Bishop Michael (Gribanovsky)

Over the Gospel

I. "And the apostles said to the Lord, Increase faith in us" Luke 17:5

Each of us has his own depth and intensity of faith. At the same time, both change in us at every moment. And the weaker we are, the more these changes there are, and the more unforeseen they are. We all know this well if we carefully observe ourselves. Now we are strong in spirit, we feel its uplift, and faith is so palpably close to us, its mysteries are so transparent and obvious to our spiritual gaze. self-consciousness has faded, faded; his solid brilliance was covered like ripples of doubt; The level of his strength dropped, everything in us became confused and shrunk. What was now so clear, so possible and obvious, felt as close and dear, has become alien, distant, doubtful, even impossible. The mysterious element receded, and the surge of its waves subsided. The soul feels naked and abandoned; the anxiety of emptiness embraces and dries it. She calls back her native blessed moisture, which so lovingly covered her, and in the boundless expanse of which she felt so easy and free. But it is powerless to delay its natural ebb.

The waves of our faith are only the surf and the end to our spirit of the boundless sea of divine life. And it is in the hands of God; his movements and strength obey the Lord's beckoning. It accelerates its tempo, increases its height, and measures its strength. He knows how much grace of faith we need. Its multiplication depends on Him, and it is not for us to change anything in His definition. It is designed for that depth of our spirit that is inaccessible to our shallow consciousness; it is directed towards those eternal ends which constantly elude our weak and wavering freedom. We must submit to the wisdom of God and entrust ourselves to His love for us as a child. It is beautifully sung in the psalm: Lord! My heart was not haughty, and my eyes were not lifted up, and I did not enter into the great things that were unattainable to me. Have I not humbled and calmed my soul, like a child weaned from its mother's breast? my soul was in me like a child weaned from the breast (Psalm 130). Let us rest in the bosom of God; let us not rebel against Him, when the breath of His grace seems to depart from us, and faith does not penetrate and expand our hearts with its ardent current. Let us not attach value to our childish considerations, why and why such changes on the part of God in relation to us; let us not run our thoughts ahead of the faith He has given us. According to the grace given to me, I say to each of you: Do not think of yourselves more than you ought to think; but think modestly, according to the measure of faith which God has given to each (Romans 12:3).

However, all of the above does not mean that our freedom and thought are completely powerless in increasing faith in our souls. We must take advantage of the moments of the grace-filled surge of faith, as a prudent owner uses the flood of a mountain river for his gardens and fields. How much energy and skill he spends on this! With the surf of the river, he hastily deepens the grooves and diverts water through them where it is needed. With its abating, he diligently fills up their entrances in order to keep the water at the roots until its next blessed rise. Likewise, we must not lightly and lazily let the tides of faith come upon us lightly and lazily, but must make use of them and carefully nourish and refresh with their grace-filled streams those feelings, thoughts, and aspirations that have been implanted in us by Christ and which rest in our souls, and in every way preserve this power from the faith from withering doubts in periods of spiritual decline. Then, little by little, the seeds of Christ's life, imperceptible like a mustard seed, with vigilant attention and careful care, will sprout well, blossom and bear fruit. In time, having become a continuous forest of strong and branchy trees, they themselves will already attract from heaven the blessed rain of faith and bring it down to the innermost and deepest roots of our soul...

Increase in faith (1 Timothy 6:11), pious reader!

II. "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" John 3:5

The grace-filled rebirth from the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is a necessary condition for entering the Kingdom of God and the Church founded by the Lord on earth, for fulfilling the commandments of Christ and for knowing the mysteries of His teaching. If we decide to follow in the footsteps of Christ, rejecting the power of the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. In the Spirit, we will soon see all the futility of our strivings. If we try to fulfill His commandments, relying only on our own strength, on our natural, unregenerate man, then at first the burden seems unbearable for us, and we will fall in despair, overwhelmed by its weight. The law of Christ is beyond the power of the natural man; it is much heavier than the law of Moses, because it refines and strengthens its requirements; it is absolutely impossible to realize it in life with our weak and sin-prone forces. The law of Christ is designed exclusively for a person who has been blessed with grace; only with the help of the power of the Holy Spirit. Through the renewal of our old nature by the new element of grace-filled life, He becomes easily fulfilled, and His commandments are only a form of revelation and development of this heavenly element, and the mysteries of His teaching are the mysteries of our own inner spiritual life, which we experience.

At the present time, Christian societies seem to bow down before the moral requirements of Christ's teaching.

And the reason for all this lies in the fact that the grace-filled power of the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit has ceased to serve as a source for the consciousness and freedom of modern man in his everyday, private, and public life and activity; everyone thinks to be a Christian with the help of only their natural powers and considerations. It is clear that nothing reliably good can ever come out of this, and before our eyes are the inevitable consequences of such a false path: the ever-spreading dissatisfaction with life and its ever-increasing sufferings... And how painful it is to look at these sufferings of people, it is bitter and difficult to realize that nothing from outside can help them! Everything you do is just one drop of water that falls into the sea of fire. Suffering penetrates into the very depths of life, into its daily trifles; like a heavy bitter sediment, they eat the very bottom of the human heart. A man walks, talks, laughs, takes care of himself and others, and look at what he is inside: all eaten away by the sorrow of life, like caustic rust, all broken and devastated by its aimlessness and uselessness, like invisible moths and aphids. Everything around us and we ourselves are only tumbled coffins...

