Satan may allow us to talk about God for many hours, but he will never let us talk with Him, even for a few minutes.
Category: KNOWLEDGE
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Clement of Alexandria furthers this notion by indicating that rewards in the afterlife will be dependent in part on one’s underlying motivation for why they performed any work for God: The same work, then, is different, depending on what prompted it. Was it because of fear, or was it accomplished because of love, faith, or knowledge? Rightly, therefore, their rewards are different.
Orthodox Afterlife
John Habib -
“We did all these things – all these miracles – in Your name. How is it that You say you don’t know us?” That is when He [the Lord] proceeds to say, “You didn’t know Me. You did these things for Me, but you didn’t know Me.”
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There’s a difference between doing something because you want to do versus because you have to.
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“A relationship must begin and develop in mutual freedom. If you look at the relationship in terms of mutual relationship, you will see that God could complain about us a great deal more than we do about Him. We complain that He does not make Himself present to us for the few minutes we reserve for Him, but what about the twenty-three and a half hours during which God may be knocking at our door and we answer ‘I am busy, I am sorry’ or when we do not answer at all because we do not even hear the knock at the door of our heart, of our minds, of our conscience, of our life. So there is a situation in which we have no right to complain of the absence of God because we are a great deal more absent than He ever is.”
—Met. Anthony Bloom -
“We may study as much as we will but we shall still not come to know the Lord unless we live according to His commandments, for the Lord is not made known through learning but by the Holy Spirit. Many philosophers and scholars have arrived at the belief in the existence of God. To believe in God is one thing, to know God is another.”
— St. Silouan the Athonite -
“It is better to be a simpleton and approach God with love than to be a learned man and at the same time an enemy of God.”
—St. Irenaeus of Lyons -
The only really valuable religious and moral training I ever got as a child came to me from my father, not systematically, but here and there and more or less spontaneously, in the course of ordinary conversations. Father never applied himself, of set purpose, to teach me religion. But if something spiritual was on his mind, it came out more or less naturally. And this is the kind of religious teaching, or any other kind of teaching, that has the most effect. “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth good fruit; and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth that which is evil. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”
—Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain -
It is a great pleasure for me to remember such good and kind people and to talk about them, although I no longer possess any details about them. I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within, and from the habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity.
—Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain -
But the saint is never a philosopher; he has given up merely trying to understand, and asks only to be given what is given him; he has accepted the world, and there is no longer any question of its making “sense” or not.
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Whether we believe or not, we belong to God. Whether we understand it or not, or feel His presence or not, or rejoice in that presence or not, He exists. He is my God. He is my Lord. Even during moments of darkness and terror, when God doesn’t exist for me, He still exists. When I feel I’m a failure, when all my efforts seem fruitless, when my life seems to have passed in vain, Christ is still my Christ. He is there for me no matter what happens. He exists irrespectively of my capabilities, capacities, and comprehension. I might imagine that God is small. But God is great. I might think that God doesn’t hear. But He does. And He has given Himself entirely to me, so that there’s only one possibility of failure: for me to break off my relationship with the “One Who Is” (Ex. 3:14)
—Elder Aimilianos, The Way of the Spirit
SO GOOD QUOTES 