the ability to be the least and to the least with the absolute certitude that it is externa

“The indwelling of the Holy Spirit…is God’s ultimate gift to every true Christian. The Holy Spirit is an inestimable divine endowment which we must strive to retain, submitting all that we are and all that we have to Christ as King and God…However, such an unqualified surrender runs against the grain of American values, which emphasize personal independence and “doing one’s own thing.” It runs contrary to our ego’s deep desire for self-actualization and self-expression…We oft

“Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition…People who have traveled far along the contemplative path are often aware that the sense of separation from God is itsel