There are no people unworthy of love.
15 This is a true saying, and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first. 16 But for this reason I received mercy, so that Jesus Christ in me first might show all long-suffering, as an example to those who will believe in Him for eternal life. (1 Tim 1:15-16).
My mother works in a group of volunteers. Together they visit local prisons and testify about God. One day I decided to join them. When we met with the prisoners, one of them said that he was sure that God no longer needed someone like him. Then one of the volunteers read 1 Tim. 1:15-16 and spoke about God's mercy and forgiveness of even the worst sinners. That day the prisoner accepted Jesus.
No matter what grave sins a person has committed in his life, God's love can reach his heart. Even a drug dealer. Even a killer. The worst person your imagination can create can receive God's forgiveness if he humbly asks for it.
There is no person in the world who is “no longer needed” by God. There are only those who have not accepted His love.
Brian
Let's talk about you.
1. Remember a person (from school, university, work, etc.) who does wrong. Imagine God looking this person in the eyes and saying, “I forgive you.” Imagine yourself doing the same.
2. Write down today's verses and memorize them. Perhaps you will meet someone who desperately needs them.
3. Thank God for forgiving you and ask for His help in forgiving others.
What does it mean that God loves us?
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You love everything that exists, and you do not disdain anything that you have created, for you would not have created it if you hated it.
(Wis. 11, 25).
Will a woman forget her suckling child, so as not to suppress the son of her womb? But even if she forgot, I will not forget you.
(Isaiah 49:15).
Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
(John 15, 13).
God loved the world so much that He gave His only begotten Son.
(John 3:16).
God's love for us was revealed in the fact that God sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we could receive life through Him. This is love, that we did not love God, but He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
(1 John 4, 9-10).
Hardly anyone will die for the righteous; maybe someone will decide to die for a benefactor. But God proves his love for us by the fact that Christ died for us while we were still sinners.
(Rom. 5:7-8).
The love of Christ embraces us.
(2 Cor 5:14).
Neither the father is before the children, as God is before the people. Everyone is about himself, but the Lord is about everyone.
Russian proverbs.
He is philanthropic and merciful, and just as a woman in labor wants to be relieved of her burden, so He wants to pour out His mercy, but our sins prevent this.
Saint John Chrysostom (407).
The very knowledge of our creation prompts us to love God. Look: what made the great Artist create us, call us into existence, if not His goodness? The Lord created man very beautiful, giving him a beautiful slender body, giving him mental and physical feelings, through which people understand each other and have mutual communication. And this is the infinite goodness and love of God for man... Knowledge of God’s creation of the nature around us also disposes us to love God. For the goodness of God it was not enough that He created us as beings more perfect than others, but He also created for man the beautiful world around him. Why did God create the heavenly lights, the beautiful stars, why did He create the earth, decorating it with countless plants and flowers, fruit trees, forests, rivers, mountains, and establishing different seasons? For man, so that through all this man would come to know God, glorify Him and be blissful here on earth. For whom did God fill the air with all kinds of birds, the seas with fish, and the earth with all kinds of beasts and animals? For the man whom he made king over all creation. Finally, the greatest blessings of God towards fallen man dispose us to love God... Christ... being the True God, seated on the Throne of His glory, descends from Heaven to earth, becomes a man, enters into the painful conditions of human life, endures hardships, sorrows, labors, and more for thirty years He carried within Himself the thought that He must suffer grievously on the Cross, for three and a half years He endured with Him Judas, His betrayer, and treated him as a friend, and finally He was subjected to the most terrible humiliation, torment, death, and with all this, not at all grows cold in His love for the human race, which brought Him to the Cross! On the contrary, He cares day and night about the salvation of people, instructs them with patience and forbearance, does good to them, heals them, resurrects the dead, forgives people for their anger and bitterness, cries for their stubbornness and destruction, prays to the Heavenly Father even for His own. crucifiers, asking to forgive them the gravest sin of murdering Christ. The sacrifice of love made for us by the God-Man is so great that human thought is lost when it tries to embrace and understand it. It is impossible to love greater than the love of the God-man for us, who laid down His soul not even for friends, but for His enemies.
Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov) (XX-XXI centuries).
God sends down His generous gifts to us with greater pleasure than with which we accept them.
Saint Gregory the Theologian (329-389).
