How gracious is repentance! It reconciles a person who has lost the closeness of God's grace for his sins with the Lord, again attracts grace and, moreover, so regenerates a sinful person that it makes him more inclined to good and humbler even than an ordinary righteous person. Repentance is God's extraordinary mercy to man: "Open unto me the doors of repentance, O Giver of Life".. (Stanza at Matins of Great Lent).

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Try to forget all your merits, do not remember them. And if they constantly arise in your memory, know that you are struggling with the passion of self-conceit, vanity, and arrogance, and you must eradicate this bad leaven. It leads to a shameful fall. It is good to dispel exaltation with the following spiritual reasoning: 1) all good things are accomplished in us by the grace of God, which is constantly poured out on us. Without grace we are nothing; 2) we are partial to ourselves, and therefore we praise our own, but it is enough to look at others, and we will see in them many things that we ourselves do not have. One, for example, has a beautiful voice, but I do not have it, another has the gift of speech, a third has health, etc., but I am deprived of all this: what should I boast of? - I will boast in my weakness (2 Corinthians 11:30).

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To everything that is happening inside your being, to all your thoughts, to the movements of your feelings, give a sense, the right course, which is possible to do with the help of the Christian understanding with the help of willpower. You are constantly out of the right rut. Try to direct yourself immediately, insert yourself into a normal channel: if you are angry, suppress your anger; if you think badly, reproach yourself, etc. Oh, how desirable such inner work is! It makes it possible to cope with all kinds of life circumstances, maintains a cheerful spirit, gives you a surge of even physical strength, breaking down and preventing in you any nervous disorder, despondency, etc.

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Why do you at times become so disgusting, unpleasant, unclean, filthy, dreamy? Look into yourself, and you will see that this is because your heart has distanced yourself from the Lord, you pray little to Him, you are little spiritually awake, you weep little over your sins – in a word, this happens when you leave God with your mind and heart and begin to walk along the paths of this world.

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We are not accustomed to thanking the Lord, we do not think about how many mercies the Lord pours out on us every day and hour, and therefore we murmur about our fate, we do not reconcile ourselves to our situation, we complain about our hard, sorrowful life.

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As I succumb to grandeur, exaltation, self-glorification: so the thought creeps towards this! For God's sake, watch yourself vigilantly, reproach yourself, punish yourself, scourge yourself. Set yourself the following task: I must at all costs get rid of this deficiency - and so, remembering this, constantly stop yourself, constantly confess it; in short, do not let yourself rest for a minute. Always repeat to yourself: "What a majestic Pharisee I am!" Deliver me, O Lord, from this unfortunate defect.

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Women and maidens! You like to pour perfumes and fragrant substances over yourself. See to it that your inner being is also fragrant with purity. Otherwise, what a terrible discrepancy can result: on the outside you will emit a fragrance, but inside you will be stinking, ugly, dirty, unclean, filthy, depraved; What will be the meaning of your perfume then? From the fragrance of the outward to the inward fragrance: be the fragrance of Christ to God (cf. Corinthians 2:15).

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