And so it was, is and will always be, everywhere and everywhere. It is a pity to see how people, like small, foolish children, try to heal the evil of their lives with self-invented medicines and measures. Is it possible that it is not clear to all of us that the evil of the world lies in the very root of our life, that it cannot be cured by any private, earthly human efforts, that the whole culture, the whole civilization is only the flower of the same root and a poisonous color, although seductively beautiful, although constantly refined in its aroma? The Romans were smarter and more thoughtful than we are: before the coming of Christ, they clearly realized that nothing can be done with the evil of life by the means that man has at his disposal. Evil is so radical that it can be cured only by a radical means, i.e., the very root of life must be renewed, a new vital element must be created, a new seed of its development must be laid. If this is not the case, because it is not in the power of man, if it cannot be, because it is impossible to imagine how it is possible, then there is no and cannot be deliverance from the evil of life; man and the world must perish, must burn in the fire of suffering; everything must disappear in the abyss of insignificance, infinitely ridiculous and monstrously cruel... And the Romans consciously plunged themselves into this insignificance, forcibly breaking the thread of their lives...

But what man could not have imagined, it was actually done by the Son of God, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He then came, so that through the sending down of the Holy Spirit. To give people a new life, to renew its very root, to lay in them a new seed for its further development. In this He also considered the essential task of His divine mission on earth.

About 2000 years have passed since then; In dozens of generations of ancestors we call ourselves Christians, and yet look inside and around you: how unreceptive we are, how stupid we are to assimilate the divine idea and the power of rebirth and renewal! How frivolously, and sometimes deliberately, we do not want to see that only in this alone is the way out for us and for the whole world from the abyss of suffering and ultimate destruction! How we still rely on our own strength and fuss in vain, trying in every possible way either to hide or to heal from the outside the ulcer that grows inside and eats away at the very root of our life, making us completely powerless in organizing its joy and its salvation! How to marvel at this, how to mourn, how to bring our insane light-mindedness to reason! We have become so shallow in the vanity and complexity of external, superficial, ostentatious life that the very thought of our radical, complete rebirth seems to us something impossible. We feel dizzy when we try to look into the depths of our souls and believe in the new life laid down in it by the Holy Spirit. By the Spirit in Christ; we lack the moral courage and determination to tear ourselves away for a while from the noise of life that captures us and descend there, into this calm silence, where the very fountain of life beats, where its very creativity takes place, where man remains alone in silence with himself and with the invisible God. And yet all Christian thoughts, feelings, deeds and deeds must arise and grow solely from that new seed which is laid at the bottom of this spring of the unchanging powers of our soul, from that life-giving breath of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit that breathes at the beckoning of God in this mysterious area... Will we continue to be deaf to our Lord's call to be reborn and renewed? Shall we still consider the very idea of renewal and rebirth to be inappropriate for our continuously and rapidly flowing time, which, the farther we go, the more and more deeply it captures us with the whirlwind of its vanity? Is it possible that we will all only gasp and groan, exhausted from the aimless hustle and bustle of life, from our sufferings and infirmities, from our fatigue and powerlessness, and at the same time reject our only medicine given to us by God?! Oh, God forbid that it should be so! Let us repent of our past, let us repent of our frivolity, of our presumptuous pride, of our passions and sins, let us decide, with God's help, to begin a new life! Let us direct all our attention, all the freedom of our heart and mind to the grace of regeneration granted to us! Let us constantly pray to God that He would germinate in us the seed of a new spiritual life that He had planted in us! Let us cherish and nourish this seed with good dispositions of the heart, good thoughts and deeds for the good of our souls and for the good of our neighbors! Let us constantly remember in our hearts and minds that we are a new creature in Christ, and, in accordance with this, in everything, both inside and outside ourselves, we must act according to the will of God, according to the renewed man, according to the power of the grace of the Holy Spirit, which is always called upon and always helps us. Spirit! Let us reject the old and old, let us enter into a merciless struggle with it, and begin to grow in ourselves and around us the new, Christ's. And most importantly, let us cease to rely only on ourselves, and put all our hope in the power of God acting in us, in the grace of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, which regenerates us and constantly gives us a source of new strength for the creation of good in ourselves and others! Let us cast aside our self-conceit and self-will, and submit wholly to divine guidance... And then salvation will be near us; then we will understand what life in the Church is, then life will be easy and joyful for us, then all its commandments and statutes, the entire law of Christ will be only a desirable and joyful path to the Kingdom of God, to the inheritance of eternal blessed life, then we will find the strength to accomplish all that is predestined for us for the glory of Christ, then the joy of life will embrace and seize us, as a cloud of heaven, to meet our Lord... O Lord! Wake up, wake up..