Воля

If you want to live for Christ God, then you must die to sin and to yourself. It is impossible to live both for sin and for Christ. Christ bought you with His own blood, you are His purchased servant. He is your Lord, you are His servant, purchased at the price of His Blood. Decide for yourself for whom you should live - for yourself or for Him, your Lord, whether according to your own or His will. You yourself know that a faithful slave pleases the will of his master, and not his own. The slave who lives not according to the will of the master, but according to his own will and his own whims, is an unfaithful slave. Likewise, a Christian is not a true Christian, but a false and unfaithful servant of Christ, if he lives not according to Christ, but according to his own will. We must submit our will to the will of God and surrender ourselves to His holy and wise providence, so that He can do with us as He pleases and lead us in whatever way He wants - smooth or uneven, cheerful or sad - just as a skilled healer does with the weak, who surrenders to his will and is thus healed. Thy will be done as it is in heaven and on earth (Luke 11:2). The will of God happens without our asking. Therefore, we do not ask God to do what He wants, but we ask that we can do what His will wants. When a sinner turns to himself the reverence, honor, glory and love that he must give to God as his Creator, Redeemer and Provider, then he honors himself more than God, Whom he must honor more than anything else, more than himself and his will, more than all creation, more than father and mother and everything that exists besides God; and so in the place where he should have and honor God, he sets himself up as an idol and worships him. This happens when he proposes and prefers his will to the will of God; what God wants, he does not do, and what God commands, he does not fulfill; and so, despising the will of God, he follows his own will; and so one acts arbitrarily as a supreme master, not subject to God, which is a godless apostasy from God and deification of oneself. He who is subject to his master submits and obeys, as in: a subject to the king, a slave to the master, a son to his father and mother. A faulty sinner, when he does not show submission and obedience to God, thereby shows himself to be insubordinate and insubordinate to God, as anyone can see and admit. Some are sins from weakness and ignorance, to which even God-fearing people are subject, and others are sins of willfulness, insolence and against conscience, which cannot happen except from a disobedient and fearless heart. Try not to do anything more than to correct your will and inner state. This is the whole strength of Christian piety. Any appearance without the inner is nothing. What is not present inside, in the heart, is not present in the essence itself. Virtue is not true virtue if it does not settle in the heart. Correct your heart and will and you will be good, and your external deeds will be good. For the internal is the beginning of the external. When there is no evil inside, in the heart, then it will not appear outside. The hands will not do evil, the feet will not do evil, the tongue and mouth will not speak evil, the ears will not hear evil, the eyes will not look at evil, and so on, when the will and heart do not want. So clean streams flow from a source when the source itself is clean. In the same way, good deeds will happen from the heart when the heart is good. And without a good heart, good deeds cannot happen, just as nothing can flow from a rotten and stinking spring except rotten and stinking water. Correct your heart and will - and you will be good, you will be a true Christian, you will be a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15). For everyone is either good or evil from his will and heart. If the heart and will are good, then the person is good, and when the heart and will are evil, then the person is evil. A good heart is one that is submissive and in agreement with the will of God, and an evil heart is opposed to the will of God and does not agree with it. Faith makes the heart willing; The parent of good will is faith, says Saint Ambrose, therefore, where there is no good will, there is no faith. Try, Christian, to correct yourself within yourself and be kind - and you will be truly kind; otherwise, as you were, you will always be evil, no matter what outwardly good you do.