Read the Gospel, allow its light penetrate your heart, make it a custom in your life. Filter any deeds or problems through the light of the Gospel’s teaching. This is the only light of our life.

Read the Gospel, allow its light penetrate your heart, make it a custom in your life. Filter any deeds or problems through the light of the Gospel’s teaching. This is the only light of our life. Among other teachings and commandments, we read in the Gospel about Christ’s preach concerning humbleness and His demonstration of it right before His passions.

Without humbleness you cannot be Christ’s disciple. Without humbleness, man’s heart cannot receive God’s teaching. A humble heart urges man to submit to God’s will, accept everything with humbleness. Then, God will arrange things so that man will submit his mind, understanding and will to the obedience of Christ. Experience has shown that those who make things according to their own reasoning will reap bitter fruits. Oh, deep are the torments caused by the “independent reasoning” of man, the darkness of perdition in which he is casted for abandoning the teachings of Christ! Christ’s path may seem narrow and painful but it gives the man that follows it something that cannot be obtained through any worldly treasures, or pleasures of this world – this is how precious the gifts of God to His disciples are.

Therefore, let us put our entire faith in God’s will. Through the prayer of the heart we allow God to walk together with us on the path of life in order to enter together with him in the Heavenly Jerusalem.

(Translation from: Stareţul Nicon de la Optina, Editura Doxologia, p. 203)