The sin, from which Lent calls us to flee, is that we prefer what we know about God over God Himself. We have not really understood that our hearts were created to beat with His love alone. Consider it carefully. Most of us see the good that we do as an extension of God, or as a substitute for having a relationship with Him in person. Indeed, this is our present sin that many among us have reduced God to what He requires. Do not underestimate this sin. I will give you an example of its seriousness, Judas, Judas the treacherous disciple. When Judas saw a woman pouring very costly oil of spikenard on Jesus (John 12:1-8), he mentioned the poor publicly. Sin is so wicked! In order to keep ruling us, it sometimes masks itself with what Jesus desires. Repentance is always possible if we can stop pretending to philosophize in justifying sin, that is, if we flee from \u201cJudas\u2019 faction\u201d. Nothing in life has meaning without embracing the love of Jesus alone. This is the source of all goodness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The sin, from which Lent calls us to flee, is that we prefer what we know about God over God Himself. We have not really understood that our hearts were created to beat with His love alone. Consider it carefully. Most of us see the good that we do as an extension of God, or ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[343],"tags":[1276,1741,1283,413,2410],"class_list":["post-8629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-divine-love","tag-judas-iscariot","tag-orthodox-lent","tag-repentance","tag-spiritual-hypocrisy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8970,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8629\/revisions\/8970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}