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.

The Lord sees everything, and if we constantly remember Him, we will be ashamed to sin, we will constantly humble ourselves, we will constantly be vigilant over our souls, we will be afraid that something impure will enter it. Of course, through weakness, through negligence, through lack of faith, through hardness of heart, we constantly deviate from God. But all the time, constantly and invariably, we need to return to the thought of God, because the Lord sees everything, the Lord knows everything, and the Lord loves us – what pain we bring to Him when we sin in word, deed and thought.

That's when our life will begin to change, our conscience will begin, as they say in Russian, to wake up, because constant remembrance of God is conscience. "Message" means "knowledge", and "co-news" is the One Who knows everything about us together with us, this is the Lord. And if He is always close to us, if we do not lose the memory of Him, then we will always stand at the judgment of God and simply will not be able to sin. Well, how can one sin in the face of God? It's scary! Of course, due to weakness we are constantly distracted, passions darken our minds, and we again forget about God, but again we can cross ourselves, come to our senses, say: "Lord, enlighten me, stop me."

The Holy Fathers invented a way to constantly remember God: for this one must constantly repeat the prayer, not with words, but with the heart. But not everyone can pray with the heart, so they begin, of course, with a verbal prayer, then they make a prayer of the mind, and then it becomes a prayer of the heart, when a person prays not with the mind, but with the heart itself. And then the heart constantly remembers God, a person is in constant connection with God and can no longer sin - that is, he is saved, because the grace of God comes to him. But for this you need to constantly try to pray: in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, at lunchtime - always. The mind should not be idle. Vladimir Monomakh wrote to his children: if you ride a horse and pray, repeat: "Lord, have mercy" - it will be of great benefit to your mind. It was nine hundred years ago that he taught his children in this way. What wisdom he had!

In the same way, we must always, in every deed, in every place, try to occupy our minds with prayer, to come to our senses all the time, if our mind is idle. Then we will not have the thoughts of strangers in our heads. We will have God in our souls, we will have constant prayer in our souls. The Apostle gave the commandment: "Pray without ceasing," which means that when we do not pray, we sin, even if we are engaged in some noblest deed. Because any deed without prayer, the most beautiful one, is a sin, and no one needs this deed. God does not need the works of our hands, because what we do with our hands, with our feet, it will all burn up, it is all not eternal, only that which relates to our spirit, to our soul, is eternal, the works of faith. And the main work of faith is prayer. That is why we must try to pray all the time, and this, of course, is difficult.

To pray means to shed blood, but this is the only way to do it. The Holy Fathers said: "Give blood and receive the Spirit." Without this, it is impossible. Therefore, one must strive all the time, one must force oneself all the time, one must force oneself all the time, one must wake up. We sleep all the time, or there is a wonderful word: "have fun". We are constantly "crazy", because there is something in our head all the time: you look there, read it - and the whole day passes in such a "bald". And in the evening, when we get up to pray, is this prayer? Again, it's just a mess. It's good if four words have come to mind. And what about dreams? And in a dream it is the same: now I dream, then that. In the morning I got up - and again again. And so we must try to get out of this demonic turmoil, out of these dreams, thoughts, plans that we make, all kinds of insane condemnations, insults that are constantly boiling in our heads, we must go out into the fresh air of God's grace. And this is possible only through prayer.

But many of us, having gone to church for many years, have not understood what it means to pray. They are looking for some good prayers or some special ones, completely not understanding that prayer does not consist of words, it is not magic. Praying is the same as; you can repeat: "Have mercy on me, God," or you can simply say: "Lord" - and this is enough. Or you can pray to some saint, or you can pray to the Mother of God. It doesn't matter at all, because when we pray, for example, to Seraphim of Sarov, we pray in him to God Himself, because God is also in Seraphim. When we turn to the Mother of God, we turn to the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, because Christ is in the arms of the Mother of God. And where Christ is, there is the whole Holy Trinity, because Christ, and the Father, and the Spirit are one. It doesn't matter how we pray, as long as we practice it constantly. And there is no need for any special art here. We must pray simply: as we talk to each other, so we must constantly strive in prayer to God.

And why don't we have such a constant desire to turn to God? Because we don't know Him. If we knew God, we would appreciate it, we would be afraid to fall asleep, because if you doze off for an hour, God will leave you. That is why the saints did not sleep - they were afraid of losing prayer, because prayer is an inexpressible sweetness, this is the Kingdom of Heaven. And as soon as he stopped praying, the Kingdom of Heaven ended, it left, because God also left with prayer. And he only said: "Lord!" - and He is here again. Therefore, if the saints slept, it was reluctantly, out of weakness: after all, they are a person, after all, some kind of rest is needed. That's why we rested, some standing, some sitting. Seraphim, for example, only slept for two hours a day, and it was enough for him, because it was not the main thing for him.