Psa 23:3-4 LXX2012

Who shall go up to the mountain of the Lord, and who shall stand in his holy place? He that is innocent in his hands and pure in his heart; who has not lifted up his soul to vanity, nor sworn deceitfully to his neighbor.

Shared using AndBible: Bible Study. https://andbible.github.io

The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians

"Full of holy designs, ye did, with true earnestness of mind and a godly confidence, stretch forth your hands to God Almighty, beseeching Him to be merciful unto you, if ye had been guilty of any involuntary transgression. Day and night ye were anxious for the whole brotherhood, that the number of God's elect might be saved with mercy and a good conscience. Ye were sincere and uncorrupted, and forgetful of injuries between one another. Every kind of faction and schism was abominable in your sight. Ye mourned over the transgressions of your neighbours: their deficiencies you deemed your own. Ye never grudged any act of kindness, being "ready to every good work." Adorned by a thoroughly virtuous and religious life, ye did all things in the fear of God. The commandments and ordinances of the Lord were written upon the tablets of your hearts."

I'm reading "Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works" by Hieromonk Damascene and wanted to share this quote with you.

"BISHOP IGNATIUS BRIANCHANINOV, speaking of his first discovery of Patristic wisdom, once wrote: “What was it that above all struck me in the works of the Fathers of the Orthodox Church? It was their harmony, their wondrous, magnificent harmony. Eighteen centuries, through their lips, testified to a single unanimous teaching, a Divine teaching!”"

Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/fmlPEWu

The Jesus Prayer: Exploring the Inner Kingdom

https://m.soundcloud.com/saint_pauls/sets/the-jesus-praye-exploring-the

The Jesus Prayer

https://www.goarch.org/-/the-jesus-prayer

I'm reading "Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works" by Hieromonk Damascene and wanted to share this quote with you.

"We must remember that the whole purpose of reading the Holy Fathers is, not to give us some kind of ‘spiritual enjoyment’ or confirm us in our own righteousness or superior knowledge or ‘contemplative’ state, but solely to aid us in the active path of virtue.... One must come to this reading in a practical way so as to make maximum use of it.”"

Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/eAsCnfd

“I spent my entire life in sickness and sorrows, but without sorrows, how can one be saved? Illness is sent by God in place of and to make up for the deficiency of our struggles. I see that my ill health is a gift of God -His epitimia, His mercy."

 “What is death?-the age with which our true life begins. A man should not despair, no matter how great his sins, for a man is not saved by his good deeds, but by his faith in Christ the Saviour; only his deeds should manifest his faith.. Just think that the great Apostle Peter himself wept bitterly…

“Faster and faster time passes, and the hour of our entrance into eternity draws nigh. Make use of your days on earth to prepare for this. Such preparation dispels temporal sorrows and brings consolation, thereby indicating that this preparation is indeed a preparation for blessedness."

“One must never, for any reason, become despondent, for we are carried in the hands of God’s Providence. Our concern is to be true to the Lord. And the Lord purposely reveals the weaknesses of him to whom He wishes to grant His gift of discernment. For the beginning of a soul’s enlightenment is the perception of its own sins and its insignificance."

I'm reading "Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works" by Hieromonk Damascene and wanted to share this quote with you.

“Orthodoxy, of course, does not change from one day to the next, or from one century to the next. Looking at the Protestant and Roman Catholic world, we can see that certain spiritual writings become out of date. Sometimes they come back into fashion again, sometimes they go out. It is obvious that they are bound up with worldly things, which appeal to people at one time, or rather to the spirit of the times. This is not so with our Orthodox holy writings. Once we get the whole Orthodox Christian outlook — the simply Christian outlook — which has been handed down from Christ and the Apostles to our times, then everything becomes contemporary. You read the words of someone like St. Macarius, who lived in the deserts of Egypt in the fourth century, and he’s speaking to you now. His conditions are a little different, but he’s speaking right to you, in the same language. He’s going to the same place, he’s using the same mind, he has the same temptations and failings, and there’s nothing different about him. It’s the same with all the other Fathers from that time down to our century, like St. John of Kronstadt. They all speak the same language, one kind of language, the language of spiritual life, which we must get into.” 

Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/5e2KHXD

I'm reading "Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works" by Hieromonk Damascene and wanted to share this quote with you.

