Posted By Macedon on March 27, 2025
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Today is the third Sunday of Great Lent, dedicated to the honourable and life-giving cross of the Lord.
The cross is our reality and the cross is the centre of our life. In fact, everything in our life is cross-centric, or, more precisely cross-resurrection-centric. Through the cross we reach resurrection.
As things stand in our everyday life, we notice that there is a duality. A contradiction between the earthly and the heavenly, between the temporal and the eternal, between good and bad (evil), and all of this is because of sin. But in the beginning it was not like that. God created His world to be good, and all was good. Because of sin, division arose, which resulted in our struggle, and now we are exposed between two extremes. That is, whether we want to serve God or mammon, or more precisely, God or the devil. Do we want to save our soul, to gain the Kingdom of Heaven and eternal joy, or do we want to lose our soul and go to the place which is not prepared for us but for the fallen demons of the underworld, for satan and the demons, in eternal suffering.
The choice is ours. God does not curtail our freedom, even though we are sinners, and that is why He says: “Whoever takes up his cross and follows me,” and taking up one’s cross is acceptance that everything that God gives us in our daily lives as our reality.
And, if we are ashamed to live a Christian life, if we are ashamed to call ourselves Christians, if we are ashamed to fast, if we are ashamed to confess and go to church, to have our own Spiritual Father, then we ourselves choose to be on the wrong side. Therefore, at the last judgment, He will be ashamed of us, or rather, we will be ashamed of Him, because we have acted in this way.
This is why the cross is our reality, and this means we are to bear all our sufferings, all our temptations, all our struggles in this life in order to gain the Kingdom of Heaven, to gain eternal joy.
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Category: Беседи, Општо, Поучно |
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