2/6/2011
St. Nikolai (Velimirovic)
All that our Lord Jesus Christ did, He did for our edification and salvation. For He came to earth in order to teach us not only with words, but by deeds, events, and by His every gesture and movement.
No one goes to a physician to boast about his health. He goes in order to reveal to him the place on his health that is rotten.
St. Nikolai (Velimirovich)
That man who would not hold back from any earthly pleasures, who reached the limits of every looseness, debauchery, uncontrolled blood-thirstiness, thievery, violent vengeance – had to die with his old soul and start living with a new one.
Whoever approaches the Lord Jesus Christ with obedience and humility will never want to be separated from Him. The beginning exercises of the newly-recruited army of Christ are the exercises of obedience and humility.
Once Jerusalem and all Judea were astir with the news that a new prophet had appeared, never before seen, and frightening. This man called out to the crowd around him, “Repent!”
We have read the last page of the sacred book, the content of which exudes innocence and piety from cover to cover. At the mere sight of this book, even the cruelest critics bearing the weight of prejudice and bias have silently stopped, and having read it from beginning to end, walked away with softened hearts and rejuvenated spirits.
God the Holy Spirit has many habitations in this vast universe, but a pure human heart is the habitation of His greatest joy. It is His true habitation, and all others are only His workshops. The human heart can never be empty; it is always filled—either with hell, or with the world, or with God. The contents of the heart depends on the purity of the heart.
Our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world in order to break and uproot people’s faithless belief in evil, and sow in their souls faith in goodness, in the omnipotence of goodness, in the invincibility and infinity of goodness.
St. Justin Popovic, St. Nikolai Velimirovich
Rating: 8.1|Votes: 17
Saint Basil hears our prayers. A saint is like a ray of sunshine, identical in its nature to the sun itself, which along with the countless other rays shines upon the earth. The soul of a saint, having become one with God as with a spiritual sun, illumines as part of this sun the whole universe seeing and knowing the hearts and minds of all people and hearing their needs and prayers.
St. Nikolai Velimirovich
Rating: 10|Votes: 3
The virgin Parasceva always yearned for the ascetic life for the sake of Christ. After her parents' repose, she left her home and went first to Constantinople, then to the wilderness of Jordan, where she lived the ascetic life until old age. Who can express all the labors, sufferings and demonic temptations that St. Parasceva endured in the course of her many years?
Rating: 10|Votes: 2
"Oh, if only we would invest as much effort in our souls as we invest in our bodies! Oh, if only we could become as desirous of adorning ourselves with virtue before God and His glorious angels, as we do with the vain, transitory, external displays of appearances!"
Rating: 10|Votes: 1
There was a great persecution of Christians during the reign of Decius. The emperor himself came to Ephesus and there arranged a boisterous and noisy celebration in honor of the lifeless idols as well as a terrible slaughter of Christians. Seven young men, soldiers, refrained from the impure offering of sacrifices and they earnestly prayed to the one God to save the Christian people. They were the sons of the most influential elders of Ephesus and their names were Maximilian, Jamblichus, Martin [Martinian], John, Dionysius, Exacustodianus, and Antonin [Antoninus].
Rating: 7.6|Votes: 14
O my brethren, let us also cease to look for the living among the dead. If there are some of us who are still seeking Christ among the dead, let them desist from this soul-destroying effort.
Rating: 6.1|Votes: 8
But this event has more than historical significance; it also has a spiritual meaning, and therefore also a moral meaning for every modern-day Christian. According to the spiritual meaning, Jerusalem signifies the human soul, and the entry of the Lord into Jerusalem signifies the entrance of God into the soul.
"Today, salvation has come to this house" said the Lord upon entering the house of Zacchaeus the sinner. Christ was the salvation that came and Zacchaeus was the house into which He entered. Brethren, each one of us is a house in which sin dwells as long as Christ is distant and to which salvation comes when Christ approaches it.
