When this world seems to you like a dungeon, without a gate, your faith tells you: Do not be afraid! Your Creator holds everything in His power. He calls you son, and He loves you to call Him Father.
Your faith protects you from all evil, Christian brother. Whenever trouble befalls you, your faith helps you.
When this world seems to you like a dungeon, without a gate, your faith tells you: Do not be afraid! Your Creator holds everything in His power. He calls you son, and He loves you to call Him Father.
When your neighbors forsake you and despise you, your faith defends you and testifies to you: Your heavenly Father has not forsaken you and has not despised you.
When you sin, and people see your sin and condemn it, and reject you as superfluous rags in this world, your faith defends your price and tells you: Christ died for sinners on the cross. He paid for your sin before God, and you are very precious and dear to God.
When losses and damages happen to you, and there is no one to lean on your caring head, your faith protects you from dark thoughts and worries and tells you how everything that fell out of your hand fell into the hand of your Father, whose are all the riches and all the possessions and all the treasures of all the worlds.
Your faith protects you in sickness and from sickness, in torment and from torment, in darkness and from darkness, in despair and from despair, in loneliness and loneliness, in death and from death. And your faith protects you from death and your faith will defend you. Indeed, even from death, from which unbelievers do not even know that there is a defense.
Your faith protects you from unbelief, from leprosy over every leprosy, from that darkness thicker than every darkness and colder than every frost. O Christian brother, disbelief in God is the living death of people and nations. Every death is dead, and faithless is a living death. Defend you from your living death and keep your faith.
Such is the decaying corpse in a colorful coffin, such is the soul in the living body of an unbeliever. He is a grave, painted and streaked and fenced, and inside is death itself, all death, every thought death, every desire death, every intention death, every plan death.
What can save you from this living death; from this death that wears the mask of life, what can save you, Christian brother? Only your faith in the living God the Creator, and in Christ the Savior. Faith in the testimony of Christ that you have heard and received. Faith in the knowledge of Christ, omniscience, which has been handed down to you under the humble name of faith, although this faith is more reliable than any other knowledge that is from man and through man, and not from God.
This holy and life-giving faith of yours defended your ancestors in long-term slavery from despair, and during the uprising from languor and hesitation.
This holy and life-giving faith of yours protects you from dishonesty, from immorality, from unclean deeds, from dirty deeds, from crimes, from atrocities and savagery.
You will hardly say, and you cannot remember, that in your life you had a stronger and dearer defender than your faith, which is the flame in your inner lamp, which illuminates and warms your soul, my Christian brother!
Saint Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich