Ioann Shakhovskoy

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE

The Power of Christ's Resurrection

Every false teaching about the truth is a serpent, every rebellion against the Saviour of the God-Man is a deadly drink: all this stings the soul mortally, poisons it and lulls it to sleep for eternity with the sleep of poison. Truth rests and gives life to the heart, while falsehood is the torment of the heart and the death of the true life of the heart.

Everything in this fallen world, rushing to its final destruction, takes up arms against the purity of Christ. The world invents all kinds of things, what people do to hide from their hearts the light that descends from heaven. One does not have to be a particularly spiritual person, but only honest and just, to see our old land, teeming with snakes and sparkling with deadly springs of water. Our eye has gazed upon evil, we are accustomed not to notice danger, and the Lord, taking pity on us, hides from us the worst part of reality, so that we do not grow weary, preserves us and covers us.

But the Lord does not take away from us the freedom to determine good or evil, for this is the meaning of our temporal life.

The temptations of evil are conducted in the realm of our freedom. All of us can endure, but not all of us strive to endure in truth and purity. And the bodiless enemy fights us not even daily, but every minute. It is possible to resist evil only if one binds oneself, like a thin twig, to the unshakable trunk of eternal truth and the highest fullness of life, to Christ. To trust wholly in Him in Whose mouth there has been no falsehood from eternity, to believe in the Saviour and to love Him more than one's own life, to place Him above the reasoning of one's mind – this is what it will mean to love God "more than one's life"...

The forerunners of the false Christ, taking advantage of the difficulty of the struggle in the world against evil for their own purposes, shout about the "lifelessness" of Christ's teaching. The "requirements of nature" are the requirements of sin. Thousands and millions of people give up their hearts without resistance to unbridled and shameless sin, beginning their fall through the bite of the heart with disbelief in the future righteous retribution.

An unbelieving heart is weak and unfounded in the face of sin. That is why the whirlwinds of world evil dispel faith.

But no matter how and by whom faith in the future world of Christ is dispelled, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

Everyone who has called, believed, flowed with a dying soul to the pure source of Christ, receives from God the power to take snakes and crush them, to drink deadly things and remain healthy. Satan does not touch the one who guards himself with his deadly breath — he rages around, goes into the very chest, squeezes the heart — but he does not dare, cannot enter the holy heart of man, and man is saved by his faith. A believing enlightened mind, like fire, burns up all the tricks of evil. The grace of the Spirit, which reveals to him the highest knowledge, shines in him, transforming his entire composition.

True faith is not blind, it does not brush aside tempting questions and whispers, it looks directly into the eyes of all evil, sees through it and denounces it. Because of this, true believers have heavenly peace in their hearts, blissful and unshakable silence in their souls. For they have risen above the serpents crawling in the dust, and the springs of dead water flowing in the dust. There are no more dead waters for the one who has foretasted the joy of the resurrection.