~Pastor’s Message of October 25, 2020~

Dear brothers and sisters,

Have you experienced Christ healing in your life? Have you experienced Christ forgiveness of your sins? Have you experienced Christ peace after a prayer, confession, partaking of the Holy Communion? Have you attained His peace in your life? Today our Lord as He told the possessed man, is telling us “Return to your home, and declare all that God has done for you.”  One of the most difficult jobs is to tell our family about Christ, but to pray for them to find Christ is our calling. But we can’t give them Christ unless we have encountered Him in our lives. Fr. Philip LeMaster writes: “Surely, one of the reasons that many people do not take Christianity seriously today is that they do not encounter people whose lives are visibly different because of their commitment to Jesus Christ.  Many in our culture equate being a Christian with simply being a good citizen or a nice person.  Many have realized that it is quite possible to be a good citizen and a nice person without being a Christian. Some who claim to be Christians do not attend a church of any kind.  Some who do attend services do not live in ways different from anyone else in our culture.  If we water down our Orthodox Christian faith to the point that it concerns only what we do for a couple of hours on Sunday, we will fit right in with the dominant trends of our culture that lead people not to take Christ seriously.  If our participation in the Body of Christ does not strengthen, heal, and transform us for lives of holiness, then we will not bear witness to what happens when human beings become their true selves through the blessing of our Saviour. St. Seraphim of Sarov said, “Acquire the Spirit of peace and a thousand souls around you will be saved.” In other words, those who are filled with the Holy Spirit and healed of their passions will live in such a way that their example will draw others 

Our Father Metropolitan Joseph asked us to support the seminaries and the seminarians. Please, make a donation and earmark it “seminaries”. Please, see letter from His Eminence.

I would like to recommend to you a book by Fr. Joshua Makoul called “Healing Your Wounded Soul”. It is sold by amazon. It will help with our healing in Christ.

Fr. Philip continues: “Remembering that the Saviour told the man to stay in his village and proclaim the good news, we must embrace the spiritual disciplines of the Christian life with integrity if we are to offer faithful testimony to our Lord.  We must fast and deny ourselves if we are to have any hope of living in a way that shows that human beings are called to something higher than slavery to self-centred desires.  We must forgive those who offend us and reconcile with those from whom we have become estranged if we are to model an alternative to the anger, fear, and hatred so powerful in the world today.  We must open our hearts to God in prayer on a daily basis if we are to find the strength to become our true selves in Christ as opposed to a bundle of inflamed passions.  We must regularly receive the Holy Mystery of Confession in order to find healing from our sins as we prepare to receive the Body and Blood of the Lord which enable us to participate even now in the banquet of heaven, the complete fulfillment of all things in Christ. And then we must make a liturgy of every moment of our lives, offering ourselves and all our blessings back to the Lord for Him to use as is best for the salvation of the world.”

Have you been healed from your passions? Do you need healing from anger, gossip, control, passion of the flesh and its desires? Come to the only Physician of our souls and bodies our Lord Jesus Christ and He will heal you if you confess your sins, He is faithful to His promises.

In Christ Jesus our Physician,