We are all terribly busy, each of us has thousands, millions of things to do, and we are very willing to do them. And the most important thing is the salvation of our own soul - in our pen, in abandonment, we always strive to do only what we want. Our soul is not directed towards the Kingdom of Heaven, we have no will for the Kingdom of Heaven, and because of this our heart is closed to the grace of God, it has become hard. Although we are mostly sentimental people, we can willingly sympathize on the spiritual plane; When we hear about someone's misfortune, our heart shrinks, but it is already difficult for us to take a step towards someone, it is already difficult for us, we are incapable of such a feat.

And how to soften the heart? Only by constant exercise. Let's take a piece of plasticine - it is tough. But if we start crumpling it, it becomes soft. So it is with the heart: it must be constantly exercised in virtue. And although virtue is a property, it is acquired by doing - that is why it is called "virtue-action". For example, how to acquire the virtue of prayer? You need to pray constantly. And how can one turn from a dry and selfish person into kind and compassionate? We must try to show love to our neighbor, to anyone and everyone, all the time. This is how to exercise your heart all the time, to soften.

Usually we forgive ourselves everything, we do not want to repent of our sins and love even them, we have grown together with them, we cherish them, we do not want to leave them. Well, how to get rid of it? To do this, one must constantly teach one's heart courage, constantly try to overcome sin, constantly not allow it to dominate oneself, remembering the Kingdom of Heaven – that only in this way, constantly striving towards it, can one soften one's heart. And if our heart is softened, we can be closer to God. If we see God closer, then our faith will grow. If our faith increases, we will be able to do more works of faith. The more a person believes, the more he can do. Why could Bessarion of Egypt walk on water? Because he had faith. For example, Peter – he had the strongest faith of all the apostles, such that, even though he did not fully receive the grace of the Holy Spirit, when the Lord said to him: "Walk on the water," he believed and immediately went. True, it was not enough for much, he soon doubted and began to drown, but still he was able to take a few steps.

Of course, the purpose of the Christian life is not to walk on water. Spiritual life is not a circus: I can not sleep, I can not eat. Although bodily feats delight us, because they speak of man's courage, of his striving towards God, this is not the goal. John Climacus, for example, always fasted very moderately and was not famous for any special bodily feats. Demetrius of Rostov did not sail on any waters. And Elder Silouan, who is now glorified as a saint, also did not walk on the waters. He lived on Athos, prayed and never bathed at all, because on Athos the custom is as follows: monks do not bathe.

The purpose of spiritual life is not to walk on water, this is already a consequence. The goal is to draw closer to God, to live one life with Him. When a person is close to God, he feels the will of God, he is at one with God, he always hears God. In the Bible there are such words: "And the Lord said to Abraham" - and then there is a direct speech. That is, Abraham heard what God said to him, because his life was completely in harmony with the will of God. Of course, this voice of God does not come to man like a thunderbolt from heaven, out of some cloud, no, the voice of God is heard within man. How can we be able to act according to the will of God?

For this purpose the commandments of God are given, to teach us to hear the will of God. And we need to delve into, understand, and realize what God's commandment is. After all, this is the voice of God to us. And if we believe that the Holy Scriptures are true and that what the Lord said is true, and since it is true, it means that we must act in this way, without conforming to any circumstances: if the Lord wants it so, then we should act in this way, then when the Lord sees that we strive with all our might to live exactly as He wants, then He will govern us in our lives. Through our conscience, He will always tell us what to do at this or that moment, in this or that case. And no matter how fantastic the will of God may seem, man will always fulfill it. Let us remember Abraham: he had no children for a long time, and he was already in despair, because he was a very old man. And the Lord said to him, "You will have a child, you will make a great offspring, a great nation will come out," and Abraham did not doubt: if the Lord said that it would be so, then it would be. And indeed, a son was born. But then the Lord says: go, offer this only son to Me as a sacrifice - that is, make a fire, take a knife, kill him and burn him, because this is the form in which sacrifices were offered to God. And Abraham doubted for a second that God was wrong? Finally, in his old age, he gave a son, this greatest miracle happened - and suddenly he said: go and kill him. No, Abraham did not doubt at all, took a bundle of wood, took a knife, went to the mountain, built a fire, put his son on this fire and was ready to make a sacrifice - and then the Lord stopped him. This is how the Lord tested his faith.

And although Abraham was not a righteous man from our point of view, there were very unchristian actions in his life: he was often faint-hearted, and cowardly, and did a lot in life according to Christian concepts of sin, because Christianity is the highest morality - but God imputed to him this faith that he had, as righteousness. Because his faith was simply amazing, almost no one living on earth had such a faith, he had this Christian virtue in the highest degree. That is why the Lord made Abraham, the fathers of all believers. And our faith is weak. Why? From our hardness of heart, because we are far from God. The closer a person is to God, the more faith he has, the more works of faith he can do. The farther from God, the more unfaithful he is.

