But if thousands of thousands and myriads of myriads of sinners now repent in one day, and, turning to Christ the Lord, become friends with Him, are united and sanctified by His holiness, then they will immediately recognize the sanctification received from Him, by which salvation is arranged, feeling a certain divine power inherent in them. For Christ the Lord is for everyone who believes in Him the power of reasoning, the power of reason, the strength of wisdom, the power of truth, the foundation of love for God and people, the action of every holy commandment and will of God, a kind of rational and nature-turned abhorrence and hatred of all evil and sin, all lust and deceit. Christ the Lord is our hope and our peace. Without the Lord Jesus, not only can no one do good, but everyone is separated from God. Only one thing the Lord demands of everyone who believes in Him, that he entrust himself entirely to Him, Christ the Lord, that is, that he should have full hope in Him and nourish the unshakable conviction that only by the power of Christ, and not by his own, can anyone be saved. And such a person is the only true Christian who places full hope in Christ alone, that He alone will correct everything in him and heal him both in soul and body. And when this faith, which is possessed with understanding, is followed by a deed, then love for Christ is born, that is, when one receives by his very deed what he hoped for from Christ, and feels it, then he loves Him. For a person who is beneficent cannot remain insensitive to a beneficence, and naturally begins to love the Benefactor, even apart from his own will. Then, when he succeeds in loving his Benefactor, he finds the Benefactor Himself within himself, because He also fully trusts and enters into the one who loved Him.

But the devil, what he first did to man, he now tries to do with everyone who begins to repent, suggesting to him: "There is no salvation for you in your God" (Psalm 3:3), that is, that salvation is not by the power of your God, but by your own. And woe to him who believes him! In this way, the enemy wants to strip the soul of the grace of God, in order to then catch it and devour it like a wolf to a lamb. For this reason it is always proper for the mind to look to God, from Whom alone comes all help, so that this mind may be enlightened by the mental rays of the light of God and, having become deified, acquire a kind of immutability, so as not to return to evil. Then at last he becomes the ruler of the earth, so that no earthly lust dares to approach him any more, but all earthly things tremble before him and fear him, not for his own sake, but for the sake of God, Who fears the Cherubim themselves, Whom he always has inherent in himself, and from Whom he does not allow himself to be separated in thought and separated by desire and feeling. To God, our Benefactor, be glory, honor, and worship forever and ever. Amen.

The Fourteenth Word. 1. What does God require of a Christian? 2. What harm has man suffered and continues to suffer from the devil, and does not know it? 3. All people are sick in their souls and do not understand this. 4. They must know their infirmities in order to seek a physician. 5. The evil devil puts his temptations as a bait that he lays before people. 6. For what reason do not all Christians excel in virtue?

God demands of every Christian, first and foremost, that he should always confess his former sins, so that, remembering them at all times, he would always have self-abasement and humble wisdom and would not despise others. Secondly, it demands that he repent before Him and pray to Him for everything in which he sins every day, willingly or unwillingly, in knowledge or in ignorance, for it is impossible for a person to pass a single day without falling into some kind of sin, great or small, because sin can be in word, deed, and thought. How these deeds, words and thoughts quickly alternate or act together in the course of the day, you will not see how you sin not in one, then in another. But whoever sins falls; there is no justification for the fallen, but he is saved by the one boundless mercy of God.

Man suffers from a certain hidden illness, great and unknowable, which is so great and so excessive, that there has never been and never will be like it. Why was it necessary for God Himself to come in order to correct and heal her? In spite of all this, however, people do not know about this and live in complete carelessness, not in the least grieving because of this illness because of their insensibility. For whoever knows this sickness also feels it; whoever feels it hurts his soul; Whoever is sick seeks recovery and tries in every way to be healed of that illness.

2. But what kind of disease is it? Listen: the devil, according to his custom, always approaches the soul in a strange and unrecognizable way, so that, being always near it and not moving away from it, he disturbs and overwhelms all its strivings, movements, and thoughts, that is, the mental, desired, and irritable forces of the soul, and directs them to what pleases him. In this way he lures us all into his nets and takes us into slavery to himself and to his will, and we do not know it; and, worst of all, the devil, using this tactic incessantly and making us passionate and useless, convinces us to think and say that this illness of ours (confusion and turmoil within), by which we are led into passions and are kept in them, is a property of our nature, and not the work of demonic snares [1]. Others he persuades to think that the evil deeds which they do by his action are the essence of correctness and virtue, and to boast of them. But this is already the complete deadness of the soul, for he who boasts of evil does not feel (its pernicious action) in the least, and this is peculiar only to the dead. And this is why the danger of being condemned together with the devil and other demons hangs over the human race, and he does not know it.

3. A person who was previously healthy and fell ill knows and understands what is illness and what is health. But if someone happens to be sick from birth, then it is difficult for him to understand what health is.

Not seeing this, not understanding and not feeling, it does not feel the need for healing and does not seek it. Was it to be hoped that she would ever be cured in such a condition? Whoever does not want to be healed and does not seek recovery, how can he be healed? Or how will he seek healing who does not know that he is sick and does not understand what his health consists in, and drives away the one who explains it to him and interprets it? By doing so, he shows that he has no need for healing.

4. Such is our affliction, and there is no other cure for this affliction than the one I have mentioned. Neither an angel, nor an intercessor, nor a sage, nor a scribe, nor any questioner of this world could and cannot heal this ailment of ours.

