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Don’t stare at the beauty of a person’s face, but look at his soul; do not look at his clothing (the body is temporary clothing), but look at the one who dresses with it; do not look at the splendor of the house, but look at the tenant, who lives in it and what kind of person, otherwise you will offend the image of God in man, you will dishonor the king by bowing to his servant, and not giving him the slightest honor due to him. Also, do not look at the beauty of the printed font of the book, but look at the spirit of the book, otherwise the spirit will be degraded, but the body will be exalted, because the letters are the body, and the content of the book is the spirit. Do not be deceived by the melodic sounds of an instrument or voice, but by their impression on the soul or by their words, find out what their spirit is; if sounds evoke quiet, chaste, holy feelings in your soul, listen and feed your soul with them; if through them passions flow into your soul, stop listening, abandon both the body and the spirit of music (6). “Do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thess. 5:19), says the Word of God. Remember this for every Christian, especially a priest and a teacher of children. Especially we need to always be burning in spirit in our high service to God and humanity. How much we would do for God, for people and for ourselves if we were to do our work with faith and love, with zeal, fervor and energy, and how little, dry, fruitless our work will be when we begin to do it sluggishly, lazily, with coldness, without any zeal and energy! We will be greatly accountable to God both for ourselves and for those entrusted to our care (6). When your heart is troubled in spirit by some passion and you are deprived of peace, filled with confusion, and words of discontent and enmity towards your neighbors fly from your tongue, do not hesitate to remain in this state that is harmful to you, but immediately bow your knees and confess your sin before the Holy Spirit, saying from the bottom of your heart: I have offended you, Holy Soul, with the spirit of my passion, the spirit of malice and disobedience to You; and then with all your heart, with a feeling of the omnipresence of the Spirit of God, read a prayer to the Holy Spirit: “O Heavenly King, Comforter, Soul of truth, who art everywhere and fulfills all things, Treasure of good things and Giver of life, come and dwell in me and cleanse me from all filth and save, O Blessed One, my passionate and lustful soul,” and heart yours will be filled with humility, peace and tenderness. Remember that every sin, every passion and addiction to something earthly, every displeasure and enmity towards your neighbor because of something carnal offends the All-Holy Spirit, the Spirit of peace, love, the Spirit that draws us from earthly to heavenly, from the visible to the invisible, from the corruptible to the incorruptible, from the temporal to the eternal, from sin to the sacred, from vice to virtues (6). Distinguish within yourself between the Life-giving Spirit and the deadening spirit that kills your soul. When your soul has good thoughts, it’s good for you, it’s easy; when there is peace and joy in your heart, then you have a good spirit, the Holy Spirit; and when you have unkind thoughts or unkind movements of the heart, then it’s bad, it’s hard; when you are internally confused, then there is an evil spirit in you, an evil spirit. When there is an evil spirit in us, then, with tightness of heart and confusion, we usually feel the difficulty of reaching the Lord with our hearts, because the evil spirit binds the soul and does not allow it to rise to God. The evil spirit is the spirit of doubt, unbelief, passions, tightness, sorrow, confusion, and the good spirit is the spirit of undoubted faith, the spirit of virtues, the spirit of spiritual freedom and breadth, the spirit of peace and joy. By these signs, know when the Spirit of God is in you and when the spirit is evil, and as often as possible rise with a grateful heart to the All-Holy Spirit, who revives and sanctifies you, and with all your might, flee doubt, unbelief and passions with which the spiritual serpent, the thief and murderer of our souls, creeps into our souls (6). You will not experience the actions of the evil machinations of the evil spirit, you will not recognize and honor as you should the benefits bestowed on you by the Good Spirit; Without recognizing the killing spirit, you will not recognize the Life-giving Spirit. Only because of the direct opposites of good and evil, life and death, do we clearly recognize both; Without being exposed to troubles and the dangers of physical or spiritual death, you will not heartily recognize the Savior, the Giver of Life, who delivers from these troubles and from spiritual death. Oh, Jesus is the consolation, joy, life, peace and spaciousness of our hearts! Glory to God, the Wise and All-Good, that He allows the spirit of evil and death to tempt and torment us! Otherwise, how would we begin