How can we bring God closer to ourselves? How can we bring ourselves closer to God? There is only one way: you need to strive to Him all the time. The fact of the matter is that there can be no game, no deception. Always, as soon as a person takes a step towards God, at that moment God takes a step towards a person. If you take two steps towards God, then the Lord will take two steps towards you. As soon as you depart from God in something, even if you take a step, the Lord will immediately depart from you. It always happens: you have sinned in something, even in small things, and you immediately lose. Therefore, there can be no play or trade with God.

God wants man to aspire to Him himself, because God is love and He wants only love. And love is expressed in the fact that the lover always wants to be together with the beloved, wants to live one life with him. And if a man desires God, then God will also desire to be with that man. True love can only be mutual, because when love is not reciprocated, it cannot develop, and love is always knowledge. One can take any area of human existence, not to mention the relationship of the human soul with God, and we will see that it is present everywhere. The more a person loves chemistry, the more chemistry opens up to him. The more he loves music, the more he is engaged in it, the more he strives, the more bottomless beauty is revealed to him in it. The more a person deals with his children, works on their upbringing, tries to show them a good example, the more these children will repay him with kindness later. The more labor he puts into the land, the more he will get a harvest. And so it is in everything, in everything, in everything.

Therefore, all the saints were ascetics. An ascetic is from the word "to move", "podvig". They were always moving towards God, every day they tried to take this step towards God. We woke up - and immediately thought: how to live a day in order to get closer to God? What do I need to do? how? And we don't even think about it. Are we usually like? In the morning, on the move, we prayed absent-mindedly, and that's it, and then there were affairs, vanity, all sorts of side aspirations, it was good that we would come to church on Sunday, but the whole week passed in vanity, we seemed to have crossed it out of our lives.

Even the ancient Jew, who lived by cattle breeding and who, in order to feed himself and his family, had to work very hard, and then the Lord gave a commandment: devote one day a week to the Lord, that is, think about God, think about your salvation, pray, read, if you can, the Holy Scriptures, go to the temple, or, if you live far from the temple, to the synagogue, pray there. But this is the Old Testament, and this is not enough for Christians. The Apostle Paul already writes: "Pray without ceasing" – not only in the morning, noon, evening, but without ceasing. And when to sleep? But when you sleep, you are no longer with God, that's the point. Therefore, Bessarion of Egypt did not sleep, there was no time to sleep. That is why Seraphim of Sarov did not sleep - not because he tortured himself, no. And he did not want to sleep, he only wanted to pray. He did not achieve this immediately, of course. So you and I will immediately start not sleeping, so what? It will end in a mental hospital, a madhouse, nothing else.

Feat follows faith: faith grows, and podvig grows, and gradually a person comes to amazing things. Barsanuphius the Great, for example, achieved such enlightenment that he did not need food at all, but ate only for humility: since he is not yet an angel, but a man, he seems to need something to eat. This is how human flesh can become thin, and what gifts can be obtained from God, because he was really nourished by the Holy Spirit. If the Lord can feed five thousand people with five loaves of bread, then, naturally, there is nothing surprising in the fact that Mary of Egypt lived in the desert with a few pieces of bread for many years, and Bessarion of Egypt ate once a week almost all his life. This is already a consequence of spiritual life. And this speaks of aspiration, of the fact that a person forgets about everything: forgets about food, forgets about sleep.

There was such a case in the last century. One servant of God, who was forty years old, asked Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow for his blessing to get married, and the latter wrote him a resolution: it is time to think about eternal life, that is, it is time to think more about death, about the transition to eternal life. Metropolitan Philaret himself was an ascetic, an ascetic, a man of prayer; and although he was exalted very high in society and the state, in his inner life he was directed to the Kingdom of Heaven. Therefore, it was wild for him that a person at such an age would think about some kind of marriage, because marriage is a temporary matter. Of course, it is not good for a person to live alone, it is better to be married, but at the age of forty it is time to do some serious things, what a person should think about in the first place, and not the arrangement here on earth.

And so, if we want to attain the Kingdom of Heaven, to attain the grace of God, we must strive to direct our souls, our minds, our hearts toward the Kingdom of Heaven. And this, too, by the way, is achieved by constant exercise, also achieved by constant practice. We must try not to lose the memory of God, of the fact that we have a Heavenly Father, that we are not alone in the universe. Remember that the Only-begotten Son of God descended to earth two thousand years ago and that the Apostle Andrew the First-Called came to the Russian land and preached the Gospel. Remember that we were baptized, and what prayers were read over us. We must always remember that last Sunday we took communion, that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit, that the grace of God dwells in us, and think about how we may not lose it. Remember all the time that the Lord sees us - not only the expression of our face, not only our actions, but also the thoughts that rush through our heads. And the Lord sees whether we accept these thoughts or reject them with anger.