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“It “Those who desire unnecessary comforts and pleasures in this temporal world – which sooner or later will perish – these people prefer other laws, not the laws of the Church but those which allow them to live as they want, to think what they want, to place their own will above the spirit of the Church, that spirit given by the Lord God Himself; and they invite others to follow this same path. It may be, brethren, that soon you will again experience a time of turmoil, and some of you will be called to take the path of denying those sacred laws and to submit to laws established by mere human authority. Beware of such a path! Beware of the path taken by the thief on the left, for by the weight of blasphemy, by the weight of reviling Christ he went to his eternal perdition. Those who revile the laws of the Church revile Christ Himself, Who is the Head of the Church, for the laws of the Church were given by the Holy Spirit through the Apostles. And the laws of local Churches are based on those same laws and canons of the Church. Let us not consider ourselves wiser than those saints and hierarchs who established the rules of the Church; let us not imagine ourselves to be great sages. Rather, let us humbly call out together with the wise thief: Remember me, O Lord, in Thy kingdom!” —St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco, Homily on the Sunday of Orthodoxy
“Those who desire unnecessary comforts and pleasures in this temporal world – which sooner or later will perish – these people prefer other laws, not the laws of the Church but those which allow them to live as they want, to think what they want, to place their own will above the spirit of the Church, that spirit given by the Lord God Himself; and they invite others to follow this same path.
It may be, brethren, that soon you will again experience a time of turmoil, and some of you will be called to take the path of denying those sacred laws and to submit to laws established by mere human authority. Beware of such a path! Beware of the path taken by the thief on the left, for by the weight of blasphemy, by the weight of reviling Christ he went to his eternal perdition.
Those who revile the laws of the Church revile Christ Himself, Who is the Head of the Church, for the laws of the Church were given by the Holy Spirit through the Apostles. And the laws of local Churches are based on those same laws and canons of the Church. Let us not consider ourselves wiser than those saints and hierarchs who established the rules of the Church; let us not imagine ourselves to be great sages. Rather, let us humbly call out together with the wise thief: Remember me, O Lord, in Thy kingdom!” —St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco
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Εveryone today seeks happiness on earth, and they think this is ‘Christianity’; true Orthodox Christians know that the age of persecutions, which began again under the Bolsheviks, is still with us, and that only by much sorrow and tribulation are we made fit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina
“Brothers and sisters! Let us aspire towards ascetic labor, in which is expressed precisely the essence of our Orthodox Christian faith, which is the labor of imitating Christ in bearing the cross and self-crucifixion – a faith of labor and, laboring lawfully as the Word of God teaches, let us suffer all things for the Truth, not moving away from it, as do many because of their poverty of spirit or self-interest. And let us remember well: where there is no labor, where there is no steadfastness in the faith – there is neither Orthodoxy nor true faith in God and in His Christ. Amen.” —Archbishop Averky (Taushev) of Syracuse
“The servants of Antichrist more than anything else strive to force God out of the life of men, so that men, satisfied with their material comfort, might not feel any need to turn to God in prayer, might not remember God, but might live as though He did not exist. Therefore, the whole order of today's life in the so-called ‘free’ countries, where there is no open bloody persecution against faith, where everyone has the right to believe as he wishes, is an even greater danger for the soul of a Christian (than open persecution), for it chains him entirely to the earth, compelling him to forget about heaven. The whole of contemporary ‘culture’, directed to purely earthly attainments and the frantic whirlpool of life bound up with it, keeps a man in a constant state of emptiness and distraction which gives no opportunity for one to go at least a little deeper into his soul, and so the spiritual life in him gradually dies out.” —Archbishop Averky (Taushev) of Syracuse, True Orthodoxy and the Contemporary World
“They have built a church career for themselves on a false but attractive premise: that the chief danger to the Church today is lack of strictness. No – the chief danger is something much deeper – the loss of the savor of Orthodoxy, a movement in which they themselves are participating, even in their ‘strictness.’… ‘Strictness’ will not save us if we don't have any more the feeling and taste of Orthodoxy.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina