Making time for God


     I don’t have time to come to church now. My life is so busy; weekends are my only time for recreation. I will start coming when I retire. When a gardener plants a tree, he carefully stakes it, so that it will grow as it should. He does not wait until the tree is forty years old to stake it, for then it is far too late. The same thing is true in our own lives. It is important for parents to form the proper habits and direction in their children their children from the earliest age, even from the breast; And it is important for each of us to continue this direction when we are on our own. It is the height of foolishness - indeed beyond foolishness – to think that we can live apart from God for many years and then, toward the end of our lives, comfortably slip on the garment of Christ. While this certainly has been done it is very difficult, even with the Grace of God, and for many people, impossible. Moreover, the very purpose of Sunday is both rest and recreation.

     We rest ourselves from out daily activities and bustle and spend time in prayer with God and in the Christian company of our brothers and sisters in Christ. In fact, the very word “recreation” is a precise description of what happens in the Christian life - we are “re-created” in prayer and worship, in repentance, in the Holy Eucharist, in love, and become new men and women, the Body of Christ Himself. Let us be courageous, consoling one another with genuine consolation of the truth of God, and let us refuse the comfort of anything less. 


                                  God becomes man for our salvation

I have a hard time believing that Jesus Christ is God. He was a good man, and there are a lot of good things in the Bible, but Jesus never said He was God; Those things were added later. One of the hallmarks of Orthodox Christianity is the amazing consistency of its teachings, a consistency unique among religions and even among Christian churches. The Orthodox Church truly has taught the same thing ‘at all times and in all places’. A comparison of the teachings of the Holy Fathers of the Church, the Holy Scriptures, Orthodox hymns and prayers, Orthodox iconography, the Divine services, the Ecumenical Councils - these sources of our faith, and the testimonies of millions of martyrs who have given their lives for that faith, show a consistent teaching from the day of Pentecost until the present, and throughout all the Orthodox world.That teaching includes,clearly and unequivocally, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, ‘very God of very God’, Who became man for our sakes. Moreover, Jesus Christ does say that He is the Son of God.

‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). ‘The Father and I are one.’ (John 10:30). There are many other examples. It is also clear that His meaning was understood: ‘Therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill Him, because He not only broke the Sabbath, but also said that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.’ (John 15:19).