Слово душеполезное

Do not spend all the time of your life taking care of your body; but when the body is hungry and requires food, reason that the soul also has a need for its inherent food, and becomes dead, like the body, if it does not accept bodily food; because man is dual, consisting of soul and body. Therefore Jesus said: You are the steward of the house, give to the soul what is proper to the soul; Not only feed the body, but also do not leave the soul deprived and hungry. The apostle speaks of such a soul: “that which feeds... in abundance, dies alive” (1 Tim. 5:6). So, do not allow your soul to die of hunger, but feed it with the word of God, psalms, chants and spiritual songs, reading the Holy Scriptures, fasting and vigils, tears and alms, hope and thoughts about future blessings, eternal and incorruptible. All this and the like is food and life for the soul; Therefore, the great prophet said: “Yes,” “my tears will be my bread day and night” (Ps. 42:4). O blessed soul of David, receptacle of the Holy Spirit! Every day and every night the prophet David shed tears; and we, guilty of thousands of bad deeds, do not want to come to contrition and repent for one hour. Oh, what joy there is in heaven when a sinful person sheds tears on earth, rejects a bad habit, hates sin and says: “I have hated iniquity and detested and have forbidden my feet from every evil way!” (Ps. 119:163, 101). Do not be rash, lest you become hated by everyone; do not allow yourself to become arrogant; never give rest to your flesh, lest it become a burden to your soul; do not be carried away by addiction to blasphemy; do not block your repentance with despair. Be careful that your desperate course of action does not drag you down from heaven. Let not your grandeur express your secret deeds; Let your slander not humiliate anyone; Let not foolishness blind your understanding; Let not stupidity darken your prudence, let not madness prevail over your mind; May your mind not be changed by recklessness; or anything else that is forbidden, do not enter your heart hidden from your mind and do not take you captive from the Kingdom of Heaven. On the contrary, be sober, as it is written, “day and night,” studying the commandments of God (Ps. 1:2), so that your poor and accursed enemy, far from all love, does not find your mind idle from this teaching and sow his tares in it, because he spends his days in vain dreams. Who will not cry for a person who has moved away from God? I tell you, brethren, that he who does not have the love of God in himself is an enemy of God, because He who said, “He who hates his brother is a murderer” is not a liar (1 John 3:15). He who has no love is a friend of the devil, he is a vessel of arrogance, an interlocutor of slanderers, a doer of pride; in a word, he is a tool of the devil. Poor and wretched is he who has not acquired patience; because he who has no patience is tossed by the wind, cannot bear insults, is faint-hearted in sorrows, is a murmurer in submission, a scoffer in obedience, is lazy in prayers, slow in answers, and courageous in arguments. He who has no patience suffers much loss; There is no way for such a person to cleave to virtue, but on the contrary, he opposes those worthy of approval, and envies those who are successful. Blessed is the man who does not easily become angry or irritable. He who does not have the spirit of anger does not grieve the Holy Spirit; such is glorified by all, praised by the Angels, dear to Christ; his body and soul are always healthy. And whoever has the spirit of anger often gets angry out of nothing. And he who does not control himself in such things is truly poor and wretched. He who is angry kills his soul. As all blessings and all virtues, love is higher; so it is worse than any sin - to hate a brother. He who hates his brother remains in death. Whoever deprives a mercenary of his reward, and whoever hates his brother, will be severely condemned along with the murderers. When you sin, do not expect blame from another; but before you are convicted and condemned, blame yourself for what you have done; start confession and don’t be ashamed. When you did something shameful to yourself, you were not ashamed; will you now be ashamed of the words that justify you? Speak here, so as not to speak there against your will. Confession of sins serves to destroy sins. God wants to hear our sins from us not because he does not know them; on the contrary, He wants us, through confession, to come to the consciousness of our sins. God does not require anything heavy and difficult from us, but a broken heart, tenderness of thoughts, recognition of the fall, a tireless and strong fall to God, and finally, that after confession we ask ourselves for forgiveness for what we have sinned, and carefully guard against this in the following time. So, how much better is it to cry and lament here during this short and temporary life, rather than, indulging in laughter here, to go there to torment that continues forever? But are you ashamed and blush when you have to tell your sins? It is better to be ashamed to sin than to confess. Thoughts: if confession is not made here, then everything will be confessed there before the whole universe. Where is more torment? Where is there more shame? We are courageous and shameless in our deeds; and when we must confess, then we are ashamed and delay. If you confess your sins, there is no shame in it: on the contrary, this is truth and virtue. And if there were no truth and virtue in this, then confession would have no reward. Listen to what is said: “Thou shalt say” that sins are “thy first, that thou mayest be justified” (Is. 43:26). He commands confession not so that you will be punished, but so that you will be forgiven. So, let us make a strict test not only of our deeds, but also of our words and thoughts, and we strictly examine how each day is spent, what sin was committed during that day, how many days we lived badly, and what movement or thought aroused us to an unkind movement. And we will try to show repentance according to our sins. Let us impose punishment on our conscience and subject it to strong reproach, so that after we rise from sin, fearing the torment of previous wounds, we do not dare to fall into the same abyss again. Keep a record in your conscience and notice your daily sins in it, and let this notebook be opened before you every day; weigh within yourself what good and evil you have done; Bring to your memory the river of fire, the never-ending worm and bitter hell, so that through the fear of torment you may increase the good in yourself and destroy the evil. Let us weep before the time, so as not to gnash our teeth in time and not to weep at the time. God is pleased with this sacrifice; a person irrigated with these waters bears fruit, a finger is washed with these waters, fire is extinguished with these waters, darkness is brightened, bonds are broken, those who go astray are converted, everyone is saved, and God is glorified; With these waters Peter also washed away the filth that had entered into him, for “he went out weeping bitterly” (Matthew 26:75). You might be interested in: