And faith is the same virtue. Abraham accomplished the feat of faith. He, being already old, has lost hope that one day he will have children. But the Lord said to him: not only will they be, but a great nation will come out of you. Indeed, soon he had a son. And then the Lord said: "Go and offer your son to Me as a sacrifice." And Abraham did not doubt for a second that it was necessary to do this; that although the Lord requires a son as a sacrifice, he will still become a great nation. And he took his son and led him up to the mountain, and he had already made a fire to be slaughtered and burned, and then the Lord stopped him.

The Lord thus tested Abraham's faith against all so-called common sense. Let's take a father who has a small son, very late, and was born by some miracle, because the father is very old. If the child is the only one, and even late, as usual, parents shake over him! And here the Lord gives a command: go kill him. And Abraham goes to kill him, but not just to kill him for the sake of some selfishness, malice, envy - no, but offers him as a sacrifice to God. That is, his hand did not tremble, his heart did not doubt in the least.

If we try this situation on ourselves, we will immediately see that we do not have such faith. And it was this powerful, indestructible faith, conviction in the truth of the Divine words, that made Abraham the father of all believers. And this faith was passed down from Abraham to Isaac, from Isaac to Jacob, from Jacob to his children. And so it went, walked like a river, and reached the parents of the Most Holy Theotokos, Joachim and Anna, and the Mother of God Herself.

Faith is the highest virtue. That is why it is said that faith was imputed to Abraham for righteousness. Although, if we compare his life with, say, the life of some New Testament saint, Abraham was not so righteous. Take and compare him with Sergius of Radonezh. Of course, the height of Sergius is immeasurably greater from the moral point of view. But Abraham showed his faith so strong that the Lord promised him: "From you will come a nation." Because the Lord demanded a supernatural effort from him, and Abraham's soul had such a capacity for faith that this virtue - his faith - simply overshadowed all his shortcomings. In the light of this great faith, all of Abraham's infirmities seem to fade.

When a person fulfills a virtue and manifests the main diligence in it, then even if the other virtues are not present in such a developed form, then this main one, in its supernatural form, as it were, pulls up all the others. Therefore, it happens that a person does not pray. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot achieve in prayer what Arsenius the Great achieved, for example. And how can he be saved? And he can do alms, for example. Or to fulfill the virtue of love: to take some poor person and begin to follow him, to help him, to fulfill the virtue of loving service, and to succeed in this in order to please God. And by fulfilling one virtue, a person gradually comes to the full Christian structure of the soul.

At the heart of every Christian feat is faith. That is why today this genealogy is enumerated, that since Christ came into the world, the blessing of faith has been transmitted not from father to son and from son to grandson, but through faith in Jesus Christ. That is, the forefathers believed that He would be, and now He came. And we also believe that He was and is. And depending on the depth of our faith, to the extent we can carry out the Christian podvig, to the extent we can succeed in virtue. The stronger the faith, the greater the feat. The greater the podvig, the greater the grace. The greater the grace, the closer a person is to God. The closer a person is to God, the more the Kingdom of God is revealed in him, that is, the Lord begins to reign in this person, and all his deeds, words, and thoughts become Divine, because the Lord dwells in him and begins to live in him.

A simple example. A person reads evening prayers. The greater his faith, the more concentrated his prayer is. You can read simply, as they say, looking for familiar letters in the text. You can read while thinking about something, without delving into the words at all. But if a person firmly believes that when he stands up for prayer, the Lord is before him, how can his mind be scattered? Imagine that the Lord Jesus Christ Himself would stand here instead of me. Would we have such thoughts now? Would we stand like that? Would we listen like that? This presence of God would be absolutely crushing for us. But in fact He is here and stands invisibly. He is also present at our confession, and it is not for nothing that the address is always read: "Behold, children, Christ stands invisibly..."

And what prevents us from seeing Christ? Why do we see the priest, see the cross and the Gospel, see the lectern, and not see Christ? Why do we not see that the temple is the heavenly Jerusalem, it is the Kingdom of Heaven? But because the eyes of our faith are darkened. Why don't we move mountains with our prayers, don't perform miracles? But because we do not have such faith. If we had faith even as much as a mustard seed, and said to any mountain: if it moved, it would move and fall into the sea. These are the words of the Lord. And the Lord was not joking, this is true. So, then, our faith is even smaller than a mustard seed, even more meager.

Faith is not trust that Christ once lived on earth, rose again, and ascended to heaven. This is all quite a scientific fact, science has long shown this. But belief in this fact does not bring a person closer to God. The faith spoken of in the Scriptures, which Abraham and all the saints had, is not faith on the word, but spiritual vision. Precisely to the extent that a person sees God, he is a believer. Simply, for historical reasons, these two words seem to have merged into one, but in fact these faiths are different: faith in the fact of God's existence and faith as an instrument of cognition of God, thanks to which it is possible to see Him and communicate with Him.

At all times and all peoples had only one opportunity to unite with God - through faith. Not through trust in the fact that God exists, but through a living connection with God. Therefore, if a person does not meet God halfway, if he is not going to listen to what the Lord says, it means that he has no faith. And the more a person believes, the more he sees God, the more he sees how the Lord acts in his life, the more his podvig grows in a person. Therefore, if a person stands up to pray and firmly knows, sees with the eyes of his heart, that he has truly stood before God, then he will not have the question: should he stand or sit? Is it reverent or irreverent to read to him? Should he yawn during prayer or not yawn? He stands before the living God. "It is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God." And the feeling of man, the trembling of his heart, tells him that he stands before the living God. But when a person stands up to pray and turns to God, God is already near. He is so close to a person that you don't even have to say a prayer aloud - but God already hears. What a closeness of man to God! Never are two people so close as man and God. And so a person begins to pray, to turn with his living heart to the living God, Who stands here and listens to him.

The Apostle Paul says: "Pray without ceasing." What does that mean? Stand unceasingly before God. Perhaps each of us has noticed that we behave completely differently in church, we talk to the priest in a completely different tone than to our own children, for example, or to a friend. Why is there such a difference? Because when a person comes to church, his soul involuntarily feels itself in the presence of God. And for a person, even a complete non-believer, when he enters the church, his soul is somehow pulled into a chord. The mind does not yet understand and is not aware of anything, but its soul begins to tremble because the Lord is present here. If the heart is alive, if it is not coarse enough, then trembling overwhelms a person so much that sometimes tears begin to flow from his eyes when he enters the church, although he himself does not know why. One servant of God, a man far from the Church, said to me: "Father, I can't go to church - as soon as I enter, I start crying, I feel uncomfortable, and I leave. That is, this is how a person's soul feels; But instead of striving to get closer and closer, she draws such a wrong conclusion that she should not go, although these are tears not of grief, not of despair, but tears of tenderness.

So we all came to church, there were icons around us, prayers were read, sung - and here we pulled ourselves up a little, albeit at times, but somehow we stood before God. But our whole life should become such a divine service. And if a person constantly stands before the living God, if faith fills his whole being, how can anyone be condemned? How can you think badly when God is near and He sees your thoughts, sees through you? All this happens to us because we are so blind and we only have glimpses of faith sometimes. All our sins, all our squabbles, all swearing, envy, malice, arrogance, condemnation, slander, fornication come from unbelief. Unbelief is the loss of God. Man lost God - and immediately condemned him. A man lost God - and immediately became angry.

Let's imagine: we came home from church, took off our coats, changed our shoes. We entered the room and saw that the Lord Jesus Christ was sitting at the table. Any of us, seeing Him alive, sitting at the table like this, dare to go up to the TV, turn it on and sit down to watch - when there, in the room, the living Christ is sitting? Or start arguing with your neighbor, or chatting on the phone? Isn't it? But in fact, Christ - He can always be with us, and we can always have communion with Him, and we can always be near and close to Him. And what prevents us? We are hindered by our unbelief, our unbelief in what the Lord said: "I am with you always, even to the end of the age." And as soon as each of us turns to Him, He is already here, near, He stands invisibly, He is invisibly present.

Even visibly, sometimes the Lord reveals Himself to man, but the fact is that we are weak people and cannot endure it. Even such great people as Seraphim of Sarov saw Christ in church and was stunned, he could not continue to serve; They took him out, set him up, and he stood like that for a long time. Therefore, the Lord, because of our weakness, knowing that we cannot endure, we cannot resist seeing such grace, He is invisible to us, and we must live by faith that He is near. And since we constantly lose this, we very easily forgive ourselves one sin, another, a third, and thereby move further, further, further away from God. Only occasionally, when life circumstances somehow "bake" us, we call out to God from the depths - and the Lord is again next to us.