to value the consolation of grace, the consolation of the Comforting, Life-Giving Spirit! (6). The Lord God is like the Self-Belly and the abundance of life. From eternity himself, as Gregory the Theologian says, he moved into Three Persons and settled on Three, that is, God is the Father, the Word and the Spirit. You ask, how is there three Persons in God? I answer: I don’t understand how, but I know that it should be this way and it cannot be otherwise. You will also ask: why is the third Person in God called Spirit and why is He a special Person, when God is without that a Spirit? I answer: The Spirit of God is called Spirit in relation to creation: the Lord breathed with His Hypostatic Spirit - and, at the beck of His Life-giving Spirit, countless spirits appeared: “By the Spirit of His mouth is all their power” (Ps. 32:6); He breathed His Spirit into the human body, “and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7), and from this breath people are still being born and will be born until the end of the age according to the commandment: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). If the Lord created so many personal individual beings by His Spirit, then how could the Spirit of God Himself not be a Person or a personal creative Being? “The spirit breathes where it will” (John 3:8). You see, the Spirit is called the Spirit as the Hypostasis of God. If there are countless created personal spirits, then should God Himself remain without the Spirit as without His Person - Independent, Hypostasis? (6). The spirit is strong and powerful, which is why it easily carries heavy matter; and the flesh is inert, powerless, and therefore it is easily suppressed by its native substance. Therefore, God carries the whole world with His powerful Word (see Heb. 1:3); therefore, the spirit of a person blessed with grace easily, with God’s help, subjugates his flesh, even the flesh of others, to their spirit (as we see in the saints), easily in prayer copes with the letter of the word, transforming it all into spirit, and the carnal man at every step submits to his flesh and is burdened by the letter of prayer, which he is not able to turn into spirit, being himself flesh, or to penetrate the unclean, embodied spirit with his pure, holy spirit (6). There is nothing more changeable than matter: it changes into millions of species naturally according to the laws of the Creator, not to mention the wonderful changes, for example, fire into dew, water into blood, water into wine, a staff into a serpent, even a person sometimes changes matter into thousands of species. What can we say about God, who created everything? The property of a substance is changeability. The Lord does not do this and does not want to do this with the rational spirit: the property of the spirit is immutability. But improvement in goodness is the work of the rational, created spirit. That triumph of spirit over matter is that spirit changes it into thousands of species. Notice, for example, how this spirit changes matter in the plant kingdom, how the forms of plants are infinitely varied, and all from one earth: one light of the sun, one air, one water, one earth. And the bodies of animals - how diverse they are! So, the property of matter is changeability; Under this condition, the world was created with all its diversity. Glory to the One, eternally unchanging God - the omnipotent Creator! If matter were unchangeable, then God would not be omnipotent. Glory to spiritual nature! May she always conquer material nature! Ask God to give you immutability in goodness (6). The unnatural dominance of the flesh over the spirit is expressed, among other things, in the fact that the spirit seems to be buried in the flesh, bound by the flesh. This is especially evident when it comes to serving God: then a person rather approaches God only with his lips, flesh, falsely, and not with his heart, not with his spirit, not with the truth. In fact, we often live as if there is no spirit in us, and the highest degree of human corruption is revealed by the fact that the spirit is completely suppressed and man becomes, as it were, one flesh. “My Spirit will not forever be despised by men, because they are flesh” (Gen. 6:3). Take a good look at the deeds of human worship: you will see how the flesh intensifies to gain predominance over the spirit. In the saints, the predominance of the spirit over the flesh is visible in the fact that they live in the spirit and throughout the world they see the spirit, in everything the wisdom, omnipotence and goodness of God; in all phenomena, in all deeds they see the imprint of the spirit; in sensual people, the preponderance of the flesh over the spirit is revealed by the fact that in everything they see only what appears to their senses, and, as they say, they do not see beyond their nose; A sensual, carnal person looks at the world and sees it almost like an unreasonable animal, and is not surprised in it by the wisdom, the ever-present power and goodness of the Creator; reads a holy book - and sees only a