Do not imagine God as a very strict judge and punisher. He is very merciful, he accepted our human flesh and suffered as a man, not for the sake of saints, but for the sake of sinners like you and me. Oh, blessed humility, you are divine, for you bowed the heavens and became incarnate in humanity and nailed the sins of the whole world to the Cross. There is no such sin that would exceed God's mercy, and the sins of the whole world, like a handful of sand thrown into the sea.
Schema-abbot Ioann (Alekseev) (1873-1958).
A cross without love cannot be thought of or imagined: where there is a cross, there is love; in church you see crosses everywhere and on everything, so that everything reminds you that you are in the temple of Love crucified for us.
Righteous John of Kronstadt (1829-1908).
...Holy nature is so good and merciful that It constantly seeks even the smallest reason for our justification and in order to forgive people their sins... Since His face is turned to forgiveness at every moment, He, using insignificant and small, almost insignificant means , again and again, through seeming accidents and unforeseen circumstances, pours upon us abundant grace, which, like the ocean, knows no measure. And to those who show even a little suffering and the will to repent for what happened, He immediately, at the same hour, without delay, grants forgiveness of sins. When the whole of creation had abandoned and forgotten God, perfected in all wickedness, of His own free will and without the request of men He came down to their dwellings and lived among them in their body, as one of them, and with a love that is above knowledge and words of all creatures, He begged them to turn to Him and showed them what pertains to the glorious creation of the world to come - He, Who even before the creation of the worlds intended to bestow such blessings on creatures! He forgave them all the sins which they had previously committed, and confirmed the truth of this reconciliation by convincing signs and miracles and revelations of His mysteries; after all this, He condescends to such condescension that He wants His sinful nature—dust from the earth, despicable people, flesh and blood—to call Him Father. Without great love, could this happen?
Venerable Isaac the Syrian (VII century).
The Lord loves us as His children, and His love is greater than the love of a mother, because a mother can forget her child, but the Lord never forgets us. We see the cross, we know that He was crucified for us and died in suffering, but still the soul itself cannot understand this love, and it is known only by the Holy Spirit.
Venerable Silouan of Athos (1866-1938).
Oh, when would a person honor God as much as he is honored by God! The debt of love is repaid by nothing other than love. For love is satisfied with nothing other than mutual love. Since God loved man so much freely, without any benefit, then man should simply, without any benefit of his own, love God. For when we love someone for our benefit, we do not love him as much as his good deed and our benefit, and therefore we love ourselves more.
Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724-1783).
When people ask why you fell in love with him, one person out of two will almost always answer: because he (she) fell in love with me. Sometimes we love first, sometimes we are loved first. Man’s love for God is always a response to God’s love for man. And often this Love remains unrequited and unrequited for a long time, and sometimes unknown to the beloved. God loves man, but man does not know about this love or, even after knowing it, does not believe in it, does not appreciate it, and remains indifferent to it. And God continues to love and wait. And His Love is stronger, more fiery, more patient and constant than the strongest human love!
Archpriest Igor Gagarin (b. 1959).
We know from human experience that to be loved by anyone, mother, father, bride, means facing judgment. Because to be loved means that someone saw in us something worthy of love: greatness, beauty, truth, purity, light. And when we look around at ourselves and think about what we really are, in our own eyes or in the eyes of those who failed to love us, then we stand before the terrible judgment of our conscience: I am not worthy to be loved! And in this regard, meeting with God is both the greatest joy (like the joy of a person to whom someone’s mother, bride, groom says: I love you), and at the same time a judgment, a terrible, final judgment. But God, who says to me: I love you, is also God, who is capable of bringing out in us all the brightest, most true, He is not only the Creator Who once created the world, He recreates us with His love, because His love is creative He knows how to evoke in us everything that is most noble, great, bright, pure, strong. He gives himself to us to such an extent and in such a way that we cannot let such an expression offend Him, we cannot humiliate Him, just as we cannot treat a child who approached us with all openness cruelly, rudely, heartlessly , with all the simplicity of childhood love. The great God, God, unapproachable in His glory, becomes a vulnerable, defenseless child and tells us: I give myself to you - do with Me what you want... And the question before each of us: what do I do with Him, with this love of God , which was given to me, with this Baby, Who is born only to be tortured on the cross and die for me, personally, and not just for the sake of humanity as a whole?
Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (1914-2003).
The Apostle John affirms by the Holy Spirit that God is Love, and not only has love, although infinitely great. Love covers everything, according to the words of St. Pavel. It also covers our sins, shortcomings, infirmities, impatience, grumbling, and so on. As soon as a believer in Christ realizes his weaknesses and sins and asks for forgiveness, God’s love cleanses and heals all sinful wounds. The sins of the whole world drown in the sea of God's love, like a stone thrown into water. There should be no place for despondency, hopelessness, despair!
Hegumen Nikon (Vorobiev) (1894-1963).
When a father approaches a child who is busy playing and strokes him affectionately, the latter, being carried away by his toys, does not even notice it. He will notice his father's affection if he takes a little break from the game. Likewise, we, being busy with some kind of care, cannot feel the love of God. We don't feel what God gives us. Parents, having given birth to a child, the more they struggle to raise him, the more they love him and root for him. So God also gave us life, He suffered in some way, raised us, He, so to speak, became tired, doing with us everything that He did. And now He cannot leave us, even if He wanted to, because He is hurt for us...
Elder Paisiy Svyatogorets (1924-1994).
One holy man once said that we are all essentially unnecessary and are not needed by anyone except God.
Archimandrite John (Peasant) (1910-2006).
God is good and impassive and unchanging. If anyone, recognizing that it is blessed and true that God does not change, is perplexed, however, how He (being such) rejoices over the good, turns away from the evil, and becomes angry at sinners, for joy and anger are passions. It is absurd to think that the Divine would be good or bad because of human affairs. God is good and does only good things, but does not harm anyone, being always the same; and when we are good, we enter into communication with God, out of similarity with Him, and when we become evil, we separate from God, out of dissimilarity with Him. Living virtuously, we become God's, and when we become evil, we become rejected from Him; and this does not mean that He is angry with us, but that our sins do not allow God to shine in us, but unite us with demons tormentors. If then through prayers and acts of kindness we gain permission from our sins, this does not mean that we have pleased God and changed Him, but that through such actions and our turning to God, having healed the evil that exists in us, we again become capable of tasting God’s grace; so to say: God turns away the evil is the same as saying: the sun is hidden from those deprived of sight.
Venerable Anthony the Great (IV century).
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He knows your name.
Now this is what the Lord says, who created you, O Jacob, and formed you, O Israel: Fear not, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name; you are my. (Isaiah 43:1)
I would like to share this verse with my friends so they know how important it is to God. God is not just some powerful ruler who looks at the earth and sees a bunch of nameless individuals scurrying around. God knows every person by name.
God knows about our sorrows and joys. He created each of us uniquely, and He wants to communicate with each of us personally.
When I think of God this way, I know that He loves me and will never leave me. And best of all, He called me to Himself and promised me eternal life.
Kate
Let's talk about you.
1. How many people (at school, university, work, etc.) do you know by name? How do you feel when someone calls your name? Why is it important that God knows the name of each of us?
2. Write Isaiah 43:1, replacing “Jacob” and “Israel” with your name. Did your understanding of this verse change when you imagined God speaking to you personally?
3. Praise God for creating you and loving you.
Ark of the Covenant
The Ark of the Covenant is a wooden box, but the wood in it is special. It is very strong and does not rot.
Wood (shittim) does not rot because it is immune to all diseases. God took this wood to demonstrate the human nature of His Son Jesus Christ. His nature is imperishable. The tree was covered with gold.
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The tree is a symbol of Jesus' humanity. Jesus came as a man. Gold plating is divine in nature. Gold inside and out. The poles are also wooden and covered with gold.
The lid is a place of mercy. It is minted from a whole piece of gold. The place of mercy covers the ark. This is not an empty box, there were three things inside it:
- Two stone tablets with the Ten Commandments, on which God wrote. That is why the ark is called the Ark of the Law.
- Golden bowl with manna .
- Aaron's rod blossomed.
The Ark of the Covenant is an image of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God placed the law in the heart of Jesus, and He alone fulfilled it.
(Exodus 25:21)
And put the cover on top of the ark, and put the testimony that I will give you into the ark.
The four sides of the lid completely covered the ark, which contained the Ten Commandments. Mercy must cover them.
