Tag: God
To Seek God Perfectly
This then is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal… Read More ›
Getting Closer to God
An old man persevered in fasting for seventy weeks, eating only once a week. He asked of God about [the meaning of] a certain passage in holy Scripture and God did not reveal it to him. He said to himself, “See how much labor I have undertaken and it has been of no profit to… Read More ›
God Can Be Seen in Man and in Each One of Us
If I insist on giving you my truth, and never stop to receive your truth in return, then there can be no truth between us. Christ is present ‘where two or three are gathered in my name.’ But to be gathered in the name of Christ is to be gathered in the name of the… Read More ›
Prayerful Endurance
(In time of affliction) we do what every human would do, we pray that it may be taken away from us. We owe, however, at least this much in our duty to God: if He does not take it away, we must not imagine that we are forgotten by Him, but, because of our loving… Read More ›
The New Creature God Seeks
For to despise the present age, not to love transitory things, unreservedly to stretch out the mind in humility to God and our neighbor, to preserve patience against offered insults and, with patience guarded, to repel the pain of malice from the heart, to give one’s property to the poor, not to covet that of… Read More ›
The Creator Exalts His Creation
Created as we were to the image and likeness of the Creator, we fell through our sin from God into ourselves, and fell from ourselves beneath ourselves into such an abyss of unlikeness that no hope was left. But there came the Son of God, eternal Wisdom; he bowed his heavens and came down. He… Read More ›
The Judgements of God
Abba Antony, failing to understand the judgments of God, asked, “Lord, why is it that some die young, and others live to a ripe old age, and why are some incompetent while others abound in all manner of skills, and why are some people unjustly rich while others live in the extremes of poverty?” And… Read More ›
Confidence in God’s Help
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I… Read More ›
Human Beings are Beloved by God
The Lord, both as man and as God, helps and benefits everyone. As God, he forgives sins; as man, he instructs us not to sin. Therefore human beings are rightly beloved by God, since they are his creatures. Other things were created by his command alone, but human beings were created by the work of… Read More ›
God’s Love of Humanity
For God loved human beings, on account of whom he made the world, to whom he subordinated all things on the earth, to whom he gave reason and mind, whom alone he inclined to look above to himself, whom he made from his own image, to whom “he sent his one and only Son” [1… Read More ›