Why don’t we become holy?

Why is it that people today don’t become holy? Because they don’t want to. They don’t force themselves, They don’t love-God and heavenly things. They don’t keep His commandments. God wants us all to become holy. Be ye holy, He says, for I am holy (I Peter 1:16). Elsewhere He says, I said ye are gods and are all sons of the Most High (Ps. 81:6; Luke 6:35). If it were not possible for us to become holy, gods by grace and the sons of God, God would not say it, because God neither wants the impossible nor does He tell lies. So the reason comes from ourselves. It comes first from our evil disposition, secondly from our negligence and slothfulness, thirdly from the little or complete lack of love we have for God and heavenly things, and fourthly from the wholehearted love we have for mammon and our attachment and devotion to what is material and base. “We were taught,” says the divine Damascene, “to become children of God, but we do not become this if we fail to cast off our passions and our sins” … Most people of today’s generation are fleshly and diabolical, because they love the flesh and prefer to keep the commandments and wishes of the Devil and not those of God. However, even today and unto the chit-of the age, there are and shall be a few saints, difficult to find, and yet not unlike the ones of old …

The Last Days

… Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away (Matt. 24:35).

      Everything the Lord said in the sacred Gospel took place, but other things are taking place and others will take place. Concerning the end of the age, He did not set the date precisely, He said only, “When you see wars, earthquakes, floods, disbelief, impiety, lawlessness, lack of love, false prophets, false messiahs, and deceivers, then consider that the end is approaching.”

      In an ancient book it was written that when the disciples asked the Teacher when these things would happen and He told them the above, He also told them that when the men became women and the women men, then the end would take place. And the divine Chrysostom said that the Lord also said this, that the Second Coming will take place when women are lacking in modesty., On the basis of all this, my opinion is that we should be ready, for we do not know either the hour or the moment of death. 

An except from the Paternal Counsels of Elder Philotheos Zervekos, translated by Father Nicholas Palls, 1991. Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher, St John of Kronstadt Pres, from whom the booklet is available