Category: JUDGMENT

  • You are angry with your neighbour, your brother, and say of him: “He is such and such—a miser, malicious, proud,” or that he has done this and that, and so on. What is that to you? He sins against God, and not against you. God is his Judge, not you: unto God he shall answer for himself, not to you. Know yourself, how sinful you are yourself, what a beam you have in your own eye; how difficult it is for you to master and get the better of your own sins; how afflicted you yourself are by them; how they have ensnared you—how you wish for indulgence from others towards your own infirmities. And your brother is a man like you; therefore you must be indulgent to him as to a sinful man, similar in everything to yourself, as infirm as you; love him, then, as yourself, listening to the Lord saying: “These things I command you, that ye love one another”. [John 15.17]

    —St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ

  • A lot of times, we think there is a problem in my life because of this or that. We rarely think that it’s my sins that are causing a problem. 

    It’s not my coworker, it’s not my life situation, it’s not my illness, not my family situation, or anything else; it’s my sins. My sins are making me incapable of dealing with this problem in a way that a true christian would deal with it. No matter your problems, no matter whose fault it is, it’s also always your fault. That’s the way a Christian thinks.

    —Fr. Seraphim Holland

  • “If you are weak, do not despair of your weakness… and if you see a person who is weak, do not despise their weakness.”

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III

  • “God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination.”

    —St. Augustine

  • “Do not offend others, even in your thoughts.”

    — Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

  • Do not condemn. Not even if your very eyes are seeing something, for they may be deceived. If we desire to find something to condemn, we will find it, whether or not it justly deserves criticism. But, it is important to realize, such an attitude comes not out of love, not out of a desire to truly make things better, but rather, to make ourselves look better than everyone else.

    —St. John Climacus

  • “Sometimes the thing we’re struggling with personally is the thing that we’re so violently loud about.” e.g. they should not be doing this

    —Fr. Antony Paul

  • You must remember that you are a sinner. Always have that knowledge when you evaluate anyone else. I’m a sinner, they’re a sinner. Who am I to say my sin is better than theirs?

    —Fr. Seraphim Holland

  • Do not be afraid of the spread or apparent victory of something that is false or untrue…

    Such things will inevitably be defeated if made to stand before the Truth, however long it takes.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Experiences in Life

  • You understand that many of our faults are voluntary in different degrees, though they may not be committed with a deliberate purpose of failing in our allegiance to God. One friend sometimes reproaches another for a fault not expressly intended to be offensive, and yet committed with the knowledge that it would be so. In the same way, God lays this sort of faults to our charge. They are voluntary, for although not done with an express intention, they are still committed freely and against a certain interior light of conscience, which should have caused us to hesitate and wait.

    —François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress