UOC Primate: the faith of those who believe in God but do as they want is dead
During his sermon on the Commemoration Day of Holy Fathers of the six Ecumenical Councils, His Beatitude Metropolitan of Kiev and all Ukraine Onuphriy called everybody to have the right confession of their faith. It is reported by the UOC Awareness-Raising Department.
His Beatitude told about the six Ecumenical Councils at which Holy Fathers “sacrificed their souls for the Church dogmata” and remarked that their feat is often not clear to the contemporary man. “Today a lot of people cannot understand why to defend some truths. Offer your hands to one another and we will live in unity and well-being,” they say. He explained such an approach is profoundly wrong, as a “human being is created for eternal life, while its earthly fragment is just a part of our being.”
Metropolitan Onuphriy emphasized that all Christians are called to prepare themselves for the eternity. “There is one way to get ready for that – to obey yourself to God’s will. In order to find out God’s will, one needs to understand Who is God.”
He also noted those who have the right confession of God, have living faith. “A living faith is when man believes in God and trusts Him absolutely. He who believes in God but does as he wants – has a dead faith. A dead faith wants to make God obey to human will,” the Primate explained.
Here is an example of one man’s prayer who said, “I recognize You, the Lord. That is why You must give me health, wealth, happiness, and control all my affairs. Such kind of prayer is wrong, and such faith is wrong. This man wants to use God for his earthly life and gives Him guidelines on what the Lord has to do for him. However, God owes nothing to us. We are indebted before God in everything, even for the very fact of our appearance to this world,” told Metropolitan Onuphriy.
“An Orthodox faith teaches to understand and treat God in the right way, as well as to fulfill the Lord’s will which consists in two commandments – love for God as our Creator and for your neighbor as a creature of God,” underscored the Primate.