letter in it; whether he prays, he mechanically runs through prayers with his mind and does not penetrate into their spirit, does not know the art of bowing in spirit and truth. The flesh also dominates in the education of people. (Look, do they learn in institutions the most important Christian work - prayer, do they learn to see God?) The flesh will dominate the world until the end of the age, so that the Lord, coming to judge, “will he find faith on earth” (Luke 18:8), and unbelief is a work of the flesh, like among the people of the first world (6). With the greatest care, you need to keep in your meager vessel, in your heart, the treasure of the Spirit, “rivers of living water” (John 7:38). You need to be vigilant over your heart, be meek, refrain from irritability and movements of pride, attachment to earthly things, from unclean rebellions of the flesh; otherwise, the priceless treasure of the Spirit will instantly leave us: peace and joy will suddenly disappear from the heart - this feeling of extraordinary, angelic-spiritual lightness of the soul, soaring in the freedom of heart and thought; These rivers of living water will also disappear, which before only flowed and abundantly watered the reins of the soul; the soul will be filled with an alien fire, painfully scorching the insides, depriving it of peace and joy and filling it with a feeling of sorrow and oppression and inciting it to irritability and blasphemy. So clearly, so sharply, the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the enemy, the kingdom of life and the kingdom of death are indicated and alternate in us! A Christian sees this with his inner eyes and is amazed at God’s truth and holiness, and is amazed at the vigilance of the enemy, always like a lion, roaring and looking for whom to devour (see 1 Pet. 5:8) (6). For a long time I did not know clearly how necessary it is for our souls to be strengthened by the Holy Spirit. And now the Most Merciful has let me know how necessary it is. Yes, it is necessary every minute of our existence, like breathing, it is necessary in prayer and throughout life; without strengthening Him, our soul is constantly prone to all sin and, therefore, to spiritual death; she weakens, becomes completely weakened by the evil entering her heart and becomes weak for good; Without strengthening from the Holy Spirit, you feel how your heart is washed away from various evils and is ready every minute to drown in its abyss. This is where we need our hearts to stand on stone. And this stone is the Holy Spirit: He strengthens our strength, and if a person prays, He strengthens his heart in faith and hope of receiving what he asks; It inflames his soul with love for God; It brings to the soul bright, good thoughts that strengthen the mind and heart; if a person does various things, He strengthens his heart with the consciousness of the importance and necessity of his work and with indestructible patience, which overcomes all difficulties; When dealing with people of different conditions and both sexes, he breathes into him respect for the face of a person who is equally the image of God, whoever he may be, redeemed by the blood of Christ God, and diverts his heart and attention from his, sometimes very unseemly, appearance of body and clothing, his rudeness in word and address. It is He who unites us all with love as children of the Heavenly Father and in Christ Jesus teaches us to pray: Our Father who art in heaven... (6) All people, like the Angels of God, are the breaths of God, which is why Angels are called spirits, or, what is the same, the breaths of the Divine, and human spirits are souls, because they originated from the breath of the Divine and breathe God. By the Holy Spirit, it is said, every soul is alive and exalted by purity 32. But all other creatures are also called breaths: “Let every breath, it is said, praise the Lord” (Ps. 150:6), because they too are from the Spirit of God, although they are not involved in reason and freedom, therefore every creature must be protected, not beaten, not exhausted (6). “The Spirit gives life” (John 6:63). To the Spirit of the Lord in creatures belongs the revival of them from the time of their creation, and to the Son of God - creation, bringing them from non-existence into being. Therefore, both the Body and Blood of Christ are transformed by the Holy Spirit from bread and wine, just as in the womb of the Most Pure Virgin it was created by the Holy Spirit from Her blood; The Holy Spirit creates us in our mother's womb; Our spiritual goods belong to the Spirit of God (6). After the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles, described in the book of their Acts, we are often reminded of the all-providential action of the Holy Spirit in the Church, of His sovereign leadership of the apostles, their saving preaching and actions in the Church. This is another Comforter (see John 14:16), all-good and all-true, whom the Lord Jesus Christ promised to send to the apostles (10). Degrees of the 4th tone, 1st antiphon. You might be interested in: