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In any undertaking, domestic or official, do not forget that your strength, your light, your success is Christ and His cross, so do not fail to cry out to the Lord before starting a task: Jesus, help me! Jesus, enlighten me! In this way, your living faith and hope in Christ will be maintained and kindled in your heart, for His is the power and glory forever and ever (6). A means to achieve success in any good deed. When you pray at home during evening or morning prayer or in church during a service, have in your heart concern about completing this task and a heartfelt desire to fulfill it for the glory of God. The Lord and His Most Pure Mother will certainly enlighten you and put a bright thought on your heart on how to accomplish it (6). The wisdom, goodness and omnipotence of God are especially seen in the fact that the Lord places each of us in a place where we can, if we want, bring God the fruits of good deeds and save ourselves and others, and that from the greatest sinners He makes righteous people who obey His grace, drawing us to salvation, and miraculously saves us from all circumstances, snatching us away from destruction itself (6). Not only do things when you want, but especially when you don’t want to. Understand this both about every ordinary everyday matter, and especially about the matter of saving your soul, about prayer, about reading the Word of God and soul-saving books, about going to God’s services, about good deeds, whatever they may be, about preaching the Word of God. Do not obey the lazy, crafty and sinful flesh: it is ready to rest forever and, through temporary peace and pleasure, lead us to eternal destruction. “By the sweat of your face, it is said, you will eat bread” (Gen. 3:19). Work hard at the talent given to you, O wretched soul (on Holy Tuesday at Matins, Kontakion, Tone 2), the Church sings. “The Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, and those who use force gain it” (Matthew 11:12), says our Lord and Savior (6). When the reckless thought of counting any of your good deeds comes into your head, immediately correct this mistake and quickly count your sins, your continuous, countless insults to the All-Good and Righteous Master, and you will find that you have them like the sand of the sea, and in comparison with them there are no virtues (6). It is a strange and wild phenomenon in our nature, damaged by sin, to sometimes hate those who do good and repay them with dislike for our good deeds! Oh, how tight, how poor is our heart with love and mercy! How proud it is! The enemy laughs at us greatly; he wants to destroy the fruits of our good deeds. But you love the more the more you do good to whom, knowing that the one who receives mercy from you also serves as a guarantee of your mercy from God (6). What is the relationship between word and deed? The Word of God called the visible and invisible world from non-existence into existence; the word in the mouth of God the Word was deed. Therefore, word and deed must be inseparable from each other, just as the soul and body are inseparable in their existence. He who keeps and creates the Word of Christ faithfully and constantly, whose word is action, even now does great and amazing things, and everything obeys his word: demons are obeyed, and illnesses are healed, and human morality is edified (7). Oh, that we would pay attention to the consequences of our sins or our good deeds! How careful we would then be, avoiding sin, and how zealous we would be for good; for we would then clearly see that every sin, not eradicated in time, strengthened by habit, takes deep roots in a person’s heart and sometimes confuses, wounds and torments him to death, awakening, so to speak, and coming to life in him on any occasion reminiscent of the sin he once committed and thus desecrating his thought, feeling and conscience. Clouds of tears are needed to wash away the old dirt of sin, it is so sticky and caustic! On the contrary, every good deed that has ever been done sincerely, unselfishly or through repetition has become a habit, pleases our heart, constitutes the joy of our life in the knowledge that we have not entirely lived our life in vain, full of sins, that we are like people and not like animals, that we are also created in the image of God, and there is a spark of divine light and love in us, that although some good deeds will be a counterbalance to our bad deeds in the scales of the unwashed 25 truth of God (7). Each of us with our own life, with our own deeds will prepare for ourselves either blissful immortality or painful eternal death, each of us with our own deeds prepares either an undying worm and an unquenchable fire, or by constantly killing this tenacious and incessantly regenerating worm of sin through fasting, vigil, and prayer, we prepare for ourselves inexpressible peace and bliss forever. Therefore, let everyone be constantly vigilant over himself and cultivate his own heart field, and even with pain and effort, let him pluck out the thorns of passions (8). We ourselves here write, so to speak, by our deeds, eternal justification or eternal condemnation for ourselves at the Last Judgment; and in this, by the way, the meaning of the future judgment is called written: “to carry out on them,” it is said, “the judgment prescribed” (Ps. 149:9). Our books of conscience will either justify us or condemn us, and we will only have to listen to the righteous, eternal verdict of the Judge of the world. Rather, through diligent repentance and alms let us blot out all our sins, voluntary or involuntary, from our conscience, and write into it all kinds of good deeds (8). It is not enough to be called a Christian, but you have to do things, fulfill the commandments that Christ commanded, you need constant repentance, constant attention to yourself in the spirit of faith, constant prayer, constant correction, constant pushing yourself forward, constant improvement of yourself and for this purpose, constant testing of yourself whether we are in faith, whether we live by faith (10). What do our good deeds mean, which we sometimes dare to boast before people and before Your face? Every good deed of ours is of little importance, because it, passing through an unclean heart, borrows from it for the most part some kind of impurity, for example, the impurity of lack of faith, unbelief, self-love, pretense, vanity, pride, impatience, irritability, etc., and right at the same time, a good deed is done by us with God’s help, so that without the Lord, according to His word, we cannot do anything ( John 15:5). There is no doubt that each of us has incomparably more sins than good deeds. How can I remember in prayer about my few good deeds, and those done with God’s help, when I have incomparably more bad deeds? No: I would rather shed a tear of contrition for my sins, I would rather shed a warm prayer to the Lord and to Him I will proclaim my sorrows, for my soul is filled with evil and my stomach is approaching hell, 26 and about my good deeds, if any I have done, I will keep silent or completely forget in the face of God, so as not to imagine that I am a righteous person and deserve a reward from Him for my virtues. I must remember the words of the Lord, which must be spoken to me after I have completed every good deed: “When you have done all that was commanded you, say: We are worthless servants, because we did what we had to do” (Luke 17:10) (14). Wealth and poverty, health and illness, joy and sorrow - everything here soon passes and disappears, but the deeds of people, their vices and virtues do not die, but pass with them into eternity and there they will either be justified or condemned before the Judge of all thoughts and deeds of men and will either be led into heaven or cast into the abyss of hell, from where there will be no escape forever (9). Unwashed (obsolete) – incorruptible. You might be interested in: