In his sermon on the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onufriy explained why it was important to preserve the right understanding of God and the purity of the Orthodox faith. The Information and Education Department of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church informs about it.
The Primate said that people sinned for two reasons. One of them is weakness, and the other one is a wrong understanding of God.
‘The Holy Church commemorates today the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, who preserved the purity of the Holy Orthodox Faith, the intactness of the faith’, he pointed out. ‘The faith is a guide to Heaven, to salvation. If the guide gives wrong directions, a man will never reach his goal. That is why the holy fathers tried to keep this guide pure and undamaged.’
According to the Archpastor, the purity of the faith was defended at the Ecumenical Councils for protecting believers from sins committed because of ignorance, because of wrong understanding of God.
‘Today we prayerfully honour the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council and pray them to ask God to give us reason, strength, courage, so that we will defend and keep the purity of the Holy Orthodox faith – this guide to Heaven. There were many more Ecumenical Councils – there were seven of them altogether, the purity of the Holy Orthodox faith was reflected by them’, said the Most Blessed Vladyka.
The Primate wished everybody to try to know deeply his faith, Who God is, what He wants from a man, and who we are ourselves.
‘It is very important to know for a man’, he emphasised. ‘If he realises it, he passes through a lot of obstacles which he encounters in life painlessly. Every man is created for salvation, his soul wants to be with God and wants to be saved. If we live in this way and work in this way, we have great hope that when we end our earthly lives, we will inherit the Kingdom for which the Lord has created a man, which the Lord has returned to a man after His Resurrection, the Kingdom which is called the Heavenly Kingdom, in Christ Jesus, our Lord.’
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