When the soul finds no delight, what is left except for the flesh to look for some?
Category: TEMPTATION & LUST & VIRGINITY
-
I have, O Lord, walked with the world, it is true.
I have desired what is in the world, it is true.
But all these had to do with lust and not love.
Lust is temporary;
it is transient and superficial, but love is deep,
in the inner depths of the heart.
The things in the world were a lust-
but they were not love;
love is for You alone.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Before the Just Judge
-
How will I be able to live all my life away from sin when my heart loves it? If I repent, I will return to it!
The false notion by which Satan instills despair into your heart is that you will live in repentance with the same heart that loves sin! No, not at all, for God “will give you a new heart” (Ez.36:26), and He will uproot the love of sin from you. Then you will never consider returning to sin, but on the contrary, God will cause you in your repentance, to hate and abhor sin. Your present feelings will change.
Even if I repent, my thoughts will be stained with former images
Do not fear. In repentance, God will cleanse your mind and you will attain the “renewing of your mind” of which the Apostle spoke in his epistle to the Romans (Rom. 12:2). How numerous were the bad images in the memory of Augustine and in the memory of Mary of Egypt! But the Lord wiped them away, that the mind might be sanctified by His love.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Before the Just Judge
-
“He who refused to worship idols was given over to external sufferings, while he who refuses to satisfy the passions actually wounds himself and forces his heart to suffer until the passions quiet down in him.”
—St. Theophan the Recluse -
Satan attempts to make sin a habit in humans or cause it to become a part of their nature. This is so that people will commit sin without thinking, perhaps even unintentionally, and without gaining any pleasure or profit from the sin. They sin, rather, because sin has become a spontaneous part of their nature.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us
-
One is cautious in life, constraining the self until it walks uprightly, and yet rejoicing from the inside. I always tell people that the narrow gate is narrow at the beginning. It is triangular shaped: at the beginning you find difficulty, and the farther you go, it widens, until you reach its wide base of joy. The beginning is the period where “the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; but at the end, the more the body surrenders to the spirit, and the more the spirit takes its ease, the more the person rejoices saying, “He also brought me out into a broad place.”! He took me out of the stage of war between the body (matter) and spirit, and brought me into a broad place-God’s love, in which a person lives happy.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us
-
Each time we catch ourselves in a thought, we just return our attention to what is above it: to our spirit and to God. We do not validate the thought by giving it any more attention. This is already to repulse or cut off the thought without directly struggling against it. It is active, not passive;
—Hieromonk Damascene (Christensen), Christ the Eternal Tao p.309 -
Do not be tempted by physical beauty
—St. Jerome
SO GOOD QUOTES 