Fr. Silouan Benedict
Rating: 9,5|Votes: 2
Our Lord was allotted the most infamous and painful death and treated as a worthless criminal. He was stripped naked, scourged and suspended by iron nails so to end His life in the midst of the insults and curses of those very men for whom He was to die—becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross (Phil 2:8). And all of this for what? To save us miserable and ungrateful sinners.
Fr. Alexis Trader
Rating: 6,2|Votes: 5
The Kingdom, the power, and the glory all bespeak God’s purifying, illumining, and deifying grace that can completely transform the children of Adam into children of light. They are His, indeed. But we also knows that He desires that they be ours. For from Christ’s own lips, we hear about the “kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34).
Rating: 10|Votes: 6
He also saw a person in the large throng of people who was possessed of a demon. This demon manifested itself as a bird. The bird is very dangerous for him for he is not aware of it. He said the bird looked very smooth like velvet. And the astounding thing about this demon possessed person was that he was the same Zen teacher that Fr. Nikon had met in Thessaloniki. The thing that is of great interest to us here is that before the sacrament of baptism Angelo could not see these things clearly but immediately after his baptism he saw them without a problem. This is the marvelous meaning and power of the Sacrament of Baptism in the Orthodox Church.
Fr. Ted Bobosh
The battle against wandering minds, against the logismoi, is not a new one, and we can look to the desert fathers for advice in such a struggle.
Fr. Thomas Hopko
Rating: 8|Votes: 9
One of the powerful stories, narratives, in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the so-called synoptic gospels, is this event when Jesus encounters this man who is in the region of the Gadarenes or there are different names—Girgesenes or Gerasene region—this man who is totally and completely possessed by demons, filled with all powers of demons.