Your Sins are Forgiven
Translated from a sermon by Fr Louka Sidarous
How much can I ask from my Lord? It was not too much for our Lord to cure someone who was paralysed. We hear in the Gospel a story of a quadriplegic man that could not move his arms or legs. Could this be too much for Christ?
As the story goes, it was not even too much for our Lord to call on someone who has been dead in a tomb for four days, and his body rotting. Lazarus was raised from the dead with just the call of our Lord’s voice.
Nothing is too much for the Lord. It is only too much for the man that loses faith.
Can a quadriplegic move his arm again, or can a dead man to rise again? But when a man loses his faith, he loses everything with it.
If we look to Christ, who can do anything, we can say with faith, “No, nothing is impossible.”
After years of sin, I wake up to myself and I think is it even possible to return to where I once was? I used to pray with all my might, all my heart, with tears, then prayer became routine. It was like it meant nothing to me. How can I come back now?
Of course I can come back. I should not deceive myself in this way. If faith can return to the heart through the power of Christ, then my prayers will be restored. It doesn’t matter how many years I was away.
So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten,
Joel 2: 25-26
The crawling locust,
The consuming locust,
And the chewing locust,
My great army which I sent among you.
You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied,
And praise the name of the Lord your God
After years of apathy, I feel dry, there is no life within me. After years, the locusts have eaten me up and there is no goodness left. I have become like a harvest that has been attacked by locusts. The harvest was once green and blooming, but it is now dry and lifeless.
Why are we afraid to return? Why don’t we return to the faith we once had? With respect to an individual’s personal life, we should increase in fruit and our relationship with our Lord.
By the age of 30 or 40 or 50 years of life, in the church, in fellowship, in communion, but where is my harvest? Where is the fruit of the Holy Spirit? The love, the joy, the peace, my fruit should be visible. As St Paul says in his letter to Philemon,
For we have great joy and consolation in your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed by you, brother.
Philemon 1:7
St Paul knows that the fruit that is in Philemon will refresh the hearts of the brethren.
You will find a person that is not greedy for the world, this person increases in holiness each day. We grow up and get older and begin to fail. We become weaker, and more complacent. We have bad experiences in this world and we lose the fight.
Just as Christ was able to heal the paralysed, He can also speak to our hearts and return life to our souls. For a life in Christ is unlike anything else. We come back and we can do more, and serve more, and work in secret place, with our joy coming from our Lord, we can produce fruit for God to please His heart.
Repentant and return to our Beloved is always much greater than the healing of the sick, even the raising of the dead. The healing of the human body is much easier than the healing of the soul. The healing of a body, but to heal a soul and to return it to its former strength – in spirit, in love, from the depth of the heart, in humility, in the Christian life, in self denial – is much greater than the raising of the dead.
Let us come back to our Lord, in humility, and beg that He restores our faith so that we may live joyfully with our Saviour, glory be to His Name forever, Amen.