Steps toward God
It is a long road that we walk toward God: from a life of repentance to purity and love to holiness, to growth in this holiness… to perfection. All these steps toward God require seriousness, and they require from us that we begin, even with the very first step.
Steps toward God
I had spoken to you about the verse that says: “Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You” (Ps 73:25). But how easy it is, in a person’s stance toward sin, that he does not want it, and at the same time cannot leave it…!
The Apostle Paul explained this matter in his Epistle to the Romans, saying: “For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice” (Rom 7:15–19).
Thus, mere will is not sufficient. For it is possible that a person wills the good, but is not able to do it, and evil overcomes him.
From here, the first step on the way of God is struggle…
Struggle for this good that you desire, for in order to express your will you must do something. You must resist and struggle.
A struggle that has a threefold character: you struggle with yourself, you struggle with sin, you struggle with God.
You must struggle with yourself, overcome it, subdue it, and turn it to the way of God. You struggle with your desires and your inner inclinations. Do not submit to yourself, but rather stand against it with all strength. As the Lord says: “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26).
The majority of those who sin indulge themselves and pamper them, giving them what they want… They are not victorious over the self from within…
You must also struggle against sin and struggle against Satan. And what else?
You struggle with God, in order to receive from Him strength and help with which you fight… that He may give you His grace and His Holy Spirit to fight for you and be victorious within you…
Say to Him: Since the battle is the Lord’s, and since without You I can do nothing, fight therefore on my behalf, and lead me in Your triumphal procession, for I will not be victorious by my human arm, but by You.
Be like Jacob who wrestled with the Lord “until the breaking of day” (Gen 32:24), that is, throughout the time of darkness he continued to wrestle, until dawn shone in his life and light rose upon him…
He who struggles with himself and with God and succeeds, finds it easy to struggle against sin and Satan, by the power he has taken from his first struggle.
As for Adam, he was in Paradise alone with God. Then new things appeared in his life, and from them the temptation began.
Eve entered his life, representing companionship that leads to error.
The tree and the fruit entered, representing matter in its leading to error.
The serpent entered his life, representing Satan and his deceitful temptations.
And the self entered, in its desire to grow and lead to error.
These four stood before the human being: companionship, matter, Satan, and the self, and Adam was no longer as he had been, alone and content with God.
He took for himself another source of knowledge besides God, which was the serpent. He indulged Eve at the expense of the commandment, and took from her and ate. His self sought to establish for itself an existence independent of God. He became concerned with matter after having been spiritual. Sin entered the world, and human nature was defeated from within and from without, and the sin dwelling in it began to weary it, and it became incumbent upon it to struggle and resist.
Many were lost as a result of carelessness, as a result of neglecting themselves.
One sin leads them to another, and one loss to another, while they do not know where they are going, like a ball rolling down a mountain, continuing to roll without knowing where it will end or what its destiny will be…!
Place before yourself an important truth: that the road ahead of you is very long, and that you are still at the beginning, standing at the stage of repentance!
The stage of struggle in which a person falls and rises, then falls and rises.
And the stage of repentance, in which one leaves sin in order to walk toward purity.
From purity he enters into love, and also into holiness…
And he continues to grow in holiness until he reaches relative perfection.
He advances through stages of perfection until he reaches the image of God, reaches all the fullness, and is finally crowned with the crown of righteousness (2 Tim 4:8).
If the road ahead of you is long, and you are still standing at the first stage without moving, then when will you arrive?
If you are still in the stage of repentance, or struggling to reach it, then when will you reach divine love and perfection? Indeed, when will you reach the stage in which you lead others to perfection? The Apostle did not accept that we stand on the road, or even merely walk.
But he said: “Run in such a way that you may obtain it” (1 Cor 9:24), that is, hasten on the road to God. Yes, many of the saints walked with astonishing speed and arrived.
Take as an example: Saint Augustine, who lived the first part of his life in the depths of sin. How, when he began to know God, he ran on his spiritual path with astonishing speed, from a sinner to a penitent, to a contemplative of spiritual matters, to a monk, to a bishop, to a great teacher among the teachers of the universal Church, and a leader in the life of the Spirit from whom generations benefited…
How will you arrive, if you walk on the spiritual road with slowness, negligence, laziness, slackness, indifference, and also forgetfulness and sleep?!
You confess your sins and return to them! You partake of the Mysteries and remain as you were!
You need on your path a sincere covenant with God, and steadfastness without retreat or relapse, without betrayal, without weakness…
If you walk on the spiritual road, do not turn back, for “no one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62). Lot’s wife looked back and perished. All the repentant saints, when they knew God, did not return again to their old sins.
The spiritual life requires seriousness and requires steadfastness… A person who loved God and lived with Him cannot thereafter betray Him!
It was a betrayal on the part of the children of Israel that after the wondrous exodus from the land of bondage, they returned again and longed for the pots of meat in the land of Egypt, and wept… It was a setback and a betrayal of God.
The spiritual person must have a clear goal and walk toward it with steadfastness.
Christ, on the path of redemption, set His face toward Jerusalem. And the prophet Daniel, in his prayer, opened his window facing Jerusalem. Thus we too, in our looking toward the East, toward the sanctuary and the altar, have a fixed goal toward which we are directed.
Another characteristic of the spiritual person is growth…
Like a tree that is constantly growing: you pass by it in the evening and find it more grown than it was in the morning, a quiet growth that no one notices, as the Scripture says: “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he himself does not know how. For the earth yields crops by itself: first the blade, then the head, after that the full grain in the head” (Mark 4:26–28).
Are you still seed, or have you become a plant, or have you grown to become an ear, or have you matured to become grain that fills the ear?
The person whose growth stops is liable to go backward.
Many placed all their hopes in repenting, and thought that repentance was the end of the journey, and they stopped there, so they returned to their sins.
But those who forgot what is behind and advanced every day forward, this growth occupied them and fortified them against going backward.
If your life stops, it then grows cold and lukewarm, and you leave your first love. Then you are liable to return to your old sins, so beware of stopping.
It is very strange to see people who, instead of growing, long to return to their former life which was better than the present!!
It is a kind of backsliding, its degree differing from one person to another.
Would that each person among us realize that lack of growth is a sin to be confessed like the rest of sins: sins of the tongue, thought, senses, heart, and body… And we must grow in everything, especially in our love for God, our attachment to Him, our tasting of Him, and our being with Him…
The majority of people grow in knowledge and experience more than they grow in love. Their growth is centered in the mind, not in the heart…
The tree of knowledge still extends its roots in the soil of the world, even within the Church, and within the sphere of preaching, contemplation, and spiritual practices.
But the growth we mean is different. It is growth in deepening fellowship with God, growth in longing for Him and for His kingdom… such that our talk about God increases every day, and our drawing of people to Him increases…
Try to grow in your lives, and by your growth your humility will increase…
For the closer you draw near to God, the All-Holy, to that extent you feel your deficiency and the ugliness of your sins, and you see the road to perfection as longer…
Train yourselves in the love of God, for you long for the kingdom.
Those who love God and His kingdom also love departure from this world. But those who love the world are terrified by the remembrance of death, and eternal life does not appeal to them, nor do they care for it or rejoice in it…
By this love of God, the anchorites and hermits were able to live in the wilderness.
The love of God filled their hearts. Therefore we say of them in the Fraction prayer: “They dwelt in the mountains and deserts and caves of the earth, because of the greatness of their love for Christ the King.” He who has not tasted God here on earth finds no delight in eternity, where the saints are nourished by the love of God and His fellowship…
I fear that we may be strangers to the kingdom and strangers to the King, having no experience of this spiritual atmosphere, not having lived in it, nor it lived in us…
Begin to enter into the life of divine love and try to grow in it.
And if the spiritual road is long, know that the longest road begins with a step. Begin with this step toward God, and trust that grace will carry you to broader horizons, as long as you have shown striving, expressing your love practically by this step… And you will not find the road difficult as long as God leads you…
Walk with God, and trust that He will give you as He gave the saints before, and He will make your path easy. And the saying of Scripture will be fulfilled in you: “But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isa 40:31).
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