On Patience and Obedience
Let us not give ourselves up to temptation of our own will, but bear with thanksgiving what is sent to us by the Lord’s allowing.
Obedience burns up the passions like fire.
Love humility and obedience, and this will outweigh all your sins.
Whatever offence befalls you, whatever unpleasantness you meet, say: “This I will bear for Jesus Christ!” Only say this, and at once your heart will be eased, for the name of Jesus Christ is mighty. Before it every unpleasantness grows calm, and demons vanish. Your heartache too will ease, your faint-heartedness will be quieted, when you repeat His sweetest name.
Everyone wants to have his own way. The poor things forget that happiness lies in obedience… Mother Tamar (Marjanishvili)
Since we were driven out of paradise because of disobedience, the all-merciful God has willed that we should regain paradise through our obedience.
I know how heavy the yoke of obedience is, how painful it is to cut off one’s will; but the sweetness of such a life is also known to me. The road is easy and salvation is near at hand when one’s own will has been renounced. It is enough to cut off our will, and a peaceful and blessed life will come to us.
Some, carried away by delusion, are punished for their pride and self-will; but he who seeks God in obedience and humility will not be deprived of Christ’s mercy and will not fall into temptation.
If a man does not leave the will of his own that nests in his heart, and does not deny himself in everything, if he does not part from his riches and possessions and make himself a servant of God by the way of obedience to a spiritual father, he will neither come to know the will of God nor do it.
If you are patient with your spiritual father — compliant and obedient — then the Lord’s reward will be beautiful, and you will rejoice in the labour that will be remembered before the Lord God. He who obeys his spiritual father does the will of the Lord God, and he who obeys God is also in obedience to his spiritual father.
An obedient man is not embarrassed by reproach, nor inflamed by insult. The obedient man rejoices in sorrow and gives thanks in grief.
We must trust those who have from the Lord the grace of caring for us, even if we think their commands contrary to our salvation. The sign of true faith is obedience without hesitation, even when what is asked is unexpected.
Obedience is putting human judgement aside even when you have a great gift of judgement.
The holy fathers call psalms a weapon, prayer a wall, pure tears a washing, and blessed obedience a confession of faith, without which no man full of passions will see the Lord.
A novice who, noticing his elder’s kindly disposition and indulgence, asks him to assign him a task according to his own wish, knows neither himself nor his own good; for with such a blessing he loses the confessor’s crown, since obedience is the renunciation of hypocrisy and of one’s own desire.
Obedience is born of self-condemnation and of the desire for spiritual health.
