“Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his arm, and whose heart turns away from the Lord” (Jer. 17:5).
Now look how upside down things are today in schools and in modern pedagogy. What does it say? It says:
– You should raise your child with high self-esteem. You should raise your child with great self-confidence.
Do you see? Exactly the opposite of what the Holy Spirit says: that you should not have self-confidence, that you should not place your hope in yourself.
– No, the psychologist tells you, you must have self-confidence, otherwise your child will not succeed.
Do you see? And instead of listening to the Holy Spirit, we listen to atheist scientists. That is why our children are being destroyed.
Because what can you do with your own strength, with your mind, with your arms? Nothing. And sooner or later the child understands this, realizes it. And what happens then? The child becomes hopeless, disappointed, and falls into decline, into melancholy, into depression. The child becomes sick.
Do you know how many sick and useless children we have today, shut inside four walls, disappointed with everything? Why? Because instead of the “good” parents teaching them to have faith in God, hope in God, teaching them to pray, they taught them egoism, pride, self-confidence. That “you are the first, you will trample everyone… you are smart, you are very smart, you are wise…”
“May you live wise,” which we sing to children at birthdays… Do you know what harm all these songs, these hymns, do to them? They are hymns to egoism. And sooner or later you end up with a sick child. And then you say:
– But what bad thing did I do? What mistake did I make?
Here is what you did! You did not take into account what the Holy Spirit says, but instead you believed in atheistic science.
Therefore, complete despair in ourselves and complete hope in God. Not only complete despair in ourselves, says Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite, because then, of course, the devil would take possession of us. Along with complete despair in ourselves, we must also take complete hope in God, and we will hope that only from Him we will receive every help, every good thing, and every victory.
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The first commandment of God is “to love God.” The first commandment of psychologists is to love yourself. Completely the opposite! I say these things because we must deconstruct them within ourselves. We have been saturated with such ideas, and we must cast them away.
The first commandment is to love God, not yourself. Psychologists say that in order to love others, you must love yourself first. A lie! Wrong!
In order to love others, you must first love God. If you love God, then you will also love others properly. That is why women do not love their husbands properly, and men their wives, their children… Because they have not loved God; therefore they do not love properly—that is, selflessly—their wife, their husband respectively, their children, their relatives, and the whole world. Do you understand where the problem lies?
That is why there are divorces; that is why there are abortions… and a mother may even think nothing of killing her child, for example… this selfless love does not exist.
She says: “Another child? What I have is enough, I can’t do more.” She has self-love (self-centeredness). On the contrary, a mother who loves selflessly says: “What, should I kill the child? A thousand times I would rather suffer a little more, a bit longer—I will raise it… God will help as well…”
But if she is self-centered, she loves no one. And if her husband pressures her even a little, she says, “I’m leaving, it’s over.”
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An atheist philosopher, Sartre, once said: “The other is my hell”… imagine how far a human being can go! To see one’s fellow human as hell.
And a Christian replied to him: “The other is my brother.”
Do you see how much Christ changes us? For an atheist, for an unbeliever, the other person is hell. He does not want to commune with anyone, because he does not love anyone. Since he does not love God, he cannot love anyone.
Because in order to love the other, you must empty yourself of your ego. But you cannot empty yourself of your ego unless Christ helps you. On our own, we cannot trample down our selfishness.
That is why a person who is far from God experiences an immense loneliness. You will have heard people say: “No one loves me, I am alone,” and then they fall into depression and despair. Why do they experience this? Because they themselves do not first love God, and therefore they cannot love anyone else either.
Saint Porphyrios used to say that behind depression and behind all these so-called psychological problems, which have increased so much in our days, there are demons. They are demons. And how do the demons come? Through sins, through bad forms of entertainment, because, as we said, everything is “entertainment.” We are clearly leading our soul in the wrong way.
Source: https://t.me/hieromonksavvas/614