"“The Church is the house... of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth (I Tim. 3:15). Christian truth is preserved in the Church in the Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition; but it requires a correct preservation and a correct interpretation. The significance of the Holy Fathers is to be found precisely in this: that they are the most capable preservers and interpreters of this truth by virtue of the sanctity of their lives, their profound knowledge of the word of God, and the abundance of the grace of the Holy Spirit which dwells in them."

Archbishop Theophan of Poltava

Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/iXdYIA4

I'm reading "Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works" by Hieromonk Damascene and wanted to share this quote with you.

"“In the Holy Fathers,” he wrote, “we find the ‘mind of the Church’—the living understanding of God’s revelation. They are our link between the ancient texts which contain God’s revelation [i.e., the Holy Scriptures] and today’s reality. Without such a link it is every man for himself — and the result is a myriad of interpretations and sects.”"

Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/9Dsb825

I'm reading "Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works" by Hieromonk Damascene and wanted to share this quote with you.

"When on a clear autumn night I gaze at the clear sky, sown with numberless stars, so diverse in size yet shedding a single light, then I say to myself: such are the writings of the Fathers! When on a summer day I gaze at the vast sea, covered with a multitude of diverse vessels with their unfurled sails like white swans’ wings, vessels racing under a single wind to a single goal, to a single harbor, I say to myself: such are the writings of the Fathers! When I hear a harmonious, many-voiced choir, in which diverse voices in elegant harmony sing a single Divine song, then I say to myself: such are the writings of the Fathers! — St. Ignatius Brianchaninov"

Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/f3TO0zb

I'm reading "Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works" by Hieromonk Damascene and wanted to share this quote with you.

"NEVER has there been,” wrote Fr. Seraphim, “such an age of false teachers as this pitiful twentieth century, so rich in material gadgets and so poor in mind and soul. Every conceivable opinion, even the most absurd, even those hitherto rejected by the universal consent of all civilized peoples — now has its platform and its own ‘teacher.’ A few of these teachers come with demonstration or promise of ‘spiritual power’ and false miracles, as do some occultists and ‘charismatics’; but most of the contemporary teachers offer no more than a weak concoction of undigested ideas which they received ‘out of the air,’ as it were, or from some modern self-appointed ‘wise man’ (or woman) who knows more than all the ancients merely by living in our ‘enlightened’ modern times. As a result, philosophy has a thousand schools, and ‘Christianity’ a thousand sects. Where is the truth to be found in all this, if indeed it is to be found at all in our most misguided times? “In only one place is there to be found the fount of true teaching, coming from God Himself, not diminished over the centuries but ever fresh, being one and the same in all those who truly teach it, leading those who follow it to eternal salvation. This place is the Orthodox Church of Christ, the fount is the grace of the All-Holy Spirit, and the true teachers of the Divine doctrine that issues from this fount are the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church.”

Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/iVCYgVk

The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians

"Content with the provision which God had made for you, and carefully attending to His words, ye were inwardly filled with His doctrine, and His sufferings were before your eyes."

"Those were times of heroism, not of words; an age, not of writers, but of soldiers; not of talkers, but of sufferers."

"They are primary evidences of the Canon and the credibility of the New Testament."

"And what had become of the disciples who were the first-fruits of the apostolic ministry? St. Paul had said, “The same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.” How was this injunction realized? St. Peter’s touching words come to mind, “I will endeavour that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance.”

"Was this endeavour successfully carried out?.....The answer is, “If you are familiar with Scripture, you owe it largely to these primitive witnesses to its Canon and its spirit. By their testimony we detect what is spurious, and we identify what is real. Is it nothing to find that your Bible is their Bible, your faith their faith, your Saviour their Saviour, your God their God?”

"They are monuments of the power of the Gospel. They were made out of such material as St. Paul describes when he says, “Such were some of you.” But for Christ, they would have been worshippers of personified Lust and Hate, and of every crime. They would have lived for “bread and circus-shows.” Yet to the contemporaries of a Juvenal they taught the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. Among such beasts in human form they reared the sacred home; they created the Christian family; they gave new and holy meanings to the names of wife and mother; they imparted ideas unknown before of the dignity of man as man; they infused an atmosphere of benevolence and love; they bestowed the elements of liberty chastened by law; they sanctified human society by proclaiming the universal brotherhood of redeemed man."

"As we read the Apostolic Fathers, we comprehend, in short, the meaning of St. Paul when he said prophetically, what men were slow to believe, “The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men … But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.”