If a stumbling block comes to you from the person dearest to you, the one as dear to you as your eyes, or even if it comes from the person who helps you the most, who is like your right hand, stay away from him.
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The stumbling might come from your dearest relatives and loved ones. The majority of youth who become corrupt do so through the corruption of their very dear friends, who influence them.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity
Category: BEST OF
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Another little fox—self-righteousness—entered into Job. Job’s problem was that he was a blameless, upright man, and he knew himself to be blameless and upright. For this reason he fell into self-righteousness. He was, as the Bible says, “righteous in his own eyes” (Job 32.1). God kept purifying him through temptation until he said: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (Job 42.3). It is very easy for a small weak point to drag us to many problems.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity -
Millions of people who are in hell wish for a few moments of life, which you have—just a few moments in which to repent—but cannot find them. They have lost the chance, and the door has been closed. How about you, my brother? You have all of this life, why do you not think about repentance, and grab the chance? As the apostle said: “Walk circumspectly….redeeming the time, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5.16).
Know that the postponement of repentance is one of the works of the devil, who does not want repentance. He knows that keeping you from repentance in a direct way is something your conscience will not accept. Therefore, he will never say to you, “Do not repent,” and yet every time your heart moves toward God, he will say to you, “That’s okay, but not now. We have many chances before us.” He then keeps leading you in a series of never-ending postponements until your life ends.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity
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You may ask, “Is it possible for me to live the rest of my life away from sin, even though my heart loves it? If I were to repent of it, I would return to it.” The error in despair is that the devil makes us think that we will live in repentance with the same heart that loves sin. On the contrary, the Lord will give you a new heart (Ezekiel 36.26). He will remove from you the love of sin, and you will not think about returning to it. On the contrary, God will make you hate sin in your repentance and be disgusted by it. Your present feelings will change.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity -
Tell Him: ‘O Lord, I cannot find anybody except You who understands me.’
For with whom I feel safe, I open my heart to Him, tell Him all my secrets and explain my weakness, which He will hear and not despise. I pour my tears before Him and reveal my longing. With Him I don’t feel alone but with a heart that holds me and power that supports me… Without You, O Lord, I feel empty and void of any real existence. You are Emmanuel, God with us… My soul longs for Your omnipotent soul, and longs for what is above the material; the world and all that is in it… Yes, inside me there is longing for the unlimited and nobody will satisfy it except You…
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Spiritual Means
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You are passing through a time of deep sorrow. The love on which you were trusting has suddenly failed you, and dried up like a brook in the desert—now a dwindling stream, then shallow pools, and at last drought. You are always listening for footsteps that do not come, waiting for a word that is not spoken, pining for a reply that tarries overdue.
Perhaps the savings of your life have suddenly disappeared; instead of helping others, you must be helped, or you must leave the warm nest where you have been sheltered from life’s storms to go alone into an unfriendly world; or you are suddenly called to assume the burden of some other life, taking no rest for yourself till you have steered it through dark and difficult seas into the haven. Your health, or sight, or nervous energy is failing; you carry in yourself the sentence of death; and the anguish of anticipating the future is almost unbearable. In other cases there is the sense of recent loss through death, like the gap in the forest-glade, where the woodsman has lately been felling trees.
At such times life seems almost insupportable. Will every day be as long as this? Will the slow moving hours ever again quicken their pace? Will life ever array itself in another garb than the torn autumn remnants of past summer glory? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Hath He in anger shut up His tender mercies? Is His mercy clean gone for ever?
The Gift of Suffering
by F.B. Meyer -
In sorrow the Comforter is near.—”Very present in time of trouble.” He sits by the crucible as a Refiner of silver, regulating the heat, marking every change, waiting patiently for the scum to float away, and His own face to be mirrored in clear, translucent metal. No earthly friend may tread the winepress with you, but the Savior is there, His garments stained with the blood of the grapes of your sorrow. Dare to repeat it often, though you do not feel it, and though Satan insists that God has left you, “Thou are with me.”
When friends come to console you they talk of time’s healing touch, as though the best balm for sorrow were to forget, or in their well-meant kindness they suggest travel, diversion, amusement, and show their inability to you to appreciate the black night that hangs over your soul; so you turn from them, sick at heart, and prepared to say, as Job of his, “Miserable comforters are ye all.” But all the while Jesus is nearer than they are, understanding how they wear you, knowing each throb of pain, touched by fellow-feeling, silent in a love too full to speak, waiting to comfort from hour to hour as a mother soothes her weary, suffering babe.
Be sure to study the art of this Divine comfort, that you may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction with the comfort with which you yourself have been comforted of God (2 Cor. I.4). There can be no doubt that some trials are permitted to come to us, as to our Lord, for no other reason than that by means of them we should become able to give sympathy and succour to others. And we should watch with all care each symptom of the pain, and each prescription of the Great Physician, since, in all probability, at some future time, we shall be called to minister to those passing through similar experiences. Thus we learn by the things we suffer, and, being made perfect, become authors of priceless and eternal help to souls in agony.The Gift of Suffering
by F.B. Meyer -
Do you cherish any resentment or hatred towards another, to whom you refuse to be reconciled?
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Is there some injustice which you refuse to forgive, some charge which you refuse to pay, some wrong which you refuse to confess?
Are you allowing something yourself which you would be the first to condemn in others, but which you argue may be permitted in your own case, because of certain reasons with which you attempt to smother the remonstrances of conscience?
The Gift of Suffering
by F.B. Meyer
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