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It was the place of mercy that was sprinkled with blood. The High Priest entered the Holy of Holies once a year and sprinkled blood on the mercy seat. As long as the blood is on the mercy seat, God will continue to bless Israel. This means that Israel can expect a good harvest and all enemies will be defeated. Their families will be blessed as long as there is blood in the place of mercy.
The Ark of the Covenant is also a type of God's throne.
He won't leave you.
35 Who will separate us from the love of God: tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or the sword? as it is written: 36 “For Your sake we are killed every day; we are counted as sheep doomed to the slaughter.” 37 But we overcome all these things through the power of Him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, neither the present nor the future, 39 nor height nor depth nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus the Lord ours. (Rom 8:35-39).
I've had a difficult month. Mentally, I felt just terrible. Even when I spent time with friends, I felt like I was all alone and no one cared about me. In the mornings I literally forced myself to get out of bed.
I don't know how it happened, but I completely forgot Romans 8:35-39. I desperately needed someone to tell me: “You are mistaken in thinking that you are all alone, that no one cares about you. God is near. You are important to Him." God loves me and nothing can change that.
God must really care about us if there is nothing in the world that “can separate us from the love” of Him. Knowing this, I feel empowered to overcome any adversity. He is with me when life is easy and pleasant. He is with me both in joy and in sorrow.
Sarah
Let's talk about you.
1. How do you feel when you realize that you are loved?
2. Think about a person who is currently struggling and needs love and support. Think about what you can do for this person to encourage him.
3. Thank God for His unfailing love.
Why cherubs?
Cherub, the ending with it indicates the plural. In the singular it would sound like cherub or cherov in Hebrew.
The first mention of cherubim is in the Book of Genesis.
(Gen 3:24)
And he drove out Adam, and placed a cherubim and a flaming sword that turned around in the east of the Garden of Eden to guard the way to the tree of life.
So God drove the people out of the Garden of Eden and did it with the help of the cherubim. As soon as people rebelled against God, they were immediately driven out into a world that slowly fell and fell because man became fallen. This affected all of nature and all of creation.
The first mention of the sword in the Old Testament. The sword guarded access to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The last mention of the sword is in Zechariah 13:7: “
Oh sword! Rise up to My shepherd..."
Who is the shepherd? Our Jesus. God speaks of the sword of judgment against our Savior. There is no longer a sword there that prevents us from entering God. Jesus went to the cross and now the sword of judgment is put away forever. You can come to God freely.
So, once a year the high priest entered the Holy of Holies and sprinkled blood on the mercy seat once, and seven times before the ark.
Why seven? This is the number of perfection.
You and I come to God today because we have a perfect situation.
We don't look at ourselves, at our good or bad deeds, we look at the Blood of Jesus. And while the Blood is in the place of mercy, the cherubim no longer look at the broken law.
Is there a prayer in Orthodoxy for help in mutual love?
In Orthodoxy there are prayers for mutual love. First of all, we must ask God for love for Him, so that our service is not based on fear of punishment or selfish desire to gain material blessings.
Also in their prayers, Christians ask God and the saints to soften the hearts of those who harbor hostile feelings towards us. What about romantic love between a man and a woman? Some prayers include a call for help in finding a loving spouse.
Prayers for love between a man and a woman are appropriate if you want to create a godly family. In such cases, it is worth asking for wisdom about choosing a worthy person, and not about necessarily winning the heart of the one we like.
One day an instructive incident occurred in church life. A believing girl fell in love with a seminarian, but he did not reciprocate her feelings and, having become a priest, married someone else.
Subsequently, the young man left his rank, abandoned his wife and child. Having learned about this, the girl, who could not connect her life with her lover, was relieved. She realized that she would not be happy in a marriage with someone for whom she had strong feelings.
How to distinguish love given by God from passion?
Many people confuse romantic love with passion. But true love is more than just a strong attraction to a member of the opposite sex. Passion is very often based only on the fact that we like the appearance of the person we adore: his beautiful eyes, face, figure.
But in fact, an attractive appearance is like the beautiful shell of an apple, the inside of which can be eaten by a worm or rot. Adoration based on attraction to physical beauty may not last more than a few weeks or months after marriage. The reason is simple: outwardly attractive people can have rather bad personalities. A happy family cannot be created with a proud, rude, selfish, ignorant and immoral person.
