St Peters Orthodox Church

God took away the shame of the barren Saints Joachim & Anna by healing them of their inability to have a child in their old age. Not only did God show mercy to them, He blessed them beyond what they could have every asked for or imagined. He granted them not only a child, but a child who would be chosen by God to bring Christ our salvation into the world. The Blessed Virgin was conceived in the sa...

Understanding the progression of our thoughts and temptations that lead us to sin (to fall short of our truly created person) is important for us to grasp. For if we can grasp the stages of sin, we can begin to reverse the process making it easier for us to overcome by the grace of God in our lives every temptation. Even the most besetting sins in our lives can be overcome in Christ. The four stag...

Jesus taught in St. John 14, "He who has My commandments and keeps them it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him." Jesus, the Word of God Who is God and is love, defines for us what it is to love God with our whole being. And note the promises offered to the one who loves God by way of loving obedience to Him. Jesus says...

St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, "Owe no man anything but to love one another." How we truly need to learn love from God's perspective. In Advent, we prepare ourselves to receive God who will condescend to lower Himself and become man that we might become like Him. There is no greater way to begin to understand love from God's perspective than to hear the words of Christ our God defini...

An antinomy is a contradiction in our own knowledge system, within reason itself. The Christian Faith is filled with antinomies. For example, Christ is the judge of every soul with perfect justice. Christ at the same time is infinite mercy. We go into error when these two attributes of the Nature of God are not held in tension that could lead us away from the true knowledge of God. In this teachin...

Advent means the coming of someone, one who was expected. What is the nature of God towards us; this One Who heard our cry and came to deliver us? Today we look at the words of God through the Prophet Jeremiah to hear the heart and thoughts of our Deliverer. "For I know the thoughts I think towards you, thoughts of peace and not affliction: you shall call upon me and I will bring you out of captiv...

An integral part of seeing clearly the despondency in us that is keeping us from the greatest fellowship with Christ our God in the moments of our lives is coming to an understanding of the human experience in Paradise compared to the human experience after the Fall of Man. Today we explore these human experiences asking Christ to show us the reasons for the restlessness within us and the great ho...

Christ our God, by His presence in the waters of the Jordan River at His baptism, redeemed those waters. His presence in those waters made that water that He had created useful for the washing away of sins, putting to death fallen man in His death, and granting us resurrection to new life in His resurrection. What Christ did by His presence in the waters, He has also done at the Incarnation by His...

At the Feast of All Saints we were given the gift of the revelation of Paradise to press us toward Christ our God, the healer of our souls. Tonight we are given another gift from our Lord. On the Feast Day of All Souls, the Day of the Lord is set right before us. We remember tonight that in the twinkling of an eye the trumpet will sound and all souls, the living and those who are dead, will ascend...

Because of so many false teachings in many areas of Christianity, the term spiritual effort sometimes leaves a bad impression in the mind of many. Some may think of having to earn their salvation by spiritual effort. Some may think of other "works" oriented theologies putting the pressure of being saved in the hands of the individual. We must see spiritual effort in terms of relationship. No relat...

On the Feast Day of Christ the King we hear the resounding words from Revelation 5: Worthy is the Lamb Who was slain. So much about the Kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ confounds the wise and is foolishness to the world; for Jesus Christ's elevation as King was forged in humility, lowliness, and suffering by His self-offering. Today we explore this paradox to see the wonder that His Kingship is t...

Today we examine our typical thought life throughout the day. Most of us will find that we are constantly being pulled by thoughts that either direct our attention to the past or thrust our thinking into the future; both of which we have absolutely no control over. These thoughts are always at the expense of the sacred and eternal now. In considering this, we focus on recognizing the deceptive tho...

Today the Parable of the Prodigal Son is the center of the reflection. It is one of the greatest scenes presenting the mercy of God given when one comes with the humble authentic need for this great gift of God. All too often we struggle within ourselves to go to God when we are in need of mercy. We also struggle to receive mercy when it is offered. May we all be encouraged to become receivers of...

The Hebrew word that describes the mercy of God is "hesed." In short, it means this: We who deserve nothing and could never earn anything from God, when we approach Him in our fallenness, deficiency, and need; God turns everything around on us and gives us absolutely every good thing. Today we not only seek to see more clearly the mercy of God, but we also look to Christ's words to us calling us t...

St. Paul writes in Ephesians 5 that we are to live in such a way as to redeem the time. Spiritual despondency would have us throw time away blind to the very healing and redemptive presence of God in the precious gifts of the moments of our lives that He has given us. Redeeming the time is to make wise and sacred use of time. We often think of and understand the concept of sacred space. But time i...

In Ephesians chapter 3, the blessed Apostle St. Paul bows his knees in intercession before Christ. He intercedes that all of us might truly come to know the height, depth, width, and length of the love of God toward each one of us. It is interesting that, on the one hand, St. Paul describes the love of God as immeasurable; that which is immeasurable. On the other hand, he uses physical measurement...

How does God view time? What is His perspective on it? Today we look further at what He has shared with His Church for 2,000 years as to the gift that time truly is for all of us. Time is the fabric in which the God Who is love grants us the experience of His love for us. Today we focus on the reality that, to the Christian, time should be a beautiful and wondrous gift to us from God. A gift throu...

In the Gospel of St. Matthew chapter 6, Jesus tells us, "Do not worry about your life." So many of us struggle to trust God to provide us with the things we need for life and for our salvation. With the words Jesus speaks from this passage of Scripture, He is giving us the antidote to our worries and anxieties over financial needs. That antidote is to behold Him; to consider Him. In doing so He wi...

Most of us are unaware of many deceptions that have crept into our souls regarding how we see, understand, and treat the precious little time we are given here on earth. Our enemy conditions us to see time incorrectly. At the root of every one of his deceptions is to diminish our awareness of the presence of God in every moment of our lives. When God is removed from the moments of our lives, time...

In Psalm 84 the Psalmist writes, "How lovely is your tabernacle, O Lord of hosts. My soul longs, yes, even faints for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God." Where does our soul make its home? The answer to that question will greatly impact the human experience in the moments of our lives. Today we look at what results for a soul that longs after God.

There is one absolute constant in our lives; that is, our thoughts continuously being painted on the canvas of our minds. Today we look at the importance of taking our thoughts captive in order to discern whether they are truths that leads us to the experience of God in that moment; or, whether they are thoughts intended to deny us the blessed fellowship with God throughout the day. Our enemy is a...

Many would say that one should not question God. The truth of that statement depends on the posture of the one questioning. God wants us to question him because in doing so we discover his greater revelation of Himself to us. Are we questioning God because we want Him to conform to our image? Or, are we questioning God to be conformed to His image?

Spiritual despondency, simply stated, is the spiritual slumber of the soul that disconnects us from the beautiful and eternal value of the experience of God in the precious moments of our lives. When we are in a state of spiritual slumber, we can never recognize for ourselves just how asleep we really are or why we are in that spiritual slumber. We need the illumination of Christ to both reveal ou...

We have the healing of the deaf-mute man in the Gospel of St. Luke 7. In the beginning we were created to hear, to receive the words of God directly from the Word of God. We were also created to proclaim through the voice that is our very life all that we have received. The deaf and mute man could do neither. Christ's compassion healed Him; restoring him to his originally created state. Today we f...

In the Gospel of St. Luke 18, we are given two parables and a lesson Christ gives by the example of children. All of these tell us something so very important about the nature of our God. They also tell us how to come to Christ by His consistent invitation. The Parable of the Persistent Widow, the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, and Christ teaching us to come to Him as little childr...