О любви к Богу

Love God the way He commanded to love Him, and not the way self-deluded dreamers think to love Him. Do not invent delights for yourself, do not set your nerves in motion, do not inflame yourself with material flames, with the flame of your blood. A sacrifice acceptable to God is humility of heart, contrition of spirit. With anger, God turns away from a sacrifice made with arrogance, with a proud opinion of himself, even if this sacrifice were a burnt offering. Pride sets the nerves in motion, warms the blood, excites daydreaming, enlivens the life of fall; humility calms the nerves, tames the movement of the blood, destroys daydreaming, mortifies the life of falling, revives the life of Christ Jesus. “Obedience before the Lord is better than sacrifice, and submission is more good than the fat of a ram” (1 Samuel 15:22), the Prophet said to the king of Israel, who dared to offer God the wrong sacrifice: if you want to offer God a sacrifice of love, do not bring it willfully, out of a rash impulse; offer it with humility, at the time and place when and where the Lord commanded. The spiritual place in which one is commanded to offer spiritual sacrifices is humility 27 . The Lord marked with true and accurate signs the lover and the unloving. He said: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word... He who does not love Me will not keep My words” (John 14:23–24). Do you want to learn the love of God? Avoid every deed, word, thought, feeling prohibited by the Gospel. By your enmity towards sin, which is so hated by the all-holy God, show and prove your love for God. Heal sins into which you happen to fall due to weakness with immediate repentance, but it is better to try to prevent these sins from happening to you by being strictly vigilant over yourself. Do you want to learn the love of God? carefully study the commandments of the Lord in the Gospel and try to fulfill them with your very deeds, try to turn the Gospel virtues into skills, into your qualities. It is characteristic of a lover to carry out the will of his beloved with precision. “I have loved Your commandments more than gold and topaz; for this reason I have been guided by all Your commandments; I have hated every way of unrighteousness” (Ps. 119:127-128), says the Prophet. This behavior is necessary to maintain fidelity to God. Loyalty is an indispensable condition of love. Without this condition, love is dissolved. By constant avoidance of evil and the fulfillment of the gospel virtues - which is what the entire gospel moral teaching consists of - we achieve the love of God. By this same means we remain in love for God: “If you keep My commandments, you will remain in My love” (John 15:10), said the Savior. The perfection of love lies in union with God; success in love is associated with inexplicable spiritual consolation, pleasure and enlightenment. But at the beginning of the feat, the student of love must endure a fierce struggle with himself, with his deeply damaged nature: the evil innate in nature through the Fall has become a law for him, warring and indignant against the Law of God, against the law of holy love. Love for God is based on love for neighbor. When the memory of malice is erased from you, then you are close to love. When your heart is overshadowed by holy, gracious peace for all humanity: then you are at the very doors of love. But these doors are opened only by the Holy Spirit. Love for God is a gift of God in a person who has prepared himself to accept this gift with purity of heart, mind and body. According to the degree of preparation there is also the degree of gift: because God is just in His mercy. Love for God is completely spiritual: “what is born of the Spirit is spirit.” “That which is born of the flesh is flesh” (John 3:6): carnal love, as born of flesh and blood, has material, perishable properties. It is fickle and changeable: its fire is completely dependent on the substance. Hearing from Scripture that our God is fire (Heb. 12:29), that love is fire, and feeling within yourself the fire of natural love, do not think that this fire is the same. No! these fires are hostile to each other and are extinguished by one another 28 . “Let us serve God acceptably with reverence and fear; for our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:28–29). Natural love, fallen love, warms a person’s blood, sets his nerves in motion, arouses daydreaming; Holy love cools the blood, calms both soul and body, draws the inner man to prayerful silence, immerses him in the rapture of humility and spiritual sweetness. Many ascetics, mistaking natural love for Divine love, heated up their blood and inflamed their dreaminess. The state of excitement very easily turns into a state of frenzy. Those who were in the heat and frenzy were considered by many to be filled with grace and holiness, and they were the unfortunate victims of self-delusion. There have been many such ascetics in the Western Church, since the time it fell into papism, in which Divine properties are blasphemously attributed to man, and worship is given to man that is due and befitting the one God; These ascetics wrote many books from their heated state, in which frenzied self-delusion seemed to them like divine love, in which their frustrated imagination drew for them many visions that flattered their vanity and pride. Son of the Eastern Church! avoid reading such books, avoid following the instructions of the self-deluded. Guided by the Gospel and the Holy Fathers of the true Church, ascend with humility to the spiritual heights of Divine love through keeping the commandments of Christ. Know firmly that love for God is the highest gift of the Holy Spirit, and a person can only prepare himself with purity and humility to accept this great gift, by which the mind, heart, and body are changed. Labor is in vain, it is fruitless and harmful when we seek to prematurely reveal high spiritual gifts in ourselves: the merciful God gives them in due time to constant, patient, humble performers of the Gospel commandments. Amen. Alphabetical Patericon. Saying of St. Pimen the Great. Ladder, Word 3 and Word 15. You might be interested in: