St Peters Orthodox Church St. Peter Orthodox Church

If Adam's lament is the lament of every soul, we need help in discovering the powerful lament within us for God. We also need the help of God to redirect that lament to Him so that our souls may finally come to rest and enjoy His peace. Today we look at how the spiritual disciplines given to us by Christ in Lent help us to uncover our true lament. We also are exhorted to pray the Psalms. 65 of the Psalms are considered Psalms of lament. As we pray the Psalter, we receive help in redirecting and voicing our lament to God alone.

Today, in the testimony of Christ our God miraculously feeding the 5,000, we are reminded of what Christ can do with the little that we have to offer Him. And yet, even though what we have is little and always deficient, He invites us to join with Him in His wondrous works to sustain and fill many. Satan has us always focus on what we lack which leads us to spiritual paralysis denying ourselves the joy that comes to us when we are united with Him in His good works. Our Lord asks us to look upon Him and see that all He asks us is that we offer Him only what we have. He knows it is insufficient. He fills what we lack with His sufficiency. Thank God our salvation is not dependent on us, for we lack much. It is utterly dependent on us keeping ourselves joined to Him Who has everything.

When we think of Lent and repentance, we tend to think mainly about overcoming our sins and coming out of the ways of our fallenness. While this must be, with the help of the grace of God, a necessary part of repentance; it is truly only one aspect of the repentance through which Christ brings healing to the soul. Repentance is two motions all at once. It is the movement away from our fallenness. But it is also a movement of turning to God seeking His Kingdom and His righteousness. It is both/and, truly a putting off and putting on all at the same time. The Church Fathers teach us that we become that which we do. Today we seek to bring balance to our repentance as we step out to do the good works in Christ that are met with His grace and lend themselves to the healing and transformation of our souls.

Have you ever gone through a season of life where, no matter how faithful in prayer you remain, our Lord seems to be very distant from you? Or, have you been in a season of suffering where your prayers for mercy and relief seem to be met with silence? Journey with Christ long enough and you will encounter one or both of those experiences. Today we hear from the Gospel of St. Matthew15. A Canaanite woman comes to Jesus pleading with Him to release her daughter from demon possession. Her plea is met with silence and then with what would seem to be a rejection of her by our Lord. How does she respond to all of this? As we look at her response to the silence of the Lord, we see how we are to live in Christ when He seems both silent and distant.

In Holy Scripture, there were three who fasted for 40 days: Moses, Elijah, and Christ our God. And through each one's fast idolatry was cast down and destroyed or left behind. Today we look each of these to see Christ's great prescription of the 40-day fast of Lent which He sanctified and consecrated for us; that by His presence in our fast our idolatries might be cast down and overcome and we might ascend the mountain to behold Him.

Today Father James shares with us several texts: The Lament of Adam, Lamentation chapter 1, St. Nicolai Velimirovich "Prayers by the Lake" (prayers that aid us to love and pray for our enemies, and the Litany of Humility. As he goes through each, we discover meaningful ways in which we can experience a true change of personhood within ourselves to, by the help of God's grace, become more like our God.