For since the time of Adam's transgression, all the natural forces of human nature have been corrupted, that is, the mind, memory, imagination, will, feeling, which are all combined in the three parts of the soul - mental, irritable, and desirable. Corrupted, but not destroyed. Why a person can think, but cannot think correctly; he may will, but he desires senselessly; He may be irritated (it would be more direct to be energetic), but he is irritated unreasonably. For this reason, everything that he thinks and invents, that he wishes and undertakes, what he sympathizes with and what he disgusts with, all this is crooked, oblique, erroneous.

5. The temptation with which the devil tempts us is of two kinds. As a bird that flies freely on its wings in order to find food for itself is deceived by a bird-catcher who stretches his nets over the ground to catch it, by the fact that, having spread his nets on the ground, he puts a bait on top of them, which, seeing it, the bird flies down to peck, and then becomes entangled in the net and is taken captive; then the bird-catcher also comes, takes it, holds it in his hands, and does with it what he will; In the same way, the devil, knowing that the human mind is in constant motion (soaring), creeps up on a person invisibly, puts some sweetness before his thoughts, as a bait, and under the sweetness he spreads, like a snare, sin, which is at the same time the hand of the devil, invisible and hidden, because without sin it is impossible for the devil to seize a person's soul. When he manages to lure the soul with the lure of sweetness, he immediately entangles it in nets and seizes it. The first thing he does here is to blindfold her, that is, to darken her mind, so that she does not see the light and the way and does not run away; and this he does with all diligence until she, through the habit of sweetness and a long sojourn in sin, completely surrenders herself to his will and becomes his handy and beloved servant in everything. After this, she herself will no longer want to flee from this lord to whom she is accustomed, and who so comforts her and satisfies her with all kinds of sweets, until he completely corrupts her with these unclean and stinking viands of his. When he sees that she is completely corrupt, then he directs her to all kinds of lewdness, sins and evil deeds. But the bird-catcher cannot pull the birds from the air to his bait, and the devil, if he finds the soul naked by the grace of God, can move the aspirations and desires of the soul to sweetness and incline it to his will. For this reason I have said that the temptations of the devil are of two kinds: the first is the bait of sweetness, which he puts before the thought, and the other is the irritation of lusts, by which he compels the soul to lust after sweets and inclines it to his own will.

A soul that submits itself in this way and so much to the devil can do nothing more for itself than to know into what depths of evil it has descended and how its will is bound by the bonds of others, to cry out as from the womb of hell, and to call upon God, Who descended into the pit of the earth, to come to it and set it free. This alone it can do, but it cannot release itself from bondage and escape, just as one who is chained with iron and kept in prison under strong locks cannot escape. She can, I say, call on the name of Jesus Christ, that He may send her help, and when she is thus strengthened through the invocation of Jesus Christ (for He is the only deliverer of our souls) and feels that she has received help from God, then she can also flee from the yoke of the devil and from the bonds of sin. But, fleeing from the devil, it should have recourse to some kind of steward of grace, that is, to a spiritual father, so that the evil devil would not find it unprotected again and would not steal it. By this spiritual father she will be taught and exercised in what she needs to think, until at last she will be able to bear the whole armor of God, that is, Divine grace, and with it to resist all the wiles of the devil, all these principles, powers, rulers of the darkness of this world, the spirits of evil. For the soul, united to the flesh, cannot alone, naked, resist such strong and so many enemies, unless it is clothed in the whole armor of God; just as a warrior, even the most courageous, cannot resist the enemies who attack with spears, swords, and shields without weapons, and if he comes out against them, he will immediately be struck to death.

6. As the body of man, composed of different parts, is united by the soul and does not allow it to disintegrate, but when the soul leaves the body, it decays and decays, because then all its connections are resolved, and that which was united and harmonized before death is separated and dissolved; the same happens to the soul, when the Divine grace is withdrawn from it (which is the soul of our soul, and before the transgression of Adam was united to it, as the soul is united to the body, and contained it in the unity and harmony of thoughts, which after the transgression were scattered in innumerable directions) – the Divine, I say, grace of the Holy Spirit, which is again given by holy Baptism to those who receive it, after faith and catechesis, this is a divine mystery - which all the external wisdom of the Greeks does not know and cannot understand. For just as every person is convinced that the soul is the force that harmonizes and unites the various parts of the body into a single harmonious whole, so every baptized Christian must always keep in mind that nothing else, but only the grace of the All-Holy Spirit, which he received through holy baptism and the new birth, it alone unites, unites, and restrains undispersed the innumerable and manifold movements and thoughts of the soul (if this is in him).

This collection of the thoughts of the soul is and is called the life of the soul, which God grants it. But just as some forget and remain carelessly unthinking that their body consists of many and varied parts, which is why it is subject to many ailments, and that it is contained in union and harmony by the soul, so that when they are healthy and do not feel any illness, they boast of it (as if it were not a gift of God, but something of their own), so some of those who have been vouchsafed to receive Divine grace are subjected to similar wrong-thinking, when, not heeding themselves and not keeping in their minds and thoughts this great mystery of Divine grace, which they have received (and which keeps in union and harmony the various thoughts and aspirations of the soul), they incline to a proud thought of themselves. For this pride they fall into the judgment of the devil (1 Timothy 3:6), are stripped naked of Divine grace and descend into a worse state than in which they were before Baptism. And only those of them who, having understood what great evil they have suffered, shed many bitter tears to receive Divine grace again, after much labor and sweat are again vouchsafed this great mercy of God.